By John Walker on September 10th, 2009 at 11:11 am.
There was a comment made by comedian Adam Carolla, many years ago, during an episode of the American late-night radio programme Loveline. He had been given an Xbox 360, because celebrities get given stuff like that, and decided he’d buy a game for it. One which involved fighting in the Second World War in some capacity. It interested him as a fan of History Channel documentaries on the subject, and he liked the idea of recreating classic battles. But when he tried to play he couldn’t get out of the opening area.
This isn’t a comment on gaming inaccessibility, or how cackhanded Carolla must be, but rather it’s about something he said after this. He said, “Where’s the button that lets me just skip to the next level?”
This thought has stuck with me for ages. It’s a thought that comes back to me every time I encounter a section of a game that’s extremely difficult. Especially when it’s a stupid stinking boss fight. With the recent announcement of all three Metroid Prime games getting remade for the Wii it reminded me that I’ve finished neither of the first two because I couldn’t get past bosses. In the first one it’s the final fight, but worse, so much worse, in the second it was a fight midway through the game. (Everyone I’ve asked about it says, “Yeah, you need to use a guide to get past that, and then be very lucky.”)
Which leads me to think: why isn’t there that button?
Clearly there have been cheat codes for as long as there have been games, and very often there’s a level skip in there. But these are fewer and farther between these days, games very often offering no such ability. Which is another interesting angle on this all. What changed where developers decided their games should be exclusively for those capable of beating them?
So let’s say you’re playing a vast RPG. It’s forty, fifty hours long, and you’re absolutely loving it. You’re halfway through, you completely adore your character and companions, and then you reach a sequence you can’t get past. You go off and do some side quests, try to level up a bit, and return to find it equally impossible. Perhaps you specced your character poorly. Perhaps the game’s difficulty is screwed up. Perhaps you’re just not good enough at the game to successfully complete this section of it. Whatever the reason, whoever’s fault, I’m not convinced it makes a difference. Right now, across all gaming, that’s you done. Game over, move on.
Which strikes me as madness.
My primary purpose for writing this is to hear the counter-arguments. I’m certain there are positions to ridicule what I’m saying, or people who would state that this exclusivity is important. I can’t see that this is the case. If I’m not good enough/levelled up correctly/meeting some really poor design, why should that mean I don’t get to see what’s on the other side of it? Why can’t I press the button that skips it, moves me on to the next bit?
You could argue that it’s cheating. Well yes, clearly it is. So it was when I put on God mode in that bit of Doom II I couldn’t do. Or when I used the level skip commands I’d found for whichever platformer. Sure it’s cheating. It’s cheating your way to having more fun.
You might say that it would ruin the game – that once you knew you could skip ahead, you’d lazily do it before you were genuinely stuck. I think there’s a wealth of truth to that. I know for sure that if I’m playing an adventure game and get totally stuck, once I’ve looked up that first hint I’m going to be tempted to return to the guide far too quickly. It’s a real discipline not to. (An aside: this reminds me of how I’d get past bits I was stuck on playing adventure games in the early 90s. My dad’s friend Ted. Somehow he’d always played all adventure games and finished them before I got them, and I’d nervously phone this smart, sensible man I’d only met a couple of times, and squeak my question to him. He’d give me splendidly cryptic clues to push me in the right direction. It’s far easier to resist phoning your dad’s slightly scary friend Ted than looking at GameFAQs.)
But you know what? So what? So what if it means someone could cheat their way through the game to the end, possibly losing out on a lot of the fun on the way? They paid for the game! It’s theirs! If you buy a murder mystery film on DVD and immediately fast forward to the end to find out who did it, you’re an idiot, but it’s in your right to be!
People seem to get very cross at the idea that someone else is taking a shortcut when they worked extremely hard to walk the long way around. I think instead this should be converted to pride. Rather than being cross with the other guy, be pleased with yourself. From your perspective they lost out.
So what’s the good reason why there shouldn’t be a button to skip to the next level/next area/other side of the boss fight?
Perhaps it’s something to do with loot/XP in my RPG example. When you kill the Terrible Giant he drops an amazing sword. If you press the SKIP button (which will be on all keyboards), you’d have to get that amazing sword automatically. But again, that’s fine! No, it wasn’t earned. But to hell with that – it’s important for enjoying the game, and it’s a damn sight better to have a sword you didn’t earn than turn the game off and never play it again because the bastard giant kept killing you no matter what you did!
So let’s have that button. What harm would it do? Let people enjoy a game some more?
10/09/2009 at 11:15 Dominic White says:
Arcade games got this right many, many years ago. You can continue as many times as you like, which’ll let even the most inept player get past the toughest boss. It’ll just cost you YOUR ENTIRE SCORE.
It’s a very simple mechanism. Bring back visible scoring systems, and let people trade all their glory for progress if they just want to get to the end.
10/09/2009 at 11:19 TotalBiscuit says:
There is a strong argument in favour of allowing players of single-player games to do what they want, since their cheating is not affecting anyone else. There is however a counter argument that suggests a dumbing down of gaming could hurt the advancement of the medium as a whole. “Lets make games easier because easier games sell more” is a nasty precedent to set.
I think we can make a solid conclusion however, in that people who call Loveline are idiots.
10/09/2009 at 11:20 Rinox says:
Didn’t the new Alone in the Dark allow you to skip levels? I recall it was pretty generally smirked upon by reviewers too…
10/09/2009 at 11:20 Tei says:
Is simple. Having such button, is like having a “who is the killer” line in a mystery novel. It will totally spoil the reader/player.
You can’t have mistery withouth.. hee.. mistery. Competition needs Challenge.
If you want a no-competitive videogame, you sould buy a sandbox simulator like Garrys Mod, or a sandbox RPG like Morrowind, most FPS’s are competitive and designed to have a challenge.
Still.. is … somewhat… possible… do add a tiny bit of “skip this level” interaction. World of Gog did it OK. But I don’t think it may work for other games. It worked for WoG, because every level gameplay is “experimental” and the game is cheap.
10/09/2009 at 11:21 Mike says:
This kind of links back to something I wrote a few months back about doing it the first time, because there’s a big difference between dull repetition of a task and actual challenge. Challenges are best when they’re being completed, not when they’re a wall you’re trying to knock with using your face as a hammer.
I reference Mirror’s Edge in the post because I think it does it extremely well, and by doing it well you get the pleasure of moving forwards. Skipping a level does have the issue that it never quite feels satisfying, I think. It’s not as good as just being capable of doing it.
But it highlights a problem that games have, which is that challenge is a very subjective idea.
10/09/2009 at 11:23 drewski says:
But surely if games become too dumbed down to sell more, I can simply not buy them?
It’s hard to find a balance between the two points of view but, in general, I think games are hard enough to finish already, so anything that makes bits that can be easily missable, missable, can’t be a bad thing.
10/09/2009 at 11:23 Bananaphone says:
@Dominic White
The equivalent now is losing achievements, cheat and you don’t get the points.
10/09/2009 at 11:27 CMaster says:
IN a game fiction sense, the ability to skip sections doesn’t make a lot of sense. If at the end the people are cheering you for defeating the big bad and saving the world, it doesn’t make much sense when you didn’t actually do that. When all the big tasks that noone else could do, you didn’t actually do either. (obviously, this exact situation doesn’t fit all games, but you can transform it for most).
Then you have the issue that if players start skipping big chunks of content, they’ll get to the end really quickly and feel dissapointed in the game. Despite the developer’s intention (and possible sucess) to improve player experience, the player feels they got a short and unsatisfying experience.
The final one is technical. What happens when you hit the skip button? HOw does the game know just what you want to skip? How far does it go forward? Does it just fade to black and fade back in at the next level/other side of the monster/whatever or does it in fact involve the computer taking direct control of the game and doing it for you in front of your very eyes (solves my first objection in some ways). Because then we literally have an “I win” button.
It’s an interesting idea, not sure that I like it. But anyway, there are some counterarguments for you.
10/09/2009 at 11:28 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
Alone in the Dark (the new one) has it and it is quite useful… I, for one, WOULD really love this feature as I haven’t finished way too many games, because I got frustrated and/or bored.
BTW: That Jim’s Google Chat status scares me…make what?!
10/09/2009 at 11:29 Pavel says:
I am now playing Tomb Raider Underworld.
I use youtube walkthrough about 3 times every level.I am just too lazy to run around the environment and search for that one piece of stone I have to move or cliff I have to climb.I play it for the nice environments, but the gameplay itself sucks for me.
On the other hand, I finished all Fallout games, Witcher, Vampire Bloodlines, Deus Ex..etc etc without ever needing or using walkthrough.
10/09/2009 at 11:29 Radiant says:
Why isn’t there a skip button on Gradius or Ikaruga?
It’s called progression; have we become that lazy?
10/09/2009 at 11:30 Yargh says:
Have it a feature of the easy mode of the game, too many games no longer have difficulty levels and this feature certainly belongs in Easy/Wimp/Noob mode.
With that in mind I’m all for it in single player games, the simple fact that you ‘own’ the game means you should be able to play it however you want.
10/09/2009 at 11:30 Dubbill says:
I’m always cheating my way past anything that irritates or frustrates me. I rationalise it the same way as John – I want to get to the fun bits. Recently I’ve been giving myself extra ammo in System Shock 2 in order to get past an endless stream of respawns. I’m sure purists will be outraged but for me the fun comes from exploration and advancing the story, not battling Cybernannies over and over.
Maybe it’s a messaging issue. Let’s rebrand them as “Progress Codes” and avoid the stigma attached to cheating.
10/09/2009 at 11:32 Agrajag says:
Fair point, there’s plenty games I’ve stop playing after getting to such points. Tried reading the guides and said “oh come one” and went playing different games.
Skip.
World of goo has it, it appears only after you fail 3 times or so. It’s not infinite, but it lets you enjoy the game. Even the stage shop in Aaaaaaaaaaaa(…)h! is a wonderful example oh how it can be performed differently.
10/09/2009 at 11:32 Turin Turambar says:
idclevxx !!
But apart from that, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to cheat to pass from level 1 to level 2. If you were stuck in level 1, chances are you will be stuck again in level 2, 3, 4, etc.
And you still can “cheat your way to having more fun.” That’s modding. Tweak the game for yourself to have more fun. From console commands to real mods to modify a .ini. Yay pc gaming!
I know i have tweaked the AI in Arma 2 to have more fun ;)
10/09/2009 at 11:35 Yghrt says:
I admit I don’t get the whole article. Many games have consoles which let you do whatever you want, and the games without consoles have cheat codes to let you skip whatever part you dislike.
The system as it is seems fine to me. Make cheating easier than it is, and you’ll end up with people who cheat themselves and then feel cheated, because they finished that game which was supposed to last ten hours in about three hours.
10/09/2009 at 11:37 David says:
Contender for gaming quote of 2009: “It’s far easier to resist phoning your dad’s slightly scary friend Ted than looking at GameFAQs.”
10/09/2009 at 11:40 God Mode says:
All games should have god mode as a feature. Problem solved.
10/09/2009 at 11:40 Phlebas says:
Over the last few years I’ve played quite a number of adventure games over the last few years that seem to have been produced expressly to be played with walkthrough in hand – I’m not talking about difficult puzzles, I’m talking about impossible ones. Riddles rendered insoluble by poor translation, object puzzles with no pointer at all to the correct solution – but the line from most of the adventure community is that it doesn’t matter because the story’s what’s important and you can always use a walkthrough if you get stuck.
Which is to say there’s a whole pile of games out there that weren’t designed to be played at all. And a generation of gamers who don’t know any better. If the game is designed to be cheatable in the first instance, there’s less pressure on the designer to make it playable. And the player learns to have less faith that the game can be beaten ‘properly’, so is less likely to bother. It would be a shame for more genres to follow that line.
10/09/2009 at 11:43 Kitt Basch says:
I agree with the overall sentiment, stopping players from progressing doesn’t help anyone, but having an almighty skip button seems like putting a plaster on a bloody nose.
Developers just need to work on difficulty balance and giving enough hints for players to help them figure things out for themselves.
I’m thinking of Pure, where the AI is so brilliantly balanced, it always provides a challenge, but never feels unfair.
