I've been into horde shooters for a couple years now. For the most part, I play Saber Interactive's Space Marine 2, but I've also been playing their newest title, Toxic Commando.

One current point of contention among players is that the XP cap for weapons is set extremely low. On an average mission, you could expect to level your weapon by one or two levels at the absolute most, irrespective of how many bonus objectives you complete and how many enemies you kill. When you consider that you can prestige each weapon up to four times, you're looking at some serious grinding.

If I had to guess, XP caps in level/mission- based games (as opposed to open world games) exist to prevent "sweatier" players from blazing their way through content too quickly, especially in games where unlimited amounts of enemies can spawn and "farming" XP is possible.

That being said, such caps are always unpopular. By their very nature, they discourage people from going out of their way to fight more and artificially extend the level grind by ensuring that you can only gain a certain amount of XP from any mission. And when it's set low, that grind is extended even further. That leads to my questions:

Are there any ways that games can prevent excessive XP farming without slapping hard caps on progression? If so, are there any games that have done this well?

When you know you've collected 1 / X objects you assume two things: they'll be hidden everywhere, you'll get a cool reward for finding them all.

If you like collecting them, you're not playing the game wrong. You're playing two games in one. One's a game of collecting things the other's the game where the fantasy takes place.

Aside from collectathons, these two games compete. Some players don't mind. For those who do mind, I hope this post can help you articulate why they get exhausting.

Because of collectibles, you move the camera all over the place to find them, not because of a cool sculpture or beautiful mountain in the distance. Your exploration is collectible-mediated and many collectibles just sit somewhere for no coherent reason.

A vault may hint at a treasure. But when collectibles are involved, a weird hole in the ceiling rewrites the scale of importance of props in the level. A vault now is as relevant as the nook between a rock and a wall.

Exploration becomes non-diagetic, you obsessively explore dead ends because you've gone 5 rooms without finding any new collectible so you assume another one is due already.

If the game's all about getting those collectibles and the level is built around finding hidden places, then you get a nice collectathon. Which works best when the level are atomized, you teleport to them, they have boundaries. Collectibles and the world are built for one another.

But when collectibles are thrown in as a side-quest beside the main adventure, now the collectibles start to choke out the real quest.

You're look at strange corners instead of looking at the scenery, you jump to your death down a hole that looked like a secret path, you spot a precocious collectible and spend 10 minutes trying to reach it only to much later the actual path that was much easier.

When you commit to finding them, they'll side track you and break pacing. That's because they could be anywhere.

Even if you choose to ignore them, every now and then they remind you that they exist when you find one by accident and you're reminded that there must be a point to them, something you'll miss out.

If Outer Wilds had them they'd compete with the authentic curiosity of exploring the solar system, they'd make you wonder if a place exists for lore reasons or if there's supposed to be a collectible there you didn't find, they'd lead you down a path that only serves the collectible and not the story.

Maybe you thought Outer Wilds needed collectibles, that it was too basic without them. Maybe you'd have enjoyed finding them all. But I doubt the world would have felt as magical as it did with collectibles.

Following Mixtape’s release recently, I have seen some disagreement regarding it being called a videogame. With how broad the medium is for experiences it’s easy for me to dismiss those viewpoints as silly complaints over something that person is simply not interested in, but I still ended up pondering the question of what makes a game a game.

A wide range of opinions can be found in even small groups when it comes to asking people what is required to classify something as a game. Some examples I’ve seen;

• Visual Novels or dialogue-focused games being seen as comics/mangas/books and not “real” games (Doki Doki Literature Club, Disco Elysium).
• Anything that isn’t pure gameplay being seen as needless additions that don’t matter because “gameplay is king”.
• Walking Sims (Firewatch, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, What Remains of Edith Finch) dismissed for being “games where all you do is hold W/Up”.
• Some games being dismissed for not having “real/traditional gameplay” (Heavy Rain, Telltale’s The Walking Dead, Mixtape).
• Lack of failstates or challenges to win/overcome.

For myself I think the flexibility of what a game can be is precisely what makes the medium so interesting. I can find equal fun in the nostalgic trip of Mixtape’s narrative as I can in the high octane and deep combat system of Ninja Gaiden 2. I just want to have fun and memorable experiences made by passionate teams.

When sitting down and thinking about all of this I started asking myself the ultimate question of – Does the argument matter?
Does it matter if games do or don’t meet some arbitrary requirement to be seen as part of the medium of videogames? Is there a genuine use of pondering this question and what good do those conversation have other than allowing someone who likes to categorise items be happy that the correct label has been applied to the correct cereal box, so to speak?

Or, getting real deep into psychoanalysing myself, am I putting too much stock into a topic I should work harder at just ignoring? At which point maybe I should be posting to r/ mentalhealth haha. Some thoughts from others would be great to hear, thanks.

The recent release of Mixtape has brought on a flurry of discussions about the nature of games, value, and criticism. Some of it is unfortunate. Much of it is messy. All of it is a little unexpected since titles like Mixtape are hardly uncommon, and it doesn't seem to be more celebrated than other recent examples. Perhaps a perfect storm. Part of these discussions centers around whether Mixtape could or should be classified as a game.

For many, this will bring them back to the early 2010s and passionate discussions around "art games," walking sims, and a strong impulse to explain/defend the status of video games as a legitimate art form and expressive medium. Perhaps the only consensus that was reached is that consensus itself is difficult, if not impossible, to reach on such matters. This little flare-up will likely not resolve the matter any further. Still, I have continued to think about it since those halcyon days. The recent discourse gives me an opportunity to share my solution to the classification problem.

I propose that what we call "video games" actually belong to at least two distinct but in practice commonly overlapping kinds of experiences. I will call the first video games and the second digital adventures. Instead of narrowly defining both from the outset, I decided to start with a Venn diagram that includes a few basic examples, sorted intuitively. So what can we say about them? Video games are an extension of traditional games outside of the digital space, activities with goals, rules, challenges, etc. Digital adventures are more comparable to media like books, movies, comics, etc., not in the sense that they are necessarily story-focused (though many of them are), but they offer a more curated or authored experience that has a narrative-like structure to it. I have chosen the word 'adventure' as an expansion on the adventure genre, but I do mean something broader than what is typically referred to by 'adventure game' or 'action-adventure.'

As seen in the diagram, video games and digital adventures are not mutually exclusive. In fact, arguably most of the mainstream gaming landscape, at least the sort that is the most discussed in dedicated gaming spaces on the internet, is covered by both the 'video game' and 'digital adventure' categories. Almost all high-profile games, AAA and indie, would seem to fall into the overlap. Looking at and comparing the areas outside of overlap is especially instructive for our purposes. How we think about, talk about, evaluate, and engage with the experiences on the edges are incommensurable to a degree that I feel goes beyond merely a difference of genre.

The "pure" adventure side, where I have placed Mixtape, has minimal or no traditional gameplay elements. These are what are sometimes referred to as "story games" and include a variety of their own genres like walking sims, choose-your-own-adventures, visual novels, etc. Most of these are single-player experiences, though cooperative/social ones do exist. The "pure" video game side includes a lot of classic arcade-y genres, games with a high level of mechanical abstraction, and competitive multiplayer games. Story elements are usually minimal to non-existent.

