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[hardcastlemccormick]

It would be nice to be able to skip things in a game that at least from my perspective are a chore. In the same way that I don’t care for bad cutscenes or lame diologue, poor game segments should be skippable.

Even if the game isn’t bad, it still helps I think. I never beat the first boss in Bloodbourne, after maybe 5 hours of forcing myself to keep trying. Would anyone argue I didn’t deserve to see a bit more content in the game? That’s all I cared about. But too bad, I’ll never see the rest of the game I guess.

 

[EventHorizon]

Re: the people saying more options aren’t always bad.

What do you do when a reviewer plays the game, skips the boss fights, doesn’t get the full context of the story, and then gives the game a bad review because the story confuses them? It’s not as simple as letting people simply bypass content they don’t like.

I think having something, anything, is necessary or else you get people that bash on something because they didn’t make the effort to actually take in the entirety of the most base level and basic content the developer provided them with.

It should be noted that I’m only speaking about games that are story heavy AND gameplay heavy.

If for some reason there was some "must see" part of the story in a boss fight, then record someone beating the boss and play that back when the player decides to skip it.

 

[Raptomex]

I'll admit I don't understand those that want to just breeze through a game or skip what makes it challenging and, arguably, fun. Take Cuphead for example. If you could just skip every boss, why bother playing? However, offering more choices to the player isn't a bad thing. I'd be all for these options as long as it doesn't hurt the rest of the experience.

 

[Clockwork5]

Nah, watch a let's play if you don't want to play the game.

But they do want to play the game, that is exactly why this was proposed.

 

[firelogic]

I find it a little shocking that there's this much disdain for including a skip option in games. It's just like threads about including the ability to save anytime or pause or easier difficulties. They're all just options that you can choose to use or not. Why is there so much negativity?

How would it affect game design in any way? They make the game as they usually would and then go back and throw in a trigger to skip that section. It doesn't make the dev want to half-ass the boss fight because there's a skip option. If they're the kind of dev that would half-ass it because of the ability to skip, their game wasn't worth buying in the first place.

Even Horizon Zero Dawn getting a late patch for a "story mode" difficulty had so many haters. Why?

Re: the people saying more options aren't always bad.

What do you do when a reviewer plays the game, skips the boss fights, doesn't get the full context of the story, and then gives the game a bad review because the story confuses them? It's not as simple as letting people simply bypass content they don't like.

I think having something, anything, is necessary or else you get people that bash on something because they didn't make the effort to actually take in the entirety of the most base level and basic content the developer provided them with.

It should be noted that I'm only speaking about games that are story heavy AND gameplay heavy.

A reviewer shouldn't be skipping anything. If they do, they should disclose it so the reader can judge for themselves what that reviewer's opinion is worth.

 

[Marcel]

Like I said, this level of defensiveness is bizarre. I have no idea why my calling something dumb is bothering you this much.

"Actually it is you who is bothered, not me" is pretty weak spin. You acted like a pompous clown about difficulty text and you got laughed at by multiple people. No one else is confused about how it is but you.

 

[MickeyPhree]

What I gather is most people on this forum of hardcore gamers just aren't very good at games to begin with.

I don't care if you are allowed to skip bosses. I never would personally.

 

[Ernest]

You can fast-forward movies you've bought, but fuck you if you want to fast-forward games you've bought.

 

[Marcel]

You can fast-forward movies you've bought, but fuck you if you want to fast-forward games you've bought.

If games and movies were the same thing and meant to be consumed in the same way you might actually have something resembling an argument.

 

[Clockwork5]

You can fast-forward movies you've bought, but fuck you if you want to fast-forward games you've bought.

Why?

 

[Audioboxer]

Lots of games have super easy modes, or you can take Persona 5 which has a mode where you literally can't game over. You'll constantly be revived.

As for asking for cheats, no chance they are coming back. Games want to monetize via "microtransactions" for booster packs and other bullshit. Cheats hurt the chance to sell you quality of life content at a few $ or more a pop.

The industry works fine if developers simply give well-thought-out difficulty sliders, where possible.

