>>751251836
I have gotten stuck in games and I didn't know I have to follow the yellow paint

>>751251836
i'm still convinced it's almost entirely because they rely on streamers for marketing and 90% of the time streamers aren't looking at the game when it tries to explain something

>>751251836
Making DSP their target player has fucking ruined games.

What I don't understand is why these smoothbrains who can't beat games should even be a development consideration in the first place. Just let devs make the game they want to make. And if you can't beat it, then get better? Practice?

Games could be hard as shit in the 80s and 90s but it didn't prevent them from being great games. Some of the best games of all time, in some cases. Nobody was demanding they all be sanded down. Beating them, overcoming the challenge, was part of the fun.

What changed?

>>751251971
Most gamers under 35 aren't giving the game their full attention either, they're watching a streamer, netflix, socials, ect while playing.

>>751251992
they were hard as shit because the game would take 30 minutes if it had a fair difficulty
devs didn't want players to feel ripped off for paying full price for 30 minutes of content

>>751251992
Streamers

>>751251954
>one tester continued to turn right here for half an hour
Bullshit. Nobody is that fucking dumb. Pond life is more intelligent than that. Rats in mazes learn not to take wrong turns after one or two failed attempts.

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>>751251836
I'm going to sound harsh but he's mostly right, have you ever done focus testing? You see some baffling shit I'll tell you, even from gamers and not just nongamers. And this has being the case for years.
When it's smaller developers they don't have has much issues, and some also tries to do it more subtly, but when it comes to big production, they are forced to think about the "common mass".

>>751251992
Back then being unable to beat a game was part of the deal. Nowadays being unable to beat a game is considered extremely bad game design.

>>751251992
Because they won't get better, they just won't buy it. And there's far more morons who suck at games out there than not so if you're a money-oriented person, you target those morons first by making the game hold your hand over a tiny handful of veterans who will complain about it but ultimately buy it anyway.

>>751251992
The smoothbrains are more likely to impulse buy MTX, DLC and shit. So the publishers want them over any functional human

>>751251992
It must mean these useless mongs have lots of money which just begs more questions

>>751252071
What if this is like one of those games where if you walk around the same hallways 4 times it turns into a different hallway on the fifth? Ever consider that??? Like PT did it.

>>751251836
>cater to retards
>make retarded product

>>751251836
There's no justification for this in the age of full walkthroughs appearing online within hours of a game's release. If a player gets stuck, they can just look up the solution.

>>751252071
>Nobody is that fucking dumb
watch lets players try to play, people are that dumb... they're even dumber

>>751251836
PC gaming died when console shitters became main demographic

>>751251992
Because we're using Idiocracy as a how-to guide. Morons hate being mocked for being morons so we have to create a world where being a moron is good and normal and acceptable, and being smart gets you burned at the stake, so no one ever has to feel bad about being stupid again. Wave bye-bye to all of humanity's potential, we're flushing it all down the toilet to appease the worst of us.

>>751251954
I literally did this in Mt Moon but I was also literally 9 years old.

He is not wrong in the slightest. 'People' (ESPECIALLY Am*ricans) are getting profoundly dumber at an exponential rate, completely lacking basic problem solving, spatial awareness, reading comprehension, and numerous other baseline cognitive functions that functional human beings are supposed to have by the age of 5.

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>>751251992
>devs have psyopped themselves into believing making a game requires hiring thousands of people and spending millions of $$$ on the hottest graphics and the latest horse genitalia physics technology
>game must recoup said millions of $$$
>only way to recoup is to reach the widest audience possible
>only way to reach the widest audience possible is to make it accessible to the lowest common denominator
>only way to make it accessible to the lowest common denominator is to remove anything unique, interesting or challenging

>>751251971
which is funny cause most streamers are dogshit already and are the ones that need to be paying attention to this stuff but they're too busy glorking off some chatter that donated 5 gift subs

>>751251836
>Make easy games to attract more people
>They don't learn how to git gud
>You have to dumb the games even more now because the new cohort never got to play anything even resembling tough

>>751251836
>>751251954
Maybe stop hiring morons to playtest?

He's not wrong tho.