10/09/2009 at 11:43 jalf says:
The last Alone in the Dark allowed this, and once I’d gotten over my initial reaction, I thought it was a great idea. It makes sense.
If I, the customer, the one the game is supposed to entertain, would rather start from level 3, why shouldn’t I? If I lost my savegame, and don’t want to start over, why can’t I just pick the level I’d got to? If I’m unable to get past a boss fight, why can’t I skip it?
I think it makes good sense. And depending on how it is presented, I don’t think it would ruin the game. In AiTD, it was simply presented as a scene selection at the main menu. So you had to quit the current game and go out to the main menu if you wanted to skip ahead. I think it’d have been too tempting if it had just been a little “press X to skip this fight” message while playing. But something outside the actual game, in the main menu is fine with me.
Of course, AiTD also provided summaries so if you skipped to a later bit, you’d get a quick resume of everything that’d happened so far.
Of course, this only really makes sense in singleplayer games, or when you might play the game for the story.
And I think it’s important to think the feature through, because there are some obvious pitfalls:
It mustn’t be too easy to use, it should require a conscious decision, and probably not be something you can do in-game in realtime, since that becomes too tempting.
The player shouldn’t miss out on important story developments. If you skip an important event, the game should at least tell you about it so you’re not completely lost.
Well, it’s their decision. If you’re interested in the full experience, you are not going to skip big chunks of content. And if youdo, you can always start over and play the full thing. But is this any worse than players getting stuck and giving up on the game because they’re unable to skip the bit that’s annoying them?
As for your “game fiction” argument, that’s nonsense. Plenty of games start you out as having *already* done a bunch of heroic things. You never did them, because they happened in the intro, or earlier still, but in the game fiction you have, and people will praise you for it. Hell, Half-Life claims you’re a MIT graduate, but you never even saw MIT. You skipped that part of Gordon’s life. So why shouldn’t you have been able to skip the bit where people kept firing rockets at you and you were low on health and out of ammo too?
10/09/2009 at 11:45 qrter says:
Completely agree with mr. Walker.
To me this seems (more or less) the same discussion as to having quicksave at any time vs. having checkpoints etc.
Just make it an option. If you use the option, you have no one else to blame but yourself. I don’t buy the “if it’s there, I’ll use it” argument – surely it would only take the most basic form of self control not to use it if you don’t want to. (I mean, if you can’t manage that, you must be fun to spend a night with in the pub, quaffing any pint you find within reach. ;) )
And yes, most games do already have cheats, but surely that’s only more reason to stop trying to pretend it’s not there and to just formalise it?
10/09/2009 at 11:46 Ian says:
I think I’m in the “let people skip stuff” group.
Those who don’t want to don’t have to.
Those who do it once and find themself falling back on it should be able to stop themselves if they realise it’s reducing the fun they get out of it, lessening the satisfaction of getting further or whatever.
Those who are happy to have a chance to skip to the next part and keep playing get to do so and the value they get from the game isn’t diminished by earlier mistakes or a lack of ability.
The problem is that it would annoy the angries who didn’t use the feature to think of others who did.
Re: the final Metroid Prime boss, it appears to be turning into the sole existence of a part of a game that many people seem to find hard but I don’t. I remember my friend at the time saying he couldn’t do it and he’d completed more (and got more kit upgrades, etc.) of the game than me and still kept dying where I managed to beat the thing. I hadn’t realised until recently that I maybe be in a minority as I’ve seen a few people bring it up as an example of a final boss fight that’s an absolute bastard. It’s strange, ’cause usually I’m in the “that was too hard” camp and give up like a pansy.
10/09/2009 at 11:46 dave says:
I always thought some sort of timer or count of how many times you’ve reloaded doobry might work. After a while the game simply sais “OK you suck I’ll half its hitpoints” then after another few reloads “OK you really do suck heres a plot item to get past it”.
One thing i got stuck on bizzarely was the first time through BG2:TOB (my favourite game of all time!) where after getting through the sewers in Althkatla you have a series of encounters heading up the tower/castle thingy. It took me about 2 weeks of constantly reconfiguring different parties (thats half the reason why BG2 is so mighty imo) until i eventually sussed it and beat Gromnir to death with his own arm. That was one exulted day. i was so chuffed i took my housemates to the pub and bought them a pint.
In one respect the “cheat past a solid bit” button would be awesome but i still keep coming back to stuffing a +3 longsword up Gromnirs bum and being over the moon about it.
10/09/2009 at 11:47 bansama says:
It’s cheating your way to having more fun.
That line right there begs for an entire article by itself.
10/09/2009 at 11:47 Nick says:
I think the issue is the fact that some games are easier, some games are harder, Usually regardless of difficulty settings. When I select easy, I want easy. Off the top of my head I can name three games that do this well; Halo 3, Oblivion and Fallout 3. I want to be able to go back and do it again when i’ve finished it, and I certainly don’t want better items going to better gamers. Easy should be easy and hard should be hard.
10/09/2009 at 11:47 Ragnar says:
@Tei
Is simple. Having such button, is like having a “who is the killer” line in a mystery novel. It will totally spoil the reader/player.
And yet there are people who begin reading a mystery novel by looking at the back to find out who the killer is. What harm does that do? Why can’t you let people enjoy books/games the way they want it instead of the author/developer dictating how it should be read/played?
10/09/2009 at 11:49 SirKicksalot says:
The new Zelda game has this option. Or Zelda prototype, whatever that is.
It’s an option any game should have, next to an option to pause or skip cutscenes.
10/09/2009 at 11:53 notlimahc says:
No mention of Nintendo’s proposed “Kind Code” system yet? It supposedly allows a player to kick the game into “auto-pilot” or skip forward at the cost of the ability to save any progress made.
10/09/2009 at 11:54 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
It would be SOOO useful in Prototype with all these super-long and mostly super-boring storyline missions…I temporarily stopped playing due to the “destroy all the patrols before they reach the hideout…” mission, yawn..
10/09/2009 at 11:55 notlimahc says:
Bah, SirKicksalot mentioned it as I was reading this.
10/09/2009 at 11:55 Malagate says:
Definately agreeing with Turin, modding can make games so much more fun, as I found in Mount & Blade where I made cattle follow me instead of having to chase it around, made cattle collecting quests actually possible.
I will also use console commands to get a better experience, most recent example I can think of is in Fallout 3 where I spawned a fusion battery to get past a bug in the hotel (only exit is the lift that needs a fusion battery, only battery in the hotel is in a robot, robot didn’t spawn, ergo trapped forever unless you already had a fusion battery/use console).
10/09/2009 at 11:56 qrter says:
Exactly.
There will always be bits of a game that will be unexpectedly hard for some players – you can playtest a game to death and those spots will still exist. Nothing wrong with giving the player the tools to make their experience more enjoyable, if he or she so chooses.
Gamers need to take responsibility for how they approach a game, accept how big their own part is in the enjoyment of a game.
10/09/2009 at 11:57 mouj says:
Well i remember that back in the Atari / Amiga days, you’d have all kinds of cheats, but games where all in all much harder to finish, so at times the cheats would really be a blessing; nowadays, it seems to me that some games feature particularily hard moments or bosses to compensate the lack of overall difficulty in other areas, thus resorting to cheats at time seems really necessary if you want to finish the said game. I just clearly remember going throught almost the whole RE 4 game only to meet a boss i could not pass (damn quick-time events, too), and dropping the game without finishing it.. feeling rather unsatisfied.
Now, is it me, or has there already been games where the overall difficulty adapts to how well you fare in the game ? Because that could be a angle to try and offer a way to beat hard areas / bosses in a game, without having to resort to cheating : try a couple times, and each time or every once in X times, the game dumbs down the difficulty for that specific passage..
All in all, i guess it also depends on the game : i found Half Life 2 so enjoyable because i’ve never been stuck anywhere, while it would really turn me off a RPG / RTS if difficulty was not improving over the course of the game.
10/09/2009 at 11:57 Turvy says:
I’ve had this thought while trying to finish Gears of War again this month. I’m still stuck at the ridiculously hard end boss, so after another hour or so of trying, I just youtubed the ending.
I think this gen’s introduction of public achievements was pretty much made for this. Allow people to skip ridiculous boss fights or fiendish puzzles, just don’t give them the corresponding achievement. Then the ones that DID beat the boss can still point to their trophy list/achievement score and go “see, I earned this”, and the ones that didn’t might have incentive to try again at a later time, but still get to enjoy the rest of the game they paid for.
10/09/2009 at 11:59 Xocrates says:
I don’t think the real question here is “Why can’t I skip levels” but “Whatever happened to cheat codes”.
But keeping it on the context of the first question, there are several reasons, but I think perhaps one that may be easily overlooked is as following: Nowadays, when games usually go on for around 10 hours, the game has to be easy and/or compelling enough to allow the player to progress through the whole game before he gets bored and moves on. If some section can not be completed by the average player in a reasonable amount of attempts then the game is clearly broken.
True, sometimes the player is so poor that even a excellently balanced game isn’t enough. But the point stands, there should be at least one way to set the game difficulty as such that anyone can be reasonably expected to finish it (difficulty options exist for a reason, game developers could use them to a bigger extent than they do). The reason games don’t have a “skip button” is because if they need one then there is something wrong with them.
10/09/2009 at 12:00 RogB says:
metroid prime is the #1 example of a game having a section so hard I gave up, even though i wanted to see and play more. I do remember at the time thinking ‘why cant I skip this?’
Yakuza on PS2 had a built in system where if you failed a fight 3 (or5?) times it asked you of you wanted an easier skill level. the problem with this is that you could never switch it back afterwards, so I resisted. After getting past that part, it was a difficulty ‘spike’, the bits after it were far easier, so if I’d put it on the easier skill level, the rest of the game would have been ruined since I couldnt swap back. So this was a good idea, but flawed execution.
10/09/2009 at 12:01 Lewis says:
I’ll rant forever about how most games are too difficult, but I think the answer is in dynamically adjusting difficulty, rather than level skip codes. Max Payne pulled this off to an extent many years ago, yet for some reason, it never caught on.
Games are clever enough these days to work out when we suck at them. Surely they could be made clever enough to work out we want to enjoy them.
10/09/2009 at 12:02 Clovus says:
If you enjoyed Loveline, Adam Carolla now has a free podcast. It’s like a good bits only version of Loveline. Anyway, having listened to him for years, I can say that Adam knows nothing about gaming and finds its popularity bewildering. He’s also semi-illiterate and racist. But still… very funny.
There is a somewhat awkward episode where he first interviews an MMA wrestler and then Jick from Kingdom of Loathing. Jick was pretty funny, but Adam clearly could not understand what KoL is.
Also, I like the system used in Oblivion. Just let me change the difficulty level any time I want. Then I can still defeat the big bad without simply skipping. Make the easiest mode super easy (but not god mode). I can see no good argument to not including this in games. The ability to easily change the difficulty at will in Guitar Hero World Tour was really great, for example. As opposed to the “you fail the whole set and fans hate you!” of Rock Band 2. Then there’s that “Prince of Persia” system that I haven’t tried yet. Similar to being able to just “continue” over and over again until the big bad dies.
Oh, and what about Mario Galaxy? Make getting to the end of the “story” fairly easy, but then have tons of other really difficult levels to do for a challenge. Award hats or something for finishing them.
10/09/2009 at 12:02 roBurky says:
I strongly think there should be no restrictions on starting a single player game at any point the player chooses. In games that are already split up into chapters that are selectable from the menu, it is maddening when they lock off all but the first chapter when the game is first installed or bought.
Why can’t I reinstall a game and replay my favourite level? What possible reason is there for denying that?
You can’t claim that you have to stop first time players from ruining the story for themselves, because books and films function perfectly well without locking pages or the fast forward button.
10/09/2009 at 12:04 Wilson says:
I agree that it’s foolish not to provide any way around awkward areas of the game, be that cheats, guides or some kind of skip function. Most adventure games I play I end up using a guide, because there is one or two puzzles in there where I’ve missed something or just can’t figure it out. Doesn’t spoil the game, just lets me progress rather than being stuck for hours. Adventure games with hint systems are good, but don’t always go far enough.
In more action related games (FPS, RPG etc) I think some kind of system to help you in bits you are clearly finding hard (like dave suggested). It would ask you first if you wanted some help, and gradually make it easier after the first 4-5 times you get slaughtered maybe.