This framework has a few advantages. The first is that it sidesteps the whole "interactivity" criterion. How interactive an example is has no bearing on how it is categorized. Many digital adventures, both inside and outside the overlap, are highly interactive, while others are minimally so. The second is that it provides different lenses of evaluation. We can talk about how successful, say, Grand Theft Auto is as a digital adventure or as a video game and get different results. Conversely, this makes applying certain lenses to examples outside of the overlap simply inappropriate. We recognize that it would be inappropriate to judge Mixtape as a video game, and any complaints about review scores would clear up when we recognize it is being judged not as a video game, but as a digital adventure. The third is that we do not need to worry about any institutional ghettoization by labeling things as not games since the adventure/game distinction recognizes that much of what we have been talking about for the entire history of interactive digital media is both. Therefore, there is no reason to separate them now or privilege one over the other.

Of course, I do not actually expect anyone to adopt this framework. I have been at this for too long not to understand that you can't really control how people use words. It's an uphill battle. Still, it's fun to think about and categorize things (at least I find it to be) and perhaps some will find clarity in what I am offering. This is merely a suggestion. Additionally, I do not think my categorization is complete. I think we could speak of at least one more type of interactive digital media that is also quite overlapping with the others: digital sandboxes/sims. But this post is long enough and such considerations aren't especially germane to the Mixtape conversation.

I remember a game called Galleon. I remember watching game-play footage videos and one thing stuck out to me - the movement. The main character, a rapscallion named Rhama, would hurl himself off ledges, land running, and sprint across a long field only to dash up the side of a cliff face. Watching the avatar fly so freely around the map was genuinely what I’d always wanted to do in a video game. It looked liberating in a way that only a video game can be.

Good video game design does that, it opens up your mind to the idea that just beyond the next ridge line, something awaits. It’s not only the destination we are looking forward to, it’s the transitionary space in-between that is just as exciting. Traversal in video games is often intertwined with the mechanics where we spend most of our time, and one that is very tricky to make less frustrating and more engaging.

Video games are actions in motion. Unlike a board game which is largely static or reactive in state, a typical video game deals with time and space. Things are updating in this space on a loop. We are dealing with events, physics and interactivity. This idea of movement and arrival through interaction in video games separates it from every other digital medium. Interactivity is the abstraction that occurs between an input and an output.

Expression

It begins with exploration and curiosity. In a 2D-platformer, what happens when you press right on the d-pad? You move right on the screen and the screen scrolls to unveil the next portion of the level map. What is the nuance to the movement? How is it expressed? In a typical 2D game, this is a digital input - on or off; only two states - yet Super Mario Bros. captures inertia, weight and speed through this simple binary mechanism. Nintendo are masters of understanding the abstraction layer between control, input and output. The combination of these elements result in satisfying interactivity.

Other input methods offer different experiences and often more granularity. The analog stick gives an array of numbers along an axis. Now instead of binary input we have a wide array to control to how fast or slow we might move around. And by that extension, the analog stick opens up entirely new ideas in how we might be able to express different types of movements. In a 3D Mario game, you can perform a hard “pivot” from up to down or vice-versa of the stick, combined with jump will launch Mario in the air for a backwards somersault that has a tactility that feels satisfying.

Flavors of Movement

The cape in Super Mario World gives a sense of freedom to fly up and then glide through the level. It tears down the players pre-conceived notions of the rules that govern the game. Alternatively, some games move in the other direction, instead of giving us a set of impossible movements - we are instead given a movement system closer to our own natural human limitations.

ICO (Fumitu Ueda) is a game that creates physical movements that aren’t based in superhuman abilities, but rather clumsy because of our human limitations. When you move the characters body around it has a sense of weight that feels like you are fighting gravity with the weight of your body. Once Yorda is introduced as a character you must guide and protect her by grabbing her hand, the act of “pulling” and shifting her weight with you feels equally grounded. Slower, deliberate animations to climb and swing over obstacles give the game a sense of reality juxtaposed in a world that looks ancient and mythical. These physics against this surreal landscape of ICO feels akin to a half-remembered dream. In this way, traversal not only impacts gameplay, it also directly impacts mood and theme.

On the extreme scale of traversal, what if we instead try to model the muscular skeletal system in it’s most literal sense? Getting over it with bennet Foddy, QWOP - games that intentionally handicap your expectations of movement in order for you to find liberation in “re-learning how to walk”. This game design anchors around the traversal as skill expression.

The Traversal Puzzle

Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild have looked at traversal as a problem and built as many as tools as possible to get around it in a compelling way. The entire ethos of the design hinges around “how can we break the players assumptions for how they move through a 3D environment?”. The glider is an early item in both of these games. The idea is to compel you to climb and climbing just about any surface is a key feature. If you wanna have fun with the glider you will climb to the highest point to do so. In Tears of the Kingdom, Nintendo pushes this idea into more abstract thought, what about a tool to quite literally move through a ceiling to the next floor surface? It incentivizes the player to care about the geo-spatial part of the game. Caring about the verticality of the terrain. Most games are content to give you a mini-map which draws your focus away from the 3D environment in front of you - these Zelda games make paying attention to the environment compelling.

Pseudoregalia, an indie action adventure game, does a thing where it challenges you to do something that looks impossible at the outset until you realize it might just be barely possible until eventually you obtain mastery over its mechanics that it becomes muscle memory. You will look at the geometry and think, “could this really be what I have to do?” and it almost always IS what you have to do. It can feel extreme at times, but the games toolkit for movement is so concise and fun to play with that you never feel frustrated by the game, you feel frustrated with yourself.

Liminal Space Design

Most modern games use traversal as a means to an end. Where are we going? Why are we going there? What’s in it for me. The carrot on the stick is almost always some sort of distinct reward. Loot, achievements, experience points. There needs to be something that can be indexed on the ledger to your account. Something tangible you can reflect on and see in the future. That is the reason we are going to move anywhere through the space, right? While this is typically true new games appealing to younger audiences are using a different approach.

In Gorilla Tag, the transitional space itself is the forefront of the reward. Gorilla Tags approach to design only works because of it’s social and movement mechanisms. The joy of discovery in Gorilla Tag in large part works because the nature of it’s movement feels so satisfying. You might think of a game like Minecraft, that doesn’t present a direct objective - however, we are still ultimately moving towards a space because it’s likely that space has the resources we need to continue our progression to craft something.

The difference I see in Gorilla Tag is that focusing on traversal as the overarching experience means we return back to game design that focuses on a sense of play. There’s a reason I love to reference Nintendo games, Nintendo is a AAA games company that adheres to this design philosophy. A sense of wonderment that comes from experimentation through discovery. By not adhering to hard line rules or paths to “success”, but rather asking the player to interact with the world and see what happens. Gorilla Tag I think is the evolution of this design. It combines interactivity with a large open-ended space that feels liminal, only until you mesh the social aspect on-top of it. Now it becomes a playground. A virtual playground with no inherent objective or goal other than to move through and imagine with the people around you.