Valve hired playtesters and they were infamously retarded

>Why don't devs playtest then
Then you run into the OPPOSITE problem the devs playing so well and they ship it which leads into the game being too hard for the average normalfag because the game was never properly scaled for them so they get frustrated and quit

>>751251836
>Indiana Jones game
Let's face the facts. Phones nowadays can play God of War on emulators. It's more real gaming today than "that one memed FPS with dlc and yellow paint this year that nobody can afford anyway". Fact is only 5 people play modern games, that's not real gaming. Mobile is real gaming.Minecraft? That's gaming. Phones? It's gaming.
Musk himself, the Man, the Myth, the Legend, plays Polytopia. Polytopia is NOT gacha. The genre is multiplayer.
When Polytopia is ported to PC does it become a "real game" because it's not a gacha on mobile? Makes no sense.

>>751252351
Yes, that's all part of the plan. The end goal is reducing the entire human race to non-sapient cattle. Docile, placid cattle. Then humanity's potential will be permanently destroyed. We will have no need for art or science or even entertainment. We will simply exist as mindless things.

>>751251992
Less people able to consume the product = less money
And (((Shareholders))) really don't like it when they make less money
LINE
MUST
GO
UP
FOREVER

>>751252071
Go search youtube for "DSP plays [game title]"

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>>751251836
This doesn't offend me because I know I don't buy video games. He's not talking about me.

Also millennial game devs all suck, their games wouldn't be good even without yellow paint.

>>751251836
in other words they have shitty level designers. very common in games these days. dark souls 2 map layout makes zero sense the more you dig into it.

The games offer virtually no information outside of highlights and yellow paint regarding the possible path you may take. On a technical level even the light works against it, and that's been a problem ever since dynamic lighting became a thing.

This is the exact same problem rpgs suffer from when it comes to quest markers and gps.
>escort me to my gay husband. here i've marked the location on your map

And worst of all, after some time the player base gets trained to rely on this stuff, so even if the game is designed properly most people wouldn't be able to deal with it because they never had to.

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>>751251954
>coomer

>>751251836
>[BREAKING NEWS] Confirmed by scientists: the sky is blue.
Holy fucking shit this is HUGE.

>>751251992
Demographics

>>751252416
south east asian hands typed this post
phone slop will never be real gaming

>>751251836
No shit, imagine what one's lot in life has to be in order to be a playtester. Hell, you actively wouldn't even want people who are good at games doing that, you want someone who represents how the lowest common denominator would think. That job basically equates to "professional idiot".

>>751252480
I remember seeing that he managed to die in the fucking BEGINNING of the Wolverine tutorial. As the OP pic mentions, that game was explicitly designed to be as DSP-proof as possible; but the nanosecond he was given control, he managed to wander out of bounds and got blown up.

>>751251992
It's easier to get a dumbass to part with their money. AAA has shifted over the last 15 years to be less a high quality experience that pushes the medium and more a quick and dirty product to be consumed by as many suckers as possible.

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>>751252071
Anon, it was a redditor.

>>751252409
When a game needs to sell 10,000,000 copies to make it money back a portion of those 10,000,000 will statistically be morons, and those morons can leave negative reviews on your steam page too, if every moron who played your game left thinking the game was the problem you'd be at overwhelmingly negative faster than if you sold literal malware, so you want those morons leaving the game thinking they had a good time too. The thing a lot of games do now is to fake the stakes, Cyberpunk 2077 did this, there is no real punishment for failure for 99% of the quests if you fuck things up and act like a retard the game just keeps going as if you didn't fuck everything up like a retard, but the non-retard never sees this because they didn't fuck everything up like a retard, and the retards who do see it are too stupid to realize they're being treated like a baby and might even think it was a scripted event that everyone sees.

>>751252694
>player decides to test game boundaries, "Can I go this way?"
>gets immediately punished for it
>somehow this is being a bad player

>>751251992
This has been going on for 20+ years and every time devs made their game dumber and more casual they were more handsomely rewarded

>>751251954
>>751251836
I blame movie games like uncharted and last of us for this shit.