I’m sure everyone has heard stories about or experienced games which include a bit which is just far harder or more irritating than anything else in the game, and I doubt it was a positive experience. The fact games can have guides and cheats built in is surely a wonderful option for making sure people never have to give up on a game against their will again. I think that would be worth it even if it reduced some people’s enjoyment because they cheated/skipped through everything. Those people probably wouldn’t have had the patience to force their way past the really difficult sections anyway, so they probably haven’t lost anything overall, and at least got to see the end of the story.
10/09/2009 at 12:06 pkt-zer0 says:
How would you design a difficulty curve when you let players just jump to whatever part of the game? If you only skip having your ass kicked so you can get it kicked even worse, then why is there even a skip function? Better selection of difficulty levels is the solution, not a “skip ahead” button.
10/09/2009 at 12:07 Alistair says:
Freespace did something along these lines – if you failed a mission five times, they asked if you just wanted to skip to the next one. Worked very well. Instantly-selectable levels could be an intall-time option – do you want to install tv (one at a time) or dvd box set (any order you like) mode?
10/09/2009 at 12:07 Tony says:
KoTOR Lightside is FUCKING IMPOSSIBLE without Destroy Droid.
Badly built characters are a staple of mine…
10/09/2009 at 12:10 Brian says:
I’m playing Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars for DS these days and it’s a splendid point and click adventure game. I play DS in bed before sleepies which is not the ideal place to to searching for hints if I get stuck, but thankfully that game has a full incremental hint system I can access whenever I’m stumped.
Equally as good is the on-demand hint system in Lucasarts’ remake of Monkey Island. Not so good is Telltale’s system in its adventure games for which you can only choose the frequency of autonomously, occasionally spewed hints which might not be offered by the game for 10 minutes after turning the feature on.
10/09/2009 at 12:11 Martin Coxall says:
I dunno, I always watch films and books in a random chapter order. Should be the same with games.
10/09/2009 at 12:12 Christian says:
This also might make MMOs a bit more fun (at least for me..). Example Age Of Conan, which I really enjoyed for some time. Every time you start a new character, you’d have to run through Tortage, the starting area, and do the same quests again, just to level up to something between 15 and 20 and start the *real* game.
Why shouldn’t I be able to start outside of the starting-area with a fresh level 20 and take my time to distribute the skillpoints all at once? Seeing that a class only starts to show it’s real potential after lvl20, trying out new classes is a real chore.
But a skip
buttonfunctionality would depend on the game, really:Example Fallout 3: where would a skip-button make sense here? Only in the main quest, as all other quests are optional. So a skip button would mostly result in the item you have to find being given to you (or the location of somewhere you need to go being revealed without you having to speak to person xyz). Of course that’s cheating, but who cares..if I want to spoil my experience (or don’t find that things like that spoil it for me): why not.
In a game like Bioshock for example..why would I need a skip-button? In this case, it would be really hard to implement because you’d also lose out on the story and everything. The development effort to implement a (in this case) rather complex functionality should rather be devoted to making the game better (or bugfix or whatever..).
Arcade-style-games, where I really just go on in linear levels (e.g. Serious Sam): yeah, give me a skip-button so that I can just skip that one frustrating and mildly unfair boss so that I can keep on shooting stuff.
10/09/2009 at 12:13 soylent robot says:
Im playing two games right now. Theyre great and I like them, except Im really stuck at two very hard bits where the difficulty has just spiked.
In the first, I’ve got use a crappy pistol to kill a tough badguy who can fire grenades at me. I cant get close to him because we’re on different platforms. There’s enemies spawning all the time around me so if I’m firing at him his minions are easily killing me. Also I have to kill him in under a minute or I fail the mission.
In the other I must protect a metal box thing from two giant tentacles and two ridiculously tough monster things. The monster things often get caught in a “curb stomp” loop where one knocks me down, and as soon as I get up, the other one knocks me down, and it repeats from there until I’m dead. I’d defeat them easily if I could get some air, but the tentacles knock me down. Also I can’t steal military vehicles or equipment to help because I’m “on their side” for this mission despite them trying to kill me up to this point. Did I mention that in addition to the health of the box im supposed to protect theres a time limit for some reason?
So, yeah, I’d like to skip these parts.
10/09/2009 at 12:14 panik says:
95% of games are too easy as it is. Lets not make them any dumber.
10/09/2009 at 12:15 phil says:
Grand Theft Auto’s approach of allowing you to drop bullet proof APCs from the sky, but then disabling achievements whilst you ride around in the monster, works for me.
Equally, Neverwinter Nights OC was impossible to complete for my character build (the penultimate fight with six Darth Maul lizards and their mage friend), after sinking 20 hours into the game I felt completely justified in turning off damage.
10/09/2009 at 12:16 John Walker says:
Hey Brian, I can’t resist mentioning that I wrote that hint system : ) I’m glad it works.
Clovus – re Carolla. I’m horribly behind on his new podcast. It’s good for keeping up with Bald Brian’s health, which is a frightening tale. Did you ever see his TLC show, The Adam Carolla Project? That was splendid, and had some lovely moments with Drew.
10/09/2009 at 12:17 soylent robot says:
Another idea I had was this: I have bought this game, therefore I own everything in it. If I want to play Chapter 5 now, I should be able to do that instantly.
I can open a book at any point and start reading from there…
10/09/2009 at 12:19 zipdrive says:
@roBurky:You are absolutely right. I have to admit, I’ve never thought of that.
@ OP: different types of games should have different types of skipping. Skipping to the end of a level is the simplest, but only works in level-based games; winning matches in sports games, ending missions/quests in sandbox and RP games and gaining God Mode in fighting games other such beasts. It might be a bit more complicated in adventure games, but I’m sure it’s solvable.
My only concern is that such a solution to bypass problem bits might discourage developers from tuning their games properly as they think “meh, the weaklings can just skip it, if they want to”.
10/09/2009 at 12:22 Ginger Yellow says:
The one game I’d really like this feature for is Pscyhonauts. I must have spent at least 3 hours trying to get through the fucking Meat Circus level without success. And, apparently, I’m not even at the really frustrating bit of that level. But I really want to see the end of the game, so every few months I load it up and plug away at it for half an hour or so, always failing at more or less the same point. I know exactly what I have to do, I just always screw up one of the jumps and have to start all over again.
10/09/2009 at 12:29 Shadowcat says:
I think about the number of times I’ve found a part of a game cripplingly difficult, but persisting with it has taught me how to play the game properly, and given me the skills required to enjoy the subsequent parts.
If I could skip forward without having learned those lessons, then all that happens is that the rest of the game sucks.
Yeah, it means we have to have faith that the developers know what they’re doing, and there will certainly be games in which it would be a great feature, but it would absolutely hamstring others.
10/09/2009 at 12:33 GJLARP says:
For me, part of the fun is derived from the sense of satisfaction of getting past a really difficult spot. If not, I wouldn’t even bother playing the game, I’d just watch a walkthrough of it on Youtube.
It’s for that reason why I didn’t enjoy Bioshock as many others did. The difficulty level was stripped down, and there was too much hand holding, despite it being a graphical powerhouse.
Admittedly, I don’t condone the use of “cheating AI” or whatever to intentionally make the game harder. In the end, this is up to the developer to strike a fine line between “playable but challenging” and “tear your hair out”.
Anyway, that’s what cheats are for. To, well, cheat, and get past a boring level or whatever. It’s not orthodox, and that’s good too.
10/09/2009 at 12:35 Deerhoof says:
I’ve been thinking along these same lines. Possibly a little differently however.
It pains me each time I format, or move PC’s, to have to replay manditory training levels before the game begins proper.
A good example of this is Plants Vs Zombies.
I played this through to conclusion once, and thoroughly enjoyed it, however each time I load it up now, since I’ve lost my saves, I lament the prospect of playing through the first 10 or so stages, where it slowly introduces all the different game modes etc, which need to be completed in order to access minigames, and the more advanced adventure modes.
I’ve barely played since my initial run-through because of this.
10/09/2009 at 12:35 The Sombrero Kid says:
Not only should you be able to fast forward a game but you should be able to rewind it too i think.
10/09/2009 at 12:48 Lyndon says:
The reason games are different to films and books is that they usually have a difficulty curve. A book is usually not supposed to get harder as you read it.
What would be the point of skipping past a difficult encounter just to face another even more difficult encounter?
Until you’ve learnt how to defeat the last boss what hope do you have against the next one?
10/09/2009 at 12:48 The Sombrero Kid says:
the argument that the ability to fast forward would ruin the discovery element of a game is total pish, films rely even more heavily on the discovery element than games do, the only part of a game that’s not reusable is it’s paper thin plot, most films have a pair of flimsy legs of cinematography and acting held up by a Giant crutch of a plot, which isn’t reusable either, the knowledge that you can skip to the end of a film or book doesn’t ruin the film or book nor does anyone watch the last 5 minutes or read the last page first.
10/09/2009 at 12:49 The Sombrero Kid says:
i have a novel that uses fewer and fewer letters as the book goes on(as they get banned from the world the books set in), so that kinda gets more difficult as the book progresses.
10/09/2009 at 12:50 Christian says:
@The Sombrero Kid:
You mean something along the lines of how Prince Of Persia (Sands Of Time) did it? That was a fun mechanic, and in this case the skip-thingie would be that it always works without running out. Or allow you to fly..
10/09/2009 at 12:50 Muzman says:
This sounds mean but reviewers are kinda the over stressed skim readers of games. It should come as no surprise they would think this a good idea, to my mind.
I mean, we want designers to create more in depth and experiences don’t we? Experiences that are interdependant on a lot of factors; narrative, atmosphere, challenge mechanics etc. That may not work out perfectly every time, but that’s the gambit. It’s difficult to ask for a way to make that more conveniently consumable at the same time.
Granted, this varies a lot and there are high crimes and low; not being able to kill that one boss and just godding to the next bit is common and seems pretty innocuous. But the resistance to this ought to make some sense to people. Art is a dictatorial exercise, and anyone who isn’t into the latest consumerist deconstruction trend really needn’t be obliged to add functions that put them there for the “Play The Game Your Way™” experience.
Consumer convenience is, and should be, to some extent at odds with artistic intent. Even in crappy art I’m afraid.
Anyway, I’m all for time skips, level cheats or tourist mode difficulties in games that it suits. It’s just that it won’t be all of them.
(My other unpopular arguments in this series include: “A lack of a ‘save anywhere’ can actually be a good thing” and “The mere existence of a third person view in Thief: Deadly Shadows could undermine its immersion goals”
10/09/2009 at 12:50 The Sombrero Kid says:
also a difficulty curve is a pretty 90′s concept most games don’t have difficulty curves these days
10/09/2009 at 12:52 AndrewC says:
This is a ‘games as sport/games as story’ issue, right? And, as with most intractable problems, it’s down, not to the game itself, but the players’ attitude towards it.
If you approach games as sport – as a thing to test oneself against – removing the challenge is lunatic as you are simply removing the game. It is ‘cheating’, it is for ‘noobs’, and so on.
Yet for those who approach games for an immersive interactive experience, the game mechanics are there purely as a means to an end to get attached to the world and to feel the experience more keenly. To have that experience stopped by some random bit of game mechanic seems loopy, and seems like bad game design.
The solution is to accept that games are not homogenous. I have some vague recollection of some Sunday Papers article about how gamers treat games as ‘all one thing’ in a way they never would with books, or TV, or movies. We can accept without mention that a comedy may have a rubbish plot, or that a romantic drama may not be all that thrilling, but when a console game doesn’t provide the putative ‘depth’ of a niche PC strategy title? All hell is unleashed.
Same with this sport/story split. Quake 3 is all about the challenge but, say, that new time manipulation game is all about getting regular interesting situations to play about in. Just because they are both FPSs doesn’t mean they are remotely similar games.
I reckon. So yeah – the problem, as with all things, is not games, but gamers. Bloody gamers.
P.S. I’m on Walker’s side.
10/09/2009 at 12:52 SuperNashwan says:
I don’t know about skipping stuff entirely, but at the very least you should be able to alter the difficulty level whenever you damn like, rather than being forced to start a whole new game.
