Age of Decadence Reviews

[Lurker King]

Trashos, Lithium Flower, I think you are both wrong. It is not lack of humility or intelligence, although you need some kind of abstract capabilities to play decent cRPGs. The real reason is that they think that difficult cRPGs are poorly designed because they assume that all cRPGs should be easy. Thank you Bethesda and Bioware for "enlightening" the new gamers! What is worse, the same gamer who complains about AoD can master hard games from other genres, such as platformers, because that is what is expected of them. The decline exists, but is even more intense in cRPGs.

 

[Fenix]

Trashos agree with your words as emotional statement, but I think Lithium Flower is right.
The thing he talked about is culture, in this case it is level of common culture that manifestate in game culture.
Those people such egomaniacs, that they even don't think for a second to blame themself.
That mean that society wrom where they come from, discourages them from taking responsibility and provoking habit to constantly shift the blame to other people or other subject.

 

[Lithium Flower]

Age of Decadence Review Discussion: the latest battleground in the biology vs culture debate.

In all seriousness though, there is probably no one comprehensive answer. The best we can do is point out a bunch of factors that we think contribute to the issue. Like the anti-vaxxer movement. As more people choose not to vaccinate their kids, they reduce the spread of autism in the world, therefore reducing the amount of people that are capable of learning RPG systems.

 

[Fenix]

In Russia it's practically impossible to avoind "vaccination", at least if you are Russian or you are really reach. In national republics - they could sent any kind of reports about that, nobody interest in it, but they closely control Russian's vaccination. And you can't refuse.

 

[Old One]

I've seen handholding mechanics in newer games that have the potential to make the player dumber, and I mean that literally.

At any given moment, the question "where does my character go next?" is answered by a big flashing or glowing arrow. It's very easy to stop thinking about the context of what you're actually supposed to be doing and just follow the pretty lights. Five minutes of that makes me feel dumber.

Do that enough, and lots of things will seem hard.

 

[Lithium Flower]

I've seen handholding mechanics in newer games that have the potential to make the player dumber, and I mean that literally.

At any given moment, the question "where does my character go next?" is answered by a big flashing or glowing arrow. It's very easy to stop thinking about the context of what you're actually supposed to be doing and just follow the pretty lights. Five minutes of that makes me feel dumber.

I have the same opinion about "press x to do y" pop-ups that seem to invade every single fucking game. It is like the game doesn't even trust the player to have the "use" button memorized for more than 5 seconds.

 

[Elhoim]

I am shit at RTS. If I try to play StarCraft 2 online without spending a minute learning the game and get raped, I'd never say "shit man, the game wasn't accessible enough for me, it felt unfair, therefore it is flawed." I feel like even the casuals would agree with the Starcraft example - but for some reason, RPGs are different. RPGs are expected to be accessible even to those that can't even learn their systems.

Because there's a deeper connection to your character than the flying camera in an RTS. If the character failed, you failed, and we know how hard is for people to deal with failure, especially if that character was your alter-ego.

 

[MRY]

I am shit at RTS. If I try to play StarCraft 2 online without spending a minute learning the game and get raped, I'd never say "shit man, the game wasn't accessible enough for me, it felt unfair, therefore it is flawed." I feel like even the casuals would agree with the Starcraft example - but for some reason, RPGs are different. RPGs are expected to be accessible even to those that can't even learn their systems.

There are lots of good arguments against negative reviews but this doesn't seem like one to me. RTS games almost invariably include lengthy -- and in Starcraft II, considerably overlengthy -- tutorials throughout the single-player campaign. Moreover, the single-player missions are usually structured so that you can be a very weak player and can adopt a very flawed strategy and still win, either by adjusting the strategy on the fly or through sheer attrition (because they start you with a dug-in position and rich resources). Moreover, even if you royally mess up a particular level on a campaign, you can always replay the level. With a few exceptions (Myth comes to mind, I suppose Total War if we're going to characterize it as an RTS), there is no legacy harm from playing a level poorly.

