Giving hardcore games to casuals

[Exius Xavarus]

Friend of mine wanted to play Demon's Souls simply because it looked awesome. So I let him have a go.

He got slaughtered as he tried to punch the Vanguard in the dick. Was upset, but not so much since he got to move on since he died. Then he got to the Boletarian Palace. Went through the level at a rather slow pace, until he reached the Red Eye Knight just outside King Doran's chamber. He recklessly charged at it, having previously taken down Blue Eye Knights, just barely.

After the Red Eye Knight kicked his ass up and down the bridge, he made one last go and promptly dropped himself into a pit. Said fuckit and never wanted to touch the game again. xD

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Anyway! She simply could not comprehend how to maneuver with dual analog sticks. One to move, one to look. I'm off blasting Covenant while I look over and she's spinning in circles. Needless to say she ragequit in about 2 minutes.

Not a hardcore game by any means but she took casual to a whole new level I'd never seen before.

As a PC gamer primarily I can sort of understand her frustration with playing a FPS with a controller, it took me awhile to get used to it and even now I prefer the old Mouse/Keyboard setup.

 

[Rob Robson]

hardcore

Grand Theft Auto IV.

I was actually looking forward to a thread about casuals playing Counter-Strike:GO, Natural Selection 2, Starcraft 2, etc. Stop muddling the definition of hardcore. You should have kept it to "More complex games" instead of creating a misleading thread.

 

[josemlopes]

My Dad is in a weird place between Casual and Hardcore. He can handle slower paced but complicated games (like Dragon Age/Mass Effect) but has trouble handling a lot of the basic stuff in quick "twitchy" games. I've got him building up with Skyrim now but it'll take time before he gets to start pwning n00bs...

Anyway, I tried playing Halo with him once, which was highly entertaining. I basically dropped the difficulty to Easy and did my best not to just murder everything that got anywhere near us. He had a lot of trouble getting used to aiming and moving at the same time so he would usually just stop in the middle of the war-zone to aim at the bad guys.

The Bigs was another fun one (arcadey baseball game). He could handle everything about it except for when it came to jumping the wall to steal a homerun. To do this, it gives you a glorified QTE and he doesn't know the buttons well enough to do even the most basic of QTE's in time. Kind of humorous since he has 3 buttons to push in 10 seconds while I have 10 to push in 10 seconds. I stole every home run from him that I could and he was lucky if he could get 1/4.

My dad also has that problem, if the game doesnt give him his time to do the thing he wants to do he ends up having a hard time adjusting to it. For shooters you could try Gears of War 3, it lets you have one player on easy while the other plays in hard if you want so at least you wouldnt be playing bad on purpose to let him have some fun. And cover based shooter, that gives time to handle things, even the enemies take time to die.

 

[NinjaDeathSlap]

Me: "Switch to the Gravity Hammer."
Girl: "Which one is that?"
Me: "... it's the one that looks like a hammer."
Girl: "But which one's that?"
Me: "THE BIG STICK!"

This is a small transcript of my efforts to help a non-gamer play Halo: Reach multi-player.

 

[Professor Idle]

Well, my mum managed to get through the ship level in Call of Duty 4 on Easy, although very quickly after she threw up due to seasickness. From a game.

 

[Killclaw Kilrathi]

I hate to say this, but I find that I'm turning into the equivalent of someone's dad when it comes to video games. I used to be awesome at twitch games like UT2004 and CS:S, and played it all the time online and at public LAN events. But ten years later I honestly feel like I've lost my edge, I tried BF3 recently and may as well have had flippers for hands. It also doesn't help my "I'm becoming an old man" feeling when I realize the only reason I tried an FPS again is because it came for free with SimCity.

These days I'm more into simulation games and MMOs like GW2, so maybe there's hope for me yet in the less twitchy genres.

 

[Rob Robson]

Would you mind defining "hardcore"?

Certainly. A hardcore game is either:

A. One that takes several hundreds of hours to master (playing Aliens in Natural Selection 2 for example)
B. One that is extremely unforgiving (Say, Dark Souls, to provide an example most here can relate to)
C. One that has both balance and skill gap in multiplayer,* and thus is competitive (say Starcraft 2/ NS2/ Red Orchestra 2)
D. A persistent game (usually MMO) with permanent death and PvP looting.

*It is much more common to relate to C. as 'competitive' or 'hardcore competitive'.

 

[ASnogarD]

Hardcore = Gamers who spent way too much time on games and forget they are meant to be fun , if you aint having fun it aint fun.

Casual = Someone who picks up a controller occasionally to relax, will not spend hours on end to master the art of a specific title and will simply dismiss a game as not fun if it cant be understood and played after picking it up.
(Note: Played, not completed...if it cannot be played)

It is blurred by the console / PC division... I am reasonably adept at playing CoD Blops II, CS (Tho the Source engine has really crappy hit reg), TF 2, BF 2 , BF 2142 <3 , BF 3 </3 ... I aint too bad on FPS on the PC, but cannot play half as smoothly on a console because to me the controllers are awkward.

 

[Techno Squidgy]

Hardcore = Gamers who spent way too much time on games and forget they are meant to be fun , if you aint having fun it aint fun.

Casual = Someone who picks up a controller occasionally to relax, will not spend hours on end to master the art of a specific title and will simply dismiss a game as not fun if it cant be understood and played after picking it up.
(Note: Played, not completed...if it cannot be played)

It is blurred by the console / PC division... I am reasonably adept at playing CoD Blops II, CS (Tho the Source engine has really crappy hit reg), TF 2, BF 2 , BF 2142 <3 , BF 3 </3 ... I aint too bad on FPS on the PC, but cannot play half as smoothly on a console because to me the controllers are awkward.

Trying to use a gamepad for FPS is just... it's like having my hands swapped with my feet.

OT: I only really have stories about me introducing friends to PC and my own personal battle with console FPS. Also, my friends get really annoyed when I point out frame rate drops, texture pop-ins, reduced FoV, etc. I can't help it! Now that I can notice these things, I can't stop noticing. I'm sick!

 

[Aircross]

I was watching my little brother play Megaman X. He couldn't get through the intro level. Then I told him that Megaman X isn't even the hardest of all the Megaman games.

Hardcore = Gamers who spent way too much time on games and forget they are meant to be fun , if you aint having fun it aint fun.

Casual = Someone who picks up a controller occasionally to relax, will not spend hours on end to master the art of a specific title and will simply dismiss a game as not fun if it cant be understood and played after picking it up.
(Note: Played, not completed...if it cannot be played)

What some people find it fun mastering a game? Example: Speedrunners...


...and competitive gamers.


You cannot blanket your definition of fun over others.

 

[Palmerama]

I cannot stand the "hardcore" & "casual" definitions! There have always been people who play games at different rates & different games but this generation has really laid out the divide!

I've been playing games for over 20 years from Pac-man to Castlevania, Tetris to Resident Evil, Angry Birds to Dark Souls and I've never called myself a hardcore gamer. All games require an evolution of skill.

My girlfriend prefers playing iOS games and played a game called Dragon Skies so much when it came out the game couldn't handle the amount she'd done and constantly crashed. She had to wait for them to update the game enough for her to continue. Playing a casual game to the extent of a hardcore gamer? Blurring the lines a bit isn't it?

Surely someone who has a K/D of 12.0 in CoD has a right to brag as much as someone who's 3 starred every level in Candy Crush saga? Both took a degree of skill and a dedicated time to achieve. Regardless of the type of game.

 

[dangitall]

Send anyone unfamiliar with RTS into DotA, LoL, HoN, etc.'s multi-player lobby.

No, that's a bit too cruel.