One of the great things about PC gaming is that even when you don’t get access to the dev console for cheatiness, chances are someone has coded a trainer for the game. I’ll often give myself eg extra money when the only barrier is time spent grinding, PC gamers just don’t need to suffer having that nonsense forced on us by developers.
10/09/2009 at 12:53 Christian says:
And to the book/film-analogy:
I quite often skip ahead in movies/books when I find a passage to be boring and leading nowhere. You could argue that skipping passages is also cheating yourself and you don’t get the whole experience as the author intended..but if I just don’t enjoy the passage, who is he to tell me I should? If I skip some important plot-turn..well then I’ll have to go back and reread it..
10/09/2009 at 12:56 Rockeye says:
It does depend very much on the type of game. A beat ‘em up like Street Fighter 4 is all about the challenge in single player, and the large amount of difficulty levels lets you tailor that challenge to your level. Having a ‘skip this opponent’ button would make destory the purpose of playing. Ditto for sports games.
For a game with a linear/almost linear progression, story and new areas and content linked to progression though, I can’t think of any reasons why it shouldn’t be incorporated. A difficulty spike part way thorugh a game that prevents you from seeing the rest of it is incredibly frustrating.
The only issue I can see is that sometimes there are situations where a game is trying to introduce a new concept/force you to use new tactics you may fail the first time because you’re grasping what you need to do, but once get the idea of it, it can be quite easy. If you skipped on your first fail without learning, it would impede your progress later, forcing you to skip again and again.
10/09/2009 at 12:56 The Hammer says:
“I’ll rant forever about how most games are too difficult, but I think the answer is in dynamically adjusting difficulty, rather than level skip codes. Max Payne pulled this off to an extent many years ago, yet for some reason, it never caught on.
Games are clever enough these days to work out when we suck at them. Surely they could be made clever enough to work out we want to enjoy them.”
I think this is definitely true, and would be a more satisfying, and less arbitrary solution. However, it wouldn’t really work too well with puzzles, I don’t think.
There’s also the case that you’d be trying to get to a level you’ve bought the game for, and you don’t want to trawl through the preceding chapters which don’t interest you as much. See the Cradle in Thief 3 (a level I’m immensely interested in playing, having seen lots of praise for it) or the open-area sections of Half Life 2: Episode 2. I can’t say, in the latter, that the antlion sections gripped me much, and I wasn’t having great deals of fun.
It’d also help when you reinstall a game, and come back to find you somehow lost your saved data, or something. No need to play it through all again to get to the bits you want.
10/09/2009 at 13:02 AndrewC says:
Oh god a level select in Thief 3 would be joy.
10/09/2009 at 13:03 Pzykozis says:
There’s definately a place for this in some games, there’s one in particular that springs to mind. ‘Tales of Vesparia’ for 360, it’s all happy and dandy everything looks good and fine then all of a sudden a wolf boss appears with like.. 30k hp when your guys hit for 100ish… I’m not even talking difficulty curve this is basically like running into a brick wall that curves back over you.. like some old 2d sonic loop de loop.. sheesh I haven’t played it since.
10/09/2009 at 13:03 Ingix says:
10/09/2009 at 13:05 The Sombrero Kid says:
to be clear the only reason to want to fast forward a game is not because it’s too difficult it could be for any number of reasons which is precisely why it should be included, if your concerned about it making the game easier don’t use it to make the game easier, which is why the counter argument stinks of i can’t be trusted with power therefore no one can have it!
10/09/2009 at 13:11 Bhazor says:
Why don’t companies use it? Because people are an idiot.
I’d say at least half of players would just skip straight to the end and a large number would then not even try the rest. That’d be a pretty big downer for those basts who put two or three years into making the bally thing.
I agree with Muzman, it’s an attractive idea to stressed out reviewers but for people who just want to play the game and the designers? Not so much.
10/09/2009 at 13:12 itsallcrap says:
With the recent announcement of all three Metroid Prime games getting remade for the Wii it reminded me that I’ve finished neither of the first two because I couldn’t get past bosses
All in all, I agree with you – there’s no point hiding good content from people simply as punishment for not coping with the last thing your threw at them.
Nonetheless, I am going to have to call you a pussy.
Sorry.
10/09/2009 at 13:25 Carra says:
In the past I used to use those cheats to pass the hard areas. But nowadays I stopped doing that as I usually ended up just finishing the rest of the games with cheats once I used one. For adventure games I have to be stuck for about half an hour before I look at the hints/solutions. And then try to not look at it again…
There’s a few solutions. The hint system Telltale uses for their sam & max games works fine. Adaptive AI. If it sees you are stuck, reduce the difficulty à la Left 4 Dead. Or go level up and get better items in rpgs or warhammer:40k 2.
One problem with cheating in the middle of the game is that it is tempting to cheat for the rest of the game. Why? It only gets harder. You’re already having problems with a mediocre part in the middle of the game. Only harder scenarios will follow. Examples would be men of war or the old commandos game. If you can’t handle the earlier scenarios, there’s no way you can beat the last ones.
When I do get stuck I prefer to use a guide then cheats. You can usually finish a part of the game with a guide. It’s a form of cheating but I still passed the part myself. I remember being stuck in Half Life 2 episode 2 because I could find no exit. It took me about an hour to figure out how to get out of a section with my boat. After looking at a picture by picture guide I finally figured out that I was doing the track in the wrong order.
10/09/2009 at 13:26 Concept says:
That level skip was necessary in Arkanoid.
10/09/2009 at 13:27 Altemore says:
I like the way World of Goo kinda sorta implemented it. If you can’t beat a part, circumvent it. This seems to me like a good middle road. Instead of simply stopping dead the moment you hit a wall, have the ability to walk around it.
Another example of being able to do this is Deus Ex.
10/09/2009 at 13:28 Vandelay says:
Comparing the ability to skip sections of films and books to a game seems an odd one to me and doesn’t add weight to the argument that we should be able to pick and choose parts of the game to play. Why would you ever want to read chapter 6 before chapter 5? Why would you skip past scene 23 of the film? These things are heavily centred around a plot, with each piece important to the overall narrative (or at least they should be.) Skipping a section would mean you would be missing out on important developments, be it plot or character related.
I know that there are plenty of people that do do this, but it completely baffles me. It seems to me that if there is a section of a film or book that is boring you enough to skip it, then you are probably just going to get bored with the rest of it too, probably even more likely as you are far more likely to not fully understand what is going on.
However, when it comes to games, where the plot and characters are usually a secondary consideration and are mostly not very interesting, skipping can be more justified.
Many people here are arguing that games contain a difficulty curve, but the number of times that a game throws in a randomly hard piece seemingly out of nowhere is very common. COD4′s Ferris Wheel section is a prime example of this, where a fairly easy game suddenly throws more enemies at you then there have been throughout the entire game so far with limited cover to protect yourself from them. I’m sure if there had of been a skip button for that piece I would have used it. I would have missed out on the satisfaction of completing it, but I’m sure I would have gone back and persevered with it in my own time.
I think a skip button that appears after you have died 4 or 5 times on the same section would be a perfectly fine. Also, being able to adjust difficulty mid-game is a real must. I’m less a fan of the game self-adjusting the difficulty, as they usually have a tendency to increase the difficulty, but not decrease when needed. I seem to recall Far Cry being a prime example of this. Max Payne did do this quite well, but I seem to remember that the adjusting difficulty setting was in fact the easiest difficulty you could play at, with the harder difficulties becoming unlocked once you finished on this mode. I expect that the system was in favour of decreasing difficulty rather than increasing.
10/09/2009 at 13:32 nine says:
My prediction: one game company will, without fanfare, put this into a top10 multi-platform title. Within two years, every new game coming out will have this feature.
10/09/2009 at 13:41 Calabi says:
I have played shed loads of games and now the majority in certain areas are becoming dull. The always ask the same things of you, you know what to expect. The always give you boring and tedious tasks which havent changed from the inception of games.
The majority of games are not a challenge they are a chore.
Bioshock was not challenging when you came to the end, they tried to make it a challenge, but all that did was made it a chore, which I would have give up from if I didnt want to get it over with.
The majority of bosses are not challenges, they are chores whereby you have to divine the single way and rules the developers have made for you to complete that obstacle.
Skills dont even enter into these things as a skilled shooter must hit that monster the same times as a non-skilled person. When you search for an item all searchers are equal and must spend the same amount of time looking as there are no clues for things locations.
Alot of games are created with elements that reduce the skill differentials so that those whom are skilled will take longer to complete it and those whom are less skilled take even longer to comlete.
It would be great to skip these things. I know I enjoyed the only myst game because it had those hints and clues, whereas I would have given up with it and hated it, if it did not.
Also note there are different kinds of games, many of them dont know what they are trying to be. Shooters, like gradius and R-type and whatever are created for the challenge. Other games think they are made for the challenge like Call of Duty but then they have such an involved story which makes the player want to continue, and yet puts sometimes insurmountable barriers for them to experience it. And why dont they have scores?
It would be great to skip the bits, where they have decided that the player must spend 3 hours in this area shooting monsters to make the game a bit longer. Maybe then developers will realize that, they are making rubbish, so they look more indepth at what they are doing.
10/09/2009 at 13:42 Mika says:
@AndrewC
Couldn’t agree more. I’ll never want to play that Cradle level again (as great as it is).
10/09/2009 at 13:44 Mattthew Walton says:
Baldur’s Gate: got stuck.
Baldur’s Gate 2: got even stucker.
Neverwinter Nights: got monumentally stuck trying to kill a dragon at a point in the game where you can’t go and do anything else at all.
Neverwinter Nights 2: got bored.
Knights of the Old Republic: got stuck at the LAST BOSS
Very frustrating, really. Most of the time I got stuck it’s because there’s some new, powerful adversary who has a power or a resistance which you’ve never encountered in the game so far at any level that actually made you think about it and perhaps ensure that your party was equipped to deal with it. The dragon in NWN had enormous spell resistance. In BG2, it was the mind flayers, I had no way to deal with psionics and failed all the saving throws against them immediately. There’s not much fun in watching your paralysed party getting slaughtered over and over and over again…
I think a lot of these things are flaws in the game design, and it’s something I’ve never, ever seen in anything from Valve. Half-Life 2 has hard bits, but it always seems possible without having to go back and redo your character. Not that you get any character customisation. Maybe that’s part of the problem – RPGs have to work for a vast number of possible different players.
10/09/2009 at 13:51 Lyndon says:
What I’m saying ties into the whole idea that games are fun because they involve learning. Let’s just look at strategy games for a second, which are full of systems and subsystems. You hit a mission, it’s really hard and you keep getting your arse handed to you. Then you suddenly click with one of the subsystems you previously didn’t understand, let’s say it’s widgit production. Once you’ve learnt the trick to widgit production you breeze through the level. Now you just know the next level will require a mastery of widgit production and probably some other sub-system you haven’t figured out yet. If you still haven’t figured out widgit production you’re just going to get your arse handed to you even worse than before.
This is generally how games get us to engage with them on anything more than a shallow surface level. By gradually exposing us to their mechanics and forcing us to master them to progress.
Is this an idealised view of how games work? Yes. Do the majority of games function this way? No. But some games, the very best games, do work like this. Like Portal, yeah I said it, I know it’s the go to great game but whatever.
Portal is the perfect example of a game that requires that you learn it piece by piece until you finish. Letting you skip a lesson would only make it harder to learn the next lesson.
The skip button may improve bad games but I believe at a cost of damaging great games. I would rather a sea of bad games and a few great ones than just a sea of the mediocre.
10/09/2009 at 13:52 Ginger Yellow says:
The difficulties Ingix raises are mostly addressed by the patent filed by Nintendo. It wouldn’t work great for something like Fallout or Mass Effect, but then Nintendo doesn’t really make that sort of game. In Nintendo’s system, the game doesn’t “skip”, it takes over from you.
10/09/2009 at 13:59 Igor Hardy says:
I agree with Phlebas – the popularization of the skip button would lead to lazy and poor game design not affecting the sales that much. This way most games would become prototypes with maybe a bunch of cool ideas, and maybe some neat cutscenes, but lacking effort to make it all truly playable throughout.