>>751251836
>too stupid to understand that the true complaint is that the means that they use to guide players through the game is immersion-breaking
>too lazy and/or stupid to design around not having yellow paint (you can't blame a lack of time or budget; only a lack of talent and understanding of the player's perspective)
>confirms that one of the problems is that the structure of western AAA is bloated and retarded (teams don't even know what other teams or doing, much less working as a single unit)
>confirms that he's ideologically aligned with the idea of everything being deigned around the least competent
>presumes that when players are given a choice between having to consult a guide a couple of times and the game being made for retards, gamers will choose the latter
This is someone who's career needs to be done when western AAA finishes collapsing.

>>751251992
Normies.

Normies fucking ruin every hobby

>>751251971
Because those streamers are morons just like their viewers

>Make yellow paint a toggle under Accessibility Options
>Call it a day

And yet I'm always the bad guy for suggesting this easy fix

>>751251836
Then let us turn it off. It's not that hard.

>>751251992
Money. Investors and executives want more money.

>>751251986
Become indie, make games for your niche, be doomed to live off low income

>>751252046
No one is watching a stream while playing a video-game, retard

>>751251836
Ah look, it's today's "another bourgeois prima donna insults his patrons and opts out of recieving their disposable income" episode.
Remind me again why I should care what he thinks, please?

Just have a easy mode with all the retarded shit turned on

>>751251992
Because commercial success is more important to them than the quality of the game.
Every person that 'quits' or 'gives up' and leaves a negative review is a barrier to that commercial success that must be removed.
That's why every group is focus tested except the one that they assume will buy anyway (and, historically, they were almost almost always right about those people until recently).
The mythical 'wider audience' was real, provably so, but it was ephemeral and fleeting.
Don't care, made money.

>>751252937
You people can't blame everything on these supposed "executives". The devs should be able to guide players without lines, paint or outright having the character say everything.

>>751252905
>introduce an NPC at the start of the game who is the guy who paints yellow lines everywhere
>if you kill him then no yellow lines show up

>>751251954
>make something kind of mazelike (is one right turn even a maze?)
>it kinda works
>NOOOOOOOOOO WHY DID THIS HAPPEN
Yeah people are retarded, but the reaction here by the devs to undermine themselves for the sake of retards is a big part of the problem.

>>751253124
I will now play your game.

>>751252826
'Whose' is the possessive of 'who', 'tard.

>>751253050
>western AAA game
>about a million copies sold
>"commercial success"
>"made money"
LMAO

>>751253024
You're not thinking like a tard - they want to play on normal/hard and have it be easy

>>751253225
Until relatively recently, yes. It was uncommon and an extreme outlier not to. We remember the outliers for a reason. Usually a plethora of compounding issues.

This shit always comes down to either A: >we're too incompetent to make our game design comprehensible so it's YOUR fault we slapped yellow paint on all the stuff you would otherwise just have to know you're supposed to be paying attention to because we didn't do anything to organically draw the player to it or properly tutorialize it to teach the player that's what they need to be looking for
Or B: >our publishers demand that even the absolute dumbest, bottom of the barrel, mouthbreathing, sub-vertebrate intellect level pond scum be able to beat the game, anyone at all even a medical vegetable on life support in a hospital failing to complete a """""""challenge"""""" is unacceptable according to some shareholders who have never and will never play a game
And as always under capitalism, it's the consumer's fault for complaining about it

>>751251992
You deeply misunderstand.

1 - Playtester is dropped into game section without context (poor methodology)
2 - Playtester misunderstands basic information or controls due to lack of context and gives very negative feedback
3 - Management looks at feedback and demands quick fix for "this part being too hard" (bad management)
4 - Devs know full well that with context the player will have no problem and will have been tutorialized, but not being fired is more important than arguing with management
5 - Cheapest solution: yellow paint. Playtester doesn't get lost, Manager is off the team's back, minimum time and money lost fixing a problem that didn't exist

>>751253191
Alternatively:
>yellow paint guy shows up throughout the game if you have the option enabled, with funny comments about every area you meet him in and he rewards you with a rare item the last time as thanks for letting him do his job
>if you have it disabled he doesn't show up until near the end of the game and is pissed off at you for putting him out of a job and he turns out to be the game's superboss

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>>751252071
>Nobody is that fucking dumb.