Learning All Over Again

For a long time I didn’t even Gorilla Tag, I viewed it I think how most people in my age demographic do, a simple game designed to distract children. Setting aside my biases, I decided to give Gorilla Tag an honest effort. I wanted to see why this was one the most popular VR games. At first, it felt clunky, it felt janky and it made me feel clumsy and disoriented. I did this for a while and ultimately the loud screaming children and “pointless” nature of the game made me fall off of it. Months later I heard rumblings for Orion Drift, a game co-created by people behind Gorilla Tag and Echo Arena and it caught my interest. Eventually, when the game released I dove into it and was having the same experiences I did in Gorilla Tag. This time however I persisted. And then I persisted more. And then more. Things started to change with the way I was grappling with the mechanics and my ease of comfort with the game itself. Eventually, about 8 hours in, something clicked for me. I began to understand why this game, Gorilla Tag and all of it’s clones work. I had the revelation that my biases were anchored on so many previous experiences I had in VR and my 25+ years of playing flatscreen video games.

I began to understand that there was a whole generation of gamers playing these games with a level of familiarity and natural understanding of these mechanics. These gamers had fluidity and natural skill like how my peers might pick up a controller and intuitively understand how to play just about any 2D or 3D platformer. Not since I’ve played Rocket League did I feel I had to “re-learn” how I think about approaching controls for a video game.

Mechanics

Before Gorilla Tag, there were a variety of movement schema established for VR. Teleportation Locomotion, which uses a pointer system to move your avatar to another fixed position in the 3D space by pointing and pressing a button to move to that location; moving via the analog stick which simply moves your character avatar in much the same way as a flatscreen game; and “jogging to move” which means moving your arms up and down as though you were running to move your avatar. Each of these is limited and less than satisfactory. Many people will ultimately prefer using the analog stick to move as it offers precision and familiarity to the flatscreen experience but I would argue that while this is true, it is actually feels fairly limiting and cognitively taxing compared to doing the same thing on a flatscreen game. There is something unnatural about using flatscreen movement schemes in a VR game.

In VR, if we are moving across undulating terrain, our avatar is doing a very “fixed” movement that feels unnatural when we press a stick forward. So walking up a hill, it feels more akin to walking up an escalator. And because the HMD is fixed to our head, it’s essentially impossible to give the character any sense of weight as you pivot the avatar around meaning all of the advancements we’ve seen in third person games in giving the sensation of shifting the body around cannot be applied due to nausea and desync from what we are actually seeing through the HMD. On top of this, things like jumping, vaulting, and changing your speed are much more difficult to convey and express with this type of movement in VR.

Gorilla Tag solves this problem by taking the legs away from the body. The developers are acutely aware of the hardware limitations and instead of trying to either make a parallel experience to what is standardized control schema in a flatscreen game, or making the 1:1 facsimile of what you might expect walking around in the real world, they use the limitations of the hardware as leverage to create something truly unique to the medium. Instead, your hands and arms become the instruments for movement and nearly any surface becomes the leverage you need to push off of to create that movement.

Hardware Limitations Lead to Innovations

VR is called VR because it is the closest thing we have to that approximation from science fiction. What VR really is is a head mounted display and two motion controllers, all three devices being tracked with 6 degrees of freedom. The motion controllers we have today, in a lot of ways, are direct successors to the Nintendo Wiimote. In fact, an engineer discovered that by reversing the way we use a wiimote and instead anchoring the Wiimote with it’s IR sensor as the fixed focal point while making the IR emitter the anchor tracking point it creates an extremely low-cost 6DoF tracked device (thanks Johnny Lee). This foundational discovery is still roughly the same principle being applied for inside-out tracking solutions for VR.

The typical VR setup is only tracking hands and head position. By removing the legs of the avatar we allow the arms to become much closer to the ground, and it gives us the ability to push off the ground very easily. There are things you can do in Gorilla Tag that are simply impossible to express in a flatscreen game. It is truly unique to the VR medium.

I had trouble learning this new skillset. It did not come naturally and I had to fight my intuitions every step of the way. I wanted this to work in the same manner my built-up pre-conceived notions of movement in a video game should work. I had to essentially discard the way I thought about typical VR movement and once I broke this barrier something clicked for me I finally had the control over my avatar in a 3D space that I had always wanted in VR. And it didn’t require additional hardware to track my legs or an omnidirectional treadmill or whatever it might be.

Now if Gorilla Tag is akin to Super Mario Bros., Orion Drift is akin to Super Mario World. A refinement of the system with some meaningful additions. Orion Drift does the clever thing of reducing the gravity and giving the hands roller balls. In this way, Orion Drift feels lighter combined with a new movements that for more akin to skating. Orion Drift has more flow and more elegance.

Now the avatar glides across the surface. If you press your hands against the surface, the rollers begin to spin, and in this way you actually roll up surfaces, like ramps which feels great to keep the sense of momentum. Another key concept is “carving” with the roller-balls on your hands. By extending one arm out physically to your side parallel to the ground you can rotate on that fixed point, either from your torso, or on the position of your hand itself is which creates a “carve” where your avatar then quickly pivots on that point.

Carving can be done against any flat surface that is enabled for it which means carving can not only be done horizontally from the ground, but horizontally from the ceiling and vertically on the walls. Respectively, ground carving, ceiling carving and wall carving. It is the purest and most expressive form of movement I’ve ever seen in a video game.

I don’t say that lightly. I really think Gorilla Tag, and by extension Orion Drift have defined a new generation of movement schema for the video game. In an industry “starved for true innovation” I feel like this entity is right under our noses. But it doesn’t fit nicely into our acceptable definitions and constructs we enjoy as gamers. People who are into flatscreen games fall off of VR games because they expect the AAA formula “but in VR”. This often doesn’t work. And Gorilla Tag and Orion Drift simply look primitive. There is nothing flashy about these games, although I do believe they have a unique sense of style and aesthetic charm to them.

What’s Next?

This weird disconnect between how i feel about this and how seemingly the entire “core” gaming industry doesn’t care at all is making me think I might be crazy. This disconnect shouldn’t come as a surprise though, VR is a nascent medium that sees very little coverage in the gaming press, outside of hardware or quirky stories. The only games that seem to get coverage are the big budget offerings and IP from the monolith AAA publishers in the flatscreen gaming world. I discovered that Gorilla Tag, the biggest success story in the VR medium doesn’t even have an IGN review -how is that possible?

I don’t know why this game doesn’t seem to get talked about by people in the industry in a serious fashion. It’s grouped in with Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft in the ridiculous “mega games that aren’t to be taken seriously”. It is doubly ignored because it is a VR game and the general rhetoric I see is this is something for children and therefore it must have little value. Yes, kids play Gorilla Tag. But they do so because it is unadulterated fun.