In AOD, by contrast, the tutorial is extremely bare and does not introduce (IMO) the metastrategic layer of the game, or the complexities of the combat system. And while I don't know for sure whether you can achieve dead-man-walking status, you can definitely foreclose huge portions of the game by bad decisions. That is a good thing! But it's a huge difference from how the Starcraft 2 campaign works.

(You're right that in PvP mode, RTS games typically don't have a tutorial mode. But AOD is not a PvP RPG, it's a singleplayer one, and so the relevant point of comparison is to singleplayer RTS campaigns.)

At some point it was expected that if you were going to play an RPG, you had to learn its systems - and if you couldn't do that, it was your fault. Now there are a bunch of people who don't even try to learn, which is fine on its own, but they also conclude that "I can't grasp the game therefore the game is bad"

Yes, the game is bad, and no, it's not the players' fault. If a game's learning curve is too steep for the incentive the game gives the player to climb the curve, that's a design flaw. "Back in the day, players had to read boring, often inaccurate manuals, and then spend hours fiddling with bad controls, imbalanced design, and dead-ends." That is sometimes true, but it is reflective of the fact that computer games were overwhelming made by people on the spectrum for people on the spectrum (and I don't mean the ZX Spectrum). And many of the games that left lasting marks on peoples' memories are precisely the ones where the systems were straightforward and intuitive and the learning curve was not especially steep.

Impenetrability doesn't seem like a virtue to me. I suppose there are people who think that Finnegan's Wake is aweosme because it's so hard to read but not me, and in any event, Andrew Greenberg is not quite James Joyce.

 

[Fenix]

Yes, the game is bad, and no, it's not the players' fault. If a game's learning curve is too steep for the incentive the game gives the player to climb the curve, that's a design flaw.

There is a problem in your statement - it count player as furniture, not a man.
You reject player's responsibility while admit devs responsibility - it doesn't work like that.
What if player has Dawn syndrome or something similiar? It is design flaw?
There are two elements, and both are responsible.
And from what I see - egoism and habit to shift the blame on other is the case in 99.9% bad reviews on good games wih complex mechannics.

The question is - it is design flaw or player is a dumb monkey.
You have a tree with banana, and a man.
If man so dumb he can't get banana - it is n'ot a tree fault.

 

[Tigranes]

The amount to which a player will feel the incentive is worth it, and the amount to which they will feel the difficulty, is dependent on their shared expectations as part of a gaming population at this point in time. So you can't just put it entirely at the feet of the games, and encourage a "if customers are annoyed they must be right so fix everything else to suit them" mentality.

(And going beyond MRY a bit to rail at strawmen now

It's not even about a linear scale where impenetratability is a virtue, either. Nobody liked a game primarily and specifically because it was so difficult to get into. But often we appreciate that the learning curve was an indispensable part of the experience that helped us stop to smell the flowers, or to really learn the game's systems instead of mashing buttons, to really feel like the game presents a challenge and not a monotonous set of victory masturbatory celebrations, and so on. And that is the case even if it wasn't exactly necessary or even positive for, say, a game to have inaccurate manuals specifically.

It's about retaining some vestiges of gaming as something where you overcome challenges, where you enter into someone else's creative vision and negotiate it, where you appreciate successes, failures, detours and accidents - rather than gaming as something where you sink your fat ass on the sofa and mash the A button until you unlock the boobies on the 3D model. That's two very distinct kinds of play, of fun - yeah, I don't feel any need to talk about games as art and get into another neverending argument, because *play* and having *fun* itself has never meant solely "instant gratification with no frustration or failure ever", like high fructose corn syrup directly to your throat.

 

[Lithium Flower]

Hey MRY, thanks for taking the time to respond to my shitpost but I think you might be misunderstanding where I am coming from.