>>751253125
>undermine themselves
They aren't. WoW is EQ2 clone but made for blackest gorilla niggers. You can easily guess that WoW was much more successful than EQ2.
In the end retards are end goal in industry for very long time because majority of players are retards, like it or not.

>>751252304
Mt moon is an actual, multi floor maze though.

>>751251836
>>751251954
not being able to contort my perspective to your adventure game brained "logic" doesn't make me a moron you stupid bitches. yellow paint is used because moth level designers are imbeciles who can't guide the player down a set path naturally

Hm I wonder if the gamer demographics also changed to accompany the changing Western countries' demographics.

We should investigate this.

>>751251836
The problem is taking playtesters seriously.
A playtester who can't get the hang of basic mechanics isn't going to buy a damn shit, and if they do buy a game, it'll be on a whim (and they won't even play the game long enough to want to ask for a refund because they got stuck somewhere).
Playtesters should be good players, so they can find bugs, exploits, and stuff like that. Not morons who represent a public that doesn't buy games...
I can't wait for this whole industry to collapse, leaving only transvestites, aurists, retards, and faggots making games with no method to their madness.

Speaking of DSP has he even ever tackled the original Tomb Raider games? I can't even imagine

>>751252751
Honestly he should be executed

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This is why you make sure your game has a proper difficulty curve, have retards buy the game then after 5 hours of gameplay significantly ramp up the difficulty, by the time the sequel comes out the retards will have forgotten they got stuck in the first game years ago and buy the sequel anyway.

>>751253648
Oh it's already collapsing in the West, it's the second crash even

>>751251836
This is why I have very little sympathy for when gamers complain that the devs aren't listening to them

>>751251836
>>751251954
there needs to be an iq test requirement for being a game tester, i am not saying you have to be a 200 iq genius to do it, but having someone that is at the very least around 100 iq would be alright, and i don't really care if retards don't enjoy games anymore, maybe they shouldn't

>>751252190
if i have to keep fucking looking up solutions because there's a crate with a winch i need to shoot that is outside my fox from every angle then i will just stop playing your game
>>751252351
>problem solving is contorting your perspective to that of a retard who is inventing puzzle solutions involving game mechanics you've never seen before because he's a fucking retard
l o l
>>751252826
he's a swede
>>751253198
whose cares
>>751253648
uhhhhh AAA videogames are supposed to be about combat, not puzzles designed by a retard who thinks everything should be myst

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>>751251992
>What changed?
Capitalism/corporate greed.
Games went from being a hobby by and for nerds to a billion dollar industry because capitalists saw an untapped market and decided to shit up everything in the pursuit of mammon.
The "fucking retards who thinks calling themselves gamers constitutes having a personality" demographic is bigger than the actual gamer demographic by an order of magnitudes. If you can rope in 2 fucking retards for every gamer that wants nothing to do with your slop then you've still made more profit than a real game would generate.
Americans will defend this as a good thing.

>>751252751
>it's somehow actuslly a redditor's fault
God I hate them

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>>751252751
>A literal "thank for the gold" cheese in the username redditor

>>751253678
You didn't read? It's not about game difficulty but game design as a whole.

>>751251971
One of the most frustrating things I’ve seen in gaming discourse is “if you have to explain it to me it’s bad design” I think it started with that Egoraptor Megaman X video and I’ve seen the sentiment echoed a lot for a decade or more. It’s not just people not paying attention it’s that people have fucking moralized the idea of being directly taught how to play as wrong so now the ENTIRE GAME has to be “subtly teaching the player to play”

>>751253363
In the 00s, it made money because graphics hype was at its peak and you had to dumb things down for investors who don't play games/hire their idiots in order to get the budget for graphics. That wasn't just a normie thing, BTW.
The 10s were the decade of throwing goodwill into the furnace to burn as fuel, which is what's given us the 20s

As graphics hype wears away and alternatives that meet player's expectations in terms of production quality become available, gamers choose the alternatives because people who like videogames and are thus likely to buy them routinely don't like theme park ride design philosophy. Ironically, the hyper-casual who likes the theme park ride design is the one who's most likely to only buy Call of Duty and his sportsball game of choice.

