*ponders*

I’ve seen players go out of their way to ruin game experiences for themselves. Difficulty settings so easy the player’s in danger of falling asleep during heated battles. Reading a walkthrough of a new game, before playing it for the first time, leaving the game completely without surprises. Cheat codes for invulnerablity, weapons and vehicles turning any attempt at seriousness or challenge into the equivalent of slapstick or a cartoon.

I guess I believe that the gamer doesn’t always know what they’ll enjoy best. That what they think they want (often zero challenge, and to see all the game’s secrets and rewards immediately), is often at odds with what the designer intended (to get the player involved with the role they’re playing, and the motives behind that, and the chance of a real feeling of accomplishment at overcoming the harder challenges). Can you imagine watching The Godfather, only someone who’d never seen the movie before had set the film to speed up any slow bits and tone down all the violence?

But being able to adapt difficulty to smooth unnecessary spikes is all good. Adaptive difficulty, and simply being able to adjust the settings after the game is well underway, are both good steps in that direction.

Also, let me add my (late) congrats. It’s great having you here, and welcome to the show. Can’t wait to see what you’ll write next. :D

By the way, Mr Cuddleswick – if I remember rightly if you played the wolf-chick thing as you laid it out, the wolf ate the chick as soon as it was unloaded from the raft. They seriously have no table manners.

(I wonder if ‘The Chosen’ will stick…)

Anyhoo, I’ve gotta say I prefer being able to choose player tailoring over having a game take pity on my lesser skills and asking if I want it made easier (I’m glaring at you Devil May Cry…..and yes, I’ll take the easy route thanyavermuch)

MGS2’s lil’ questionnaire at the beginning was quite a cool way of setting you up too, even skipping the prologue (best bit of the game methinks) if you claimed you’d never played MGS before.

To be honest, I’m not sure being able to change it so you can succeed straight off the bat is such a good thing – yes, I can see the merit of it when you’re tearing your hair out in frustration but it could be abused so easily. Challenge is gone completely. Skill becomes an irrelevance. Now a hidden adaptive difficulty gauge that affects the game based on how good, or bad, you are without you choosing the level(s) is a totally different matter.

As more and more people come to play games, we can’t expect everyone to be headshotting, bullet-timing, insane-difficulty players.

So I think we are in a transitional, experimental phase, and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

Instead of a simple menu system I’d like to see more of a push into adaptive gaming which morphs based on how you play.

I’d certainly like some elements to be fine-tunable – but to be honest; my main issue with some games is difficulty – I’m happy to accept a generic difficulty level; but sometimes Easy isn’t easy enough.

I game a hell of a lot (I’m just not great at FPSes on Consoles) so I think it must be incredibly offputting for new gamers… If I can’t do easy, how can someone beginning for the first time?

When it comes to Skate, taxis and ignorant businessmen are realistic nuisances, which begs the question ‘how real’ do you want your games to be…though I’d say that a sandbox should have the option to switch them off.

Welcome, by the way… :)

But I by no means think being able to tweak aspects of a game is a bad thing.

Right off the bat I’d imagine I’d be more willing to pick up a serious driving game if I could maybe have it help me out a little on the cornering for a while….and dare I even dream of a world where I can be bothered to go back and try and finish GTA 4 free from molestation because I’ve been able to turn off the feature of one of my needy friends calling me to demand I go bowling with them (picking them up and dropping them off at their door of course.) every fifteen minutes…you know little things like that we could switch off at the point it stopped being a nice novelty feature and started to become a royal pain in the ass.

Oh what a world the future promises to be.

Sorry, got distracted by the (well-mannered to a point) wolves and chicks.

I’ve never really liked the idea of too much customisation……if the games were properly balanced in the first place then you wouldn’t need to turn bits off and on here and there, and you could experience the game as it was intended. Things like the bystanders in Skate 2 are part of the gamer world, taking them out would surely be like taking out the police from GTA, just because they hamper you. Also, making many aspects of the game customisable would take up development time that could be spent getting the balance and controls right in the first place.

Though it’s a shame I don’t like TRUnderworld, because it’d be a fun experiment to try this new difficulty setting.

Great job my friend, you definately earned your ReadyUp position. :)