Do you think modern games underestimate the intelligence of their players?

[norashepard]

I don't know if they're underestimating our intelligence or our attention spans. A large amount of the "non-gamer" player base isn't looking for a challenge so much as they're looking for some fun way to pass the time, so if they play a game that gets them stuck for even a moment, they're likely to just toss it aside and do something else. I mean, why waste time doing something you don't enjoy when you could go find something you DO?

idk that's just my thought. Maybe they really do think we're all fools though.

 

[Zen Bard]

Some people like a challenge. Some people like to button mash. Developers strive for the happy medium.

Unfortunately, they seem to err on the side of stupid.

Not sure that I agree this gripe is purely nostalgia driven, but games did seem to require a little more thought and strategy back in "The Day".

But at that time, the gaming market was geared towards a fairly niche group of people. As the consumer space grew, developers had to moderate the games so they wouldn't alienate potential buyers.

They had to take into account not just different levels of skill, but different age groups and cultures as well. And the result can be somewhat watered down for experienced gamers.

Look I'm an old table top AD&D Player so when I first played "Morrowind", I thought it was the Holy Grail of Computer Role Playing Games.

But not everyone shared that view,so Bethesda tweaked each subsequent game to broaden the appeal.

I don't necessarily like it. But I get it.

 

[mrdude2010]

It's annoying when they make things so easy, but they won't stop because they have to appeal to morons so more people buy their game.

 

[CpT_x_Killsteal]

To answer the title question: Not exactly. They tailor their games to appeal to the dimmest of the dim, because they are more likely to pick up a game because it looks pretty and are more likely to blow their cash on rip-off DLCs and microtransactions.

This isn't nostalgia talking. Only a complete moron would consider Skyrim's puzzles to be difficult for anyone without mental retardation. Games are being made to appeal to morons. Which is why I fancy games like Dark Souls. I'm not treated like illiterate 4 year old. And if you ever do need help, just Google it. One of the additions of the modern age people.

Although as people have mentioned, creating puzzles that scale with difficulty setting would be great.

 

[1Life0Continues]

Borderlands 2 DLC
Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Full of puzzles, of varying and often infuriating difficulty that can be solved in multiple ways.

Spoiler: Here Be Dragon(s Keep Spoilers)

The cube puzzle was one of the most infuriating ones for me to work out. It required memorising the sequence, and then repeating it backwards. This seems logical at first, except it hinged on the idea that you would be smart enough to repeat a memory puzzle in reverse. And as far as I know, when faced with a memory puzzle most people do it in order they see it. This puzzle was pretty ingenious in it's simplicity.

Or, if you didn't care, you could hit it to solve it. The reward for solving it properly (access to a dice chest) remained locked but the game gave you credit for solving it anyway.

I think more games need this kind of puzzle solving logic.

So yeah, I think it really depends on how smart the designer is to anticipate the players and put in ways for them to sidestep or even solve in an alternative fashion.

 

[lacktheknack]

Anyone remember silent hill 3? With the puzzle difficulty? Hard was hard as fuck if you didn't have basic knowledge of a lot of things.

This. "Puzzle Hard" did NOT screw around - if you wanted out of the first area, you needed to know the plotlines of five different Shakespeare plays. Later, you needed to know traits of various birds, and at the end, you needed to know how to recognize features on Tarot cards.

If anything, I'd almost say that retro games tended to overestimate player intelligence and ability. Hell, I just played Bad Mojo from 1996, and while the game had almost no puzzles, the one major puzzle it had ran on high-grade moon logic.

I'd take uber-dumb puzzles over moon logic any day.

inb4 Covarr calls me out on liking Myst games because they have moon logic. He's wrong, always has been wrong and will always be wrong about it.

 

[MCerberus]

No, they're just aiming to accommodate the lower end instead of challenging the higher end. Which isn't necessarily bad. That said, I'd really like a modern RPG to pull the "we're throwing you blindly into the game. Figure out the meta or die."

Currently it's match based competitive games (DOTA2, LoL, WoT) exclusive up to it. Single player games are taking the Mass Effect 2 approach to things, which I *despiiiiiiiiiiise*

edit- actually, I think X-Com: EU did it the right way. I think anyone who isn't a veteran screwed up their first playthrough ROYAL.

