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Comment by babuskov | Hacker News Reader

Easy mode has ruined games for me.

For example, Metal Slug 3. My steam stats show I used to play it for 100+ hours. Before they added easy mode via infinite continues, I was really enjoying the game. I had to learn how every enemy behaves, where the powerups would drop and plan strategies to beat bosses. Every day I would get a couple steps further into the game and I could have played it for years. There's a great satisfaction and getting better at something and seeing the results.

Then the change came and I completed the game in one afternoon. I didn't care about all the cool enemy setups on later levels, because I could just bomb them, die when I ran out of bombs and then bomb them again after I revive. There was no real challenge.

I never turned that game on after that. Easy mode has ruined it for me.

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I'm not sure I follow. I'm assuming the easy mode is something you have to explicitly select or at least have to the option to change to and from. Could you not have simply ignored the option of the easy mode and continued playing the way you had done before?

Once the option is there, it's hard to ignore it.

That is not a given. Plenty of people ignore easy modes by choice, either because they prefer harder games, or because they sneer at the "plebs" playing "their" games

I don't think he was arguing it's impossible to ignore it. Just that it's hard.

Of course.

The thing is, once the option showed up, I turned it on once to try it. A couple hours later and I beat the whole game. At that moment, I didn't even know the game was ruined for me. It felt nice being able to see all the levels and content.

But a couple days later, when I thought about turning it on, I figured there's no point because I have seen it all.

It's so easy to fall into the trap of playing easy mode.

I wonder if part of the problem is the attitude that games are there to be "beaten". That the aim is to beat it, and then you're done.

If games were seen as something to be played and explored rather than beaten, perhaps people would approach them differently and get a lot more out of them, even if they'd already completed a playthrough.

I read an opinion piece[0] recently that suggested one of the (many) reasons that No Man's Sky was so poorly received at launch was due to the fact games have commonly been boiled down to constant action and "gotta beat the game" mentality, and that players don't know how to just explore and enjoy games as an open-ended single player experience.

As someone who plays almost exclusively single player games across a vast numbers of genres, I enjoyed No Man's Sky's "exploring and discovering the unknown" game play at launch and have ever since, as they add more and more content.

0: http://www.thegeeklygrind.com/opinion-no-mans-sky-doesnt-mul...

I’m pretty sure the bigger issue was that it was a very weak simulation, with relatively little interaction. Exploring a simulation/procedural generation is not about getting to view the infinite permutations that randomness gives us — it’s to explore the rules that create the simulation, and then to manipulate those rules.

The reason sim city and dwarf fortress are intersting, and NMS and Spore were not, is because the simulation is sufficiently expanded as to be worth manipulating (while of course not being so expanded to hinder understanding your manipulations; this is the craft); whereas NMS and Spore had very trivial rules: they didn’t really have any. Which is also why when Dwarf Fortress breaks down, its interesting, while in NMS, it’s pathetic.

Note that I’m only referring to NMS on release; though I doubt the simulation has been developed since (I’d bet that the game has since gotten prettier worlds, but not more interesting ones)

Tldr; it was poor simulation/generation game, regardless of whether the current market has ADD

We're talking Metal Slug here. It's completely linear game. Once you complete it, you have seen it all.

Well, there are 2 branching paths you can take on some levels, so you should play the game twice to see it all. But that is it, once you played it twice, there's nothing new to see or explore.

> But a couple days later, when I thought about turning it on, I figured there's no point because I have seen it all.

I just had the same experience with Pathfinder Kingmaker, but came away with the opposite sentiment.

I am super glad to have an easy mode. I don't want to waste more time than I already do playing video games. I want to see what narratives and mechanics they have to offer, not reload the same level for 20 hours.

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