Posts by Tag / CREATOR: Shamus Young (7)

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Right Now Is A Great Time To Jump Into No Man's Sky

Via Kotaku: Right Now Is A Great Time To Jump Into No Man’s Sky

I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this for a month.

On the one hand, it’s a gratifying surprise that No Man’s Sky’s 4.0 “Waypoint” update seems like it finally deals with the problems I had with the game, and I went ahead and redownloaded it. But it’s also bittersweet, because Shamus Young had the same problems, so my immediate reaction to the news is to wonder what he’d have to say about this—

And then I remember.

I still don’t know what to say. I wrote before that I no longer had heroes in the talking-about-games-online space. Shamus was the closest thing left. I don’t think there was anyone I looked up to more.

I never met Shamus or even managed to have a direct interaction with him, but it’s hard to overstate his influence on me. I’ve been reading his work for something like fifteen years. There’s a reason he’s the first link in my blogroll and I’ve quoted or linked to him several times. I’m going to feel his absence for a long time, and I’m not the only one.

No Man’s Sky is just one game, and though Shamus wrote about it several times it’s not in the top handful of games that are most associated with him. But I can’t help but find it tragicomic that after he revisited the game multiple times and repeatedly found that its core issues weren’t fixed, they finally are and he didn’t live to see it.

You have to find the humor in these things, because otherwise there’s only the darkness.

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Actually Learning to Play: Why There Should Be Easy and Hard Modes for Game UI

Why don’t games have hard and easy modes for the UI? Different players have different needs, and one-size-fits-all solutions shrink a game’s audience.

In a blog post titled The Importance of the New Player’s Experience, Josh Bycer catalogs several types of “new” players for a given game:

  1. Players who are new to this specific game, but familiar with other similar games or the conventions of the genre.
  2. Players who are new to this game’s genre and conventions, but familiar with gaming in general.
  3. Players who are completely new to gaming.
  4. Players who have played this specific game, but have put it down for an extended period and are returning - especially if it is a live-service game which may have changed considerably in the meantime.

All of these players need some amount of guidance (or at least reminders) to understand how to play the game, but the amount and nature of guidance needed varies considerably between them. One might expect games to thus present a few different levels of optional guidance to cater to each group, but it’s typical for games to design their tutorials and onboarding for only the first group, providing little help for the “new” players of other kinds.

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Uninformed Economic Voters

Recently, your friend and mine Cliff Bleszinski wrote an essay defending microtransactions in general and EA in specific. There are a lot of things to be said about this essay - some of which are said expertly by Jim Sterling here, and some of which touch on concepts discussed by Shamus Young writing a couple of years ago about Bobby Kotick here and here.

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Blizzard and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad DRM

You may have heard that there’s been a bit of a kerfuffle recently in response to some news about Diablo III. I’ll walk you through it - but first, we need to talk about Ubisoft.

On July 28, Ubisoft reported that they consider their constant connection DRM scheme to be a “success.” This despite the uproar and backlash caused by the scheme, the fact that it was immediately cracked, the clear demonstration of the system’s flaws when denial of service attacks locked out paying customers and left pirates unaffected, and Ubisoft’s eventual scaling back of the DRM to a once-per-run validation. Their reasoning?

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In Praise of Easy: Lowering the Barrier to Entry

Easy Button

The challenge/punishment confusion is a major source of disagreement about video game difficulty, but it’s not the only one. Even when we have set punishment aside and are very clearly discussing only challenge, we run into trouble. Let’s take a look at the question of how much “easy” there should be in games:

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Test Skills, Not Patience: Challenge, Punishment, and Learning

You and your friends are dead. Game Over.

Difficulty in games is a popular and thorny subject. Are games easier than they used to be? Does easier mean worse? Are games being “dumbed down”? And how do the dreaded “casual players” fit in?

The problem with these questions is that it is not productive to discuss difficulty as a single quantity. The term “difficulty” as it is commonly used encompasses two almost completely separate phenomena, with profoundly different effects on the player:

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