 

[josemlopes]

I dont mind them putting easy puzzles for story based content since you need to get through that puzzle to finish the game (puzzle games get a pass though) but if its secondary stuff they really need to demand more from the player since if that player is doing the puzzles that arent even mandatory its probably because he enjoys puzzles in the first place. Tomb Raider really fucked up that part.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

I'd have to agree that the general populace is pretty stupid. Or is it laziness? I'll take my examples from Kingdom Hearts Dream Drop Distance. All the basics you need to know are presented in 'optional' tutorials (most are optional because I suppose the devs didn't want to have all that stuff get in the way of the action), and those tutorials are kept in a section of the main menu, easily accessible at any time, yet no-one seems to do that if they need to review something. I've lost count of how often someone would make a topic with questions that are answered in those tutorials. If it was for clarification, or because you want to know more, I'd get that, but when it's asking exactly how to do something that the tutorial literally explains, that's getting annoying. It became a case of we'd have to teach those people how to play the game because they plain refused to let have the game teach them.

 

[Whitbane]

It's what happens when companies try to sell their product to everything that breathes. You're going to encounter tons of people who have never played anything more complicated than Angry Birds, people who have never solved difficult puzzles, and people who want instant gratification instead of a reward after a long, arduous journey.

No one wants the player quitting after 10-50 minutes because they don't want to bother solving a puzzle, so the only logical thing to do is make the puzzles so brain dead that anyone can piece them together.

It's better to underestimate the average player intelligence, than to think most players are able to think on the fly, because sadly, most aren't.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

I think they certainly do. I don't want puzzles necessarily, but just a bit of credit in regards to finding my way around and accomplishing objectives. This is something Dark Souls (yep, I'm fanboying again, get used to it) does very well. The game doesn't tell you much or direct you on-screen, the level design implies things and you have to be paying attention to pick up on them, or else do things the hard way/die. For instance the Taurus Demon plunge attack. The NPCs also tell you things, in a natural way that suits the context, like the Undead Merchant mentioning a bull demon and a goat demon, those being the subsequent bosses, without marking it on a map or putting an objective marker. Admittedly, Dark Souls, while open-world, has very specific levels and isn't like Skyrim where you can go anywhere in a largely wall-less map where there isn't an implied place to proceed. Skyrim would need a much more detailed system for NPCs to tell you things that you can then act on without assistance from a marker.

But my point that I would have eventually gotten to is that most games don't give you the option of working things out for yourself, not just because they do it for you, but because there is no system in place for you to work it out yourself.

Another thing I didn't appreciate, games like Assassin's Creed telling you how to approach something. They've gotten worse over time, but even in one of the Ezio series, I remember seeing a big guarded palace, and I said to myself "Imma have to get into that at some point". So I found a way in ahead of time and went on with my business. When there was finally a mission to kill someone inside it, I had a moment of "YES! I used some intuition and it paid off!", which was then obliterated when the cinematic panned and zoomed suggestively to the pillars I had used beforehand without help. It just told me what to do, again, and it wasn't necessary.

tl;dr: Yes, except Dark Souls, I love Dark Souls.

 

[Auron225]

"You pressed Start - ACHIEVEMENT!"
"Push the analogue stick Forward to run Forward!"
"When your health drops to zero, you die!"

Wherever do you get that idea? The sad thing is, fewer people are going to not play a game because it's too dumbed down as opposed to too complicated.

 

[MrBaskerville]

It's like Uncharted, there's all these elaborate puzzles but you are always given the solution. I think they just focus tested the shit out of the puzzles until they were so easy that everyone could solve them in their sleep. I honestly don't know why developers even bother to make puzzles these days, it just seems pointless when it has to be so damned easy.

 

[CorvusFerreum]

Reminds me of this:

I like the part where they mistake "Wounded Knee" for a Skyrim joke. Y'know, as opposed to the site of a real historical massacre that is included in the game's story.

Clearly the game was made for people smarter than whoever made that video.

I think you might want to rewatch the video and rethink wether the creator really thought it was a Skyrim joke. Becaus I think you might have missed a joke here.


