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[YianGaruga]

Back in the SNES days, my peer group would laugh at people who read the manual instead of just pressing buttons. Unless it was a fighting game and we wanted to learn how to do our moves.

I always read my manuals, often multiple times. No one laughed at me

Spoiler

because I had no friends

 

[Mushroomer25]

Makes sense. If I sit down in front of something like Madden or Fifa with no context, it's difficult to just start playing the game and enjoying myself. There's a learning curve built by so many years of annual updates.

I think there's merit to looking at franchises like that, and considering the pick-up-and-play experience.

 

[Foshy]

I see his point from a business perspective. To be fair, controls have always been a major barrier to general public playing games (amongst other stereotypes). He wants to create a product that appeals to as many people as possible. The vast majority of people, don't want to be bothered spending hours learning how to control a game. That is one of the reasons smartphone/tablet games are so popular.

Exactly. Ideally, you want to keep your controls as simple as possible, so one can easily get into the game. Simple controls do not mean that the gameplay can't have depth or that the game can't be hard. Look at the platformer genre.

The problem arises when you have games where the depth comes from the control scheme, like many sports and fighting games. Which is ironic because these are usually the ones that are most often played together and as such, could be appealing to "non-gamers" too.

 

[Danneee]

Hoho haha hihi hehe

I can't believe these people are in charge of stuff that they want us to buy. They're so damn disconnected it's scary.
It must be such a uphill battle for the people working on the games, I feel truly sorry for them.

 

[Old Gimlet Eyes]

That's menus, not gameplay mechanics. Doesn't take 2 hours to figure out the menus, and it certainly doesn't take 2 hours to learn how to play a game published by EA.

The hand holding in most games today is ridiculous.

So you think someone who has never played a video game, hell someone who has played a game but not a first person shooter, could figure out how to play battlefield 4 in 2 hours? I doubt it.

 

[antitrop]

I think the problem with companies like King and Zynga keeping customers is more because they are exploitative than low-bar.

And EA isn't exploitative itself? Dungeon Keeper?

EA keeps itself strong by being diverse. The homogenization of all their games will just turn them into another King/Zynga.

 

[mrklaw]

he says that, but when was the last madden game that teaches someone like me that played some football in PE and watch the superbowl how to play properly?

I miss arcade sports games.

FIFA is crazily complicated. I don't understand why the controls needed to be complicated to have deep mechanics. Difficult not to sound like I'm shouting at clouds but sensible soccer had one fire button and still managed to be a great multiplayer game.

 

[Zen_Arcade]

Worst fucking idea ever. No thanks, I'll take my non-homogenized games. Stick to selling stock, Pete!

He's right in a lot of respects. After playing years of FPS I hate it when a developer tries to switch things up and make a face button the shoot button instead of leaving it on a trigger. Some things are just good ideas that shouldn't be messed with because they're already perfect where they are and the alternative is something less functional.

 

[GravityMan]

The bigger problem here isn't that games are "too hard to learn". It's that many games are too boring, which will cause most people, especially casual gamers, to drop your game quick.

Make the game (including its learning curve) fun, engaging and interesting...and many gamers including "average" ones will set time aside to learn how to play it.

I do think though that 2D games are easier for the average person to learn than 3D games.

 

[TTUVAPOR]

Makes sense. If I sit down in front of something like Madden or Fifa with no context, it's difficult to just start playing the game and enjoying myself. There's a learning curve built by so many years of annual updates.

I think there's merit to looking at franchises like that, and considering the pick-up-and-play experience.

Well...it's a game.

Board games are the same way. Hell, I still re-read Monopoly rules to this day everytime I father with family and friends to play it to make sure we're doing it correctly.

This CCO makes me cringe. Its this kind of mentality that makes today's game continue to get dumbed down.

 

[AndyMoogle]

So you think someone who has never played a video game, hell someone who has played a game but not a first person shooter, could figure out how to play battlefield 4 in 2 hours? I doubt it.

Figure out how to play it? Yes, definitely. Figure out how to be good at the game? No, of course not.

 

[QaaQer]

And EA isn't exploitative itself? Dungeon Keeper?

EA keeps itself strong by being diverse. The homogenization of all their games will just turn them into another King/Zynga.

Of course EA is exploitative, just not to the same degree. And yes, they failed with PvZ2 and Dungeon Keeper. But they have succeeded nicely with things like ME3 multiplayer, ultimate packs, and simpsons tapped out.

 

[Not Spaceghost]

I hope by this he means "clean, intuitive controls with a lot of depth".

 

[-Pyromaniac-]

Welcome to Game. Press A to Game.

*game occurs*

You win game.

Please purchase seasons pass/DLC for more Game.

 

[Freeman]

Get out of here.

Unless he means they need more intuitive controls, then I might actually agree.

