That difficulty post got me thinking about other things and how I generally kinda strongly dislike videogame advice that attempts to 'flatten' the medium. "You have to do this, you never should do this, use this trick all the time" blahblah you heard me talk about Coyote Time.
So here is one I loathe. "Players shouldn't think about the controls! They should be invisible! It's your job to put the player's intentions on screen. If the player isn't getting what they want, it's a failure of the game" ... or similar variations.
The most insidious little bits of advice are the pieces of advice that are true like, 90% of the time, cause most of the time, this is a great advice! But in this time where arcades are rare and virtually all games are designed for the same type of controller, people forget that sometimes the controller is as much of the game as the game.
I'm a flight sim nerd. I love controls, I love buttons, I like awkward operating mechanisms, cockpits with poor visibility. I dream about getting more gear that will, ultimately, make me less precise, but increase my immersion. I'm not the airplane. I am the little dude inside the airplane, trying to be the airplane... and I think this example makes sense to people? Like who is gonna say "Having to use a stick shift in a hardcore racing sim is a failure of UX", right? But lets extend this to other games.
I took a long time away from the FGC pre covid and when I came back and was watching a someone play on twitch (thx pat) and he said "I really like how [Player] pilots [Character]." and I immediately fell in love with this expression cause it bridged two concepts so perfectly. Fighting games are the poster child for the "If the players are messing up their moves it's a problem with the game! Why don't they do what Smash did already??" but a fighting games, especially the ones I love the most, are less about being a character and more about being a pilot. It's about having a character, with all these capabilities and this super high performance theoretical ceiling and being the horrible meat bag that has to try and cox a fraction of that out. There was a great Day9 I think about a Starcraft Broodwar and it's hard mechanics and chunky interface and all the things players think they need to learn before playing.
All of these are not requirements to begin to play the game... They are they game
The controls and interface are as just much of the games as the developer wants them to be... and you can take this single player and talk about Bennett Foddy games, or Dark Soul's infinite input buffer thats actually trying to get you killed, but it's the same idea. The game just did what you asked it to. It's on you to get better at communicating.
Yeah. I think its important for there to be both. For example, RTSes that appeal towards both people who are in it for the more physical & micro aspects, and people who want to focus on, for example, the strategic aspects and arent interested in the taxing micromanagement etc. Both are important and should exist rather than just being kneejerk dismissive of each other when the topic comes up. You cant ignore that micromanagement etc can be really enjoyable for people by itself and often produces nuances, but you also cant ignore that a lot of people arent interested in micro etc(and it isnt inherent/necessary as long as you're willing to expand the design) so you should make things for them too. Stuff like Steel Division 2 and Starcraft 1 are for very different types of players and that's fine. Ultimately, each game has to consider where it lands and not just write things off according to tradition or some insufficiently calculated sense of what matters.
One thing thats related for me is something like "weight". I get kind of annoyed how it feels like a lot of games go towards just "make everything as fast and instant as possible, nothing takes any time to happen and theres no commitment to any action and you just zip along." Being responsive can feel good, but I really personally hate how, for example, most diabloesque games just turn into a slurry of instant attacks and movement where nothing has any weight or telegraphing.
This is part of why some people(like me) love, for example, Black Mage in FFXIV or Bladesworn in GW2. They have long windup times on their attacks, and i think that makes them feel SO much better than like everything else. Windup gives attacks anticipation and weight and impact, its exciting and it feels so much better than instant attacks generally do. And it adds tactical aspects that are part of what make those classes so great.
Instant attacks feel good when alongside things that are weighty. They're amazing when they're an exception that allows you to move at incredible speeds and deal with things you cant normally deal with. But when everything is instant, for me it just makes a game feel awful, attacking isnt satisfying and enemies usually have to be designed in unpleasant ways to counteract the player's power level.
Or similarly I really like tank games like War Thunder or Girls Und Panzer Dream Tank Match. The vehicles are relatively realistically slow, and you're limited by how fast your turret can turn, and their reload times are generally 5 to 15 seconds which is long for most games. It feels just really satisfying moving around these huge steel contraptions and trying to play around the different physical limitations they have, they have tactics fundamentally different from usual shooters and they're just really satisfying feeling and I love trying to control janky tanks that have multiple turrets.
Also, "players shouldnt think about controls" bothers me in a different way- theres no such thing as intuitive controls besides maybe movement ones. Everything is built on experience and trial and error. People get blind to this because they're used to video games.