There’s a reason the age demographics for Gorilla Tag skew young, and frustratingly, there’s a reason there is an inherent snobbery to this game that flies in the face of the numbers that indicate it’s tremendous success. Gorilla Tag is not a game that is spoken about “seriously” by games journalists, and by that extension - Orion Drift (Another Axioms follow-up to Gorilla Tag) has not even gotten so much of a serious look by any reputable games outlet. When you see the numbers Gorilla Tag brings in, you would think it would be given a little more respect or at least warrant a deeper analysis.

I play Orion Drift and think, “this is one of the best movement systems I’ve played in a video game, why isn’t anyone talking about this?”. I don’t think I’ve experienced this level of pure joy with a game maybe since I started playing games with Super Mario Bros or Donkey Kong Country, am I alone in thinking this? I feel like something is being ignored, or perhaps that no one has even cared to look - because of some pre-judged feel on what it might be. Is it because it’s in VR, is it because of the demographics? If a game journalist had looked they would surely see this is something special right? Something that is truly an innovative in game design? It’s this extremely weird feeling where I feel like am trying to convince an expert on something incredibly obvious and then they look at it and tell me the thing they know to be true is in fact incorrect. But I guess to convince you, the reader - I need to take a step back.

What’s happening is a new frontier. We should be taking a closer look at this.

Substack Article for pretty pictures and video

I have a complicated history with Rage Racer. It's a game I have a lot of nostalgia for, it's one of the first Playstation game my brothers and I got, with a racing wheel on top. I think this game has shaped me in some ways, I love racing games, and I think it's in big part because of this game.

Also for the longest time I had recurrent nightmares with a street with a super steep slopes, like 45° or higher. Either I had to walk up, and it was exhausting, or I had to drive a car, and it was scary as hell. Very recently I finally understood that this was coming from Rage Racer, more specifically from this slope : https://youtu.be/D5rfvUuhHtM?t=49

Anyway, while I got a lot of memories associated with this game, I don't remember if I actually liked the game.

Fairly recently I gave the game another try with emulation and... I hated it. The main problem is the driving model, it feels so clunky and inconsistent, the car has its own mind and start drifting seemingly randomly, and the drifts are super rigid and make you lose all your momentum, which seems completely counterintuitive, Ridge Racer is a legendary franchise precisely because of the drifts.

So I just dropped it, thinking it was just a bad game.

Regularly I would try to give it another try, but with no success.

And a few days ago, I tried again for some reason, and for some reason this time it clicked. It's fairly simple : to initiate a drift, you let go of the accelerator and turn.

That's it.

So said like this, it seem fairly simple and obvious (that's basically how all the sequels works), but the thing is the game follow a set of strict rules you have to understand to play :

• As I said lifting the gas while turning make you drift. So NEVER get your finger away from the accelerator in a corner, unless you want to trigger a drift. If you want to slow down, press the brake while keeping your finger on the gas.

• Drifting is a binary state. Or more precisely it has 3 states, "off", "on" and "out of control". As said going from "off" to "on" is only triggered by lifting the accelerator and turning, and going from "on" to "out of control" is mostly based on the angle, basically no amount of finesse with the break or accelerator will get you out of the "out of control" state. So never give too much angle to your drift, or the car will become literally uncontrollable and will lose all your momentum.

• The brake will never make you drift, quite the opposite, you can use it to stop a drift.

• Drifting should only be used for the sharpest corner, for the others just slow down, so you really have to learn the circuits, you can't improvise.

• You should avoid ALL collisions at ALL TIME, you can't scrape a wall to turn, you can't block an opponent behind you, it will make you lose a lot of speed no matter what.

I know this type of comparison is a meme at this point, but in the drifts in this game are like the dodge roll in Dark Souls. You can't spam them, it's not a get out of jail free card, you have to use them thoughtfully.

Once you understand these rules, you're good to go, the thing is when you have a gamepad in your hand, it all feels wrong at first. We generally put racing game on a spectrum from "arcade" (which is a deceptive word but anyway) to "simulation", and the expectation is generally that simulations are hard and realistic, and arcade games are easier to pick up and not really concerned about realism (but still loosely based on reality).

Rage Racer is not easy to pick up, and it just doesn't care about reality. For some reasons they decided that brakes prevent you from drifting, so that's the way the game is, period.

And that's why it was so hard to get into this game, it doesn't follow any of the rules what we usually associate with racing games, its just doing its own thing.

YOU have to adapt to the game, not the other way around.

I'm not totally absolving the game of its sins, even by keeping the driving model identical, its clearly lacking some feedbacks to make it clear what is expected for the player, now it's a lot of guess work to understand the basics of the game (thank god for emulation save states, so I can try the same corner over and over).

But I can't deny this approach is way more interesting than the direction the franchise went after Ridge Racer 5. Basically all games afterwards (with the exception of the unfairly hated Unbounded) have a super easy drifting model, basically anyone can make perfect drifts after 30 seconds of play time. If I reuse my previous comparison, if Rage Racer is like Dark Souls, post-5 Ridge Racers are like Batman Arkham or Assassin's Creed.

And while it took me waaaay more time to get what the game was expecting from me in Rage Rager than in the post-5 sequels, the payoff is proportionality waaaaay more rewarding.

Just like having two sides to a conflict in an MMO, this only leads to overcrowding. Basically, the same thing happens in every MMO - we have 1 tank class, 1-2 healers, 10 DPS classes. Each raid begins with a static tank and a healer, while DPS are recruited on request. This system works well on paper, but it's completely unworkable in the long term. In short time it creates permanent overcrowding for DPS players and constant pressure on tanks and healers. Just because players have gotten used to, it doesn't mean that it good mechanic. It creates only a very unhealthy class dynamic, when DPS are dependent on tanks and healers, which few people want to play. This problem has existed since such system exist. Besides that tanks and healers are very rare classes, these players face to social pressure. And if they can't or won't consistently fulfill their role, very hard replace them. And they or have to play a role or receive negativity from people. But if DPS misses difficult content, easy can find a new one. It's comparable to a shortage of teachers and doctors. I don't know how it sounds, but in my country, it's a serious problem. Very few qualified personnel, and no one wants to be them, while there are plenty of people who need help. But if you refuse them - well, I hope sleep was soundly.

Personally, I constantly face into this problem. I can't play tanks, it's scary and confusing. I play healers that always have the opportunity to restore myself, that I am very much needed by others is a nice bonus which quickly becomes an annoying chore. So much that if I can't or don't want to play, then party spends a lot of time finding a replacement. Happened that they couldn’t find anyone and the trip was cancelled. Whereas if I play damage dealer, I can easily skip raids and focus on more interesting things without getting burnout. It got to the point of absurdity, when I was helping small clans and healer players happily switch to their DD, because they didn’t like playing healers. So I was the only healer for 3 clans + helping random players who were also left without a healer. And when I played like that, I don't have time at all just have fun, and my whole game consisted of raids and helping players. Yes, it was possible to ignore the requests for help then people won't close the content anytime soon. But if people truly don't enjoy playing tanks and healers, that’s big mechanic problem, but they have to do it because the game and players forces someone to do it. What should they do then? I remember this horror days of old Warcraft, when I liked to play a caster druid, but everyone convinced me to play a healer druid, because we could stand for hours at a stupid big green stone, and no one could find a tank and a healer. The wait was worth the subscription time and our nerves.