I hate tutorials, I have quit on entire games because I couldn't stand how boring the begging was because of them. At least have the competence to disguise it.

I don't read manuals, I don't ask for directions and I don't like tutorial, sue me.

Also if you are going to show a tooltip, make sure it isn't something I already did countless time.

 

[Sir Garbageman]

He's not wrong. Mega Man is way easier to learn than Uncharted. Chrono Trigger is way easier to learn than Xenoblade.

Easy to learn, depth, and difficulty are not mutually exclusive.

Nobody wants to hear it, but he's actually not wrong if we're talking about people who have never touched a videogame before. It's much harder for them to learn the controls for 3D AAA games now than it was in earlier eras.

This is not necessarily about hand-holding and dumbing down mechanics.

Pretty much this.

 

[BibiMaghoo]

Welcome to Game. Press A to Game.

*game occurs*

You win game.

Please purchase seasons pass/DLC for more Game.

You just described a game by another developer, that has sold millions, and is actually pretty damn good.

 

[Steroyd]

Gee if only games had something where a player would know what the controls were before picking up a controller.

Something they could read.

I'm completely stumped at what that could be.

 

[Saty]

Could it be that the overuse of tutorials is what largely contributes to the increase in time that it takes to learn the game's mechanics, considering that it is usually just faster to press the buttons yourself and figure out what they do?

Indeed.
As much as these big publishers push accessibility and how they must grab the player in the first hour or else they lose him, their games' starting hours are tiresome and overbearing tutorial sections that can drive you insane. Yet, they are still baked-in as part of the campaign instead of being a separated optional entity.

Have 'Tutorial' on the main menu that teaches most of everything so when i start the game proper i'm not shackled down by instructions. I couldn't care less for an in-fiction explanation of why my player character might be transported to a cut-off area that has me going through every mechanic in the game in 15 minutes with deliberately designed encounters to teach me them.

 

[Darrcyphfeid]

Hilleman's comments came in response to a statement from interviewer Pete Holmes, the comedian, who said he would prefer that controller layouts and button maps stay the same for future installments in established series and even across franchises.

EA's approach is probably always going to be over-reaching, generally misguided, and/or just plain wrong, but standardizing controls isn't necessarily a bad thing. Specifically, the ability to (fully) customize control inputs on consoles would accomplish this and also be a massive boon to players with physical handicaps, which is another subject that I've seen come up time and again while lurking this message board.

 

[BlastProcessing]

FIFA is crazily complicated. I don't understand why the controls needed to be complicated to have deep mechanics. Difficult not to sound like I'm shouting at clouds but sensible soccer had one fire button and still managed to be a great multiplayer game.

Yup.

When you are designing a game and run into a problem, the easiest solution is usually to add complexity. Which can just push responsibility for solving the problem from the designer to the player. Making games is fucking hard and it is easy to fall into the trap of "add a new feature = add an new button". You have to be really vigilant against this as a designer.

If you let it run away from you you end up with something like this PA comic:

Nintendo is traditionally excellent at this. A good example is how Ocarina of Time does not have a jump button. You just run to a ledge and he jumps. No need to add complexity to solve the problem.

There was a story about the development of Journey where they were figuring out how the platforming should work. They were hung up on how to implement a ledge grab mechanic but it was causing headaches. Then they stood back and asked why do they even need a ledge grabbing mechanic? The best answer they could come up with is because it looked odd that a character wouldn't attempt to grab a ledge on a missed jump. So the solution was to remove the arms from the character model.

EA's sports games are a great example of complexity creep.

 

[virtualS]

Catering to the lowest common denominator in an effort to maximise popularity and profitability runs the risk of alienating the more valuable consumer (us).

 

[MH3M3D]

I'm all for better tutorials, but don't make games easier please... Dark Souls for life!!1!

 

[kinoki]

While I don't think a game should require a tutorial I do think that some games need a tutorial phase. Even board games have that awkward first stumblings around the rules and what you're allowed to do. Card games suffer from the same problems. You can't learn a console game without mastering the controller.

 

[BlastProcessing]

Catering to the lowest common denominator in an effort to maximise popularity and profitability runs the risk of alienating the more valuable consumer (us).

Alternatively, catering only to your existing audience runs the risk of making you stagnant and largely irrelevant to the market at large.

Blackberry is a good example of this. They held on to their physical keyboards because that's what their most loyal fans wanted.

I'm all for better tutorials, but don't make games easier please... Dark Souls for life!!1!

I mean, would you like the next Dark Souls to control like QWOP? It would be harder then.

 

[Vintage]

to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask

I'm pretty sure that when the game stops teaching you the fun ends, not begins. From that point it just begins sinking into repetitive mindless grinding.