Also, the ability to skip levels in World of Goo almost made me to give up on that excellent game. I got to a point where I didn’t beat several levels in row and after giving into the temptation to skip all of them I suddenly felt disconnected from the game and in general depressed about my incompetence. After a months or so I came back to it, but I still have this unpleasant memory.
10/09/2009 at 14:00 Bhazor says:
Reply to Walton
Yep. As such they’re also by far the hardest to design skip points for. Deciding how much a player needs is very different to designing a competent build and equipment lay out.
Also
About BG2: use a Invisible Stalker (level 6 mage spell) psionic immunity, they’re invisible to flayers and they drain all their magic rendering them powerless.
About KOTOR: Kill the prisoners
10/09/2009 at 14:06 qrter says:
@ Bhazor
Oh come on.. that works both ways. Do you think the “basts who put two or three years into making the bally thing” are impressed by all the people who give up on their games? I bet that must feel great.
And seeing the number of people here who wouldn’t be averse to such a function, it’s not something just for stressed reviewers.
10/09/2009 at 14:07 Clovis says:
@John Walker: Ya, The Adam Carolla Project was great! My wife likes watching all those home improvement shows, so it was nice to watch one that was not mind numbingly boring. Oh, if you enjoyed that you need to watch Adam’s movie, “The Hammer”, just so you can watch Ozzie “act”. The movie itself is pretty good too. I recommend it on DVD so you watch the extras and commentary which are great.
I don’t know how there can be 100 home improvement/house flipping shows on US cable, and no one would give that show a second season. Adam did somehow manage to get that show on Comedy Central but it was really terrible. The best thing about the podcast is that you don’t actually have to look at the host.
Oh, BTW, I actually heard that episode of Loveline and was really impressed with the idea at the time too.
10/09/2009 at 14:08 Gap Gen says:
I think Yahtzee has made the point in ZP before that skipping games is pointless in some cases because if you want to skip a section, it’s a sign the game design isn’t good enough. I think the most recent Alone in the Dark was an example of this.
10/09/2009 at 14:13 Bhazor says:
Reply to Qrter
Getting stuck and having no lower difficulty or in game solution is just bad design. A level skip would ruin the best games as people would just skip levels at the first hurdle.
Also how many people who comment on this blog are game journalists? I dare the say the ratio of reviewer:player would be higher than in the general gamer population.
10/09/2009 at 14:15 Dracko says:
Solution: Better designed games.
10/09/2009 at 14:16 Mister Adequate says:
Because games aren’t directly analogous to other mediums. At the core of the experience is the progression. You do task X and acquire item/weapon/ability Y which then lets you tackle task Z. To remove that is to remove a core component of what makes games games.
Because games are, quite simply, meant to be played (whatever Hideo Kojima might think). I may sound elitist, heck I probably am elitist, but I can’t quite wrap my head around the idea of not wanting to play the game (Which is to me what this all boils down to).
And because if a game is poorly balanced enough to be too difficult to get through, or is not engaging enough to be worth sticking with, then adding in a level skip option is just bad design which doesn’t address the core issue – that the game is poorly balanced or isn’t engaging enough for people to want to stick with if they get stuck.
10/09/2009 at 14:17 BooleanBob says:
The World Ends With You (DS) had a really smart take on this. It had a range of difficulty levels that could be changed at any time out of battle, each of which altered the lucrativeness of any treasure obtained by offing foes. On top of this, any battle (after a point) you contrived to lose was immediately available for retry – and there was a separate option to replay that single fight on the easiest difficulty.
Thus you could tailor the game’s challenge through these settings (and a couple of others for good measure – it’s the only game I’ve ever played where you have the option to level down), dipping down a notch when some too-great obstacle was encountered but never really feeling like you were just giving up on the game (either literally, or by skipping ahead through the content as mooted by JW here). And conversely, taking it on at standard difficulty or higher would provide satisfaction and pride, as well as the in-game validation of material reward.
For what it’s worth, I’ve played over a dozen adventure games, cherished each dearly, and completed precisely none without the help of a guide. The best I’ve ever managed was the first episode of Teenagent, which took me a year of on-off effort, and made me feel like God himself.
10/09/2009 at 14:17 Noc says:
I think part of the problem for some games is logistical. These are the ones that aren’t level based, or where you’ve got a ton of interconnected “levels” nestled around various nooks in an open world.
So doing a bit either a) gifts you some item that opens up new areas, or b) changes the world in some way to allow to reach new places. They’re very much about doing these things in sequence; jumping around will have you missing things you were supposed to pick up (and will need later), and bypassing script cues.
So something like a “Kill this boss” button would be workable, but it would require quite a bit of effort to build a system allowing you to dynamically jump around between different points in the narrative. Especially if (god forbid) you’ve got any choices somewhere down the line.
Even games that don’t fall to sequence-breaking are also often about progression, where you’ll need the experience/loot/whatever you get from the hard bits to continue. I remember playing FFIX a while back; I was running it on an emulator, so I just quick-loaded out of all the random encounters, because they were boring. Then I got to the endgame and was horribly underleveled and got slaughtered by everything. This gets more complicated when you’ve got games where you have some choice in how your character progresses; do they set you up with new levels and equipment if you jump ahead? What equipment do they give you? Do they just give you a bunch of experience and gold and leave you to make up the difference yourself?
And then you’ve got plot bits, for games that require them. Is there a way to fill you in? Will you just be confused? Will you be asked to make choices based on information you were supposed to hear before and then skipped?
So I think a lot of the reason it’s disappeared from some games is just because it’s more difficult to incorporate than simply teleporting the player to the requisite location. No excuse for discretely level-based games, though.
. . .
@Matthew Walton: OH GOD the NWN dragon. I couldn’t beat it either; it’s got both a high SR and a high AC, and I guess I didn’t have enough of a dope build to make it through. It’s not that great a loss, though; the basic NWN campaign is the most mind-shreddingly tedious thing I think I’ve ever played.
Every so often I (used to) think “Man, I never got through the NWN campaign. I think I’ll try again.” And then I try. And after a chapter and a half or so, I say “screw this” and go do something more interesting. I think the NWN campaign has single-handedly turned me off to a lot of Bioware’s subsequent games: after seeing the formula presented so starkly, that’s all I see when I try and play KOTOR and such.
10/09/2009 at 14:24 Jake P says:
@Gap Gen: Good point about Yahtzee.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/892-2-5D-Hoedown
Skip ahead and watch 1:46-2:00
10/09/2009 at 14:24 H says:
Totally agree with that JW said: If I’ve bought the damn game, I should be able to skip ahead or God mode or do whatever the hell I like.
For GTA:SA that would be skipping a mission that I could never do. on GTA:IV that would be making the game actually work.
10/09/2009 at 14:35 Gorgeras says:
Prototype was one of those games where death should have not been included: you’re not playing something that mere bullets and rockets are supposed to kill and there are at least three NPCs that re-occur in the game precisely because conventional means can’t kill them. Why isn’t Alex Mercer one of them? They should have made that so your ‘life’ bar depletion just means you can’t use any powers and need to run away rather than friggin restart from a checkpoint/ragequit.
Yes it is about better game design. When Ubisoft made the Sands of Time they included the reversal mechanic as a means of avoiding the irritating ‘die and quickload’ 95% of the time. But why do you die in Sands of Time? Not because the jumping is fiddley but because no one who hasn’t played it before can predict what happens in the next few seconds. They weren’t covering for bad design as much as they were simply solving an unsolvable problem.
But skipping levels, etc; the problem is solvable easily most of the time. This is just a way of not having to solve it.
10/09/2009 at 14:36 phil says:
The only way to beat the NWN dragon I found was hit it twice, teleport out (with a now dead companion), heal, resurrect, save, teleport back – which didn’t exactly make me feel like a demi-god after it fell over 30 mins later.
That said, the design logistics of including an epsiode skip in a RPG would be problematic, auto resolving side quests and auto leveling might take too much away from the player.
10/09/2009 at 14:38 Dante says:
“People seem to get very cross at the idea that someone else is taking a shortcut when they worked extremely hard to walk the long way around. I think instead this should be converted to pride. Rather than being cross with the other guy, be pleased with yourself. From your perspective they lost out.”
I think we can also see a prototype version of this in difficulty levels. In a strictly logical sense there is no reason to play a game on hard when easy is available, yet people still do it, and take pride in it. I think this cuts a neat hole in the “if you can skip it, everyone will just cheat” theory, because in theory everyone could just play games on easy mode, but we don’t, because we’re too proud.
Really all that you’re asking for here, and I totally agree, it to take what difficulty levels have started and run with it.
10/09/2009 at 14:42 Mungrul says:
Rather ironically, Ninja Gaiden, acknowledged as one of the hardest games recently released, asks you if you want to lower the difficulty if you’re dying a lot. But here it acts like a slap in the face; “Do you want to abandon the way of the Ninja?”, it politely asks you.
But here it’s like a slap in the face, and I can never swallow my pride enough to take up its offer. So I stubbornly battle on, resenting the game’s subtle sleight on my skills.
10/09/2009 at 14:42 Dante says:
@ Phil
Have you heard of the Baldur’s Gate 2 mod, ‘Dungeon Be Gone?’. It takes the starting Dungeon of BG2, which is fun enough the first time, but rapidly becomes annoying on replays, and skips you right through it, giving you an appropriate amount of xp, gold and the important items you would have found.
It’s wildly popular, because it skips a dull part of the game and gets you right to the meat of it. I sometimes wonder how many people might have given up in Irenicus’s dungeon and written the game off entirely, people that could have enjoyed it if the mod was standard.
10/09/2009 at 14:44 Bhazor says:
Re NWN Dragon
Not sure if theres another dragon but I’m pretty certain you can just kill it by feeding him a bad soul. Now the dragon’s in BG2 on the other hand were quite literally bastards. But they were still beatable with a lower resistance spell and a half dozen of Yoshimoto’s special traps.
10/09/2009 at 14:48 Rinox says:
I can’t remember the NWN dragon. Either my mind is Swiss cheese or I must have done something right for a change.
10/09/2009 at 14:49 Psychopomp says:
“Didn’t the new Alone in the Dark allow you to skip levels? I recall it was pretty generally smirked upon by reviewers too…”
Correlation does not imply causation
10/09/2009 at 14:50 Dante says:
@ Mungrul
It’s not a subtle as you think, I’m told those who abandon the way of the Ninja are forced to wear a pink armband and not shown the final cutscene.
10/09/2009 at 14:52 Dante says:
@ Bhazor
In fact all the Dragons in BG2 were optional bosses, the difficulty curve of the game would have taken a sharp turn upwards if you were forced to fight them.
10/09/2009 at 14:56 Psychopomp says:
I like how I Wanna Be The Guy handled its easy mode
10/09/2009 at 14:57 Gap Gen says:
“@Gap Gen: Good point about Yahtzee.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/892-2-5D-Hoedown
Skip ahead and watch 1:46-2:00″
Arf.
10/09/2009 at 14:59 JKjoker says:
i think some cheating features should be in every game by law:
-a way to unlock every unlockable feature without having to replay the game (ppl reinstall games but they often delete savegames and there is the always dreaded corrupted savegame problem, and this is needed even more in those that unlock multiplayer features, its just ballbreaking to invite a friend to play some fighting game only to find out all the cool characters need to be unlocked by some extremely time consuming, boring and retarded task)
-a god mode (sometimes you just want to let off some steam)
-a level choosing feature
these 3 “cheats” are crucial to ensure the replayability of the game, ive given up on several games i would have replayed if i had these
10/09/2009 at 14:59 The Innocent says:
The reason I don’t want cheats in my game is because I’d use them, most likely. Games that require me to unlock the console or that don’t allow me to easily cheat force me to play better, and as someone who god-moded through Quake II back in the day, that’s a good thing. For instance, I got Alone in the Dark and was so appalled by the controls that I just skipped around through the game to see different cutscenes, to my eternal shame.
I can see the point, however. Perhaps they should have a version for me and a version for everyone else. That would solve everything. Yes.
10/09/2009 at 15:00 Matt says:
The presence of a “Skip Level” button was directly responsible for my fiancee not giving up on World of Goo. She likes to play games to relax after work, and she was beating her head against the “Tower of Goo” level – near the end of the first section. She could get the tower up to the pipe, but she was always 3-5 goo balls short. It was driving her crazy and making her stop playing, because it was making her angry rather than relaxed. Once she broke down and just skipped the level, she got back to having fun again.
