Not my cup of tea (Destiny)

by kapowaz, Friday, August 22, 2014, 13:49 (3545 days ago) @ Kermit

I'll have to finish the whole article later, but already I can tell she and I don't agree.

They want their audiences to grow much faster than barriers to entry allow. They want to make games that everyone can enjoy.

Did your hackles just go up? I don’t blame you.

Why would that make my hackles go up? Why would making games that everyone can enjoy be a bad thing?

Because there are a bunch of people in the troughs, where you start off, and so very few in the peaks, where not everybody makes it the easiest way to level things up and open the game to more people is to lop off the peaks and mine down to the level of the lowest common denominator.

This sounds like the kind of elitist snobbery I've encountered from hardcore WoW players that assumes that the only way to make an accessible game is to walk at the speed of the slowest. I don't buy it. Same goes for this:

No matter how often developers and PR managers talk about “scaling difficulty” and “lowering the barriers to entry” we all know what happens when a game has its fangs drawn. The fun goes out of it for the hardcore, and it’s the hardcore who build long-lasting communities and keep games alive.

We had a conversation about something similar on TSDIRC the other night, and whilst I don't dispute that the hardcore are an important demographic, I think the notion that these people are the ones that ‘keep games alive’ is pure indulgence. No; hardcore gamers don't keep the game alive, a thriving player population does, and that means you have to cater to them one way or another. You can argue that hardcore players help in providing aspirational moments that help sell a game to other players, but once they're attracted they have to be retained somehow, and you can't do that if you shut them out.

I've mentioned it before, but Blizzard tried this hardcore approach with raids in WoW (something like only 4% of players ever stepped foot inside the final raid of The Burning Crusade). The following expansion they abandoned this policy, and raids exploded in popularity.

I guess we'll have to revisit this in 12 months time or so and see how it worked out for Bungie. Maybe I'll be proven completely wrong about it and most players will get to participate.