OT:
I can understand why they would put in easy puzzles, as not everyone is good at them or even likes them. Broadening the mainstream appeal of a game is what AAA is about these days. Though, to be fair: If a "puzzle" might as well be a button or be solved in a cutscene they should just leave it out. The Bioshock example really annoyed me, when I played it. If you are going to rub the solution right in my face, at least don't make let me be the monkey-man to press the button prompts on you command. If you don't trust me on doing it, game, fine. But then do it yourself.

 

[snappydog]

The thing I've found with Skyrim's 'puzzles' is that they're hard for me because I suspect my TV's brightness is kind of low or something. The most I've been held up in that game is looking for a goddamn pull chain that I JUST CAN'T SEE, even with Candlelight, and it's not deliberately hidden either. It's just annoying false difficulty, because there's no skill or logic to finding it, just a lot of fumbling about.

 

[Salus]

People are going on and on about how "people are stupid" in this thread. In one sense, yes, but I find individual people tend to be smart, but a group of them tend to be stupid, because you are applying the same problem with ONE RIGHT ANSWER to people with MANY unique intelligences, as someone else mentioned already. Unlike RL, we do not yet model multiple ways to solve one problem in games.

For example, let's find a typical "stupid person." How about one of those superficial girls who just does her hair and makeup all the time and reads fashion magazines? If she were to lead a platoon into battle she'd get them all killed before you could say "relieved of command," but honestly, it's because she's simply spent her energy learning something else. If I for some reason ever decided to wear makeup or go to parties, she could probably school me in that department.

For the record, there's a difference between designing "smart" games and "intellectual" games. Like an above poster mentioned, having to know the plots to several Shakespeare plays and what Tarot is would constitute an INTELLECTUAL problem, where you are relying on general available knowledge. This simply tests how good of a walking textbook you are. SMART games work an a more intuitive level. For example, deciding not to reveal critical information to the person to whom it concerns, for fear of his reprisal. ANYONE can figure this out once they realize they are playing a game where such things are modeled. The thing is not many games bother to put that "logic skeleton" in like book authors do. In many books, you often catch a problem developing and think it's a flaw in the book, but it later plays out in the story, creating a sense of realism.

Again, even though a lot of people from South Central may not have high IQ scores, I probably wouldn't last 10 minutes in their neighborhood without their guidance. Same thing goes if I ever get transported back to live with the Vikings. Relatively speaking, I'm the stupid one, that can't even feed myself or make my shelter, etc. without their constant help.

 

[Aeshi]

"No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."

Let me assure you, no matter HOW simple a task may seem, there is somebody out there who can (and has) screwed it up.

Even the smartest of us have our dumb moments, I've had more than one occasion where I've wanted to grab somebody I otherwise respect for their intelligence and shout "You dense mud-sucker, how have you not worked this out yet?!" because they somehow managed to go about 20 minutes without noticing the bright glowing weakspots on the Supports they needed to destroy to proceed. I've probably been the subject of quite a few of those moments too.

 

[Blood Brain Barrier]

It's the reason I don't like Elder Scrolls. They boast about having such a huge world and exploration but what's the point if it's filled with copy-and-paste puzzles and monsters all over the map? I spent much less time with Skyrim than I did with a typical RPG or adventure game, because the puzzles and challenges weren't unique or challenging. It had such a casual feel to it, which I hate. I would prefer the world to be ten times smaller and every person, puzzle and quest to be unique and hand-crafted, instead of computer generated. It's hard for me to fathom the people who claimed to spend 100+ hours on the game, let alone 20.

I'd take uber-dumb puzzles over moon logic any day.

I wouldn't. Moon logic is still logic, and it's a hell of a lot more satisfying to solve than stumbling across another door code written on a wall in a dark cave for the 50th time.

 

[JasonKaotic]

Well I absolutely agree that games nowadays treat their players like morons, but there's a lore-related reason the puzzles in ruins in Skyrim are easy. Don't know if this has been said yet, but the locks are supposedly there to keep the Draugr from getting about rather than to keep people out. So the locks are supposed to be easy so that people can get about in the ruins unhindered, but they still exist because the Draugr won't be able to figure them out and that keeps them locked up.
The more you know.

But yeah, I still agree that I'm sick of having my hand held all through games. Let me figure shit out for myself, dammit.