>>751251992
They shouldn't be taken into account.
What's happening is that the internal culture of big corporations is pure mysticism and pseudoscience. These companies are convinced that making games that don't frustrate retards is absolutely essential to selling games to as many people as possible, which isn't true. You don't need anything more than From Software's games to understand this.

By the way, things are so bad that you see that classic example of Valve ruining level design in an attempt to cater to a woman with a low IQ who doesn't like games and will never buy a video game in her life (in fact, she herself later said on Reddit that games aren't her thing), as if that were an example of GOOD GAME DESIGN. It's complete madness.
It would be like a writer fucking with his writing, trying to make his book accessible to illiterate people, and people still praising his efforts instead of denouncing the disservice he's doing to literature.

>>751251836
>When did this happen?
Skyrim, easily

>>751251836
Their playtesters must've been some of those "new Europeans" I've heard about.

>>751251954
Dishonored did this fine though. Having in-universe hints that feel reasonable within the world of the game is not a problem and not something that I have seen people complaining about in any appreciable number. In the party mission you have various characters talk about sneaking upstairs or asking you to abduct the lady and if you accept they tell you to sneak upstairs. There isn't an 'assassin vision' mode that shows you a glowing line to upstairs nor are there conspicuously colored boxes/crates that form steps to a second floor balcony with a hole in the banister.

>>751254173
>In the party mission you have various characters talk about sneaking upstairs or asking you to abduct the lady and if you accept they tell you to sneak upstairs
You don't have to go upstairs though, there is no reason to, you literally only have to talk to 2 NPCs, who are right in your path from the moment you cross the front door, and they tell you who your target is and you can just talk to her to get her to come down. There was a great mission in this, and retarded playtesters ruined it all by refusing to interact with the game. Anyone can finish the mansion section in less than 2 minutes.

>>751253998
>now the ENTIRE GAME has to be “subtly teaching the player to play”
That's what Dragon Quest Builders 2 is like. The game is 60 hours long, and it's one big tutorial where you have to follow EXACTLY what the game tells you, to the point where you have to place the blocks exactly where the game tells you to, throughout the ENTIRE campaign.
It's crazy that the developers don't trust the players, even when it's a game inspired by Minecraft, which is based on the "do whatever you want" principle.

>>751251836
We already know that. You don't have to design the game for retards, it's your choice.

>>751253648
You're confusing impressions-gathering playtesting with QA

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the most influential gamer to ever walk the earth
kneel and donate

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>>751252434
yeah goy, keep blaming the shareholder boogieman

>>751254016
Graphics is only one facet of the equation. It is the primary driver of budget inflation, inflation which was justified and later expanded massively by the provable existence of this ephemeral and fleeting 'wider audience'.
But it was ephemeral and it was fleeting and chasing it required taking a jackhammer to the foundations that everything was built on over the years.
That space in late 00s and early 10s is when the 'commercial viability' of the 'wider audience' became the primary driver and motivation for large parts of the industry. So they started compromising and filing things down to entice them. Leading us to where we are.

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I used to work making advergames. I was genuinely impressed by how retarded some people can be.
one tester could not find the B button.
then our boss made us map every single button in the controller to the same action.

anyways I'm glad I don't do that anymore

>>751251954
Lmao who are they grabbing for these tests? Seriously? I remember miyamoto made a change to a game cause his own kid was retarded playing it and was actually annoyed by how dumb they were. But back then most kids still figured shit out

>>751254360
Where does it say that you originally had to go upstairs to beat the level?

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>>751252071
>Nobody is that dumb

Does it really matter? Zoomers play games only after some eceleb has already fed them the meta solution and I kinda doubt the younger kids are any better.

>>751255012
Fun Fact:
cheap focus groups/focus testing tends to attract the elderly, the disabled, and the mentally ill.

Someone should make a game where the game tries to kill you or get you stuck/lost with hints, yellow paint, guideposts etc. and the player has to figure out that they have to ignore the game systems to actually progress.

