boholikeu said:
X3:TC still isn't designed as well as it could have been. They could have included a real tutorial campaign that slowly unlocks features as the player progresses.
You know, the word tutorial just wasn't being connected with the word 'design' in my head. You're quite right about that, I suppose a comprehensive tutorial would have been a harmless improvement to X3's design.
I retain my stance on Supcom though. Going back to something I said earlier, about playing to achieve a standard and for no other reason... In Supcom FA, balancing your economy with your military efforts, while leaving enough spare to upgrade a mass extractor at a time and *gradually* escalate was the mark of a competent player, but the intensity and volatility of that process meant that competent players numbered about 15% of the player base. And yet, the design was absolutely flawless.
Supcom 2 is, in my opinion, a game for not-very-gifted-gamers who like to smash toy cars against each other without being fettered by additional concerns. The ceiling of skill is catastrophically low. Achieving a high standard of play there is just meaningless; I look at my friends list as I write this, and I see a lot of people who'd laugh if I used the name Supcom2 and the phrase 'high standard of play' in the same paragraph.
The game was pillaged of everything that was good about its predecessor for the sake of "accessibility", which is the byword for casuals.
On the topic here, "why is casual bad", it's bad because *that lesson has been learned* now. Any developer in the foreseeable future will avoid creating another Supcom FA because the casual majority responded a little better to the much simplified sequel. It's happening across all genres. The featureless grey paste that gets barfed out as 'appealing to core players' these days is a sick, sick *joke*. It's just more casual fodder.
I don't blame the casuals, as I've said before, you can't play what you don't like. I just wish there were a lot fewer of them, so that developers would forget about them and start catering to me and my lot again (it'd be ideal if we could morph casuals into core gamers until we had a 50/50 ratio). I'm understandably disappointed that I'm always backtracking through my collection for things to play, and rarely looking forward to something.