 

[SixMachine]

I remember seeing a video of him playing Witcher 2. He wanted to pause during a cutscene and pressed escape. Then he went on an angry rant about pressing escape to skip cutscenes and how he missed viewing the scene, so the the real story is only slightly less dumb than the comic. Because honestly if there is a button you would expect to skip a goddamn cutscene it would most likely be ESC.

 

[ArkkAngel007]

For someone playing a game for the first time or the first time after several generations of being away, I can see it. That may have to do more with the number of inputs on the controller now though than actual game mechanics.

Had my father visit back in October, who had introduced me to video games and used to play them. One of his favorites on the PSX was Alien Trilogy, given it was one of the last he played before he quit gaming altogether.

I showed him Alien Isolation, and as much as he was impressed by it, had a lot of trouble grasping the controls.

Point is, it's not that casual or average players struggle, but new audiences or those who've been out of the hobby for a while.

 

[CarbonFire]

Welcome to Game. Press A to Game.

*game occurs*

You win game.

Please purchase seasons pass/DLC for more Game.

Welcome to the future of gaming! So easy, everyone can play!

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

We give a lot of shit to Kotaku for writing clickbait titles to articles, but GAF members do the same thing for threads.

 

[Robert at Zeboyd Games]

Two hours to learn a game is too long?!

Persona 4 is a 60+ hour game. The intro segments (which includes many tutorials, spread out between story sequences) take about two hours to complete.

The number one complaint people make about Persona 4 is that it has a slow start. If even serious gamers think that two hours to learn a game is too long, just imagine how less serious gamers feel.

 

[OtakuReborn124]

I feel like a lot of people are missing the point. He's not saying games need to be easier, I think he's saying games need to be easier to pick up. There's a big difference between the two.

While many games are either easy to learn and easy overall or hard to learn and hard overall, the ideal "sweet spot" is a game that's easy to learn, but hard overall. Easy to learn hooks new players in, and hard overall keeps them there.

This is somewhat related to the number of buttons your game needs and the number of functions your game has. Most modern games have relatively complex controls that make it rather inaccessible to anybody who's not already onboard, especially games that overload a button to perform multiple actions depending on context, or require multiple simultaneous actions to perform basic functions.

If you give a controller to somebody who wants to learn how to play a console FPS for the first time, what you usually get (at least from my experience) is somebody who can do precisely one thing at a time, either move, look, or shoot (forget reloading, throwing grenades, melee attacks, switching weapons, or crouching -- those are all advanced controls (doesn't even include jumping, which many FPSes have flat out dropped, or the unique game mechanic for the specific shooter you're referring to)). Yet I think many would agree that being able to do all 3 simultaneously is a rather basic function of playing an FPS. And when the primary multiplayer game mode is online, there is no real way for these guys to get anywhere without getting pummeled by people that know what they're doing. In most cases, people get frustrated and go back to playing games on their phones.

You can't even get to the mechanical depth of the game if you can't get past the control complexity first. I think that's what EA is driving at. Learning a game for a lot of people is learning the controls, not the mechanics. Assuming EA isn't content with pleasing the same fan base over and over again, they'll want to attract new players as well, which complex controls is not conducive to doing. Their comment isn't for existing players, though it will almost certainly affect existing players, but for attracting new players.

 

[BlastProcessing]

I'm pretty sure that when the game stops teaching you the fun ends, not begins. From that point it just begins sinking into repetitive mindless grinding.

In two hours you should have mastered all of the "verbs" all of the tools the game gives you. Then you can get down to actually applying them to the challenges of the game. In a challenging boss fight you want to feel like you are fighting a formidable foe, not wrestling with unfamiliar controls of manipulating systems you don't understand. You want to fight the boss, not the game.

Persona 4 is a 60+ hour game. The intro segments (which includes many tutorials, spread out between story sequences) take about two hours to complete.

The number one complaint people make about Persona 4 is that it has a slow start. If even serious gamers think that two hours to learn a game is too long, just imagine how less serious gamers feel.

Preach.

 

[Timu]

Lol DSP.

 

[Kill3r7]

Does a game really need a longer or more in-depth tutorial than what Mario 64 offers? Take any FPS for example. You aim, shoot, throw grenades, choose a gadget, run and crouch. There really isn't much more to it than that in most games. Just throw the player in a small playground and let them do whatever they want without any stupid instructors or text that pops up automatically.

I'm not sure which of EA's games requires 2 hours to learn. Maybe their RPGs, but do people really expect to grasp everything in a RPG with some kind of depth in 5-10 minutes?

FPS games have a massive learning curve, if you have never played them before. There is nothing intuitive about the controls. Next time you get a chance, try teaching your parents or grandparents how to play them. Than feel free to report back.

Exactly. Ideally, you want to keep your controls as simple as possible, so one can easily get into the game. Simple controls do not mean that the gameplay can't have depth or that the game can't be hard. Look at the platformer genre.