Miyazaki has shown that you can still just do whatever you want without giving a shit about stupid players. Now people will say summoning etc in ER, but look at Dark Souls and Sekiro. Dark Souls is one of the most acclaimed games of all time and within the first 30 minutes you can just die to skeletons and give up. The real impetus is on the design team to just ignore retarded playtesters.

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>>751255657
the tester was sent by the company paying us to make the game, it was a 35ish yr old guy.
the most retarded were always people like that sent by the company, they would grab some random manager and send them over.

there was a lady that didn't understand that things look bigger when they get closer to your eyes.
it really feels terrible when some retard like that is a manager and you know they are getting paid more than you to just be a retard and annoy everyone. I'm glad I quit.

The sheer number of souls I've seen filtered by half-life's long jump tells me I shouldn't blame developers for retard proofing their games. It is a lost battle, yes, but still a noble one.

>>751252071
>Bullshit. Nobody is that fucking dumb. Pond life is more intelligent than that. Rats in mazes learn not to take wrong turns after one or two failed attempts.
Pond scum is more intelligent than the average conservative and there are quite a few of those about.

>>751256003
>it really feels terrible when some retard like that is a manager and you know they are getting paid more than you to just be a retard and annoy everyone
For a bit my job was trying to scope software projects with managers from all kinds of companies.
It was like herding cats if those cats lacked object permanence.
They really seemed to think the world ran on magic and vibes.

>>751256314
Ah yes, because reddit is known for its conservatives >>751252751

You dumb nigger retard, games are being made for average joes, not your political strawmen, and average joes don't like getting confused and lost, they can only accept challenge as a part of combat enounters. And so yellow paint is a nessessity for this kind of customer which is a majority.

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hes understating it, i don't think /v/ knows how bad its gotten
i think games from 2026 on have to be designed with no text in mind, because players cannot read anymore

>>751256124
The crouch jump is a shit mechanic that should never have existed and that's the reason it's been extinct for 20 years. Yes, tuck your knees up inside your chin in order to scale this 2ft obstacle, that makes sense.

Why don't they just find non retarded playtesters

>>751251992
theyre like 70% of the audience
this isnt a small minority of gamurz, this is the average, they just wait for a popup on screen to tell them what to click and press, no thought process required

>>751252416
mobile games are the asian equivalent of AAA slop. both target the lowest common denominator

>>751256756
Because then that won't give you a representative sample of the kinds of people they want to sell AAA games to.

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>>751251954
>they wouldn't go upstairs because a guard told them not to

>>751251836
Morons existing is not a valid excuse to make a game for them. You should always make products for average to high IQ people and treat morons like they don't exist.

>>751251836
browns are the problem. you cant have even simple corridor rpg without handholding or basic adventure game with simple puzzles because browns are medical definition of retarded ON AVERAGE. any nog you speak to is literally retarded. and the reason they put messages like dont eat the box on products is because we have to babysit these "people". video games are designed to take welfare money from them and the games are designed to babysit them for hours in hopes they dont do anything retarded in public. thats why they are lead paint chip tier simple.

DSP won, every game is now made with him in mind

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MANY SUCH CASES

>>751254797
you have to, it's written by law in Dodge vs Ford

>>751257240
>I know for a fact there are people with as few brain cells as me!
The sad part is he's right.

>>751256657
I'll take it over press x to watch a 2 second animation of some guy grunting.

>>751252979
you underestimate how absolutely fucked the average zoomer's attention span is

>>751257240
>Retard was a Redditor all along
Checks out.

>>751257501
everyone across all ages are fucked in the head with 0 attention span now. the issue is way beyond gen Z

>>751256962
You can literally just walk behind the guard and up the stairs with no tricks or powers or timing required, just do it, and those subhumans didn't even try. And this is in a game where you can teleport, stop time or possess people and creatures, all of which are obvious solutions to pass any guard, and you've been playing for a good 5 hours at least at that point in the game.

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Like 70% of people that buy games only play up to the end of the early levels if that and then only a few of those players bother finishing the game at all and then even less of those people replay it or replay it on a higher difficulty.
What's the point in spending millions on the budget and decades developing it if they don't even see past the tutorial?

