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Comment by Fargren | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I would have loved a "skip combat" button on Mass Effect 2. The combat was decent, but it got dull after a while, very repetitive. By the end I just wanted to see the next dialog and make the next choice. That's where the real engagement of the game was for me.

And I love playing games in general.

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I'm coming around to that view, myself. I've long since switched to playing most games on "normal" difficulty or below, because ratcheting up the difficulty really only adds tedium, not challenge. Once you figure out how to beat the bad guys, you just have to work at it longer on nightmare difficulty. And very quickly, the repetition is not fun.

I've definitely had games where I was enjoying the story and every once in a while I would totally have used a "fast forward combat" button if I had it.

While some games just add tedium at higher difficulties, many good games require you to come up with different strategies and use features you wouldn't otherwise use. And for many games, being on edge because you are close to losing is part of the atmosphere.

What games? Most of them tend to get difficulty wrong: "this guy requires 3 headshots instead of 1!" It's better when the difficulty shows itself as more enemies, or stronger enemies, etc.

The MGS series is a good example of a game series that scales difficulty well; the enemies are stronger AND work together better as a team, will hunt you better, etc.

Off the top of my head, Bioshock: at lower difficulties, I found it easy to run through the game guns blazing; at higher difficulties you need to use your skills and the environment to your advantage. When 3 head shots are unviable or a drag, have you tried setting the enemies up the bomb?

Another example is Dungeon Defenders, where strategies differ dramatically (as in almost 100%) in the later stages of the game -- which in this case just means same levels, stronger enemies. Baldur's Gate (2, particularly) also was much deeper when it was difficult, forcing you to think more tactically to win fights. The list goes on and on.

The general ideas expressed by the person at the center of the controversy seem a bit more than that. It makes it almost more of an interactive novel than a game. She was basically saying that she doesn't think that a majority of women will enjoy any part of the game other than the dialog/story. If that is really the target market, then why bother creating the gameplay aspects?

Not saying this is a bad thing, just that creating gameplay elements that most of your target market will not enjoy seems superfluous.

Well, the interactive novel game genre does exist. I'd say the biggest exponent of it is the Visual Novel, which is in general purely interactive dialog. Very popular in Japan. Still, these games are more popular among men than women.

The other genre that eschews most non-story-driven gameplay is the graphic adventure. But the thing is, the genre has basically been non-existing since the 90s. The last AAA adventure game was Grim Fandango in 1998. There's a recent resurgence, but mostly as indie games or remakes of time tested classics.

My point being that it doesn't seem like game without strong gameplay elements are selling a lot, neither to men nor to women. I think it's important to find a balance between history and gameplay if you want to have broad appeal.

> If that is really the target market, then why bother creating the gameplay aspects?

I think this is a function of the economics that rule the game industry today. (Yes, even at BioWare.)

The problem is that what used to be a distinct genre of game, the first-person shooter, became so economically successful that now it has become the default template for every type of game. Stories that in the past would have been told in the format of an adventure game, or an RPG, or a strategy game, are now forced into the format of an FPS, for the simple reason that today AAA titles are FPSes, full stop.

This leads to all sorts of weird mutant games, such as the Mass Effect titles, where the things the designers want to do jar roughly against the format. You spend most of your time in Mass Effect games running around gathering power-ups and shooting stuff. (Pedantry alert: it's from a third-person perspective rather than first-person, but the core run-cover-shoot mechanics are the usual FPS staples.) Periodically this tedious routine will be interrupted by a brief non-shooting interlude, which happens to be where all the interesting stuff in the game happens. But after a few minutes of that the game pulls you right back to the running and gunning. You can practically hear the game grunting at you through clenched teeth: "This is a AAA title, dammit! You better believe you're going to be running and gunning!"

If adventure games were still an economically viable genre, you could imagine Mass Effect making a hell of an adventure game. Rip out all that running and gunning and just focus on telling the story, since that's clearly where the designers' hearts are anyway. But they can't do that, because between publishers, retailers and gamers, the marketplace won't allow it. If you want to make a game with a AAA budget in the 2010s, it has to be a shooter, or at least be close enough that you can argue the point.

So you get a bunch of games that try to weld the mechanics of the FPS onto stories that would fit other formats much, much better. (I'm looking at you, BioShock.)

Great insight. I've been gaming for a long time and I never thought of it like this. Do you think this is also why the RPG market is split between Japanese and Western RPGs? Western RPGs tend toward the "go kill everything" motif, whereas Japanese hold your hand the whole time, story-wise.

That seems like less of an argument for Bioware letting you skip combat in Mass Effect games and more of an argument for Bioware making combat in Mass Effect games not suck.

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