Hey, everyone. Recently I bought the new game by Polarbit Studios called Reckless Racing 2. I really don't intend to review the game but I do want to talk about a brilliant innovation in the controls.
In the picture above, notice the silver bar and just above it the box you can check for Dynamic Difficulty. The studio people explain that dynamic difficulty is the practice in the gaming community of making a game get harder as you progress and have success in it. This is the instrument that ruins gaming for the casual gamers because they get stuck at levels and can't progress and enjoy the game they have paid for.
As you know, I have constantly griped about this, even threatening to give one star reviews for games I get stuck on when I have selected the easy level. (see my post entitled The Shadowgun Manifesto). The gaming industry has catered to the hardcore gamers who want games to be super hard so that they can prove something or brag amongst themselves or whatever. Polarbit has not only given you the ability to remove the dynamic difficulty crap but have given you a sliding difficulty bar control so you can select a difficulty ranging from 0% to 100%. I can not begin to tell you how I love a developer with this kind of wisdom and responsiveness to the needs of their users. Hey, we who are 'lame gamers' have money too.
The solution was simple but brilliant. Polarbit should immediately patent this idea, because it should be on every game on the app store. In fact, Apple should require it to be on every game that is over a certain price. Can you imagine being able to go back and play all those levels you were stuck on? You could destroy that last crate on Angry Birds and make those darn monkeys stop mocking you. You could see what is at the end of Star Battalion.It would be like you suddenly had dozens of new games! You could set up the controls to suit your own skills. The hard core gamers could still brag about 'I beat it on max difficulty and it was easy for me, dude'. The casual gamers could feel more fulfilled and not so 'lame'.
I'm not saying that this is a diplomatic breakthrough of the proportions of something that a brilliant Secretary of State would come up with, but it is pretty darn cool. Here's hoping that the buzz will spread to other developers. It makes financial sense. If you don't want to lose the casual gamers from this vibrant industry, throw us a bone here. Make every game with similar controls. The problem is that most game developers are hard core gamers who decided to make a living with their skills. Please look at this from a financial perspective and mimic these controls. Maybe we can all meet at Cupertino and sign some sort of accord. Then there will be peace on the Ponderosa once more.
From the author's green retreat, I'm CE Wills.
In the picture above, notice the silver bar and just above it the box you can check for Dynamic Difficulty. The studio people explain that dynamic difficulty is the practice in the gaming community of making a game get harder as you progress and have success in it. This is the instrument that ruins gaming for the casual gamers because they get stuck at levels and can't progress and enjoy the game they have paid for.
As you know, I have constantly griped about this, even threatening to give one star reviews for games I get stuck on when I have selected the easy level. (see my post entitled The Shadowgun Manifesto). The gaming industry has catered to the hardcore gamers who want games to be super hard so that they can prove something or brag amongst themselves or whatever. Polarbit has not only given you the ability to remove the dynamic difficulty crap but have given you a sliding difficulty bar control so you can select a difficulty ranging from 0% to 100%. I can not begin to tell you how I love a developer with this kind of wisdom and responsiveness to the needs of their users. Hey, we who are 'lame gamers' have money too.
The solution was simple but brilliant. Polarbit should immediately patent this idea, because it should be on every game on the app store. In fact, Apple should require it to be on every game that is over a certain price. Can you imagine being able to go back and play all those levels you were stuck on? You could destroy that last crate on Angry Birds and make those darn monkeys stop mocking you. You could see what is at the end of Star Battalion.It would be like you suddenly had dozens of new games! You could set up the controls to suit your own skills. The hard core gamers could still brag about 'I beat it on max difficulty and it was easy for me, dude'. The casual gamers could feel more fulfilled and not so 'lame'.
I'm not saying that this is a diplomatic breakthrough of the proportions of something that a brilliant Secretary of State would come up with, but it is pretty darn cool. Here's hoping that the buzz will spread to other developers. It makes financial sense. If you don't want to lose the casual gamers from this vibrant industry, throw us a bone here. Make every game with similar controls. The problem is that most game developers are hard core gamers who decided to make a living with their skills. Please look at this from a financial perspective and mimic these controls. Maybe we can all meet at Cupertino and sign some sort of accord. Then there will be peace on the Ponderosa once more.
From the author's green retreat, I'm CE Wills.
Comments
Post a Comment