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>>751251836
It's amazing how Dead Space solved the problem in 2008 without compromising the believability of the world or the art style. It's amazing how Mirror's Edge also had a solution that fit better. So many other games found better ways, whether it was non-diegetic sparkles, or more subtle diegetic markers. All were better than obnoxiously obtrusive fart trails, sparkle trails, or alien jizz splattered all over the environment.

Players didn't get dumber, but developers sure as hell did.

>>751258136
and EA forced the devs to turn DS into more dudebroslop to increase sales and now the franchise is dead

The last game I 100%d was Void Stranger.
Oddly that game was great, respected the end user, and had zero yellow paint.

>>751252071
Have you ever seen women play metroidvanias?

>DSP is the model gamer for whom devs have to balance their game around
Does anyone have the picture from like a GDC panel where the devs for some game actually showed a picture of DSP as the example of 'lowest common denominator' that they have to dumb down for?

>>751251954
>Both issues were solved cleverly and intuitively in a way another player wouldn't find obnoxious
Wow. Crazy, crazy stuff here

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>>751251836
He is saying that players are morons, but he's basically also saying that devs are morons and that it takes an incredible amount of effort to NOT take the easy way out and put yellow paint everywhere.

>It requires buy-in from all parts of development, and a trust that the design team knows what they're doing and can solve these issues in other ways. I'd argue that the bigger the team, the harder this becomes.

He's making the argument that devs are to blame for yellow paint, because players getting lost is fundamentally a design problem and that can be solved in ways other than yellow paint and quest markers.

>>751258925
Bratty ghost

>We completely failed at game design and have so little respect for the player we will not offer the option to opt out
I knew, but it's refreshing to see it said outright

>>751257290
>Dodge vs Ford boogeyman
lol

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Silent Hill Townfall has an option to turn off the hints which I think really helped with making the puzzles more interesting. Normally in games the protagonist would speak out loud to hint you towards what to do, but in Townfall he just shuts the fuck up when the hints are turned off. More devs should just ask if you want hints/guidance or not for puzzles and progression pathways before starting the playthrough.

>>751251992
>Just let devs make the game they want to make.
Xbox did that the last 10 years and the result was nothing but horse shit.

>>751258925
>>751258925
Rare colosseum meme. Wonder if this is why every zoomer hates it, because it was too hard for them. Thread is pretty funny too because part of the reason why people dislike green was because he was a dick. So gf in turn has feminized the entire series

>>751254608
I watched a rather long, insanely well researched video dissecting and proving without a shadow of doubt how DSP cheated at Demon's Souls. Pretty funny how much effort went into it.

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>>751259735
>Game: Would you like to turn on hints?
>Player: Hints? I'm not a baby, I can do this on my own!
>Player can't actually do it on his own
>Player: WHAT THE FUCK THIS GAME IS ASS I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!!!
>Game: Would you like to turn on hints?
>Player: NOO I'M VERY SMART AND GOOD AT VIDEO GAMES STOP TELLING ME I NEED HINTS THIS GAME SUCKS ASS!!!!!!!!!!
>Metacritic review: 40/100

>>751260060
Well I think that's to be expected, people will be prideful idiots and then complain. If it's an official "journalist" review then that would have to be noted and then they'd be advertising that they're a moron.

>>751251836
>Waaah! only 14% of the players play my whole game!
>GOTTA FORCE EM TO PLAY TO THE END

>>751260060
If you cater to the homeless you'll find your own home destroyed.

>>751260060
this but unironically, don't give me a fucking reminder to turn on hints, there's a big-ass options menu button for them and i don't need to be constantly reminded that it's available

>>751259878
Colosseum sucks because it’s insanely slow and there’s a very obvious “correct” way to play as far as what Pokemon to use.

Retards should be ignored. If you're somehow playtesting and can't figure basic shit out - tough.

>>751251836
No totally nothing to do with Microsoft globoshlomos chasing the "mass audience" who believe that braindead-simple games will lead to more sales

Also ACCESSIBILITY is part of DEI(A). You add retard mode - your ESG score goes up. This is why every game is braindead these days.