There are lots of good arguments against negative reviews but this doesn't seem like one to me. RTS games almost invariably include lengthy -- and in Starcraft II, considerably overlengthy -- tutorials throughout the single-player campaign. Moreover, the single-player missions are usually structured so that you can be a very weak player and can adopt a very flawed strategy and still win, either by adjusting the strategy on the fly or through sheer attrition (because they start you with a dug-in position and rich resources). Moreover, even if you royally mess up a particular level on a campaign, you can always replay the level. With a few exceptions (Myth comes to mind, I suppose Total War if we're going to characterize it as an RTS), there is no legacy harm from playing a level poorly.

In AOD, by contrast, the tutorial is extremely bare and does not introduce (IMO) the metastrategic layer of the game, or the complexities of the combat system. And while I don't know for sure whether you can achieve dead-man-walking status, you can definitely foreclose huge portions of the game by bad decisions. That is a good thing! But it's a huge difference from how the Starcraft 2 campaign works.

(You're right that in PvP mode, RTS games typically don't have a tutorial mode. But AOD is not a PvP RPG, it's a singleplayer one, and so the relevant point of comparison is to singleplayer RTS campaigns.)

My argument wasn't an attempt to discredit negative AoD reviews but rather a comparison (admittedly, a purely anecdotal and not particularly substantive one) between the standards applied to RPGs and other games.

Yes, the game is bad, and no, it's not the players' fault. If a game's learning curve is too steep for the incentive the game gives the player to climb the curve, that's a design flaw.

"I can't grasp the game therefore the game is bad" is a nonsensical statement. It attaches an objective quality - the game's value - to a single person's subjective experience. Say we take a hypothetical perfect game that is perfectly designed in every way. By this logic, a single person's inability to grasp its rules renders the game bad. Now obviously, even people who express these types of sentiments don't really believe that - which is why this is a bad argument to use when criticizing a game's lack of accessibility. The same problem to a lesser extent exists in your statement. Which specific player? It is not equally easy for a niche game to hold the attention of a casual player as it is to retain an enthusiast through its challengers. Therefore it doesn't make sense to make a blanket statement like that.

"Back in the day, players had to read boring, often inaccurate manuals, and then spend hours fiddling with bad controls, imbalanced design, and dead-ends." That is sometimes true, but it is reflective of the fact that computer games were overwhelming made by people on the spectrum for people on the spectrum (and I don't mean the ZX Spectrum). And many of the games that left lasting marks on peoples' memories are precisely the ones where the systems were straightforward and intuitive and the learning curve was not especially steep.

Impenetrability doesn't seem like a virtue to me.

I agree with everything you wrote above, which is why I never stated otherwise in my original post. This is where I think the misunderstanding comes from - I am not coming from a place of nostalgia over 80s RPGs. I do not have fondness over the lack of accessibility in games like Wasteland (where certain skills are completely worthless and the game makes no effort to tell you that, or much of anything else). Neither do I attempt to shut down every argument for accessibility. My point is that the acceptable expected learning curve in RPGs has become alarmingly flat, to the point that something that requires some learning while still being a far shot from the RPGs you'd get on Commodore 64 - like AoD - is mistaken for impenetrable. I think that is the reason why accessibility has become a dirty word on elitist communities like the Kodex - because more often than not accessibility is compromise in disguise.

 

[MRY]

Fenix If a tree evolves such that animals can't get at its fruit, it probably will go extinct. "But it will die nobly."

Tigranes "Nobody liked a game primarily and specifically because it was so difficult to get into." In almost every field of endeavor, those who go through an unpleasant process to attain some reward (however trivial) tend to ennoble the unpleasantness and criticize those who can attain the award without going through it. "Back when I was a kid, you had to log into a *nix terminal and use tin to communicate on a bulletin board. That meant something!" Etc. Thus, while your point is mostly true (I think there are some people who do like games specifically because of their impenetrability), the fact that a game was difficult to get into is retroactively turned into a virtue even if at the time it sucked and earned nothing. "Drink your tarwater and be a man!"

