I deeply, deeply, deeply disagree with the notion that shooting games (or arcade games in general) are only enjoyable when played for score, and I'm someone that doesn't use continues in arcade games.
I wouldn't say they're only enjoyable when played for score, just that (arguably) most of their enjoyment is locked behind that mastery gate that you can't really make much progress on until you've finished the game. In a way, though, shooting games kind of have multiple levels of engagement; there's pre-1cc and post-1cc. Pre, you're just trying to survive, and making the game even harder by playing for score isn't really a thing (except on, maybe, the early levels, as you necessarily end up mastering them before the later ones due to sheer repetition). Post, you're taking those skills and making whatever adjustments necessarily to get your score up. The whole way you play the game changes. You might jump to specific problem points instead of continuing to play through the game over and over.
I disagree. Character action games like Bayonetta are best when great enemy design forces players to adapt, and use different tools to overcome ever-increasing challenges.
Devil May Cry 1 is one of the prime examples of this. Fuck the scoring; you needed to master every weapon and attack except maybe Vortex and the Nightmare Beta to stay alive on ever-increasing difficulty levels. Every tool had an optimal use case, and plenty were all but useless against certain enemy types. Changing your weapon set profundity altered your combat style.
Devil May Cry has always appealed to me more than Bayonetta for that reason. 1, 3, and to a lesser extent 4 are all superb at forcing players to experiment with their abilities, precisely because there was no single weapon or combo that universally trashed every enemy in the game.
Nothing is balanced with such perfection as Devil May Cry 1 though. It's so much simpler than the newer games in the genre, but the enemy design and combat balance between the player and the various configurations of opponents has never been more finely tuned.
Scores and ranks are awesome if that's why you're playing, but the best character action games force players to get better in order to proceed, rather than just applauding players with more or less fanfare based on how stylish a given inevitable victory is.
You say this as though you can simply faceroll through Bayonetta, and as if playing for score doesn't make Devil May Cry 1 harder than just increasing the difficulty. Neither of those things are true.
This sounds to me that this is the game's fault for not providing proper amounts of engagement when allowing this type of play to exist.
Of course this is solved with context and a story, which to me works wonders in making me care more about getting more familiar with the gameplay, not to mention incentives to not "credit feed"
All of these games have context and stories. I couldn't really explain even the most basic facets of the plots of many of these games, half because most of them don't get localized at all, half because I never cared, but the story is still there. That being said, games like Ketsui were designed for arcades. You put in 100 yen (or whatever) and play as long as your skill holds out. If you get a game over, you can continue from where you left off, but your score is reset. In this way, the game gives you control over how you play it. The incentive not to credit feed is the right to enter your name on the high score leaderboard.
It's basically impossible to get a high score after a game over, because you will have a strictly lower score than any player that beats the game on one credit.
Credit feeding through a shmup is kinda like pouring a beer wrong and drinking a glass full of mostly-foam.
Agreed. While Bayonetta's plot is really cool on paper, the execution is absolutely horrible. Most non-action cutscenes are a confusing snore-fest. I think that's why gaffers seem to really love Nier: Automata. It's imbuing a P* game with the one thing they do horribly: competent storytelling.
I can see why this feels like a cop-out. Take Bayonetta again, for instance. In your first playthrough, you're constantly thrown into new environments with new enemies to fight. On top of that, you're periodically unlocking new weapons, moves, and equipment. It's simply too much to really internalize how to fight each enemy, use each weapon, etc. on the first go without duplicating the encounters multiple times, which is also not ideal. I'm honestly curious to hear what the alternative is.
Yep. Normal is basically a really long, fun tutorial. It's why you're forced to play it before unlocking hard, I think. If you jump straight into hard mode, you're gonna have a bad time. The enemies hit twice as hard, there are more of them, and more difficult ones appear more often. They're also more aggressive, and give you less time to react to their attacks.
It's interesting that you mention duplicating encounters, because Bayonetta, for the most part, doesn't do this. The game is broken down in to chapters (levels) comprised of various verses (battles). Each chapter at each difficulty has the same set of verses (except no Alfheim portals on Easy and below), but each individual verse can have 1 to 4 different enemy layouts, depending on the difficulty (only 4 because there are very few differences between Easy and Very Easy; basically, on Very Easy, you can't fail QTEs, and you get passive health regen if you avoid damage for 5 seconds). This means that while you'll see the same cutscenes (though, since they're all in-game, Bayonetta will wear her current costume) each playthrough, the enemies and enemy behaviors will very often change.
