That's how Bayonetta was too though
I mean it just seems weird that people are so hung up on the retry systems for games that are designed for you to complete them at any difficulty level without ever being hit. The retry system in these games is for newer players only. Once you reach a certain skill level it should be irrelevant to you as your goal has shifted from not dying to not being hit at all, ever.(I still get hit in bayonetta but I honestly can't remember the last time I died in the game.)
Death/Retries have nothing to do with the intended difficulty curve of these games. I have no idea why Riposte keeps insisting in every thread that they are or that they should be. It's like trying to smash a square peg in a round hole. The games he wants are not the games Platinum wants to make.(Save Rising I guess) The true difficulty comes from the score requirements, not the frustration of death. (which is far more interesting to me personally.)
If you don't like that, that's fine but I mean that's the game you're playing. It's not Ninja Gaiden and it's not trying to be.
A simple completion is SUPPOSED to mean nothing in Bayonetta and it's supposed to be nothing here. The actual difficulty comes in getting pure platinum on every act on every difficulty. That's what you do if you want a challenge but I mean for most people that's too difficult. Action games should only be about survival and crowd control and prioritizing troublesome enemies out of a wave! No one wants to think any harder than that about these games.
Alright, first I need to understand if you disagree with the premise I laid out. I'm not sure if you actually think it is untrue, only you don't feel that it is a bad thing (so in other words, I do "know what I'm talking about" when I describe P*'s design, you just don't like my conclusion). To repeat and expand on it:
P* moves punishment away from stage/game progression (for lack of a better term) and toward score (the number/medal/title people see after they beat a stage). This score is, at most, related to purchasing upgrades/actions, but never in a demanding fashion (certainly not so after buying the first few upgrades and you can grind in most games, with progress carrying over from previous game clears). Score penalties is also what they use to police the use of items/resources that unbalances the game toward the player. The conclusion should be clear: they are dropping out the bottom, with score penalties being used to punish those who can't rise above that drop off.
With "very easy" difficulty settings and these advantages (especially with TW101's respawn system), it is hard to imagine someone who's played videogames before not being able to see the credits of the P* game they bought. Essentially, everyone in their audience will be able to clear the game. This is a modern expectation (of reviewers, even), which is why I say it is P* way of modernizing Japanese action games. This is the compromise they make. Something like: "We make our games with a bunch of crazy attacks and bosses, but we've added three layers of safety nets so virtually everyone can still beat it". I don't understand how this isn't decisive in measuring the game's difficulty curve.
Yes, there is the scoring system, meaning getting a "Pure Platinum" is its own difficulty, but a great majority of people don't care enough about that to feel frustration (the feeling of powerlessness, of not having enough power/skill). To say it is the "intended difficulty" or it is suppose to be played is funny, because their intention and the purpose of the design is to rely on people not caring about that difficulty or playing that way so they do not get frustrated (and most of those people would gladly accept a Bronze or lower without blinking an eye). That isn't to say people don't get frustrated by the scoring system, just very few do and those that do are either those with the discipline to seek that out or are motivated by something of social significance outside the game (bragging rights or achievements/etc). (In both cases frustration is very important, just as it is very important part in all cases of true difficulty - obvious once you understand what frustration is. The former relishes on seeing a numerical measurement of their power over a game (or at least its scoring system) and the latter would not gain any significance if frustration didn't make it a rare achievement.)
At the end of the day score in games like Bayonetta get treated like chasing 1-ups in Mario by most people. And like I said, "most people" doesn't just mean casual players. Being one of the people who will allow themselves get frustrated (i.e. feel challenged) by the scoring system doesn't change that they are dropping out the bottom of the difficulty curve. I make the argument that this isn't a worthwhile exchange, that this compromise hurts me far more than it gives me anything appreciable. Now, I still willing to say they make very good games, games that I will always buy immediately and treasure, but I won't change my ability to discern things to the point where I can't say a compromise isn't being made and it isn't negatively affecting me.
The phenomenon Warm Machine initially described I find to be very real. I actually felt it myself to some extent when I was playing TW101, mainly during the first few levels when I was learning the ropes. A lack of true failure means players are not required to learn and sort of "fail forward", fumbling about jumping from one climatic QTE moment to the next. Do they actually recognize they are playing incorrectly? Are they ever pushed to play correctly? If nothing, this makes the game harder to defend. How much of the game I like and want to defend is locked away in my head and not on the disc? I actually have methodology to make some sense of this, but that's another topic I feel.
And if a game was truly designed to be cleared without being hit, then it would end upon being hit (many games are actually like this). No, they are designed to not require that, actually. That's kind of the point I've made up until now.
To keep this post shorter, I deleted about half of it. I'm still going to briefly share some highly condensed thoughts:
The game "they are trying to make" is not necessarily tied to a scoring system. If anything, the scoring system is meant to encourage players to play a certain, creative way (penalties for repetitions, being too methodical/slow), but in the process players can come to care more about score than the overall experience (putting rote score building tactics before an approach I can only briefly/poorly describe as "instinctual"). Also, when you look at each of P* games, they seem to put a priority on being stylish over being an accurate means to compare player skills with QTEs and oddball mini-game moments being all over the place, for better or worse. 3D action games in general don't seem to take to scoring systems as well as their 2D cousins and I've never been intrigued by P*'s scoring like I may be by a STG's.
And since it has been brought up, I also believe challenge is not the end all, be all goal of a game, only highly necessarily to varying degrees. It is difficult for me to discuss this since I have hard time expressing it, but the sheer complexity of a game like Bayonetta compared to a 2D action game has a way of making the challenge less vital than it would be with that 2D game. This is partially why the compromise P* makes is halfway acceptable, because they are ultimately making "modern" games and those have their own strengths in spite of these compromises.
Maybe when I have more energy for it, I'll actually detail what I'm trying to say in the last two paragraphs. Sorry if it came out confusing.