The problem arises when you have games where the depth comes from the control scheme, like many sports and fighting games. Which is ironic because these are usually the ones that are most often played together and as such, could be appealing to "non-gamers" too.

Agreed.

 

[Kill3r7]

Sorry. Double post.

 

[Falk]

EA comes up with some real corkers from time to time

(This was before the Simcity triple shitstorm, for context)

 

[Thursday War]

So you think someone who has never played a video game, hell someone who has played a game but not a first person shooter, could figure out how to play battlefield 4 in 2 hours? I doubt it.

You could fairly easily learn the basic mechanics of BF4 in a mere 2 hours.

 

[King_Moc]

Has anyone criticising him actually played the UFC tutorial? It's fucking ridiculous what they expect you to remember.

 

[John Kowalski]

He's talking about ease of use, which is no real sin to discuss. Games are getting increasingly complex and interacting with them is also increasing in complexity. If mainstream games can be more succinct and more satisfying as well, what problem is there? Often great games become so through easy interaction with complex environments. Portal, Demon's Souls, Antichamber, they're all very easy to use and understand, and yet their content is satisfyingly complex.

 

[L Thammy]

I remember seeing a video of him playing Witcher 2. He wanted to pause during a cutscene and pressed escape. Then he went on an angry rant about pressing escape to skip cutscenes and how he missed viewing the scene, so the the real story is only slightly less dumb than the comic. Because honestly if there is a button you would expect to skip a goddamn cutscene it would most likely be ESC.

I don't think DSP is a good example of the average gamer. It's funny to think of him when you deal with an annoying tutorial, but the guy is only interesting because he's an exceptional case.

 

[BennyBlanco]

who said he would prefer that controller layouts and button maps stay the same for future installments in established series and even across franchises.

Don't they already do this?

 

[Cidd]

Oh no, Will Mass Effect 4 only have 2 colors to choose now?

 

[Corgi]

if you think about it. for how easy and casual you think assassin creed games are... the controller layout is fucking insane!

 

[Archaix]

Persona 4 is a 60+ hour game. The intro segments (which includes many tutorials, spread out between story sequences) take about two hours to complete.

The number one complaint people make about Persona 4 is that it has a slow start. If even serious gamers think that two hours to learn a game is too long, just imagine how less serious gamers feel.

You aren't learning the controls in those first two hours. For the most part, you aren't learning game mechanics at all. You're slowly plodding through the start of the story. You're barely doing anything other than pressing X for that time, it hardly applies as a game that takes too long to learn.

Hell, the most complicated systems in the game barely even get touched on by the game itself. The beginning moves slowly because it's a slow moving game, not because they are taking a long time to ensure you understand how to play.

 

[kutthoat5150]

new controller now bundled with all EA games

 

[thebloo]

Of course since it's EA a lot of people will jump on the hate train. But...he's not wrong. Games have gotten more and more complex. I've been gaming for ~16 years and sometimes I take a step back and go "how do I understand any of this?" Contrary to what it seems he's saying, he doesn't want to make the game "press X to win".

Take the Souls games, praised for difficulty and uncompromising nature. Once you're done with the tutorial, that's pretty much all you need to know in order to play the game. Sure, there's a ton of depth there, but it's easy to learn to play it.

 

[Dick Justice]

Worst fucking idea ever. No thanks, I'll take my non-homogenized games. Stick to selling stock, Pete!

Isn't that pretty much the case already? At some point, a game (probably Gears) used L2 to aim and R2 to shoot, and now every shooter uses that, whereas I remember something like Syphon Filter on PS1 using square to shoot. Also you have stuff like L3 to sprint, circle to crouch, x to jump and square to reload used in almost every game out there.

 

[Briarios]

I'll grant him this much: the menus in the last few BF games have been a pain in the ass to figure out. Been playing FPSes since i had the wolf3d shareware floppy running on my Packard Bell and i don't think i've been that stumped by a layout for a multplayer shooter before BF4. Hardline is kinda weird, too, but that just might be because I somehow got used to the funk that is BF4.

This is what I think he's talking about. I was really annoyed with AC: Unity and the crappy design for the map and the ridiculous number of icons overlapping each other, it too me a while to get my bearings, while in other games I'd be off and running.

I think it's a design issue and not about making games easier or less challenging; it's about introducing the player to the concepts organically and efficiently.

 

[AndyMoogle]

FPS games have a massive learning curve, if you have never played them before. There is nothing intuitive about the controls. Next time you get a chance, try teaching your parents or grandparents how to play them. Than feel free to report back.

I've taught someone who never played a FPS before to play CoD3. It's not hard to grasp the controls. The hard part is to get good. Especially the aiming is difficult for someone who hasn't played a game before. Learning what each button does in a FPS, does not take 2 hours.