As for the plot, I really couldn't tell you what was happening. I've played through without skipping cutscenes three times, and the plot of both games is still pretty impenetrable for me. I think it's because I never read any of the lore books I picked up along the way. In a way, the game's story is another layer I have left to explore.
Not everyone play a game for the challenge, some like to relax, others like the story, the setting, the characters or whatever, saying that one way to play a game is the only way to play a game is wrong in every case.
That said times changed, scores aren't good for everything or everyone, i play games since the 8bit era and find scores pointless in single player games now, arcade games were short and more competitive(even in coop), now games have a lot more than that, they have story, acted cutscenes, choices and many other things, the shortest ones are 6 hours long, rpgs can arrive to hundreds of hours, hardcore gamers or fans aside not many people would replay all those hours just to master it when there's an insane amount of other games to choose from, many people have huge backlogs.
Exactly. Varying difficulty levels are a wonderful thing. Some people want to beat the game once without much trouble. Others like to challenge themselves to unlock rewards for beating more difficult gameplay (weapons, etc) to enhance the experience of more gameplay, often on higher difficulties. Others want to play over and over to get perfect grades and scores. It's not hard to implement all these things into an arcadey kind of game. Not to say every game should, but those that do have much broader appeal than those that only cater to one type of player.
I'm not saying it's the only way to play. Just that any game
with a scoring system is probably at its most fun when playing for score. RPGs, in my experience, do not have any sort of scoring system at all. They also don't particularly reward mastery, or at least don't incentivize it much (or at all), even if they have difficulty sliders.
By the way, the whole concept of "backlogs" runs counter to the idea of mastery, so I don't think about my collection as a "backlog" anymore. Just because I own a game doesn't mean that if I enjoy it even a little, I "have to" finish it. I'd rather play whatever it is I enjoy the most. Games that you finish once and then move on are probably less fun, not more, when you start a new playthrough. Once you learn how to play, it becomes easy. And raising the difficulty often merely increases enemy power and decreases player power, which is extremely lazy. Games like Bayonetta and Rocket League get more and more fun to play the better you get at them, because the game never runs out of a new challenge to provide. You'll never get so good that you never want to play anymore, because playing at that level is inherently fun.
All that being said, Bayonetta scales all the way down to nothing in terms of difficulty. You can make the game almost play itself thanks to the Immortal Marionette. And once you beat the game at that lower difficulty, you can then take that item to the other difficulties in the game, if you rely on it to do combos.
Regarding the "game starts after the first playthrough" thing: I've been vocal about this before, but in an ideal world it would be possible to do a singular playthrough of Bayonetta that hit all the heights offered by all the difficulty levels. We can talk about why this doesn't happen (budgetary reasons, a sizable chunk of the audience not being interested in the challenge, etc), but if there's mechanical complexity that makes the experience more enjoyable, I would like that to be closely linked to the aesthetic progression of the game (the advancement of the plot, the introduction of new enemies, new areas, etc).
So going from there, I see "for score" versus "for survival" in arcade games (or games like Bayonetta, even, because Bayonetta certainly isn't an arcade-styled game) in a similar light: survival is where the aesthetics and mechanics tie closest together. You aren't fighting for a higher number to compare with out-of-world people, but instead overpowering a boss, the glimpse of a new stage, etc.
Of course, scoring mechanics absolutely can improve games and often do. If only those mechanics, like the harder difficulty levels of Bayonetta, could be more deeply connected to the game's aesthetic progression!
I don't think it's that important to only ever play a game once, or only enjoy a game the most the first time through. I actually don't think what you're talking about is possible. Even Resident Evil 4 has a Pro mode that you unlock after the first playthrough, and that game arguably has the best adaptive difficulty design in history (maybe second to Tetris DX or something).
I'm glad I'm being met halfway, I feel very strongly about this subject and am usually met with hostility
I'm not sure that there is an alternative, especially since there's a lot of people who really enjoy this style of gameplay. I think the best thing is to learn lessons from other games and see what works for those games and try to implement them.
On the subject of character action games, I enjoyed the often maligned DmC: Devil May Cry a ton. Putting aside the aesthetics and the story, both of which I was head over heels with, the game was very accessible, allowed for encounters to facilitate a variety of weapon usage from the start, and had a manageable difficulty. Being invested in DmC was easy because you could enjoy yourself without putting the time in to learn all of the system's mechanics and you were incentivized to dig deeper with additional difficulty modes that tested your expertise at the game. I loved that. Anybody could have fun.
