Mastermind said:
It's more than that, it's an abomination. Combat is pretty much 99% of the gameplay in Bioware games. She wants to turn games into movies. Except we already have movies. There's a difference between an option to get through difficult parts, and just fast forward through a game without playing at all.
Nah. The abomination is fighting the same damn, un-challenging darkspawn encounter ad nauseum in a boring series of corridors fifty times over. I honestly can't begrudge someone who wants the option to skip certain content in games to better be able to get to what they want to experience.
Is her stance a little...EXTREME? Yeah, certainly. But the core point is one I find little fault with. Don't force unwanted content on players.
Blackadder said:
Ok then. What new CRPG's last for 80 hours? And how about improving the combat/content instead of getting rid of it?
Like I said, I'd rather better quality content. The thing is, with most mainstream RPGs, I'm realistic enough to realize that, for a multitude of reasons, the median quality of content will be sub-par. And because of this, I'd rather have the option to skip to the good parts. Instead of fighting a bunch of trash encounters in Dargon Age: Whorigins, which have no narrative significance, and thanks to the setup of the game (what with regenerating health/mana/abilities automatically after every battle) have little to no gameplay significance, let me skip ahead to the boss fights and/or the fun encounters, while getting my dose of laughibly goofy Bioware writing on the side.
As for the 80 hours comment, it's more my dissatisfaction with raw game length as a benchmark for RPGs, especially in the mainstream, one that encourages the deluge of filler content we see in most RPGs nowadays, just to pad that all important length stat (insert dick
joke here). Fallout 1 was slammed for being "too short" for an RPG, despite the fact that it is highly re-playable, and densely packed with good content. I have no doubt that one could spend 100+ hours derping around Cyrodiil in Oblivion...but really, how much fun is another marauder cave?
I know it would be great to have long, and
thick content rich
dicks games...but that's too panglossian an outlook. I'd rather focus on how to mitigate my suffering and maximize my enjoyment of games given the circumstances I'm in. Sadly, if I want my new RPG fix, there isn't a Knights of the Chalice every 3 months, I gotta make do with mainstream stuff sometimes, and a "skip button" would certainly help me in that endeavor.
Antihero said:
I haven't seen it myself, but I thought it was argued that it could also be more like a trainer to show you how it's done or a "this part is too hard - I'll try it again some other time" button. Not a "Combat is boring - let's get to the sexing part" button. Having that option would make me more annoyed because it's an easy way out instead of challenging me to get better - unless it's one of those things where only 0.001% of the population will be good enough for it anyway. Edit: and at that point, stick it in a super-duper bonus stage or something.
The way I see it, is that these sorts of things are more like safety nets that allow the designers to work with a little more leeway, try more adventurous ideas. With a system like this, it's no problem if a certain boss is too hard for 45% of the audience...they've got the skip button. Because they don't have to worry about dumbing everything down, they can make more challenging content. Check out Donkey Kong Country Returns...it's actually pretty difficult for much of the game.
For RPGs, this might make for less filler combat, since it forcibly obsoletes it. When players can just fast forward, no longer is it useful as filler to pad game length. It might even light a fire under developer's asses to make combat worth playing...stuff you wouldn't want to fast forward through.
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