The true solution is to stop developers from making unreasonable difficulty spikes in their games, but I think we all know what kind of chances of that happening are. The next best thing is to let people sidestep unreasonable bits. People play games for more than just the challange.
10/09/2009 at 15:01 Bozzley says:
‘Splosion Man on the 360 recognises when you’ve died at a particular section too many times, and offers you a level skip. Although this is on the inferior consoles, and so it doesn’t count. Naturally.
10/09/2009 at 15:02 schwerpunk says:
I think [b]Yargh[/b] said it first: Bring back difficulty levels. And let us switch them mid-game. For those that wish, there is still the allure of beating The Entire Game on Hard Mode. But for some of us, that one part of HL2, in the prison, where you have to set up the turrets to fend off waves of combine, is just too frustrating. Let us notch down the difficulty to ‘wimpy’ then ramp it back up again when we’re ready.
(Not me, though, I’m too proud – spent a week on that damned level.)
10/09/2009 at 15:03 Rinox says:
@ Psychopomp:
I don’t know if I got your point re: correlation does not imply causation? I was just saying what I remember about the critical reaction, not my personal pov.
10/09/2009 at 15:03 Tei says:
I have to admit, that I read the wikipedia page of some animes that I don’t want to watch, to see how things ends. I love these wikipedia articles full of background, subtext and context about these animes.
I know some games that have this feature to skip “levels”, and that work for these games. But I fear it may ruin other games.
There are games where If you are allowed to fly, you will see that everything is a illusion. What is seens, can’t be unseen. So It may make some sense to protect peoplep from that. I understand that you must have the freedom. But for convenience, and because is the best way, such trick must be hidden, a console command, a particular key combo, etc… or It may trivialize the game.
10/09/2009 at 15:05 ulix says:
I was also wondering why there wasn’t any mention of Nintendo’s patent. Seeing that picture of Samus I thought: Now he must mention it.
But nope.
Nintendo’s patent adresses all these issues.
10/09/2009 at 15:12 ego says:
Game Developers aren’t going to do this for the same reason many games STILL won’t let you skip cutscenes, even if its your 100th time playing it.
The game developers are so sure the sequence is great, that they don’t want anyone to miss all the hard work they put into it.
Of course it doesn’t take much thinking to realize this is a dick move but its not going to stop a huge swath of developers do it.
10/09/2009 at 15:13 AtkinsSJ says:
I’m of the ‘cheating will ruin it for you’ mindset. But still, getting stuck is no fun. There are a couple of games I can think of right now where a section I’m stuck on has stopped me playing – one even with a walkthrough.
An interesting example is ‘The Way’, an RPG Maker game, that lets you switch puzzles and battles on and off at will, with no consequences. If you don’t want to fight, fine. I think it’s an interesting case, though it probably couldn’t work in a lot of genres. Link: http://www.crestfallen.us/
10/09/2009 at 15:16 Broklynite says:
Mario had a warp zone. Nobody complains about that.
Still, I think to myself of once or twice when I was so stuck I looked up the answer, only to find myself outraged by the answer. Not because the answer was simple but because what I’m told to do to get past a particular spot is so ridiculous I ask myself how on earth anyone was supposed to know that. There was a puzzle game some years ago called Shivers. One of the puzzles was to go press a button and listen to a song, then go to another area and play the song on an organ. You had to figure out that you had to do this, plus you had to remember the sequence of notes through long load times, and many of the organ notes sounded the same. It was a ridiculous puzzle. Why shouldn’t I look up the answer?
10/09/2009 at 15:21 Theory says:
Er, you can do that in HL2.
10/09/2009 at 15:27 CDust says:
Level skip? No thx.
I’d rather have a way to make easier(Make-it-so button anyone?), after the second or third time I fail at a extreemly annoying place in a game.
10/09/2009 at 15:28 Max says:
I want to agree with you since I’m a textbook “hardcore gamer”, but at the same time I know (thanks to Valve’s stats) that only 50.2% of the people who own HL2:Episode 2 have actually finished the game – and I find that practically criminal.
10/09/2009 at 15:38 JKjoker says:
i dont get it guys, you know that you DONT have to use the cheat right ? its “optional”, your weakness against the lazy side does not make them any less useful, refusing to have cheats for those that need them because “im weak, i have no will, i would use them” sounds really stupid, if you can resist the need to put your fingers in the power outlet “to see how it feels like” you can resist using cheats
10/09/2009 at 15:42 JuJuCam says:
I think any skip mechanism must include some punishment to avoid abuse or reward slogging through it the traditional way, pride notwithstanding.
Many examples I’d throw in the ring have already been covered, except for Wing Commander – ahead of it’s time in so many ways, it was almost over designed in this respect. A branching mission structure that allowed you to continue on with an appropriate admonition from your Admiral if you happened to hit the eject button in a panic or otherwise fail. And promotions and awards for good play, including all the pomp and ceremony of such occasions. Losing a wingman in this game was devastating – a funeral scene and fighting remaining battles without that extra gunner.
I’d also like to note Chrono Trigger, a game that after a certain point allowed you to challenge the end boss at basically your leisure, and crucially had a number of different endings depending on when you… well… ended it.
On the other hand Roguelikes (including Dwarf Fortress) are remarkably entertaining and popular considering they’re basically fantasy deathsims. I’ve never ever come close to completing a roguelike with any sort of satisfactory ending but the quick-drop into the action nature of the purest of this form makes death and failure a learning experience that helps with future playthroughs. But then again who plays a roguelike for the scintillating storyline?
10/09/2009 at 15:54 medwards says:
Worth noting that games are already ‘easing up.’ I’ve pointed it out before in time-based damage starting with Call of Duty, moving to things like ‘incapacitation’ in DoW II. More visible access to things like difficult settings would be better, but hell half the time we miss it is because we assume that you can’t change it like in the old days.
I think we’re more likely to see things like Left 4 Dead’s director which doesn’t fix hard boss fights, but it does modulate the play experience. And sometimes it throws a tank at you as soon as you leave the saferoom.
Anyways, generally I agree with you. In the meantime most games have been moving towards scenarios where you don’t dead-end yourself into impossible situations (like 1 health just prior to a boss fight… now, just wait 10s!). People who argue it won’t have meaning without challenge don’t realize that the entire intent is to challenge ‘appropriately’ and that some people simply aren’t as good as us.
Lastly, there will still be room for the ‘no-you-must-do-this’ type games. In particular the art-games could benefit from there being more variety in methods of progression in games. Then the progression style can be an artistic decision as well rather something which is just assumed.
10/09/2009 at 16:22 Ryan says:
Many, many xposts to Soylent Robot: you’re talking about the mission in Prototype where you have to protect the Bloodtox rig, yes? Trust me, there”s nothing stopping you from eating a soldier or two for their rocket launchers or disguising yourself and surreptitiously taking the driver’s seat in a tank. If I remember correctly, the military doesn’t even care if you go all monstery in plain sight and start throwing their guys around- the alarm will go up, but they have bigger things to worry about and won’t bother you. Though it’s much easier if you do it in disguise, as that way you can’t get knocked off a tank mid-hijack by a bastard Hunter.
10/09/2009 at 16:25 Ryan says:
And speaking of bits in RPGs that are difficult or impossible without the right character setup: do you have Air Critical Pain yet? If not, you’ll want to pick it up before you complete this mission.
Really.
Trust me on this.
10/09/2009 at 16:35 NoahApples says:
I loved the way Resident Evil 4 handled this: Once you’ve played the game for long enough, you can buy a single-use rocket launcher that can kill any enemy in the game. Including bosses. Of course, there were tricky portions of the game where this was inapplicable, but for the most part I think it works splendidly. You get one “get out of boss fight free” card in a way that is justified and validated within the game. It doesn’t feel like cheating, the plot remains contiguous, and it adds an extra choice into the game (who do I shoot with my rocket launcher?), rather than taking any away.
Also, @Max re: Steam Stats and HL2:Ep2
The ~52% quote is misleading, because it includes people like me who own the Orange Box, but are too bust playing TF2 to have even started playing Episode 2 yet.
10/09/2009 at 16:44 shiggz says:
Not gonna happen anytime soon. For many basement dwelling, mall working, overgrown boys their game-accomplishments are pseudo-life accomplishments. Like having hiked Everest or creating a fulfilling and healthy relationship. Instead their version is beating a game on “insane mode” or finding all 100 blah’s blah’s.
10/09/2009 at 16:46 Chris says:
I think I wouldn’t trust myself with a skip-to-next-level button, because the moment I’d get stuck I’d be extremely tempted to just move on.
For me, it’s the same reason I won’t buy a book of crossword puzzles. If I’m doing a single crossword in a newspaper, I’ll give it my all, working at the clues over and over again until I get as far as I absolutely can. If I have a book of crosswords and I get stuck on one, I’m very likely to just give up on the puzzle altogether, turn the page, and start a new one. By the end of the book, I’ve just got a book full of partially completed puzzles. I just don’t much care for being stuck in one place, going over and over the same ground, I guess, if there’s an option to try something else. I’m sure some gamers would never use that skip-ahead button, but I just couldn’t be trusted with it.
10/09/2009 at 16:46 Eric says:
It’s as if you want games to be like movies: a start-to-finish experience that everybody is guaranteed.
For your Corolla example I would argue that he is much better off sticking with documentaries and film since he does not have the patience and/or skill to persevere.
Now go play a roguelike and man up!
10/09/2009 at 16:54 Vinraith says:
Games are getting easier and easier as it is. I’m fine with cheat codes to get around situations like this, but really the need to “skip ahead” should only be present in the case where game design causes a given section of game to be impossible or feel “cheap” and frustrating. Genuine challenge should always be the goal, and I pity anyone that wants to skirt their way around that.
10/09/2009 at 16:59 kaibren says:
i remember in Driver i played first only with first city open map, because i couldn’t get pass the garage mission, where you had to do all the cool tricks just to start missions. and in Mafia there were mission where you had to race some nasty car, also couldn’t win that any way. finally solved both problems with downloading savegames where these missions were just done. A lot of games could use skip mission.
10/09/2009 at 17:04 Mman says:
Since it’s mentioned several times in this thread, I find developers current obsession with completion statistics ridiculous. It’s one thing if they had some context (and stuff like “what levels did significantly more people stop on?” make far more sensible research material) , but it seems like most are “of started game sessions, how many were completed?”. Treating stuff like “”only” 50% of players finished Episode 2″ as a bad thing is ridiculous; when you factor in people who would never like the game in the first place, people who only played it at a friends house for ten minutes and didn’t get around to purchasing it, people who don’t finish games even if they enjoy them (for whatever reasons) and probably various others, in realistic terms “50%” probably accounts for 90% or more.
I’d agree with people here that stuff like cheats, enhanced difficulty settings and stuff like Nintendo’s “play that part for you” patent thing are a better bet than outright skipping things, since it’s far easy to balance into the game than being able to just skip through things, although that’s not so much of an issue in strictly linear games.
10/09/2009 at 17:07 bigblackjesus says:
Anyone remember the old system of getting a code when you reached a level so if you wanted to continue later you could just plug it in and start back up where you left off? I know we have the ability to save now but if they just included that, problem solved?
10/09/2009 at 17:08 shiggz says:
Also i like the old Onimusha option, where if you died 3 times in a row “easy” mode would open up.
10/09/2009 at 17:25 Baris says:
I agree with you fully John. What you’re talking about actually happened to me recently in the Witcher. There was a part in the game I just couldn’t get past and after 4 tries and looking for a command menu which didn’t exist, I just had to give up unless I wanted to do those 10 hours again.
10/09/2009 at 17:28 bill says:
I wouldn’t want it too easy, cos i know i’d be tempted to click it too soon… and i would have missed all the fun/reward in something like Ninja gaiden.
but i thought the Alone In The Dark style DVD menu was a great idea.
Or games like X-Wing Alliance allowed you to skip 3(?) missions if you failed them.
Or even Dark Forces where you could select the difficulty for each level (but it annoyed me to have those two “easy”s listed in the menu, so i went back and did them again on hard.