Lithium Flower "'I can't grasp the game therefore the game is bad' is a nonsensical statement. It attaches an objective quality - the game's value - to a single person's subjective experience." It is nonsensical only if you don't fill in the implied interstitial steps like "Despite my being a reasonable and experienced player of games, I found it impossible to grasp how this game works. That made it impossible for me to enjoy it. I suppose it's possible that this was because of some idiosyncratic personal flaw, but it seems more likely that many other players will have the same problem, and not like it, so bear that in mind." "Bad" is shorthand for "likely to lead to a negative player experience." It's not like the average player can meaningfully assess goodness or badness in some mystical objective way. Maybe Felipepepe can, but the rest of us can just say whether we liked the damn thing.

I think you and I basically agree on substance or maybe it's that we agree in theory but not on substance. I think you're right that lots of RPGs have flat learning curves. In my opinion, this is not limited to modern RPGs. In many older RPGs, 90% of the learning takes place in minutes negative 90 to 90 (i.e., reading the manual through character creation). For example, I don't remember "learning" much in Gold Box games once I figured out how to play them, nor really in Wasteland either.

The reason why I find the "modern players can't deal with learning curves" argument unpersuasive is that it seems to me that there are three sharply divergent but extremely well established successful game tracks right now:
(1) Low-penalty, easy-to-master, narrative, cinematic games like Call of Duty or Telltale or ye dumbed downe RPGe.
(2) Low- or high-penalty, hard-to-master, non-narrative action games like Spelunky or Super Meatboy or Crypt of the Necrodancer or League of Legends or sports simulations or FTL.
(3) No-penalty exploratory games with complex emergent systems like Minecraft or Terraria.

If it were true that players were essentially unwilling to learn game systems, then games in the second and third categories wouldn't do as well as they do.

I think the main things that players can't stand are: (1) barriers to entry in lieu of difficulty curves; (2) traps and dead-ends in a context that requires you to replay identical content or lose significant play time; (3) narrative games where you're not able to get the story you want. Of these, the third is the one that bothers me the most, while the other two seem reasonable. I think players are actually quite happy to have difficulty that ramps up, but they prefer a gradual incline rather than having the steepest upward slope at the outset.

 

[Lithium Flower]

MRY

I meant "objective" in terms of grounding your criticism in actual analysis. Sure, no one can evaluate a game from the standpoint of a completely neutral observer but they can base their criticism in analysis of the game as opposed to their individual experience. For example, I have 0 problems with the statement "X game is shit because it is unapproachable, doesn't explain its mechanics well, relies too much on artificial difficulty rather than a genuine difficulty curve, etc"

As you said, we basically agree besides getting caught up in semantics. Perhaps you put slightly more responsibility on the game being approachable as opposed to the gamer being responsible to learn the game than I do. I'd even agree with you that the attitude of most gamers towards challenge is probably more fair than most people here would give it credit, which was the reason why I somewhat disagreed with Trashos in the first place. However when we focus on a particular (and sometimes imaginary) kind of player, the type to leave a negative AoD review saying something along the lines of "too difficult; game sucks", it is easy to paint mainstream gamers with a broad brush. Somewhat understandable since said gamers happen to make up the audience of Codex boogeymen like Bethesda.

 

[MRY]

I meant "objective" in terms of grounding your criticism in actual analysis. Sure, no one can evaluate a game from the standpoint of a completely neutral observer but they can base their criticism in analysis of the game as opposed to their individual experience. For example, I have 0 problems with the statement "X game is shit because it is unapproachable, doesn't explain its mechanics well, relies too much on artificial difficulty rather than a genuine difficulty curve, etc"

Well, that definitely provides a more thorough explanation, although at some point it's all just a vain striving to explain one's subjective gut reaction. For example, many Primordia reviews describe the puzzles as superbly logical, some as completely nonsensical. Both of those are conclusory (and maybe you'd ding them for that) but they purport to be describing something objective ("The puzzles are this way") rather than subjective ("The puzzles make me feel this way"). The explanation you say would give you zero problems is just a chain of "the puzzles are logical" -- as masquerade of subjective feelings as objective statements -- because it begs the questions what made the game unapproachable, how it failed in explaining its mechanics, what "artificial" vs. "genuine" difficulty is, etc. It's just an expansion of "I can't grasp" without any additional content, or at least, all the additional content is stuff you could've inferred from "I can't grasp."