Microsoft has sockpuppet accounts everywhere on the internet. Don't believe a word some producer shlomo says (managed by 3 different PR companies btw) .

>>751261365
If you die 10 times in a row to the same thing in the same way you're getting a hint bitch boy

>>751251992
Sales numbers must go up in order for development budget to go up.

>>751262764
fuck you leather man i will consistently bash my head against the brick wall until either it or i break

>>751261554
Arguably, catering to retards just ends up lowering the barrier for natural selection and next generation we end up with even worse retards because we didn't filter out the last batch of retards

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>>751251954
grim.

>>751252190
This is precisely the reason why games are dumbed down anon. If you know players will always look up the solutions when they are stuck, then designing games that flow without looking up solutions is the way to prevent this. The best modern games find other ways to challenge the players. In my opinion this is why we're seeing more action heavy games. You can't build puzzle box games easily anymore because nearly every player will just pull out their smartphone the instant they hit a friction point and when they're doing this they aren't playing the game.

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>>751251954
See if the game directors were smart, they wouldn't just close that maze path immediately, they'd add in something like "if user already took bad path 3 times, close it down to force them on the right path" or some such shit. The director of Crash Bandicoot had a long blog post on how they did things like that, if players fail one part of the game, the game automatically spawns an extra powerup or make enemies slower at that one point. Even old ass shmups dating as far back as Gradius and Darius (1980s) have a mechanic where the better you play the harder it gets up to the point where it can become near impossible, but if you die the difficulty gets toned down.

But no, these fags just made the entire game ultra linear because 1 tester was dumber than a rat.

>>751252071
>Bullshit. Nobody is that fucking dumb.
You underestimate how much of an idiocracy we live in. webm related.

>>751258056
>You can literally just walk behind the guard and up the stairs with no tricks or powers or timing required, just do it, and those subhumans didn't even try.

They are trained cattle. Don't blame them, they are an important aspect of capitalism.

>>751258136
One part of this discussion that gets overlooked is that graphic details add visual clutter. Older titles were easier to read on the screen. You didn't have to guess there was a path to your right because you could see it. This isn't a problem that is easy to solve without simplifying visuals in spite of what people say. Yellow paint gets brought up often as a bad thing but video games have been doing this for decades in slightly different ways. Often interactable items would be very different from the environment in old titles in ways that modern gamers would probably complain simplify the gameplay too much. It's not a new thing. The vocal gamers moaning about this just aren't old enough to know better.

>>751251836
>call others morons
>Save a screenshot of text as jpg

Always cracks me uo when people lump in OG Silent Hill/Resident Evil as some hardcore gamers games. Not difficult and far easier than their modern incarnations. I also prefer them because I suck at games.

The hard fact is that you absolutely DO need a little bit of 'yellow paint'.
Crimson Desert launched with absolutely zero of the handholding or QOL features that have become commonplace in western games and the general sentiment is that the game was too difficult and the puzzles were straight up impossible moon logic that you'd need a Youtube guide to progress. This directly impacted the game review score.

Since then the game has been patched and a few puzzles have big hints or some sort of light beaming down showing you where to go, but most players still just google how to get through the sky island puzzle dungeons. Hell, I know I did.

>We spent an enormous amount of energy tackling these questions on Indy, and I think it paid off

This the same Indy where the bitch companion shouts out the answer to every puzzle before you even get a chance to take a look?

>>751252071
Have you seen a woman play Portal?

>>751251836
He's right. People are dumb as fuck, you just didn't hear it before because the world wasn't as connected.

>>751265850
Games need clear guidance in general unless you throw structure completely out on purpose. Hell, it's why even combat frequently implements color coding in techniques, enemy designs and feedback, never mind level layouts. That said, the whole "yellow paint" approach specifically gets shit for being too unnatural and on the nose, it swings too hard in the other direction. The anon that pointed out that modern visual design is more cluttered is also onto something, but surely there's a middle ground to where guidance feels natural.

Where are the playtesters who are telling developers "I don't like being patronized and treated like a retard?" Surely even fucking morons dislike being treated like fucking morons.

>>751266351
Doing better shit and landing better jobs than being playtesters.