I've long hated boss fights, as chronicled perennially on these pages, because they're difficulty spikes as game design.

The payoff of navigating to a boss and then fighting it has long been what has propped up many genres of gaming since kids could first buy games consoles or go to arcades. It works for a reason ¯\_(&#12484_/¯ Poorly designed bosses or battles that are in no way fun is on the design mechanics and what the developer has implemented as a boss fight.

Some of the boss battles in the MGS have been great due to having multiple ways to complete, some incredibly funny/quick that do allow you super easy mode or to skip altogether. That's good/interesting game design.

 

[aygomyownroad]

I miss boss fights. So many games these days don't have them or it's a poor quick time cut scene.


Don't let us skip them please.

I wouldn't be against an option like FINAL fantasy IX to help people struggling to kill them more easily.

 

[bosseye]

Seems sensible to me. Just design the game as you normally would, but at every boss add a 'skip boss?' yes/no prompt.

I fail to see how that would harm anyone's experience, but it would certainly enrich many others.

 

[EventHorizon]

You can fast-forward movies you've bought, but fuck you if you want to fast-forward games you've bought.

I love audiobooks, but I've recently learned to speed up the playback 2x for unexpectedly dull spots. It has improved my enjoyment of those books considerably.

 

[Clockwork5]

Seems sensible to me. Just design the game as you normally would, but at every boss add a 'skip boss?' yes/no prompt.

I fail to see how that would harm anyone's experience, but it would certainly enrich many others.

I could see it being alright if the prompt came up after you lost 3 times. I think it would be cool to have a NSMB style "demo" of your character beating the boss, if you choose to skip it.

 

[Unai]

Well, a "skip batmobile battles" option in Arkham Knight would surely be welcome by me.

 

[Tain]

Blue Revolver dev’s take on the article:

http://danbo.vg/2017/10/03/no-skip-button.html

 

[GhostWriter24]

No.

 

[pa22word]

Re: the people saying more options aren’t always bad.

What do you do when a reviewer plays the game, skips the boss fights, doesn’t get the full context of the story, and then gives the game a bad review because the story confuses them? It’s not as simple as letting people simply bypass content they don’t like.

I think having something, anything, is necessary or else you get people that bash on something because they didn’t make the effort to actually take in the entirety of the most base level and basic content the developer provided them with.

It should be noted that I’m only speaking about games that are story heavy AND gameplay heavy.

Game reviews are generally dumb anyways, thus I don't really care if some big website hack decides to skip half the game and score it; I'm not going to read his review anyways, and neither are most people.


I've avoided taking a stance on this thread simply due to my own personal apathy to the subject and general disdain for walker's pointlessly antagonistic and frankly, lazy writing style, but really this isn't a "problem" so much as it is greed getting in the way of something that used to be a natural part of the industry. Why include cheat codes anymore when you can sell them? Why include mod tools when you can sell a bastardized version of them with plug and play "content packs"? Why unlock the console when players can jump around your stupid treadmill mechanics and bypass your lootboxes? etc etc etc

I think the general lack of cheat codes in the last gen has led to this weird elitist mindset of purist gamers praising a strict, "classical" way of playing that prior to the 7th gen never existed. Some of these gamers, as sad as it is for me personally to admit, grew up on these systems so their perspective on these things is more than a little warped and I think that's contributed to some of the backlash seen in this thread and elsewhere over content bypass.

Anyways, I doubt this is going to happen anytime soon for the few AAA style games that actually do still have bosses simply for the fact that they'd rather sell this to you. Want to get through a difficult boss? Buy this invulnerability pack for the low price of 4.99* (one time use) to really show those guys who's boss! etc for whatever else is giving you problems.

 

[Shotgun Kiss]

 

[Marcel]

Blue Revolver dev's take on the article:

http://danbo.vg/2017/10/03/no-skip-button.html

Unsurprisingly a working game developer takes issue with a game journalist's half-baked and filmsy ideas about skipping gameplay.