Perhaps you put slightly more responsibility on the game being approachable as opposed to the gamer being responsible to learn the game than I do.

Players give their time, attention, and money to the product of my hobby/passion. If something goes wrong, the onus on me to fix it, except in extreme cases where it is impossible to satisfy that player without some horrible compromise. So if someone doesn't like Primordia because it's too low resolution for his taste, I don't tell him his taste is wrong, I explain why we used the resolution we did and offer him a refund or one of the keys I have floating around for higher resolution adventure games.

Conversely, if I play a game and I'm not having fun because I can't grasp its mechanics and it doesn't interest me enough to make me learn a life-useless subject matter, I'll just quit the game. I'm not going to write a bad review or crap on the game on Twitter, but I'm not going to beat myself up for not sticking with it.

Still, I guess at the end of the day I, like the Codex, think people aren't pushing themselves hard enough to appreciate challenging things, so we aren't thank different.

 

[Tigranes]

Tigranes "Nobody liked a game primarily and specifically because it was so difficult to get into." In almost every field of endeavor, those who go through an unpleasant process to attain some reward (however trivial) tend to ennoble the unpleasantness and criticize those who can attain the award without going through it. "Back when I was a kid, you had to log into a *nix terminal and use tin to communicate on a bulletin board. That meant something!" Etc. Thus, while your point is mostly true (I think there are some people who do like games specifically because of their impenetrability), the fact that a game was difficult to get into is retroactively turned into a virtue even if at the time it sucked and earned nothing. "Drink your tarwater and be a man!"

You imply that the ennobling of the frustration/struggle is therefore fake and founded on bias, but there's no logical basis to suggest this. A grognard can be bitter about how kids these days get a billion songs on to their iSkedadoodles when he had to record his favourite songs off late night radio on cassette - but that doesn't mean there was no meaning behind that difficulty and that the point is not valid. This is similar to when people trot out nostalgia not as an argument but as an emblem, as if just pointing out something you liked happened a long time ago automatically makes your argument based on poor memory and bias.

The point of my post is that I fundamentally disagree 'having fun' is about eliminating anything momentarily frustrating to try and reach some perfect distillation of indulgent experiences, and the long tradition of 'play' across many civilisations is testimony to that. And I fundamentally don't believe that making things 'easier' for the player or getting rid of 'furstration' in a game experience is a good thing in itself. If anything, neither frustration or ease-of-use are inherently positive, because what matters is crafting a sense of meaningful challenge, consequence and achievement over the course of the game rather than jerking them off every 5 seconds (or killing their characters and deleting their savegames every 5 seconds, for that matter).

Again, I know you aren't exactly advocating Dragon Age 2 here, I'm just using you to rant and rave in the grand Codex tradition.

 

[MRY]

Yes, I think it is actually entirely possible that every generation has gotten worse and weaker and lazier and more lascivious and worse at RPGs than the prior generation. It is possible (but I think less probable) that the Second Coming will actually happen in our generation, even though every other generation before us expected it to come in theirs. But the more likely fact is that things plod on much as they always have, conveniences replace inconveniences and new inconveniences arise to fill the gaps, and the world gets more crowded and richer. Some day whippersnappers will take about how they had to put up with loading delays and make careful decisions about whether to enter a new zone or not.

Anyway, more on topic, it is demonstrably true that RPGs are in many ways dumber and poorer experiences than they used to be (and in other ways perhaps smarter and richer), but I think that's because in the course of development people confused difficulty and accessibility, and "frustration because I was not good enough to pull off my plan" or "because my plan wasn't good enough" with "frustration because the game screwed me." For a time it seemed like people didn't like hard platformers, but then it turned out they just didn't like sloppy controls and hit detection and actually loved hard platformers. Same could well be true with RPGs. But you can't tell until you unpredictable/unfair failures from predictable failures.

