About a year ago, I decided to lose some weight with the Rock Band Exercise program. In short, Rock Band on Expert Drums will totally and completely kick your ass. Along the way to losing about 40 pounds, I gold starred 400 songs. Yay, me.
Well, most of those pounds found their way back on me, and I have some time to kill while I seek out funding and/or jobs, so I’ve been picking the drums back up. I decided a good place to start would be to re-gold star the songs I’d gold-starred in the past (gold-star is above ‘5-stars’ and means ‘near perfect’ on most songs). So far my hit rate is… not good. About 40% of the songs, I’m able to gold star again. The other 40% will take me getting back into fighting shape. Some percentage of that, I have no idea how I beat it the first time through.
But there’s some joy in there as well: the Stephen Seagal moment that Bad Romance gave me. Yes, for a long while, Lady Gaga’s best song was my great white whale. It had one tricky drum part that made it trivial to 5-star, but almost impossible to defeat. It was on my list of songs to beat for some 5-6 months, as I kept getting closer and closer to the desired score, but not hitting it. Beating it was difficult, grueling, and rewarding in a bloody and bruised sort of way, like the ending to The Karate Kid.
Well, now, well out of practice, I just obliterated it. Played it once, it clicked, then followed up immediately and decimated it. No Ralph Macchio here, this was more like Stephen Seagal in Under Siege 2. (Spoilers!) The movie goes to great lengths to convince you that a major fight is coming up and, when it finally happens, Stephen Seagal finishes what he started in about 10 seconds. It was an ultimate display of mastery. It was a brutal beatdown. And it perfectly describes the feeling that was just crushing Lady Gaga’s gauntlet.
The Stephen Seagal moment is often used in games as a way to display progress. RPGs do it all the time clumsily, by sending you back to areas you have levelled past, just to demonstrate your growth to yourself and the world. So do games like God of War – a Minotaur Boss may be a grueling fight at the end of act 1, but once you’ve unlocked some more health and attacks, the game has no qualms about throwing them in multiples, or as part of larger waves. It truly gives a great sense of your own personal growth.
But even that is somewhat artificial, hand-crafted by the designer. In skill-based games like Rock Band or Mortal Kombat, such moments are even more magical. Because you, as the player, have to earn them.
So screw you, Lady Gaga, you’re my white whale no more. Your Bad Romance is in my rear view mirror, and that feels pretty good.
However, I simply cannot at this time see a reality where I figure out how I ever beat Duran Duran again.
Congratulations on your returning prowess 🙂
And there was me thinking that games sent you back through areas to pad out the playtime and conserve art assets 😉
I always liked the personal skill involved in racing games such as Gran Tourismo (what do you mean I have to get a license before you let me on the track !?) and some of the fighting games. My musical ability is zero so I never went near the Rock Hero style of games, being laughed out of the room by an 8 year old when I tried to play Parappa the Rapper was bad enough.
It’s always surprised me that more mini-games that rely on co-ordination haven’t found their way into MMOs (maybe they have and I just haven’t come across them). The best example I can think of would be ‘GTA 3: San Andreas’ and the inclusion of several rhythm style mini-games. I’m not sure clicking a set rotation counts, but a trial that uses class specific abilities and asks you to mirror them would be close.
MMOs aren’t a great place for precision-required minigames mainly because of lag issues, I would think. For games in which the entire challenge is precise maintained rhythm, inconsistent response time would be a deal breaker.
I can understand that being a factor for the older design methodology behind MMOs and other online games, after all once upon a time we could only use slow dial up.
Now there is relatively easy access to fibre connection and scalable cloud server tech.
Reaction time gameplay is already in the game in the form of counters to opponents channelled abilities. Many boss fight mechanics require specific timings to telegraphed abilities.
In PvP it is also there with the use of stuns and breaks, and your lag issues are more obvious if players have less than capable connections or the server is under strain.
But, I’m not talking about having the rhythm game as the core underlying mechanic but rather an additional mechanic in the existing arsenal of quests that can be delivered.
While not being as familiar with netcode as I would like I am aware of Lag buffers or possibly allowing the client to run time sensitive sections.
While Lag may be one consideration, I think it’s more likely that quest progression is higher in priority.