 

[afternoon delight]

 

[BRocknRolla]

"Actually it is you who is bothered, not me" is pretty weak spin. You acted like a pompous clown about difficulty text and you got laughed at by multiple people. No one else is confused about how it is but you.

"Pompous clown?"

"Laughed at by a multitude of people?"

You've also invented this scenario in which I'm apparently really bothered by this difficulty text.

If this is the way you want to read this whole situation, be my guest. You clearly have strong opinions on how absolute your stance is.

It's not worth it for me to engage any further.

 

[tiebreaker]

Many games usually ask if you wsnt to lower the difficulty after many failed attemps. Skip them entirely is weird, but hey, if people like it.

 

[Clockwork5]

Unsurprisingly a working game developer takes issue with a game journalist's half-baked and filmsy ideas about skipping gameplay.

But they are okay with the game beating the boss for you.

 

[sibarraz]

I dont get the movies argument used here, I seriously doubt that anyone here fast forward movies the first time that you are watching them

 

[QisTopTier]

But they do want to play the game, that is exactly why this was proposed.

They clearly don't, they want to see what's next without the effort of playing it at that point just watch a lets play

 

[Itaremustbedangeres]

But even if that's true, why not let people play whatever parts of the game they want?



A lot of people enjoy the challenge of a game, but would rather not keep replaying a single part. Maybe they feel differently about how they get "fulfillment" from the game.
Also, plenty of games are not focused on challenge anyway, except for maybe their boss portions.
Some are focused on immersion, others storytelling, and some are just about playing around with a mechanic like a toy.

I don't see harm in giving the people who might want that option the freedom to do so. Most people just stop playing the games anyway, so it's not like it's going to take some experience away from them. A lot, at this point, would rather just go to YouTube and watch the rest. It would only make the game better if it'd keep more people playing.

Agreed! I barely finish most of the games I buy, because I lose interest in them super fast which is also due to segments that are too hard or boss fights I can't win. If I can't progress in the game in the foreseeable future or I have to fight a particular enemy/boss over and over again I just stop playing the game altogether most of the time.

I mean what's so bad about giving players the option to do so? It's their loss, not yours (speaking to the people who disagree with that option) and if it helps the people to complete the game and enjoy themselves anyway there's nothing wrong it, imo.

 

[Camjo-Z]

If you suck so bad at a game that you can't beat a boss fight then go watch a let's play/longplay instead.

 

[Clockwork5]

They clearly don't, they want to see what's next without the effort of playing it

They want to PLAY what is next without the unwarranted frustration of many boss battle difficulty spikes.

otherwise they would just be watching a LP.

 

[RalchAC]

As an author I wouldnt be super happy about people skipping to the end of my novel, defeating the purpose of the plot and story arc. Just because you CAN doesnt me you SHOULD.

Is this a strawman argument he is putting forth for skipping boss fights or making games easier?

It's idiotic if you ask me. I re watch movies and re read books frequently, yet I dont skip to the end. Who fucking does that?

NO dude, you shouldnt be able to skip boss fights. Dont like a dev's game or find it too hard? Play a different one. FFS game developers do not need to cater to EVERYONE.

If the person in question is enriched by the story you created, I don't understand why you'd be mad at it.

I don't fully re-read that many books. By I re-read much more often the passages that I like the most.

A lot of reading clubs do this too. Someone will just pick whichever chapter from a book they liked the most and show it to the rest of the group. A lot of them will never read the whole book. But that segment might be totally great in its own and impact them.

If games and movies were the same thing and meant to be consumed in the same way you might actually have something resembling an argument.

Not every game is Super Mario Bros, and not every game tries to tell you a story through gameplay and fighting. Even those that do could go the Nier Automata route and give you a way to autoplay those segments so you can still experience them.

If tomorrow you were part of a car crash and lost all mobility in your left hand, I bet you'd still want to play games. And you'd probably appreciate all this options. And you'd be pissed at the people making certain kinds of comments.

 

[LakeEarth]

I have the perfect solution to him, go to Youtube, type "lets play" and the name of your game, and watch the video while holding a controller in your hand. Bingo, you don't have to play any boss fights!