 

[Lurker King]

At some point it was expected that if you were going to play an RPG, you had to learn its systems - and if you couldn't do that, it was your fault. Now there are a bunch of people who don't even try to learn, which is fine on its own, but they also conclude that "I can't grasp the game therefore the game is bad"

Yes, the game is bad, and no, it's not the players' fault. If a game's learning curve is too steep for the incentive the game gives the player to climb the curve, that's a design flaw.
.

So Chess, Go and JA2 are bad games because they demand a learning curve that is too steep to incentive lazy popamole players who can’t appreciate the complexity of abstract systems. No wonder you only played as a talker in AoD. What a joke. This line of thinking ignores the main thing about games: they are attempts to surpass unnecessary challenges. If a game has no challenge, it is no good.

"Back in the day, players had to read boring, often inaccurate manuals, and then spend hours fiddling with bad controls, imbalanced design, and dead-ends."

Or maybe they tried to learn by try and error and have fun in the process, because failure at the beginning was not perceived as at the end of the world, but a learning process.

That is sometimes true, but it is reflective of the fact that computer games were overwhelming made by people on the spectrum for people on the spectrum (and I don't mean the ZX Spectrum).

You mean, they were made by real gamers for real gamers who have real interest for cRPGs and strategy games.

And many of the games that left lasting marks on peoples' memories are precisely the ones where the systems were straightforward and intuitive and the learning curve was not especially steep.

I don’t think that is true. Not so long ago even the games with the most intuitive systems, e.g., Super Mario Brothers, have a decent learning curve. You can die a lot playing these games. Kids with 8 or 10 years old grow up learning that failure was expected of them and part of the process. They learned that in order to beat the game, they had to struggle and persevere. This fact alone explains why your equation between system complexity and learning curve doesn’t work. Nowadays, most games have no real complexity in it and are too easy. We have the worst of both worlds.

Impenetrability doesn't seem like a virtue to me. I suppose there are people who think that Finnegan's Wake is aweosme because it's so hard to read but not me, and in any event, Andrew Greenberg is not quite James Joyce.

There is a difference between the obscurity for sake of obscurity and the impenetrability that naturally results from the complexity you are trying to present. You can’t have Shakespeare with a simplistic vocabulary or decent cRPGs without complex systems and a steep learning curve. The main reason why there are so many bad cRPGs out there is because most developers nowdays are people like you, MYR. They hate cRPGs and want them to be something else. The game industry is filled with popamoles.

 

[Lurker King]

You now what, Lithium Flower? I take it back. Popamoles are lazy and lack humility. I know this because I wasn’t a grognard and the first time I played AoD I tried to learn the system instead of quitting. I revel on the challenge and became fascinated by the possibilities of a complex system. If players don’t have this attitude when they are trying to play cRPGs, this is a flaw of character and shows how superficial they are as individuals.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

"if a game feels unfair, that is probably a fault of its design."

The game should be fair though, its not the same as saying the game is too difficult. A game can be very hard and still be very fair.

I find it interesting that Wizardry is brought up as an example of a game with too hard difficulty and opaque systems. Because the difficulty of the systems is (at least from my experience with Wiz6, I know its easier that its predecessors but still) often greaty exaggerated. Read the manual, fiddle around a bit and you are basically ready to go. Its not that hard to get into than people make it up to be.

In his interview with Robert Woodhead, Matt Barton asked him about criticism that Wizardry was too hard for most players, and he said "of course it was hard! The question is: was it fair?"

 

[Lithium Flower]

"if a game feels unfair, that is probably a fault of its design."

The game should be fair though, its not the same as saying the game is too difficult. A game can be very hard and still be very fair.

Absolutely. That isn't my problem with the sentence. The "feels" part is. One should base their criticism in analysis of the game to explain why it is unfair - simply stating that you found it unfair, and therefore the game is bad, I take issue with because we don't know who "you" are and what your credentials are. By that logic, a single "you" is enough to make a game objectively bad. My disagreement with MRY over this sentence is largely superficial and comes down to a difference in interpretation. He chooses to give that statement a charitable interpretation, I do not. I would argue that the former is more suited to, for example, examining philosophical arguments than it is to reviews which are meant to be precise - but I don't think either approach is inherently flawed or that arguing about which one is best would be very productive.