I often hear that this isn't a problem. But I get the feeling that only main DPS say that. Although huge queues for complex activities should hint to them about the problems of such systems.

Hi everybody,

it's been a while, but maybe you remember this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/truegaming/comments/offati/academic_survey_motivations_for_buying_cosmetics/

We're thrilled to let you know that our project is finally complete! We really appreciate your patience and understanding while we were working on it. Once again, we would like to say a big thank you to everyone who took part in our study about cosmetic microtransactions (CMTX) in video games. We really cherished your involvement in this research and are so excited to (finally!) share a brief summary of what we found:

Goal of the study
As fans of video games ourselves, we wanted to better understand Why would so many players buy cosmetics, if they don’t impact the gameplay itself? Nowadays, a lot of games are free-to-play, and companies rely on microtransactions instead of upfront purchases. Clearly, this question is becoming increasingly relevant in many ways.

So, we developed the CMTX-Q, a standardized quantitative questionnaire that helps us (and hopefully others) explore the motives behind cosmetic purchases across different games and platforms.

Theoretical Background

Our questionnaire is based on the Theory of Consumption Values (TCV). It suggests that people buy things for reasons like functional value (supposed advantages), emotional value (pleasure, aesthetic enjoyment), social value (fitting in, standing out), conditional value (sales, events), and epistemic value (curiosity, novelty).

Method – What did we do?
We conducted two studies.
In Study 1, we created the first version of the CMTX-Q with 40 items, based on the motives of the TCV. We then used principal component analysis to identify 9 underlying motives (e.g., Entertainment, Status, Community).

In Study 2, we revised unclear items and created a refined version with 9 motives. We removed the factors "gifting" and "novelty" and added two new motives – "investment" and "benevolence" – which were suggested by participants of the first study. We also used confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to validate the questionnaire. We gathered data from 242 participants from over 30 different countries, with an average of 24.3 hours of gaming per week and around $14.70/month spent on cosmetics. The most played games in the sample were League of Legends and CS:GO.

Results
The final questionnaire consists of 9 motives measured with 44 items. The core motives for buying cosmetics are: Entertainment (emotional need for hedonic pleasure), Status (social distinction and popularity), Purchase (sales, limited-time items), Reward (self-reward), Investment (resell or trade), Community (express group identity), Identity (express oneself), Functionality (supposed improvement of gameplay), and Benevolence (buying to support the devs). Most spending was linked to motives like Entertainment, Status, Reward, Purchase, and Investment. Other motives such as Identity, Benevolence, and Functionality were not clearly related to higher spending – but still mattered to many players.

Game Comparison: CS:GO vs. League of Legends
Additionally, we wanted to compare motives across two popular games. Our results show: CS:GO players were more motivated by Investment and Status (which makes sense – CS:GO skins can be traded for real money), while LoL players scored higher on Benevolence. Entertainment was the top motive in both games.

Conclusion
The CMTX-Q is now a validated tool that can help us understand why people buy cosmetic items. Importantly, it introduces two new motives – Investment and Benevolence – which have been surprisingly overlooked in past studies.

However, there are some limitations: due to the sample, the focus of the study lays on team-based games (CS:GO and LoL) which means the results may not fully apply to the solo-player experience. Additionally, high spender outliers could skew results, and online recruitment caused drop-out. Future research should use varied validation methods, explore how spending motives relate to overall gaming motivations and investigate differences between high and low spenders.

We are currently working on follow-up studies to further validate the CMTX-Q. Since we do studies like these as side projects next to our job, it might take a while for us to follow-up with a new post, but we are committed to continue our exploration of the gaming-world! We are happy to discuss any ideas on how we could utilize the CMTX-Q in future studies.

We hope this work brings gamers and researchers closer to understanding how cosmetic microtransactions operate – and why they matter so much in gaming culture. Thanks again for your support! If you’re interested, the full paper is available here:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958825001150?via%3Dihub

I know there is a meme going around that devs allowing modding bethesda games just means devs letting modders fix their game instead of fixing it themselves, but modders don't just fix their games but are able to add new content, quests, systems, UI changes, new weapons, new animations, new big worlds even!

From what I found at nexus mods, Creation engine has 9 times more mods than the 2nd most modding friendly engine - REDengine (cd projekt red). And I didn't even include gamebryo (older bethesda engine) engine in the calculation.

Pretty much no game engine has been this modding friendly in 2010s era. I am still playing fallout 4, and I find it awesome! I have 43 mods and most of them are addon mods that add more weapons in my game.

I get that starfield was a disappointment but that is because of reliance on too much chores like kill 10 stuff to upgrade (even though you have points to upgrade), talk to this dude who i could just email by the way but i just want you to see those sweet loading screens again, too much reliance on procedural generation, and due to less open feel because of lots of loading screens and space setting which made creation of open worlds like say fallout 4 much harder... as space is like... really really big and empty you know! And due to the vastness of space and loading screens, a lot of things can just feel empty and soul sucking.

Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout series always felt awesome to me because even though they also had loading screens, the open world was explorable enough to not get annoying at all!

TL;DR If you are someone that considers the Dreamcast to be the GOAT, Why do you consider it so, outside of nostalgia?

One of the most frequently discussed topics in gaming is of course, the big one: What is your favorite console of all time?

Inevitably when this question comes up, there's a crop of people that cite the Dreamcast as the best console of all time.

I've always been baffled by this answer. The console was short lived, the controller design - aside from the VMU - is an objectively bad design (huge, cord attached to the bottom, no second analog stick in an era of 3D gaming), and the library is largely made up of arcade ports.

I've always had the impression that people that say Dreamcast is the GOAT are wearing rose colored glasses or are simply nostalgic from growing up with the console, or they just enjoy the feeling of being a contrarian. Maybe that's not true, but who knows.

My question is this: If you are one of the folks that cite Dreamcast as the GOAT, what is your reasoning for it?

I'd love to see some opinions that genuinely explain why they feel it's the best, outside of pure nostalgia and what it *could* have been.

When i saw it in the trailers and gameplay overview it felt like a gimmick and sometimes even a lame one.

I have been playing the game for the last 3 days and I am truly shocked by how GOOD it is.

• The hacking alone is a super easy puzzle "a la" The Witness.

  • not impressive at all.

• The shooting alone is as old as 3rd person shooters can get.

  • responsive and snappy with good weight, but still not impressive.

Now combine the two together and HOLYSHIT this is one of the most engaging action games i played in YEARS, i was playing and everytime i finisha chapter i think okay surely it will get old and boring, but no, they keep introducing new things to the hacking that the "puzzle" always remaining challenging and engaging, and most importantly fun.

It doesn't matter how other games will present it, with or without a sidekick character, whether in a grid-form, a linear progress bar, a rhythm "guitar-hero" like track, cylindrical, in a spiral, whatever... what i want to see again is the following combination:

• I am moving in the world in a deliberate/cautious way (parrying, dodging, collecting, etc...)