But even I managed to complete Metroid Prime, and i suck at that kind of game… ;-)
10/09/2009 at 17:33 Metroid48 says:
I think ‘Splosion Man is an excellent example of this – after dying a lot you can take the way of the coward and skip the problematic section. While you can finish the game through doing this, the game constantly reminds everyone that you cheated by making your time 99:99:99 and by having your character wear a tutu! It’s a great way to do this as it removes some of the pride of beating the game and motivates players to immediately try again.
10/09/2009 at 17:35 antonymous says:
He should have tried Oblivions “difficulty” slider or any other of the certified idiot rated games. Of course with WoW it’s also idiot prime time, but the grind is rather the purpose so there he’d have to buy gold with real money.
And I bet some moronic console maker exec will soon have the idea to sell trainers as addons…
10/09/2009 at 17:59 Rohit says:
Just implement cheat codes.
Because blasting enemies with a BFG9000 with YELLOW EYES is more satisfying than skipping the entire level.
10/09/2009 at 18:02 Clueless says:
I think the main reason (or one of the main reasons) is the explosive popularity of “Achievements” on the Xbox 360 and similar structures elsewhere. These instantly lose their value if you let people skip over parts of the game or use god mode. Sure, clever designs like World of Goo can get around this, but the basic fact is that gaming achievement has become a public badge now, and developers can’t let just anyone get past those achievements without effort without destroying this concept.
10/09/2009 at 18:05 archonsod says:
In order for a skip level button to work, it would force developers to come up with actual decent content/story/widgets in order to make players *want* to play through a level.
It’s like murder mystery novels. Most start when the investigator arrives, because there’s an inherent desire for people to keep reading to find out whodunnit. Writers with rare talent however sometimes take the opposite approach, the book starts with the murder so the player is aware of precisely who the murderer is. The desire to continue reading is driven by the cat and mouse game between the protagonist and antagonist; which tends to be a lot harder to build sufficient suspense to keep people reading.
It’s like the part in Bond movies where the charismatic spy manages to get himself cornered by the villain. We already know he’s going to escape, the compelling part is precisely how he’s going to beat this years improbably death trap.
With a skip button, unless the level can be made compelling enough for the player to want to play it then there is no reason for them to not skip past it. In effect it demands the developer heighten their game; no more dodgy filler content as an excuse to prolong play time, no more bland fedex questing or mob grinding.
10/09/2009 at 18:07 pkt-zer0 says:
“And I bet some moronic console maker exec will soon have the idea to sell trainers as addons…”
Will? Namco has already done that, I think.
10/09/2009 at 18:09 LionsPhil says:
The other advantage of cheat codes being that you don’t miss any narrative. Of course, you need one that matches the type of fail encountered—god mode and allammo won’t help you a damn thing across jumping puzzles. (Noclip/fly usually bypass script triggers, which can either get you stuck again, or again bypass narrative lumps.)
10/09/2009 at 18:15 brog says:
Clueless: Achievements could provide an incentive to actually play through the levels, if they were only earned if you don’t skip. The whole world would be able to tell you’d skipped the middle level if you only have early- and late-game achievements!
10/09/2009 at 18:20 Yghrt says:
Re: “If I bought the game, I should be able to be in godmode / skip to whatever part I want” / “Why don’t you want to let people do what they want ?”
But… You can already do that. It’s called the console, or cheat codes. The option is already there, making it easier and possibly letting a significant part of the playerbase ruining their own experience doesn’t make any sense.
10/09/2009 at 18:26 perilisk says:
Rather than a skip button, why not add an autopilot that lets a cheatingly brilliant AI bot take over the character? It isn’t so much “skipping” as letting someone really awesome play through the hard part while you watch over their shoulder.
Is that similar to what Nintendo was proposing?
10/09/2009 at 18:27 WJonathan says:
I actually remember listening to that show. I think the AceMan was actually talking about Medal of Honor Rising Sun on Xbox, which actually did have a fairly confusing opening level. The correct question he should have asked: “Where’s the button to skip the entire game.” Rising Sun kind of sucked.
10/09/2009 at 18:31 Rid says:
It’s an area where the developers can both improve the experience AND imprint their personal “touches”.
> If it’s a boss fight, most player won’t want to skip it just have an easier time – Why not start by providing visual/audio cues that points to environmental traps you can use to defeat it? Or show some ghost trailing that make it is easier to deduct the attack patterns? And if the player still fails, allow some cannon fodder that attract the attention of the enemy for some time, or some comic relief that both entertains, and make the fight easier, etc..
> If the problem is while fighting common grunts, then you can add a temporal power by showing the character going on “rage” due to continual failures, and to make it fair, trade a bit of his health for added damage power, etc. It’s just a matter of making sure the extra help flows with the “mythos” of the game.
> If it’s an RPG with “tech tree”, then making fights easier or skip whole sections is something that none will want at all, because it’s an indication you have made wrong “choices”.
But what if that’s what you aimed for (for example, took the “seductive/non-lethal” path?)? The game then should be balanced to make sure there are always alternative ways to tackle those tasks.
But can also offer to bring some of your named allies (which usually you have in spades at that point) to fight as well… but with the added risk of dieing.
> Finally, the classic “difficult slider” should be a most.
How many time you have started a new FPS where you are unsure if HARDEST will make the AI behave in a more exciting ways (improving the experience), or just will add more hitpoints, thus dragging the fights?
Overall, I’m more interested on seeing ways to allow the player advance in the 1st try. Because once you reload-revive, you are already cheating because already know what awaits you. And once the 1st experience is passed, is gone for good.
10/09/2009 at 18:33 pilouuuu says:
We need better AI that suits the game difficulty automatically. So if the game realises that there’s some part that you can surpass, then it would automatically make the enemy take less hits, an ally appear and help you, give you more energy, make the enemy more dumb, etc.
I’m so annoyed that after so much time of making graphics better, developers and hardware industry can’t work toward better AI.
But if you really can’t overcome some enemy then maybe some allies should come and take you back to your HQ or something and then you would have the chance to choose another mission, skiping that difficult one.
10/09/2009 at 18:36 EyeMessiah says:
As a teenager I hacked my younger brother’s doom2 executable and changed the cheat codes. I believed I was doing him a good turn because I was preventing him from giving into temptation and “ruining it for himself”.
As an adult I think that this particular rationalisation is one of the most absurd puritanisms I have ever been guilty of.
IMO, people who cheat and skip their way through games weren’t enjoying it in the same way as purists to begin with, so purists needn’t worry about them spoiling it for themselves. Chances are they instead of struggling their way past a tough obstacle and subsequently achieving a state of enlightened purist-fun they would just quit the game and not revisit it, which doesn’t seem like much of an improvement over skipping to me.
10/09/2009 at 18:41 EyeMessiah says:
Also, I strongly agree that Completing games seems less and less relevant somehow. Are there just lots more games now and less games get finished? Is the multiplayer “endgame” where all the best players expend their energy these days, leaving the obtuse SP campaigns unfinished? Was it ever really the be-all?
I spend a lot of time playing games and rarely Complete any, and I find this maximises my funs/hour.
10/09/2009 at 19:07 reaper47 says:
I might have missed something incredibly meaningful not reading the past 200 paragraphs of text, but isn’t that ominous “skip” button called… a cheat? And has existed pretty much since the beginning of gaming as we know it?
Example: “sv_unlockedchapters 15″ for Half-Life 2…
10/09/2009 at 19:11 Radicand says:
I can see the rational for this; if you want to skip ahead in a film or book then you can. My counter-point to this would be that if you did, you wouldn’t really be watching a film or reading a book per se, you’d just be consuming fragments of them which isn’t really the same. Also, distinct from ‘passive’ forms of entertainment, games have rules that govern whether or not you succeed. Thats why they’re called games. Without the effort-reward structure I don’t think they’d be as entertaining.
So, I’m not in favor of letting people just skip ahead whenever they feel like it, but I do think games could do more to help people get past regions where they’re stuck, provided these err on the side of ‘cheaty’ rather than ‘game-ruining’. For example, if you’ve died three times in a row in one level, the game could give you a little health boost for your next try or make the enemies a bit less bad-ass etc.
10/09/2009 at 19:33 Sunjammer says:
Nintendo are adding an option to future games where you can basically just hand the controller off to the game itself and let it autoplay through the tough bit for you.
This is a semantic shift, but i find it more preferable to the notion of just skipping ahead. When i was a kid, me and my friends would regularly pass controllers around when we got stuck.
I suppose the technical problem for me is specifically RPGs. If you’ve gone and fucked up your character to the point where you literally have no possibility of survival, then the whole rest of the game is going to be you just hitting the skip button over and over again
It’s a deeper problem than just skipping ahead to the next level. The more choice the player has, the less sense that functionality makes.
Personally i much prefer the challenge of having to deal with the consequences of my own actions. I wouldn’t be much interested in a skipping feature.
10/09/2009 at 19:35 Web Cole says:
Well, to transfer this to another medium (and I’m not sure this entirely works, but bear with me) what if during a scene in a film, despite all the fancy camera work, the subtle emotional by-play of the actors and all that, what if we had a nice pleasant voice over informing us what was going on.
“She’s in love with him but she can’t tell him, because her father wants her to marry someone better.”
If you take away the challenge of interpretation, it ceases to hold any interest for us.
If you take away the challenge from a game, you remove the value also.
10/09/2009 at 19:37 Bib Fortuna says:
When I watch a movie, and it moves towards a point that I dislike (it happens every time), I ask to myself: where is the wheel to steer it to a better show?
10/09/2009 at 19:48 Buemba says:
Crimson Skies let you skip a mission if you failed it (I think) 3 times. If it didn’t have that I’d never have finished the game.
10/09/2009 at 21:21 Nerd Rage says:
For the RPG example, I’d imagine skipping boss fights or other sections would make the game feel fairly disjointed. Either they stick you with a default choice for whatever option you might have had during that segment, or you skip straight to the moment of choice, read some words, and (unless the game was structured so these things are not irritating to the skip-ahead people) you may have to immediately skip to the next player-decision required whatever, still in the same encounter. For most other genres, however, I expect it would be perfectly acceptable with a skip-ahead feature. Even with something like Half-Life 2, I wouldn’t mind skipping certain levels, *cough* obligatory vehicle sequence *cough*
While scanning the comments I saw someone mention AI that adjusts to you. I’ve been really big on that since the AI director from L4D. Arguably it may not be everything they said it was, but as a concept it’s brilliant. An AI that considers dozens of performance metrics to determine how easily you’re finding the game, and adjusts the difficulty accordingly, in order to provide a more consistent level of challenge. This is something that would be an excellent addition to the RPG genre, as a rule for all games.
If I’m low on health, and the designers intended the upcoming encounter to be very hard, the AI should know that even a moderate resistance from the enemy would be hard for me to get past considering I have 2 HP. They don’t have to send a mini-boss and his 4 elite bodyguards after me, that’s for the guy who breezed through the rest of the level and still has full hp.
10/09/2009 at 21:24 Nerd Rage says:
To finish my last thought, maybe a post or two up by now, it should be noted that some players might be confused if they get to the end with low health one time, and get to the end with high health the next – expecting an easy fight and getting a very hard one instead.
10/09/2009 at 21:31 Earl_of_Josh says:
I would agree that for the most part, including codes that allow you to progress the game could very easily enhance *some* games. The problem comes up with games which progress in a manner where skills you learn in earlier challenges, become the building blocks for later challenges. If you can’t be bothered to learn how to wall jump 3 times, what happens when you reach a later puzzle that makes you wall jump 5 times, WITH SPIKES??? Skip that one too… alright, but at what point do you simply put the game down because some of the challenges are simply impossible without the previously derived skills? I think in a situation like this, it becomes similar to “treating the symptoms” kind of approach. I think some games are all about challenging yourself and increasing your skill level to eventually complete the game. I think a “level skip” button in something like that would essentially be game breaking. It’d be like taking calculus without knowing algebra. You’d end up completely lost, alone and confused wondering why everyone thought calculus was so great crying and sobbing and slobbering over anyone that would listen. Like I was when I took it. But that was just because I’m a bit slow.
Note: My point also the same as other’s point. I think.
