Skippable Combat in Games

[WTF]

I normally do the treasure hunting via chapter select since that seems to be the best way esp since all games tell you how many treasures there are in a chapter and how many you missed.

 

I suppose it's always going to be 100+1 treasures but getting 99 and the strange relic is enough for a platinum.

[TheMightyEthan]

Yeah, I don't think making it unlockable is good enough. Sure it makes subsequent playthroughs nice, but it means that you have to suffer through the bad parts at least once before being able to use it.

[SomTervo]

In general, Dean, I disagree with you. I know a lot, a shockingly large amount of people who actually genuinely play every game on 'Easy' so that they can just get the story. They don't care it's a medium about interaction and challenge, they still want to play it for just the plot and narrative and universe.

 

However, this:

 

However in my experience a fair chunk of the dialogue happens within the combat and action. Meaning you'd either have to write the game in such a way that nothing narrative-ey happens within combat or the boss fights.

 

... Is a very good point. BUT, it's one that developers can work around. If you decided, early on in a game's development, to have skippable combat, why would you put important conversations into said combat? Even if you did, it wouldn't be hard to have an alternate version of each following cutscene to keep the players up to date. Just paste the dialogue in there with a moment's more animation. I think, as with so many issues in games, it's the developers choice in design, and its success depends on how well they implement said design.

[deanb]

I'm aware it's something that "can be worked around". Except that comes at the expense of cutting the game up.

 

You end up with a game that is more like this:

 

instead of something like this:

 

 

You'd reverse years of maturation within the industry in story telling within games. Moving on from the old coin-op days, on to bolting on some kind of story, probably just printed in the manual with occasional "cutscenes" of "princess is in another castle" n that stuff, then moving on to the modern era of Half-Lifes, Bioshocks n Heavy Rains. The whole point of video games over stuff like a plain old film is the game part. I'm not even one of the "games are art" types and I can see that.

 

I'm still not seeing on how folks would not want to play the game, but an LP is "not the same thing". Either way folks are still just watching the game play out. Maybe get a dud controller to hold n twiddle with the buttons if it makes people feel any better?

[TheMightyEthan]

Well my main point is that it should be there not for people to skip through every bit of combat, but so people who are otherwise enjoying the game can skip that one terrible part.

[deanb]

Well my main point is that it should be there not for people to skip through every bit of combat, but so people who are otherwise enjoying the game can skip that one terrible part.

 

Yeah I'm unsure if I covered this before:

If the developer is able to identify "that one terrible part" of the game, why are folks suggesting that they add in the ability to skip over that instead of....fixing it. "So in our QA testing we found there's a part of the game that's really awkward to do. Takes at least 15 tries, and for most of our QA guys it's by fluke they complete it. How about we just leave it awkward and spend the dev time on making a 'skip point'!".

 

Does this not strike anyone else as silly?

[Hot Heart]

Years and years of testing and games can still have that problem anyway. If you can't eradicate it completely, at least give people the option to skip it.

Edited March 1, 2012 by Hot Heart

[MasterDex]

Dean has vocalised very well the fear I have of this becoming the norm. The games industry is very commercial so the great majority of members and the biggest spenders will work hard to appease the vocal majority, right or wrong, thus risking compromising the art for the product. Skippable combat, in itself, isn't a bad idea but it's effect on game design, especially in the big leagues, might not be as desirable.

[TheMightyEthan]

Well my main point is that it should be there not for people to skip through every bit of combat, but so people who are otherwise enjoying the game can skip that one terrible part.

 

Yeah I'm unsure if I covered this before:

If the developer is able to identify "that one terrible part" of the game, why are folks suggesting that they add in the ability to skip over that instead of....fixing it. "So in our QA testing we found there's a part of the game that's really awkward to do. Takes at least 15 tries, and for most of our QA guys it's by fluke they complete it. How about we just leave it awkward and spend the dev time on making a 'skip point'!".

 

Does this not strike anyone else as silly?

 

I'm not saying they should identify that one terrible part and allow you to skip that part, I'm saying they should let you skip any given combat encounter so that the player can use that feature to get past that one terrible part, which isn't necessarily the same part for everyone.

 

It doesn't even have to be something you can just automatically do, I'd be fine with it being an option after failing 5 times or whatever.

[SomTervo]

I'm aware it's something that "can be worked around". Except that comes at the expense of cutting the game up.

 

 

You end up with a game that is more like this:

 

instead of something like this:

 

 

You'd reverse years of maturation within the industry in story telling within games. Moving on from the old coin-op days, on to bolting on some kind of story, probably just printed in the manual with occasional "cutscenes" of "princess is in another castle" n that stuff, then moving on to the modern era of Half-Lifes, Bioshocks n Heavy Rains. The whole point of video games over stuff like a plain old film is the game part. I'm not even one of the "games are art" types and I can see that.

 

 

Ehhh. I don't really see how. I didn't mean it can be 'worked around' per se, I meant that design choice can be 'worked into' the fabric, the seam of the game itself. So there would be no loss of fluidity or immersion, the story wouldn't be tagged on. The level design would simply be stripped back an area or two of pure combat, and the flow between gameplay and cutscene would be intact.

 

I think your statement that this would strip back years of maturation is hyperbole. Mind that combat isn't a synonym of 'gameplay'. There can be plenty of other things for a player to do in a game, which has combat, besides fight. An example of what I'm saying would be like if, say, in a new Uncharted game, where you had combat turned 'off', combat-only segments would be reduced to a brief cutscene of Drake taking guys out in a way, only a few seconds, a montage basically, and then (if required) a couple of lines of dialogue to fill in what's going on. A lot of the most thrilling sequences in Uncharted are nearly cutscenes anyway. Or AI teammates who are present almost the whole time anyway, can take the guys out for you. You'd still have the platforming, adventuring, puzzling (maybe made harder to compensate), enemies removed from levels in general, but when there's an area that would harbour a big fight and a cutscene, a moment could just be added to the start of the cutscene where Drake et al. take out the bad guys.

 

In some games this sort of thing obviously wouldn't work at all, but those games wouldn't make the choice to remove combat, as it'd make the whole game redundant. This really depends on each individual game, and how much weight they put on combat as a gameplay mechanic.

 

EDIT: Also, I'm not too bothered anyway as long as it's a choice. If games started losing challenging segments like combat altogether, in the interest of a casual audience, that would be a real issue. If it's a player choice: not so bad.

 

I guess another argument against this whole thing is that people would start playing games very differently. A new gamer might miss what it's all "about" if they could skip the combat, they'd lose a lot of the unique gameplay that makes the medium what it is. Even if they might like the combat gameplay if they had tried it.

Edited March 2, 2012 by kenshi_ryden