A quest that asks a player to attain a certain level of co-ordination and physical skill with the game or not progress is probably not a great idea if you want the greater part of your player base to make it through to endgame.
While not an MMO I know my experience progressing through ‘GTA: San Andreas’ was frustrating when faced with the racing missions that unlocked the next island.
One possible solution would be to use those sort of mechanics to side quests not required for progression.
Or, to introduce several levels of success (I see many of the app style games use a 3 star system for completion), this also acts as an incentive to go back to quests and replay them to get that higher success level.
One can see how important such ‘false’ Seagal moments are while playing Oblivion and it’s metagame of everything becoming harder and harder the higher your level. And how players complained about the level scaling there.
Than again the Elder Scroll games are hilariously funny in how ‘easy’ it can be ‘breaking’ them by certain actions and it really makes me wonder if that’s part of their planned design or really just oversights.
If it’s ‘easy’ to ‘break’ a game then I’d say that’s very poor design or an oversight.
The latest incarnation on the Elder Scrolls franchise Skyrim (no not the online thing) is a case in point.
A visual treat but the focus on sandbox destroys narrative flow and any ability of the designers to put effective challenges in the path of the player. The scaling of the opponents and an inherent level cap on the opposition (about level 50 if I recall, while players could manage to reach level 81 in the original game, pretty much unlimited with the Dragonborn expansion where legendary skills were introduced) means that it is a struggle to keep the game challenging. I find it more of a toy, where I have to come up with my own challenges (yes I know that’s pretty much the working definition of sandbox) rather than a game that asks me to beat it.
Don’t get me wrong I love Skyrim (and Morrowwind, to a much lesser degree Oblivion), when I want to walk around in an immersive fantasy game and pick flowers it’s my go to game.
Oh the level system and scaling wasn’t even what i meant in that case. I thought of the whole spell/potion/enchantment creation with the added in smithing now. And it’s hard to believe that no one of them recognized beforehand what a 100% Chameleon would mean. Or found out about some of those other ways…
I mean sure it might have been a “Okay it’s a special case, which we only found now and we’ve only got a few days left to release”, but having seen such things persisting from Morrorwind onward simply makes me wonder – especially as it’s a sandbox game as you wrote.
Yeah, best not to get me started on crafting in Skyrim I could go on for hours 😉
Enchantment was about the only skill tree worth taking to the end for the ‘two enchants’ per item (pretty much all the other skill trees while nice in theory were bottom heavy or full of perks that were rendered pointless). Coupled with the ability to put 25% mana reduction on 4 items and you could get a set of gear that allowed for free casting (Destruction and Restoration being my favourite combination).
A hard cap on armour rating meant a set of light armour could give the same protection as heavy yet weigh so much less, it was easier to walk around with half a dozen sets of light armour with various combinations of enchantments on them to match every situation. There was no real reason not to considering you could pause mid combat to do a full outfit change. Well, maybe the awful inventory system was an active disincentive (but you could get around that if you took the time to name your enchanted items in a logical manner).
And I’m not sure you can really call those exploits as such as they were part of the system design.
An exploit would be using the ‘trade,quick save, attack vendor, quick load’ to auto refresh the vendors.
Did I mention I really liked Skyrim and spent around 600 hours in game… mostly picking flowers 😉
The normal enchants were already quite good but you could go into a loop with fortify restoration potions, an item with fortify alchemy enchant and fortify enchanting potions which lead to crazily overpoewerd enchantments. And as far as i remember something around that lines was already possible in Morrorwind.
I like the series quite a bit, while still becoming mad for some individual points – i mean even Oblivions level scaling didn’t hinder me to play it quite a while.
Ah I see this chain of response has stepped down to its minimum :/
I’m aware of the cycle of alchemy/enchant buffs, they have diminishing returns, and it was fun to do once but I’ve never pushed it beyond one loop.
I feel Skyrim was a missed opportunity, and reinforces the power of graphics over gameplay.
That said, there are a few high points in the game that I’d be reluctant to discuss because of spoilers 😉
Ah so if I reply to my own post and not to the responders there is no indent and it remains in chronological order. Good to know 🙂
Or does every one already know that and I’m just late to the party? 😉
Now you have to pick up The Pinball Arcade, on whatever platform you prefer, get Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and hit 4 billion or more on that table. 🙂