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But often times, that’s desirable. Not everyone sits down with a game to be thoroughly challenged, and even with the difficulty dynamically adjusting to you, there are often other ways to further tune it up. They don’t make failure impossible, but they try to find that sweet spot for a flow state, which is going to be incredibly difficult to find with unchanging difficulty modes. If you didn’t notice, games used to have astonishingly low completion rates back when they did have unchanging difficulty modes.
It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.
Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.
I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.
Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.
Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.
And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.
Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.
But often times, that’s desirable. Not everyone sits down with a game to be thoroughly challenged, and even with the difficulty dynamically adjusting to you, there are often other ways to further tune it up. They don’t make failure impossible, but they try to find that sweet spot for a flow state, which is going to be incredibly difficult to find with unchanging difficulty modes. If you didn’t notice, games used to have astonishingly low completion rates back when they did have unchanging difficulty modes.
It’s not desirable. Building a game that enables people to continually make actual progress is desirable. Allowing people to modularly adjust difficulty if they feel a game is too difficult is desirable.
Removing feedback to make it significantly harder to get better at a game is not desirable. You cannot get better if a game is constantly lying to you about what is good and what is bad. Rubber banding isn’t just “fake progress to get by an encounter”. It actively prevents you from being able to learn because it gives you unreliable mixed signals. It’s fundamentally broken and being forced to rely on it means your actual game design is fundamentally broken.
I think you’re overstating the importance of games as a platform for skill development as opposed to a platform for, you know, having fun. The fact is that the vast majority of players play any game on one of its lowest difficulty settings.
Rubber banding is made for the core of the game’s audience and challenge-seekers are just not large enough to be that core. Some of those rubber banding mechanics can and are disabled at higher difficulty settings. Others are needed at higher difficulty because the AI can’t compete and the investment in dev time to improve the AI just isn’t worth it because, again, very few people actually play the game at those difficulties.
It’s not possible for a game to be fun without development of skill over time.
That’s the core concept of what a game is: forcing you to make ambiguous decisions in an uncertain environment.
Hard disagree. There’s plenty of games that are little more than dressed up choose your own adventure stories. Plenty that are meant for chill and relaxing gameplay. Plenty that do little more than guide you through horror scenes. And so on.
And even beyond that, most people don’t even play a game long enough to have any real “skill development over time.” I read from the Civ7 director recently that if you’ve ever finished a game of Civ you’re literally in a minority of the player base. And that tracks with what I’ve heard about other games as well.
Most players of any given game never finish it. Most of those quit at the first sign of frustration and most are on the easiest game difficulties. This would indicate to me that the majority’s conception of “fun” has little to no relation to skill development in the game. They’re there for the moment to moment experiences. Rubber band mechanics are there to evoke those fun experiences more often in the majority of the player base.