10/09/2009 at 21:41 Dominic White says:
I think a lot of the issues with games at the moment can be solved by cleverly gauged difficulty settings. The Metal Gear Solid games spring to mind. On the easiest settings in that series, you’re an invincible superman in a world full of blind, deaf, dumb and crippled enemies. It’s basically Sandbox mode, allowing you do do whatever the hell you please, with almost no chance of dying, even if it’s hilariously dumb.
On the highest setting, the game is far more constrained. Enemies behave like professional soldiers, going out in full-formation searches the moment they think they saw or heard something. You need to mold yourself into how the game ‘should’ be played, as there’s much less freedom now that you’re dealing with a much higher grade of opposition. Most of Kojima games have that level of variation between difficulties, and it changes tons of things, like how much gear you can carry, how aggressive bosses are, enemy equipment and more.
One FANTASTIC idea I heard for difficulty settings is the upcoming Bayonetta (due on consoles) – it’s by the crew who made the original Devil May Cry, and it’s more of that kinda thing. Hyperkinetic ratbastard hard arcade action. Only… they’ve added difficulty settings that go down as far as ‘total non-gamer’.
On the easiest setting, the game is basically controlled by a high-level bot. The player gets DDR-styled timed button prompts on nearby enemies, and hitting them triggers the AI controlling the character to launch into spectacular, elaborate combos that would normally require a ton of effort and precision from the player. While you need the stick to move around between combats, you can play the thing entirely one-handed, with just four buttons.
You still get the full game, and see every fancy move, every cool weapon, every huge boss – you just don’t need to be a gamer to enjoy it. Conversely, on the highest setting, there are no training wheels at all, and enemies are faster, tougher and smarter than normal. Apparently it’s up there with Ninja Gaiden 2′s hardest levels.
That’s so much better than the ‘you do less damage, enemies do more’ that most games settle on.
10/09/2009 at 21:43 Immortal says:
Since I was a kid, I always remember going to web sites to look up cheat codes. Maybe it was a section of the game I couldn’t beat. Or, maybe it was just to destroy everything in God Mode.
I don’t see why games can’t still include cheat codes. I think as a gaming community, we’ve grown more competitive. In fact, most games I’m interested in are developed specifically for competitive play. However, there are more than just competitive consumers in the video game market.
In addition, programming cheat codes into a game could create jobs…or at least web sites that have millions of ads and viruses.
10/09/2009 at 22:26 Azradesh says:
Games on average have been getting easier and easier over the years, these days I think if you’re truly stuck then you just shouldn’t be playing, because you suck.
I mean, go back and look at Star Control 2, or the X-Com games, they are hard. A lot of games these days just give you “magic-super-hide-behind-a-wall-healing.”
10/09/2009 at 22:45 Dominic White says:
Passive healing doesn’t mean the game is easy. Anyone who has tried to beat Call of Duty 4 on the highest difficulty can attest to that. It’s just a simple way of making each fight a self-contained encounter, rather than have the player counting hits taken and relying on quicksaving/quickloading when things turn sour.
10/09/2009 at 23:38 Y3k-Bug says:
Because it would allow players to skip parts of the game that will be important in teaching new game mechanics.
Because it would belittle the work of the designers who put the skipped over parts together.
Because you miss important plot devices, and you would receive new abilities that there would be no explanation for due to you skipping the parts that explained why/how you acquired them, and how to use them.
I think Carolla’s comment is more of a comment on the inaccessibility of many games more than anything else.
10/09/2009 at 23:42 Y3k-Bug says:
Just to make my point clearer: I think Carolla’s comment is pointing at the fact that the game he was playing wasn’t well designed in that section. Or he’s not very experienced with videogames. Either way a skip ahead button is going in completely the wrong direction.
11/09/2009 at 01:28 Dave says:
In response to Azradesh’s comments, I will admit that there are many types of games that I “suck” at, according to the designers, but which I still love to play. The notion that I should just go away and not play games because I don’t “deserve” them is preposterous. Should I, perhaps, confiscate your DVD collection because you lack 20/20 uncorrected vision, or an inability to hear a certain frequency of sound? Of course, that’s ridiculous, but so is your assertion that there should be some minimum bar set to play games – which, after all, are another form of entertainment.
Simply put, when a developer puts a game on the market, they put it up for sale to anyone who has the cash – and, therefore, anyone who purchases the game should be able to play through the entire thing, regardless of their particular skill level. Until there are bright, prominent warnings on all games sold that state “you must be this badass to buy this game,” developers need to operate under the expectation that a wide variety of people will be playing their games, and design accordingly.
More directly on topic, I agree that a simple skip mechanic is probably not the best way to go about solving the problem. A game design that adapts to how you play and changes things accordingly seems like it should be the standard going forward, at least in linear types of games. Plenty of games manage to strike a balance between challenge and frustration for gamers of multiple skill levels, and for those that don’t, it is my opinion that the fault falls not on the skills of the gamer, but on the developers who fail to take into account all the potential buyers for their games.
11/09/2009 at 05:13 Tony M says:
Heres a related issue. I once wrote in a forum that I wished the Dawn of War 2 single player campaign allowed you to savegame anytime during a level. The save-between-levels game design does not suit my lifestyle (husband, father, on-call work). Half the respondents agreed, the other half felt that the ability to savegame mid-level would ‘ruin’ the game because you could just cheat your way through.
11/09/2009 at 05:47 Vinraith says:
@Tony M
Some portable games (Etrian Odyssey 2 on DS comes to mind) allow you to create a save on exit that is deleted when you reload it. That way you can’t just iteratively save/load your way through a level that you aren’t approaching well, but you can still stop whenever life gets in the way and start back up where you were. More games that aren’t designed with a “save anywhere” mentality should have a feature like that.
11/09/2009 at 09:36 TooNu says:
Good question.
11/09/2009 at 11:54 Vae Victus says:
IDDQD
11/09/2009 at 15:10 Flopsy says:
So much seems to depend on the quality of the game design. I remember never getting too frustrated with the original Half-Life 2 because the difficulty curve ramped-up slowly, and although things got tougher towards the end, there was a logic and method usually involved in getting to grips with the bigger, tougher enemies towards the end.
And that’s the thing. Lots of lesser-quality games might rely on cheap tactics: the super crazy-hard boss right at the end of the game after the build-up has been so straightforward, or a boss that appears mid-way through the game that upsets the balance of the game play thus far and kind of spoils what you’ve been enjoying.
I thought Bioshock also did a good job with making opponents tougher, but never throwing the crazy fifty-times your size super boss at you in the “final battle that will save the world” or some such crap.
So, it all comes down to design and story. If they do a good job and grab your attention, I’m more likely to seek ways of getting past a tough spot, but if the game seems to be merely playing cheap tricks on me or not holding my interest much, I’m more likely to just try and ‘cheat’ my way past.
Thinking of recent games, even Call of Jaurez: Bound in Blood just threw the one-on-one duels at you, even after some tough fire-fights, and that was kind of neat… at least there wasn’t some absurd 50-story hombre you had to kill that emerged out of a giant cactus to ‘win’ the game. Didn’t think the game was that special, but appreciated it didn’t throw a crazy powerful Wolfenstein-type boss on me.
11/09/2009 at 16:37 Clippit says:
Just like the web was never designed to handle business transactions, video games as a medium were never intended (originally) to be anything other than an amusement in the form of a linear challenge.
The fact that they’ve now got compelling stories attached, or offer an “immersive” experience and that this usually works (to some degree) is a product of compromise (e.g. Dreamfall gets this slightly wrong) and bending the rules a bit (e.g. eBay – it’s pretty dodgy really, but somehow it works).
I understand what John is getting at, but for me, not being able to skip bits is intrinsic to the medium. It doesn’t follow that because the game is supposed to be enjoyable, you should be able to skip bits you don’t like. The game is a test. It’s an obstacle course, it doesn’t make sense if you can bypass bits. You have to “earn” your passage through the story, or your experience of the game world. There are workarounds – like ‘non-linear’ design, where there may be a few ways to do things – but this doesn’t mean there has to be a “bypass” option in every case.
I think the important thing, for a sophisticated game, is to get the balance right. Part of creating a good player experience is designing challenges that aren’t too hard, but aren’t so easy that the player feels they are being patronisingly made to “go through the motions”. Enough challenge and context must be provided to give the player the impression that 1) what they just did wasn’t trivial, and 2) it was a reasonable thing to do (it made sense in the context).
A well balanced game shouldn’t feel like a test, it should feel like playing an active role in a story, or some sort of open-ended ‘experience’ (i’m thinking about GTA here). John’s right though; no matter how good the balancing is, there’ll still be some sense of exclusivity. Certain people (i.e. your mum) will not be able to take part, won’t satisfy the “minimum requirements”. For example, my mum can’t play Portal, the whole first-person thing is just too foreign to her, although i’m sure she’d get something out of it if she could.
This brings me back to my main point again: it’s just something intrinsic to the medium. Books and films have certain requirements too; you have to be able to read to engage with a book, and tiny children won’t understand what’s going on in an adult film.
(there’s my grand theory, what do you think?)
11/09/2009 at 17:00 Melf_Himself says:
An auto-skip feature means that you didn’t learn whatever lesson the game was trying to teach you. The subsequent lessons will be harder still/take the lesson further, so you’ll then have to skip everything after that too.
There IS a skip button. It’s called, throw the game in the bin.
11/09/2009 at 18:54 undead dolphin hacker says:
I fun I get out of playing games comes from overcoming the challenges they put in front of me.
A skip button breaks the immersion produced by the illusion that these challenges matter.
When the immersion goes away, you blink and realize you’re a 20-40 year old man sitting alone in front of a glowing screen.
11/09/2009 at 18:55 undead dolphin hacker says:
The* fun. Blody lack of edit.
11/09/2009 at 18:58 Nick says:
Yeah, but noone is forcing you to press it. S’why I liked it when games had cheat codes, I used them a lot when younger, as I got older I stopped and took to enjoying the challenges of the game, but its not for me to dictate my preferential playstyle on others, otherwise we’d all be playing lots of Baldur’s Gate 2-esque games.
11/09/2009 at 19:48 Jake says:
In a word: Agreed.
12/09/2009 at 01:08 Spacegirl says:
I think the Appropriate Internet Response to this whole discussion is :
L2P
12/09/2009 at 22:39 geoff says:
totally agree with this.
13/09/2009 at 03:01 Wooly says:
Dracko says:
“Solution: Better designed games.”
^This. And cheats.
13/09/2009 at 15:07 Hodge says:
Resisting the urge to go all ranty-ranty, I will just say that I too agree with John.
13/09/2009 at 17:42 UK_John says:
With no pressure coming from gamers or the media, I don;t know why we are not surprised! Have you ever play Oblivion, for example, and wondered why you have to move the cursor out of the way, because it doesn’t automatically disappear until the conversation is over, to allow for better immersion? What about Empire Total War, to name but one of many, where you have to move the cursor out of the way when a movie plays! If games companies and game reviewers don;t even bother with THAT, how can we expect all the rest?!
13/09/2009 at 17:42 UK_John says:
With no pressure coming from gamers or the media, I don;t know why we are not surprised! Have you ever play Oblivion, for example, and wondered why you have to move the cursor out of the way, because it doesn’t automatically disappear until the conversation is over, to allow for better immersion? What about Empire Total War, to name but one of many, where you have to move the cursor out of the way when a movie plays! If games companies and game reviewers don;t even bother with THAT, how can we expect all the rest?!
16/09/2009 at 12:33 Katastrophe66 says:
I will admit, I didn’t read all the other comments first…
I’ve wanted a similar feature in World of Warcraft for a while now. I don’t have the time or schedule to commit to “raids,” but I would still like to see all the content. I really think that raids and dungeons should have a “visitor” feature unlocked at some point (I dunno, like six months later/next major patch/next expansion) that allows someone who meets the level requirement to simply wander around inside. No mobs would be able to be activated or fought but all doors would be open. This would let the casual gamer, such as myself, to experience the whole game that I paid for. I mean, I bought the silly thing just like everyone else, and I pay the same subscription fee, so why must these features always be blocked?
(Note: I do know once you hit, say, 80 you can go into 60 dungeons with little fear of aggroing everything, but if there are guarded doors or event-triggered doors you still can’t see all of them.)
16/09/2009 at 16:05 atr says:
Nintendo is including this feature in the upcoming New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. They call it “demo play”: