The thing is without hand holding, gamers are going to get very frustrated fairly quickly. While it is part of it, it's not necessarily a good thing and I think it's what made the NES and SNES days of gaming somewhat of a niche. While some gamers say that those days were the holy grail of video games (debateable), some of the frustration associated with some games is too much to handle. My husband who has been a gamer for all of his life doesn't really have the time to sit down and play an 8 hour marathon of one game just trying to nail every mechanic, to pass ONE part, or going through trial and error, both of the last ones back in the NES and SNES days forced you to start far before you left off because of a lack of checkpoints. I'm sure a lot of avid gamers like him share the same problem of being busy a lot of the time with having a wife and kids.
While I admire a good challenge, there is such a thing as something being too vague and too frustrating. While I got through the first Zelda without TOO much confusion, the second Zelda (and I liked the game portion of it) was fucking terribad. Asking villager after villager and getting vague clues and just being boring made me get bored and frustrated because I couldn't be bothered with taking 30 minutes going to one gravestone far away without dying, or finding a secret entrance in a house by mostly chance. A similar game to this is Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. It is not challenging, it is vague, ridiculous, and I do not want to waist a ton of fucking time just walking around and NOT HAVING FUN.
Oh hey, guess what, I liked the first Zelda and Metroid (to a certain extent) and DQ/DW, but Castlevania II and Zelda II were fucking stupid, I liked the gameplay of the second Zelda, but the fetching and going about the world asking for hints was boring and monotonous.
Games have more or less become less of a niche market and are breaking out to the mainstream and becoming accessible. This is why we have tutorials and as long as gaming is going to exist, there will always be some type of tutorial. Although, I always wish that there's an option to skip them. For most shooters, all the mechanics are the same, don't show me them over and over again. Although in most games now there's always the option to put it to hard mode and it's similar to what you'd have back in the day almost, I know some games take away the hints in game and stuff, so that's nice.
It's a double edged sword either way you go, you can't please both crowds, so there's no point. The older style challenging games are for the niche markets (Demon's Souls and 3D Dot Game Heroes), and the more modern cinematic/hand holding games will still thrive on. In the end, all I want is a good FUN game that's just challenging enough for me to think that it's fun and not teeth shattering frustrating.
Replying to #3
As long as the online mode is good, I honestly don't care. Although I do wish there were more local multiplayer options.
Zydaline · #1There was no hand-holding and no lengthy tutorials. You're stuck most of the time listening to vague villagers hinting at you and tyrannical despots shouting at you to slay demon kings without telling you where it is. You fight, you get killed, and you learn from your mistakes. You grapple with the menus and the inadequate menu descriptions, you spend two hours desperately reconfiguring your equipment to beat a boss. That was all part of the adventure.
I honestly never heard a game being like this. And the thought of this game makes me bleed from the inside even more than usual, this game sounds like the worst game in existence. Why would I want to play a game where I 'grapple' with menus? What kind of game would make it difficult to access a MENU?