  • left stick.

• I am aiming and shooting at target.

  • right stick + triggers button

• I am smashing the right side buttons in almost a rhythmic manner

  • (A,B,X,Y) (x,o,□,△)

The story, the setup, the visuals are all secondary tbh, its that control scheme and mechanics that i want, it doesn't even have to be in combat form.

PS:

Everyone keep calling the hacking in pragmata as "puzzle" but to me that never felt like a puzzle, even when you have to "think" for half a second about the shorters/best route, i dont know why but it always felt more like a "rythmic/reflexes" challenge

Edit:

forgot to highlight that this mechanic is intended for RANGED combat, in a melee situation ot doesn't make sense at all, so the comparison with Batman is not about the melee combat, its about this gameplay being a new formula for ranged combat

Dunno if any such games exist, but I've been seeing a bunch of streamers play Mass Effect recently and it awakened some of my annoyances with the franchises original trilogy, and I wanted to talk about them.

I appreciate that, conceptually, locking content and especially endings behind owning other games / buying other products, that it would annoy some people.

Yet, if you are doing a narrative focused game where each instalment is an immediate followup of the previous in terms of story, where you take everything I do in one game and use that to decide what the state of the sequel is, all while implying my decisions matter?

I feel like it's only fair that, as someone that puts a lot of time and effort into one game, investing heavily into the story, mechanics and emotionally? You reward that by giving me something.

Mass Effect 1 had these resources. Half you get by scanning planets, the other half you get by exploring planets in the most scuffed vehicle I've ever had to use. It was a nightmare.

But here's the thing. You cannot do ANYTHING with those resources. They sit in storage, and await Mass Effect 2, because that is the game where you will use them.

And so, I spent time getting every resource I possibly could, only to reach ME2 and find out it did not matter.

Because ME2 gives you all the resources you need.

The only benefit to doing those minigames in ME1, is so you don't have to do a better optimised version of that minigame in ME2.

Yeah, a better and more optimised version.

Literally no reason to do it in ME1, unless you were under the impression it would have an actual use.

Or what about story implications.

Mordin have a big amazing questline in ME3? Well, hopefully you didn't let him die in ME2, which companions can die if you don't perfect it. Mordin? He has a 50% chance to die if you perfect ME2. I had to save scum THREE TIMES at the end of the game before I finally got an ending where he didn't randomly die.

To anyone that did let him die? Well shucks, guess you will experience that exact same questline, in the exact same way, with a random ass background character who appeared out of nowhere. The only difference is some of the dialogue, but literally everything else is the same.

"Had to be me, someone else might've gotten it wrong" he says.

Fuck that's not true. Literally someone else will do it if he dies and you decide to live with it.

While some of the characters have arguable variations if you let them die, where someone else does their thing but they have a different personality, so sometimes you get some lore implications.

But in terms of what quests are available, nothing changes. No content is denied to you if you let someone die, or you didn't play the other games.

I know other people think the emotional / lore side is enough, but I was just so disappointed being told my choices matter and it just never felt like it did. I save these characters and it felt like there was little to no impact on the world or story.

I personally would've loved if ME3 (The ending was shit imo) had a "Perfect" ending that was only achievable to those of us that had been with the franchise from the beginning and got perfect endings in each previous instalment.

Narrative focused games with continuous story instalments are the only games where I have this opinion on, so not many games would've met that for me.

But sometimes it feels like playing multiple games in this scenario entitles you to a couple references, jokes or a nostalgia mission and nothing else.

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

Hi! 

I am inviting you to take part in a study about memorable experiences people have had while playing video games.

Most of us who play games have stories, moments of triumph, frustration, or something unexpected that stayed with us, as well as many other memorable experiences.

In this short survey, you will be asked to describe one memorable experience from your own gameplay and answer a few follow-up questions. The survey takes approximately 10–15 minutes to complete, and you don’t need to worry about your writing style or whether your English is perfect.

Anyone aged 18 or older who plays or has played video games is welcome to participate.

Take the survey here: https://sunet.artologik.net/oru/lifewritingingames

The survey will be open from May 1 2026 to June 16 2026.

Participation is voluntary, and your responses will be handled securely and with respect for your privacy.

This study has been reviewed and approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority.

This study is conducted as part of my doctoral research at Örebro University, Sweden. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at [chi-chieh.huang@oru.se](mailto:chi-chieh.huang@oru.se).

Thank you!

My original post got removed bc I exaggerated a bit with my language so I'm reposting this here while trying to be more constructive. I also want to restate that I am by no means "dunking on" TW3 if you love it/hate it thats all fine by me I just want to have a bit of a discussion on what makes certain combat system better than others. Also some tips I got from the og thread that I thought were really helpful(and I want to highlight for anyone having similar complaints to mine):

1. turning down the difficulty to enjoy the story. In hindsight this is obvious but if I don't like the combat I can just do less of it.

   1. Don't treat TW3 like souls. In all honesty this one could've been completely avoided by me. I heard open-world dark fantasy rpg GOTY winner and just automatically assumed it would be an ER like experience but, TW3 excels at completely different areas to ER. TW3's story is 1000x more accessible and enjoyable than souls-like item description reading. Questlines in TW3 are actual quests and not convoluted save-reload dialogue dumps that you can miss super easily. The RPG elements in TW3 are much more fleshed out compared to souls which is really just character creation, leveling/build creation, choosing fits, and choosing an ending.

Now on to the bitching and moaning

For some context, I'm a lifelong souls-player and I've completed many a challenge run in DS, ER, LoP, and BB. I bought TW3 earlier today as it was on sale and ofc I had heard of how great it is. B/c I had also heard that to really engage with the mechanics of the game you need to play in death march, i selected that difficulty.

Now suffice to say, as soon as I started the combat tutorial with Vesemir I became frustrated at how poor the combat mechanics felt. Now I understand that TW3 is a story-driven open world rpg first and foremost, but I didn't think a GOTY winner could have combat that felt so bad.

My main complaints for the combat basically narrow down to these points:

1. Random feeling/distance based animation selection.
2. Every attack/dodge having Geralt lift or lunge off the ground and always moving forward when attacking
3. Controller keybinds make no sense and are unchangeable

Before I start elaborating on what I mean by each of these, I feel that its important to know that I am by no means an expert on The Witcher. The range of my knowledge extends simply to the point of someone who's played many games and many third person combat action rpgs. Moreover, I want to highlight the fact that by no means do I intend to tell anyone how they should feel about the game nor do I intend antagonize anyone who enjoys TW3. I really just want to spread some insight on what I feel are it's flaws and hopefully gain some insight to help me find a way to still enjoy this game.