As for bullet hells, I think there's a lot to learn from Undertale. While the bullet hell gameplay of Undertale is very simple to understand and doesn't throw many mechanics at you, the way it was implemented into characterization and the story was nothing short of brilliant. On TOP of that, Undertale's accessibility was wonderful, embracing skill levels and personality types of all shapes and sizes. Many people played Undertale for the character and stories, and others were able to realize how the bullet hell gameplay integrated with that and made for a better experience.
I don't think either game started only in your second playthrough, but had systems in place to tell you that you should keep trying and going at it. The fact that playing awfully in DmC still made you feel cool was a big factor in keeping me engaged and feeling positive. Even playing like a scrub earned you a "DIRTY" which is infinitely cooler and less demeaning than the Consolation Prize in Wonderful 101 or Stone Awards in Bayonetta, which honestly make you feel like shit and make you ask "why am I even playing". It goes a long way in terms of game feel and making you feel happy playing, which I think Platinum needs to work on their accessibility a lot.
I look forward to playing Nier: Automata a fair amount to see how they've addressed my common criticism towards their games. I hear they made progress, which is great!
I can't speak to DmC as its presentation turned me way off, but Undertale, IIRC, doesn't have a scoring system, so it's not really trying to challenge you that much. You kind of get through it and play for the story more than anything.
Those Stone awards are the game's way of telling you "fine, I guess you survived the encounter, so technically you pass even though you aren't playing the game in a fun way." These games aren't about that participation award life.
Another example most players play in kuso- mode are the Arkham games. You can beat the game by mostly mashing, but good luck getting decent scores in challenge mode without knowing every nuance of the system front and back and being able to weave insane combos using every gadget.
Man, what a terrible opinion.
"Go is such a shitty game, it's not engaging at all! You just have those black and white pieces on a plain board, so bland and boring. It's the game's fault that I was not engaged the first time I played. Go should definitely learn from a game I've enjoyed from the start, Snakes and Ladders! It has all kinds of cool things going on in the board, plus when I play Snakes and Ladders even against excellent players, I have the same chance to win. This is so much cooler than Go where I always lose, which is so demeaning and makes me ask myself "why am I even playing?"".
I agree about Arkham (though it's still piss easy compared to the other games we've been discussing), but as for your second point, I can relate to people who feel that way about games. It took me over 20 years of playing to get to the point where I realized the stuff I'm talking about in this thread. Where, instead of doing stuff like trading games in and waiting for sales, I simply dive into the intricate systems of these games that I've ignored for years.
It's good that games have depth and the capability to offer scoring as a motivator for those that wasn't to continue playing. But I have 2000 games on Steam alone. I bought Bayonetta because it looks cool and I'm enjoying playing it, but I know I'm never going to touch the depth you're referring to and I know that. Which means it does need to be engaging in one play through (which it is). I'm not going to invest hundreds of hours info it, even my favorite games I'm not doing that with any more, because I have too much else I wanted to play. Sure, when I was a kid and owned maybe one new game every few months (if that) I would play them to the point of mastery, learning every little detail. Getting 101% on Donkey Kong Country in under an hour (save time, actual time was weeks on end) is still something I consider a great accomplishment. But now? I don't need that nor do I really want a game that expects it. Games should be engaging and fun to play as well as deep. Games with a good story don't need a score and if anything seeing constant scoring at times just feels like a relic of an arcade past that is now long gone.
Of those 2000, you could probably pick 50 and be set for life.
You can begin making progress towards the depth I'm referring to in Bayonetta when you start playing the game on Hard mode. The initial Normal playthrough should take 8-12 hours, counting cutscenes and deaths. But in that first playthrough, you'll only rack up enough halos to buy a fraction of the game's available weapons, items, techniques, and costumes. And each combination of accessories can have a very significant effect on your playstyle. The Moon of Mahaa-Kalaa, for example, lets you parry enemy attacks. The parrying system is lenient enough for you to parry just about everything if you keep mashing a forward input on the left analog stick towards your enemies, even mid-combo. But this overlaps with special moves like Stiletto, so you'll have to either disable those, or simply get used to parrying with real timing instead of mashing. One option is easier, but the other is much cooler. Or, you can mix and match, switching strategies depending on what works for you in any given fight.
Play Bayonetta for 20 hours and tell me you don't enjoy the second 10 more than the first. Read the strategy guide. Watch tutorial videos. Learn the advanced skills. Once you start getting better, you can't stop.
Not all home versions of shmups have unlimited continues
This is true, but this is really just a cheap way for developers to artificially extend the "replayability" of those types of games for the types of people who would simply hit continue at the game over screen until they were done, then complain about the game taking only 30 minutes to finish.