 

[Dyle]

For some reason when I saw the title I thought it was going to be some absurd hot take on Cuphead being too difficult, good to see it's pretty reasonable.

Improving accessibility is always a good step as long it doesn't water down the content for those not needing/wanting to skip the hard parts. Nintendo has provided lots of great examples of ways this can be implemented, and there are other ways out there too. Although I don't see devs going out of there way to do this, as the market for more accessible games is probably pretty small, especially if the normal game is supposed to be challenging as is

 

[Marcel]

But they are okay with the game beating the boss for you.

The tone of that part of the developer's essay is sort of settling on a solution he finds digestible rather than necessarily liking the solution. Look to the paragraph from earlier:

A general hatred of boss fights is surprisingly common, I’m finding - I find it illogical, but understandable in the context of what many people play. There was a period when triple-As abused the hell out of boss fights, a little distant now but I certainly remember it. But they are on the whole too valuable a tool to thoughtlessly skip, and I don’t really trust people sadly trained to hate them to tell the good kind from the bad kind.

They think boss fights are ultimately a valuable tool and people trained to hate them don't have the capacity to properly judge them when they have a bias.

 

[TheRedSnifit]

Quoting for truth:

"Developers, please don't aim for the lowest common denominator and please also make sure everyone can enjoy your game"

Videogames are likely the only artform where not desiring a wider audience can be seen as a moral failing, a form of selfishness at the expense of the potential happiness of others. This seems to happen because of two reasons:

1) The interactive nature of the medium means games are modular when no other medium is ("menu options" and "modes" are apart of the game itself).
2) Difficulty, which is more or less not present in other mediums, is not considered "artistic". This may apply to interactivity in general, since interactivity most often gains meaning through difficulty. Even people who like videogames think this way.

In other words, since difficulty is not a valid goal, why not make it disposable, since you can. (Otherwise, you are just excluding people and decreasing the net-happiness of the planet for no good reason, you self-centered asshole!)

"More options are better" and "More people who enjoy it the better" are both weak platitudes which seem to dominate this conversation for some reason.

Expanding on the post above, this is part of a broader trend of people viewing the actual art of video games being in the story, visuals, and music. These people see the gameplay as being something that's "just there," and it being even remotely challenging is holding the game back from being "true art."

This particular subject is particularly silly since the vast majority of AAA games don't even have boss fights anymore. People at least used to say "At least be happy that you have challenging games like Souls and such," but now Walker and co. are complaining about the mere existence of games that haven't compromised on their vision.

 

[Clockwork5]

Someone should alert Jim Sterling to this thread for his upcoming Commentocracy video.

 

[QisTopTier]

They want to PLAY what is next without the unwarranted frustration of many boss battle difficulty spikes.

otherwise they would just be watching a LP.

The boss fights are did you learn how to play checks, If someone is that unmotivated they should just save their money/time

 

[Marcel]

Not every game is Super Mario Bros, and not every game tries to tell you a story through gameplay and fighting. Even those that do could go the Nier Automata route and give you a way to autoplay those segments so you can still experience them.

If tomorrow you were part of a car crash and lost all mobility in your left hand, I bet you'd still want to play games. And you'd probably appreciate all this options. And you'd be pissed at the people making certain kinds of comments.

If that happened to me I would not expect to continue playing the types of games I enjoy, namely action, fighting and FPS to name a few. I don't expect competitive games to conform to my problems as sad or desperate as they might be. I would find simple input narrative games to play or ones that don't require much controller dexterity.

 

[Flo_Evans]

No, if anything we need more boss rush modes.

 

[Ogodei]

I feel like Lets Plays have more or less covered people who want to passively experience a game.

 

[///PATRIOT]

How about skipping cutscenes for all games?

 

[Incendiary]

Boss battles have always been my favorite part of games, it feels like you're completing a section and advancing. Fewer and fewer games have them now and having the option to skip them in the games that do have them might make them obsolete entirely and I'd hate that.