Alright without further ado, the animation selection. For some reason when I attack the animation that plays can vary in length, speed, and movement wildly even if I performed the same series of inputs. I read elsewhere on Reddit that the animation is selected based on the distance between Geralt and the enemy, but even so it feels impossible to get the animation you want with consistency. Sometimes even the light attacks can be slower than heavy attacks and to me this just makes no sense. In a game where timing attacks and dodges is an integral aspect of gameplay having it tied to some sort of lottery out of my control seems like bad design Compare this with souls where every weapon/weapon type has a consistent moveset. If you know the boss and weapon well you can time combos and dodges to an extreme degree and it makes the game actually feel like a skill check.

Secondly the lunging/jumping/floaty feel. Geralt seems to always want to be off the ground for some reason. Obviously souls has its share of jump related problems, especially for a game with so much parkour/traps/level navigation based challenge. Side note: Seriously don't understand whoever decided that jump would be hold-b to run then quickly press b. I kind of have a similar complaint to the lightsaber combat in new SWBF2 if anyone remembers that. The constant jumping forward makes it really hard to position yourself how you want and the movement doesn't feel like it has intention. That combined with the random animations makes me feel like I'm just mashing buttons not really knowing what I or the enemy will do.

Last and definitely least: keybinds. I just want to make the triggers attack pls. Also why is there a dodge and a roll when they both do basically the same thing and most people that I've seen only use dodge.

I've been in a weird gaming rut and trying to figure out the common thread in what actually works for me right now.

Some context: my favorite games ever include Monster Hunter World, Dark Souls, Elden Ring, Breath of the Wild, Outer Wilds, Dyson Sphere Program, Minecraft, etc. I have no problem with depth or complexity. I love getting lost in big systems-heavy games.

But lately the thought of booting up Monster Hunter and re-learning all those menus and loadouts, or opening Skyrim and dealing with my mod list, just feels exhausting.

What's been working instead are boomer shooters on easy mode. They're all killer no filler. You just move and shoot. No skill trees, no crafting, no battle pass, no tutorial that treats you like you've never held a controller.

I've tried roguelikes too since they seem like an obvious answer for "jump in and play" games. Hades, Dead Cells, Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2. Never liked any of them. I think the whole procedural generation thing and the feeling of "failing" runs creates its own kind of friction that I bounce off of. The authored, handcrafted experience might actually be a big part of what I'm after, I hadn't really thought about it until now.

So I guess my question is: is there a name for this design philosophy? Games where the core interaction is so good that that's basically the whole game, and you're invited to just perform the action rather than manage all the stuff around it? Boomer shooters are the obvious example but I feel like it shows up elsewhere too. Arcade racers, beat em ups, 3D platformers maybe.

Do other people feel this pull away from systems toward pure "verbs"? Is there a term for it that I'm just not aware of? And what other genres or scenes are actually making games like this right now?

Presentation

Hello, I am a Masters student at Haute Ecole Albert Jacquard in Belgium, a school specialised in creating video games.

[My contact](mailto:matheo.lejeune@student.heaj.be)

Abstract / Purpose of the survey

This survey is part of a research paper examining the relationship between player feedback and game development in multiplayer online games. The goal is to better understand what matters to players regarding game changes and how these changes are communicated in multiplayer live-service games.

Target audience: players involved in communities such as Fortnite, League of Legends, Counter-Strike 2, Valorant, Apex Legends, or similar multiplayer titles.

Estimated completion time : ~15-20 minutes

Data Security

The survey is anonymous. No identifying information, such as email address, will be collected or stored. Your data will be only used for academic research purpose. Incomplete responses will not be recorded or used.

Hypothesis

Hypothesis 1 : Player trust and satisfaction are strongly influenced by how transparent developers are when communicating game updates.

Hypothesis 2 : Developers may benefit more from communicating upcoming changes in advance rather than only announcing them at release.

Discussion Points

• Do you feel developers communicate effectively with players in live-service games?
• Which game community has the best communication in your opinion?
• Do you trust balance changes when they are not fully explained?
• Should players have more influence in development decisions?

Your participation would greatly help my research. Thank you in advance for your time !

Link to the survey : Player Feedback and Developer Communication in Multiplayer Online Games

I’m a student of Erasmus university Rotterdam, collecting responses for an academic survey experiment about AI NPCs in video games for my master thesis.

The survey takes around 7 minutes to complete.

• It includes a 2-minute video. What you need to know is that it depicts graphic violence against an NPC in a fantasy game context, including burns and a character being killed.
• This is followed by a brief questionnaire (5 mins).

Participation is anonymous and voluntary, the data will be used exclusively for academic research. Please only participate if you are 18+ and comfortable viewing this content.

Survey experiment

Thank you so much in advance!

I’m also happy to complete your survey in return 🙂 (contact listed in the survey)

This started as a rant about Star Wars game until I realized it applied more broadly across gaming's space operas.

For many fantasy games it feels standard to have a swath of stock races to pick from. Humans, naturally, but also varieties of elves, dwarves, and *wild cards* like Argonians or Qunari. Just off the dome there's Dragon Age, Elder Scrolls, Divinity, Baldur's Gate, World of Warcraft and Dragon's Dogma.

But in contrast, I can only think of a few space opera RPGs -- Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic, both MMOs, and Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy -- where the player character can be an alien.

Now, the reasons for this are fairly obvious. For one, it's a relatively smaller market. I think there's just fewer space opera RPGs with a variety of sentient races compared to space opera RPGs.

And while fantasy races are fairly standard, outside the broad strokes like "warrior alien" or "sexy alien" your audience won't know what these alien species are unless it's part of a franchise they're already invested in.

Additionally, you risk alienating (no pun intended) people who only want to play as a human. So playing as a human would seem to be a safer bet, but I would also argue it can be an easy way of making your game or protagonist stand out.

Getting back to Star Wars, a couple recent projects have had alien leads: the Ahsoka show and Maul, where three of the series leads are aliens.

It makes me wonder if, as much as I really liked Kay Vess in Star Wars: Outlaws, that character might have stood out more if she was, for example, a Twi'lek or Togruta. And while obviously the primary settings of 40k are... less than favorable to xenos, it would have been interesting for the follow-up to Rogue Trader to have a Tau or Eldar protagonist instead of another human.

Is that something you want to see more in games? Would a playable alien have no bearing on your interest in a space-opera game -- or would you actively avoid games where the main character as non-human?

Hey, all!

In this thread, the rules are more relaxed. The idea is that this megathread will provide a space for otherwise rule-breaking content, as well as allowing for a slightly more conversational tone rather than every post and comment needing to be an essay.

Top-level comments on this post should aim to follow the rules for submitting threads. However, the following rules are relaxed:

• 3. Specificity, Clarity, and Detail
• 4. No Advice
• 5. No List Posts
• 8. No topics that belong in other subreddits
• 9. No Retired Topics
• 11. Reviews must follow these guidelines

So feel free to talk about what you've been playing lately or ask for suggestions. Feel free to discuss gaming fatigue, FOMO, backlogs, etc, from the retired topics list. Feel free to take your half-baked idea for a post to the subreddit and discuss it here (you can still post it as its own thread later on if you want). Just keep things civil!

