Eurogamer's Games of the Generation

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Originally Posted by bVork

freedom to re-spec at any time

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Because playing a game for 20 hours and realizing your character is garbage because of decisions you made in hour 1 when you didn't know shit sucks ass. I know it's how it's been historically, doesn't mean it is good or fun.

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Originally Posted by Diff-chan

Because playing a game for 20 hours and realizing your character is garbage because of decisions you made in hour 1 when you didn't know shit sucks ass. I know it's how it's been historically, doesn't mean it is good or fun.

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Designers gotta learn how to balance.

How about playing a game for 20 hours and realizing the character you choose is garbage?

I'm not defending things one way or another, I like respecing at points but not constant switches personally. Gives the decisions some weight without completely locking you into something.

Games need to do a better job informing the player about consequences of lasting decisions, generally. I shouldn't have to consult a FAQ to find out what fruit my skill tree will yield.

I think it was Digital Devil Saga that gave only the name of the skill you were buying in advance. You had to buy it to find out exactly what it did. I got burned dumping a ton of points into bad skills.

Nailed it.

Also don't put any points in Swimming in Deus Ex.

Free re-specs are a cheap solution to bad design. Ideally, the player should have the information they need to make an informed choice in the first place. Re-speccing should be a serious decision that is not made on a whim. Etrian Odyssey games, particularly later in the series, strike the right balance between the freedom to change things and the cost for doing it. Meanwhile DmC lets you reshuffle your skill points at any time, meaning that I don't even think about where to throw new skill points since I know I can change them whenever I like.

But in D3 the free respecs work beautifully because the system was designed for it and it wasn't a cover for shitty design. DmC has plenty of bad design choices, it's not like that was some standout issue.

It's not the respeccing that's the problem, it's the game design.

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Originally Posted by bVork

The success of games like Dark Souls and The Last of Us makes me worry very little about whether games in the future will be easier. There is a market for hard games, and major publishers seem to have finally realized that. Are there going to be lots of easy "cinematic" games? Definitely. But at the same time I don't think those of us looking for hard games are going to be left out.

What does concern me is the continuing trend towards focusing on short-term decisions rather than long-term consequences. Regenerating health, freedom to re-spec at any time, or the simple lack of any major decision-making at all are all symptoms of an emphasis on immediacy that almost totally excludes player choice on how the game evolves. Of course, the two games I cited above manage to avert this quite nicely for the most part, but at the same time I think it's a far greater and more prevalent problem than difficulty.

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Good points. Games like Dark Souls and The Last of Us give me hope.

I do think that making player choice matter can be tied in with higher difficulty. It's not necessary for interactive fiction like The Stanley Parable but look at something like Epic Mickey. It was supposed to be a Mario type game mixed with Deus Ex style choice. I enjoyed it for the atmosphere and classic Disney stuff but the player choice aspect failed big time. I think the reason it failed was primarily because it was so easy. Why search around for new ways to solve problems when solutions are planted right in front of you?

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Originally Posted by A Robot Bit Me

I think it was Digital Devil Saga that gave only the name of the skill you were buying in advance. You had to buy it to find out exactly what it did. I got burned dumping a ton of points into bad skills.

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Yeah, that's just a bad design decision. I don't think a game needs to tell you the consequences of everything ahead of time but it should at least tell you what you're buying/upgrading.

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Originally Posted by Joust Williams

Also don't put any points in Swimming in Deus Ex.

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True, although I don't consider it much of a flaw with the game like many do. On my first playthrough it seemed fairly obvious swimming wasn't worth investing in.

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Originally Posted by MechDeus

But in D3 the free respecs work beautifully because the system was designed for it and it wasn't a cover for shitty design. DmC has plenty of bad design choices, it's not like that was some standout issue.

It's not the respeccing that's the problem, it's the game design.

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Which is what I said: free re-specs are a symptom of a nearly exclusive emphasis on immediacy rather than longevity and consequence. There are ways that free re-specs can work just fine, particularly when they are justified within the game itself. But at the same time, plenty of games use them as a panacea for useless skill trees (instead of rebalancing or removing the worthless ones) or simply because it's (sadly) expected at this point. It's not that the concept exists in the first place, it's how it is often misused and what that represents as part of the culture of game design as a whole.

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Originally Posted by A Robot Bit Me

Games need to do a better job informing the player about consequences of lasting decisions, generally. I shouldn't have to consult a FAQ to find out what fruit my skill tree will yield.

I think it was Digital Devil Saga that gave only the name of the skill you were buying in advance. You had to buy it to find out exactly what it did. I got burned dumping a ton of points into bad skills.

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But there weren't any bad skills in DDS... You pretty much use everything you get in those games and they really don't let you power your way through

Maybe it wasn't that, then. DQVIII would have been a better example.