Anyway, I think people might be sort of talking past each other in this conversation. I don't think MRY thinks that games with steep learning curves are objectively shit and I don't think myself, Lurker King, or Tigranes think that we should do away with all tutorials and go back to the times of 100-page paper manuals being required reading to learn a game. I think we can all agree that both extremes are bad and importantly that we are not actually endorsing either - we are somewhere on the spectrum between the two, and I'd argue we are pretty close. We might differ on how close to either extreme we should get, but I doubt there is any kind of major disagreement. Doesn't mean we shouldn't shit on each other relentlessly because, hey, this is the Codex after all. I'm just saying that our shit would probably hit closer to the mark if we stop pretending the other side is arguing for something they are not.

Interesting and monocled discussion regardless, my dudes.

 

[Fenix]

If a tree evolves such that animals can't get at its fruit, it probably will go extinct. "But it will die nobly."

You better see the video where various people failed to get athe nut while monkey did it.

Feel free to comment on intellectual abilities of these "players".

the fact that a game was difficult to get into is retroactively turned into a virtue even if at the time it sucked and earned nothing

It's not true - I know people who learned something while they tried to play some complex game, from languge to programming.

Despite my being a reasonable and experienced player of games, I found it impossible to grasp how this game works. That made it impossible for me to enjoy it. I suppose it's possible that this was because of some idiosyncratic personal flaw, but it seems more likely that many other players will have the same problem, and not like it, so bear that in mind."

Man, I think you carried away by demagoguery, really.
Because all I see in quoted text is I AM SUCH A PRO WHY I'M FAILING.
That person THINK he is experienced, and then he use an argument to a plurality of gamers who in turn same shitty gamers as he is.

I will not tolerate apologetics of mediocrity, stupidity - because this is what you douing here.
And while you can think that you doing something good - you only multiply stupidity and therefore suffering.

And I tell you one thig - I think this advocacy of mediocrity comes from you teacher background, and you just translating standarts which you were taught, because whole western education system happens to be system that reproduce mediocrity and this is a rule, so you actually advocacing work most of your life, or you should admit you did it all wrong, and you should take responsibility for all that dumber-than-monkey audience too.
System is based on people such as you.

 

[MRY]

I think you carried away by demagoguery, really.
***
And I tell you one thig - I think this advocacy of mediocrity comes from you teacher background, and you just translating standarts which you were taught, because whole western education system happens to be system that reproduce mediocrity and this is a rule, so you actually advocacing work most of your life, or you should admit you did it all wrong, and you should take responsibility for all that dumber-than-monkey audience too.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Fenix]

It is possible (but I think less probable) that the Second Coming will actually happen in our generation

we should do away with all tutorials and go back to the times of 100-page paper manuals being required reading to learn a game.[/QUOTE]
You know, today all "100-page paper manuals" moved to wikipeda, and I can't imagine Elona+ without it more than actually 100 page manual.

I think we can all agree that both extremes are bad and importantly that we are not actually endorsing either - we are somewhere on the spectrum between the two

I absolutely disagree.
Gamedev today absolutely lack complex, difficult games, so we actually should strive to complex games, and we anyway will get TONNS of simplistic and primitive games - just because of such thing like entropy.
Shoot for the stars!

 

[PlanHex]

You better see the video where various people failed to get athe nut while monkey did it.

Feel free to comment on intellectual abilities of these "players".

This is actually a really good example of (intentionally) terrible game design. If you're told "go solve the puzzle on this table", there's an expectation that what you need to solve it is provided to you, but the solution is intentionally obfuscated, hidden as a snack/refreshment table that the players only see when they walk in and will pay no further attention to as the placement of the chair ensures they won't think about it again until they're explicitly told that they need water.

All in all, I rate this shitty clickbait for well-designed trolling.

 

[Fenix]

No, it is an example of modern people's overall IQ. Just like that.
I bet among them were those who wrote bad review on steam...