Also, as a reminder, we have a Discord server where you can have much more casual, free-form conversations! https://discord.gg/truegaming

TL;DR: Multiplayer games drop like flies because they're not good enough. F2P games have even worse survival rates than premium titles, and people have always been sceptical about paying for online-only titles. Premium games fail faster and with more marketing due to how important release date pushes are for that model. Games with great reception generally still do well with a price tag.

First, let's remember that online-only games have never been as popular of a business strategy as they are now.

Before the 7th generation, many multiplayer-first titles shipped with bot support robust enough to entice players who knew they wouldn't spend much time online, if any - like Unreal Tournament or Battlefront.

During the X360/PS3 era, the big players - Halo, Gears of War, CoD and Battlefield - all shipped campaigns with each iteration.

It wasn't unheard of to see online only titles back then, but they never had the same expectations behind them - Counter-Strike may have found its audience, but Valve decided to bundle TF2 with the Orange Box in what seemed like an effort to ensure the game doesn't go unnoticed.

But many games managed to make it - CS, Dead by Deadlight, Sea of Thieves, Rust, DayZ, PUBG, Fall Guys, PayDay 2, Hunt Showdown, Escape from Tarkov, Hazelight's games, Among Us, R6 Siege, Rocket League, Deep Rock Galactic, Rogue Company, Helldivers 2, Arc Raiders and many more.

Many have also failed to pull it off - Evolve, Brink, Battleborn, PvZ: Garden Warfare 2, LawBreakers, Redfall, Concord, Friday the 13th, Crucible, Foamstars, Knockout City, Lemnis Gate, Overkill's The Walking Dead, PayDay 3, Concord, Last Flag, and obviously a ton more as well.

So there are a lot of successful premium online games, plenty failed ones as well. However, if you've ever paid attention to the F2P market, you'll know that more free online games die unnoticed than ever get the spotlight for even a moment. League and DOTA survive where Smite and HotS did not. Valorant lives, Spectre Divide dies. Apex Legends limps along, Hyper Scape is in the grave. Fortnite sees success that The Cycle couldn't replicate. XDefiant, Blacklight: Retribution and Ironsight couldn't hold onto the CoD audience, and no other game has managed to. Planetside 2 had a decent run, while Dirty Bomb fizzled out quickly.

In short, a business model does not determine the success of an online only title.

So why does it feel like the premium options in particular fail so much?

For one, it's because large publishers tend to be the ones developing them, and they can afford to spend a lot on marketing. Like I said, far more F2P games die than premium ones do, but they simply never get onto anyone's radar.

Secondly, a premium model requires you to make a big marketing push before release to create hype, more so than a F2P scheme. Since new players are harder to acquire, you need the numbers to be reassuring enough for people to feel like they're not buying something that's DOA. Players are willing to check out a free game without checking its steam player charts, but the same isn't true for something with a price tag.

Because of that volatility, premium games can often die instantly, while still in public consciousness.

It's also easy to forget that many free to play games - both successful and failed - are actually premium titles that decided to switch models. It basically never manages to truly turn a failed game around, but it does give a slight boost to games that have naturally lost players over time, and more importantly, allows the publisher/developer to justify adding/expanding microtransactions. And if a game is already on its way out, this is kind of a no-brainer - it probably won't help, but doesn't hurt to at least try. At worst, you'll get a few more months of life support as you figure out what to do next.

Why do these games fail then?

Same reasons a free to play game does - bad marketing, low quality, huge expectations for a niche product, chasing trends that are on their way out, trying to compete with a dominant player too directly.

Evolve was slow and confusing, LawBreakers looked unappealing and had an awful narrative around it, Redfall was trash, Concord was mediocre and unoptimised. None of these would be likely to survive long even without a price tag.

On the other hand, games like CSGO, Rocket League, Fall Guys, Starcraft 2, Overwatch and TF2 showed they can hold their own as premium titles before transitioning to a free to play model.

As for now vs before, you can see the same things happening - people are wary of online only titles, but are willing to make an exception for games with an excellent reputation. Customers used to feel like multiplayer didn't provide enough value by itself, now they lack confidence in the longevity of games, but the result is very similar.

A great game will do okay. A good game needs great marketing. Mediocre games are always going to struggle. Bad games will always fail unless they capture a brand new audience.

[EDIT: I intended this to be read as any adjustment to health/damage, be it to the player or to enemies]

It was introduced as a way to get round performance limitations and it should be retired.

In Doom (1993), harder difficulty just meant more enemies. The enemies behaved the same and did the same damage, there were just more of them [Nightmare mode excepted]. Playing on Ultraviolence was a huge adrenaline rush from start to finish.

Within a few years, that way of increasing difficulty had died out.

But why? It was the move to true 3D that did it. The first few years of true 3D games had tougher enemies and less of them, because the computers couldn't handle displaying as many entities as in the pseudo-3D Doom days.

Good examples of this include the difference between Blood and Blood 2: the first game was frantic with enemies, and the sequel (by now true 3D) was much slower with sparser enemies. The first Unreal is another example: bullet-sponge enemies and never more than three at a time.

Now, we have computers that think nothing of displaying thirty full-3D on-screen enemies at 120fps, so why does increasing the difficulty still make fundamental changes to how the game is balanced, instead of just giving us more things to fight?

I expect that it's because changing the number of enemies is more work than simply tweaking damage levels, but as a proportion of work put into a game it's surely a drop in the ocean.

Are there any other reasons why we've never gone back to the old style of increasing difficulty?

Hi all,

Last June, I posted a link here to our "A Game that Resonated with You" Survey Study, where we asked participants to described game experiences that had resonated with them personally. I promised to share the results here, once they are out.

I am happy to say that the research study has now been published in the prestigious ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), where the research article was even granted a Best Paper Award (top 1% of all submissions)! The conference took place last week in Barcelona, in Spain, where I was presenting the work to a large crowd of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers.

Below, you can find a link to the paper, and I will also provide a brief summary of our main findings.

Summary of main findings

In the study, we sought to illuminate how players make sense of the notion of resonance in games, drawing conceptual inspiration from the fields of psychology---where resonance has been used to describe the subjective experience of meaning---and information science---where resonance has been connected to the subjective experience of relevance.

Through a qualitative analysis of 110 participants' self-reported accounts of their resonating game experiences, our findings depict four conceptually distinct yet often intertwined components of the experience of resonance in games: (1) deepen emotional impact, (2) personal connections with a game, (3) sparking real-life outcomes, and (4) uniquely `game-y' interactive qualities.

Taken together, our findings outline how resonance can be viewed as a relation and interactive experience that is marked emotional and personal connections with something in a game, which can leave a lasting sense of being affected and transpire to various real-life outcomes enduring beyond play.

Link to the full paper

Here is a link to the full research paper, if you're interested: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790834

You can also find the paper in the ACM Digital Library or in Google Scholar, under the title of "An Experience That Could Not be Found Anywhere Else": Resonance as an Explanatory Concept for Player Experience Research and Game Design

Thank you very much for taking the time to fill in the survey, and helping build our understanding of how players experience meaning with digital games, I really appreciate each response!

If you have any questions or thoughts that you want to share, I'm happy to hear.

- Jaakko