brendan mcleod

So I've talked about how I think 'story' difficulty is the better experience in Alan Wake 2, and how I wish Control had an actual designed easy mode the reduced enemy spawns, curtailed some rougher enemy abilities (and so on) rather than the assist mode that was patched in that lets you mess with combat parameters.

And like, I will often say that the combat challenge is just not the point with these games, and I think this begs the question of "okay but isn't having combat then superfluous and therefore a flaw?"

And... no, actually. These games do need the combat to be there, the combat is just poorly tuned in Control (and on Normal difficulty in Alan Wake 2). Just because combat challenge isn't the point doesn't mean that the combat doesn't have a purpose.

These games would just be fundamentally different in tone if they were pure adventure games with no combat. To get a certain mood or tone you just ultimately need the world to be able to push back on the player; you need some push and pull where the game world isn't just a passive object that the player acts upon. Just like how a horror story needs to put its characters in jeopardy. 'Mechanical jeopardy' in a game is a fundamental storytelling tool. Not every game needs it, of course, but some do.

It doesn't have to be combat, either; Amnesia uses pure stealth, for example. Combat is just widely understood by both players and designers and it typically makes sense in the milieu of, say, a horror story.

But I think that very often this kind of friction ends up tuned to a point of frustration that drives players to want to turn it off (see SOMA); or there's some misidentification of whether it actually is necessary. And I think that these kinds of games are ones that really do benefit from a general difficulty slider that bring the combat challenge down. Because I think a lot of the time the best experience is one where combat is there to push back on the player but not really knock you over.

Also definitely difficulty sliders like this should affect the number and type of enemy spawns and not just change combat parameters like damage, thank you for coming to my GDC talk.

#video games #alan wake 2 #control

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in reply to @bruno's post:

Natalie @nex311/11/2023, 2:08 AM

as a Combat in Video Games Hater, I grudgingly admit that you have a point

Bruno Dias @bruno11/11/2023, 2:12 AM

I mean don't get me wrong, I think combat is frequently done very poorly especially in games like these, and it can sour people on the whole concept

Amy Dentata @amydentata11/11/2023, 2:19 AM

The combat in Control was absolutely perfect for me, up until various chronic illnesses started taking over my life. I think they tune for a slightly too-high difficulty; before my illnesses went into overdrive I was above-average skill-wise. I guess, more accurately, they tune for the crowd that used to be a "typical" PC gamer in like the 2000's, which is a smaller subset of everyone that games today.

Unangbangkay @Unangbangkay11/11/2023, 2:22 AM

I honestly don't remember if games that implemented combat parameter tweaking for accessibility have done it this way (i feel like it'd be a given for games that do go far enough to include them)

but having both a general slider and per-parameter tweaks and using them like graphics presets that you then fine-tune in an advanced section to your needs/liking

would be the ideal

Bruno Dias @bruno11/11/2023, 2:28 AM

I don't think I've ever seen this for combat tweaking.

I think with this kind of approach you run into the problem that a good difficulty mode goes into finer detail than you'd want to bother exposing as sliders to the player.

In Control, the 'assist mode' parameters don't add up to a real difficulty mode. You can turn combat challenge off entirely, or you can make it harder to die without actually retuning the combat properly.

But a proper easy mode would need to change enemy spawns, both by spawning fewer enemies (thus keeping the length of combat encounters appropriate) and by spawning a less challenging mix of enemies. It should also individually tune elements of different enemy abilities to reduce specific pain points, because a lot of the overtuning in Control is coming from specific enemies being very potent against the player. All of that is too fine grained to really put into sliders, like does the player benefit from a slider that's like, 'enemy sniper lock on speed'?

Unangbangkay @Unangbangkay11/11/2023, 2:37 AM

Good point, and also remembering that sometimes difficulty modes include more design-based tweaks beyond combat (like IIRC Persona 4 and 5's easy modes pump up your cash intake, essentially unbalancing the game in your favor)

@secrets11/11/2023, 2:27 AM

I think the issue is less whether those games require some friction or time pressure (yes, absolutely) and more whether shooting up an infinite stream of soldier dudes is a particularly well-considered form of that to pair with a spooky ghost story. The zombies keep me from dawdling around picking at threads in the scenery in a way that'd ruin the effect but I'm not scared dealing with them, mostly I'm bored and annoyed. The difficulty of the shooting per se is sorta besides the point; I guess maybe it was tuned to the point where it wasn't frustrating for me anyway, but only because I've killed these exact same zombies a thousand times before in supersoldier power fantasies and edgy fairytales and games about camping and it's just muscle memory at this point. I'm thinking about doing the dishes while I dodge the screaming explody dudes in the FBC.

There's a case to be made that games don't seem to sell huge if they don't revolve around one million zombies and a shotgun but that doesn't make it any less a lame way to keep things moving

brendan mcleod

@sulcata

throw my better self overboard

On Remedy Combat

in reply to @bruno's post: