• he/randomly switch any

follow me on https://bsky.app/profile/mightfo.bsky.social (alternatives welcome, just comment) and https://www.pillowfort.social/Mightfo and https://mightfo.itch.io/ (got two projects in the works :D :D)

leftist/feminist/atheist. into anime, history, mmorpgs, games, cuties, stuff~

genderfluid, usually femboy

About Me Post~ https://cohost.org/Mightfo/post/307133-about-me

Avatar by AyakoFukiishi, header by flivine.

If you wanna comment then go ahead and make a comment! Ill probably smile and reply back :>


Kayin
@Kayin

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.


Mightfo
@Mightfo

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.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Kayin's post:

Wait, dark souls has an INFINITE INPUT BUFFER?! That's cool, I hadn't realized but makes sense.

Great post btw! I think that advice has another potential problem of erasing how 'conscious' using an input device is for new players too. Also how there is just a lot of joy in being conscious of your controls? A super embodied experience often involves that to some degree, as you say with flight sticks, but even just 'a fun way to use the gamepad'. I think there's some Foddy quote about making games that are fun to play with the controller unplugged? As in, just the motions it asks of you on the controller are enjoyable to perform.

On that point of 'a fun way to use the gamepad', I've been playing Splatoon a lot and singing the praises of motion aiming, but even outside of the aiming benefits its just fun and intuitive to look around this way. I've totally caught myself picking up the controller while its off and just moving it around, or spent way too long in the lobby just moving/shooting around, there's a joy in controlling this game that makes it hard to put down.

There's of course a lot of talk about how having precision aiming like this leads to better competitive play vs sticks with motion assist, but even at complete casual/beginner levels, I'd say there's fun in being at fault for a miss, in having to perfect the piloting, to manage getting precise movement out of a fuzzy input device.

Yeah, gyro control in Splatoon is really excellent. In general, I think motion control is seriously underrated and a great example of this kind of thing! It really has an unnecessarily bad wrap.

I was having a chat with some friends the other week about how it's criminal that so few switch games use the touch screen, but also just not enough using gyro or motion in general. The fact that as far as I know hardly any switch games use it's touch screen (even just for optional inputs like clicking on menus) is willlddd to me.

the concept of piloting is critical in competitive Magic; there have always been players who get very upset at the idea that someone is playing a deck they didn't personally come up with, but it's an inevitability because of the internet that anyone with the money to pay for cards can easily find out what the most successful deck in any constructed format is and have a good deck. but simply having ~the best deck~ doesn't mean you'll win against players who are playing other decks; there are so many layers of instinct and deep understanding of the format you're playing. the ability to assess what information your opponent gives you and what information they might be concealing is the product of endless hours of practice, and the ability to quickly adapt to an evolving format and continue to perform at that level as the meta evolves is what truly separates the best players.

One thing I find interesting in magic too is like any deck you look up online is no longer the best deck. Like the deck may still be leveraging the strongest card combos and strategies in the current block, but the "best" deck can only exist in the moment, where a skilled player has predicted the meta and has tuned their deck and their sideboard as a precision strike, tuned for exactly that moment.

Yeah, I've seen this metaphor of "invisible" aspects being propped up in other areas too, such as "The Crystal Goblet" in typography. I don't think it ever holds up to scrutiny. Interaction, just as presentation, cannot be invisible. It can at most be homogenized.

this reminds me of how i sorta felt about the controls in hardspace shipbreaker. the game has really sluggish controlls (which simulates the fact that you are in space using a jetpack to move around). its six degrees of freedom as well (up down left right forward back and also rotate left and right). learning how to get around fluidly is a huge part of the game. starting out you are extremely aware of how awkward the movement is—you overshoot targets constantly and end up upside down a lot. but theres this wonderful progression of getting better at the movement to where they slowly start to disappear. its genuinely really thrilling to go from “ah fuck what button was rotate again? shit how do i brake??” to “okay and now ill just grapple over there and slam everything into the barge. sweet. lets get to the back of the ship now”. if the controls were “better” the game would be much less interesting to play

been thinking about how the rhythm game community, specially iidx's, really go out their way to replicate the exact arcade measurements for their homemade controllers.

despite iidx's button and turntable placement being objectively awful ergonomics (your hand can't rest in a natural position to reach every button and the disc is far from the hands despite being required to spin constantly on some charts), it's arguably also what makes that game and players clearly recognize that since they are actively seeking to reproduce arcade accurate measurements instead of settling for something far more efficient to reach higher scores.