Bring back cheat codes. I IDDQD'd and IDKFA'd my way through Doom back in the day and I'm all for new games employing similar cheats to help players who want to make it through the game but get stuck at certain points.

Hell, I'll even compromise and say I'd be fine with the option to skip boss battles as long as there's an option to also do boss-only runs in the same game. As long as developers still get to make enjoyable and interesting boss fights and don't start skimping on them because they don't think people want to play them.

 

[Waddle Dee]

So what would happen in the theoretical future where all bosses can be skipped? What's next? Will all standard levels be designed with the ability to be skipped? Can you just skip these chunks of gameplay on your first "attempt" or do you have to fail multiple times in order to trigger the ability?

When everything becomes skippable, won't the designers of many games start putting less and less effort into the gameplay (since not everyone will experience it) and more and more effort into the presentation (something many are already doing)?

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the medium in the long run?

 

[Camjo-Z]

They want to PLAY what is next without the unwarranted frustration of many boss battle difficulty spikes.

I can't think of too many games that keep a totally consistent level of challenge throughout with the only difficulty spikes being the boss battles. They tend to start easy and get harder as they go along, so if you let people skip tough bosses then they're going to want to skip any hard part that frustrates them instead of getting better at the game, and at that point they might as well just watch it instead of play it.

 

[BRocknRolla]

To the OP, the idea of "skipping" doesn't make a ton of sense to me. AT LEAST, on the first playthrough. Games are ultimately about some level of interactivity, and if you're skipping that interactivity, I'm not sure why you're playing a game. (Perhaps for the story, but arguably, a boss fight would be part of that game's "story" including the potential challenge you faced in that gameplay). If you have a movie, and you're skipping chapters, are you really even watching the movie? Same goes for games.

Now, I do think that there should basically be an easy mode where the player is pretty much invincible in all games. That allows for an accessibility that I think would be valuable for the broader audience, but even in such a mode, the player should still need to actually play the game, even if the stakes of failure aren't there.

If we're talking about second playthroughs, I'm all for skipping. There may be bad game design you simply wish to bypass on another playthrough to get to what you enjoy. There are broad technical reasons why this stuff might be really hard to implement in a game though, so I'm sympathetic to devs who wouldn't want to make it.

 

[LordJim]

So what would happen in the theoretical future where all bosses can be skipped? What's next? Will all standard levels be designed with the ability to be skipped? Can you just skip these chunks of gameplay on your first "attempt" or do you have to fail multiple times in order to trigger the ability?

When everything becomes skippable, won't the designers of many games start putting less and less effort into the gameplay (since not everyone will experience it) and more and more effort into the presentation (something many are already doing)?

Doesn't this defeat the purpose of the medium in the long run?

Of course they will not completely ignore it, actual gameplay segments will be DLC.

 

[badcrumble]

i'm fine with games doing this as long as they make it feel humiliating (i.e. only allow you to skip a boss after you've died to it ten times), block off all achievement/trophy access for the rest of the game, don't let people get the true ending, et cetera

 

[Sanctuary]

Seems like a waste of development time trying to cater to everyone like this. Spend all of that time creating a boss design and encounter, knowing full well that someone who doesn't like boss fights will simply ignore it, or those that think a boss is too hard will skip past it after they don't win on a first attempt. Some of these players would actually stick with it until they progressed beyond the fight because that would be the only option. When the option to skip exists, they'll just skip.

There are plenty of games out there for those that do not enjoy boss fights. Play those instead?

i'm fine with games doing this as long as they make it feel humiliating (i.e. only allow you to skip a boss after you've died to it ten times), block off all achievement/trophy access for the rest of the game, don't let people get the true ending, et cetera

That's not a bad middle ground.

 

[Double Donut]

Cheat codes used to let you do this.

This is why this whole situation seems so weird.

A cheat code allows you to skip a boss? NICE!
A normal feature allows you to skip a boss? Now hold on just a minute, let’s not casualize everything...

 

[Clockwork5]

The boss fights are did you learn how to play checks, If someone is that unmotivated they should just save their money/time

What if they just aren't very good?