I remember feeling guilty when I remembered what was on the next screen, because it felt like cheating. It kind of broke my heart when I realized that was the best way to get good and it was pointlessly stubborn for me to resist a technique that games were designed to cater to.
This is what is nice about research. Real problem solving matters.
But also what is frustrating about research: real problem solving is hard!
Another set of games my girlfriend recently turned me on to are rhythm games, particularly VOEZ[1]. Again, as I don't think I said in the first comment but said elsewhere, it's not like I don't like the "classical music" style and I'm all "jazz music," but my "jazz" style is definitely my default mode. If you asked me afterwards to remember the notes, I would be able to tell you the gist but I certainly don't remember details, a lot of it is focusing when it gets complicated and responding on beat. And, as I said above, my absolute favorite is playing a song for the first time and trying to get a good score, because I really have no idea what's coming and it pushes my "respond quickly" buttons.
[0] not that you don't learn quickly/during the fight without dying, and as many games often are, there is an obvious hint of what to hit, the rhythm to a boss, etc.
I totally relate to that guilty feeling. I like having to think on my feet, and never saw the point in memorizing a sequence of controls. It's like it ceases to be a game at that point!
It's just that some games have this strange curve in the learning curve, for instance Starcraft, where beginners think the game is all about strategy. But as you learn to play, you find out that it's more about macro, cause having more units normally beats any strategy. But then if both players have top notch macro, they have to begin doing tradeoffs in what they build, maybe cut some units to get a technology faster, or be greedier but more vulnerable for a while for a later payoff. In other words, the game becomes about strategy.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Mornington_Crescent_(game)
My completion of Age of Engineering is this small countryside feeling open air base, Direwolf20 (famous YouTube Minecraft player) beat it with a space station. The only obvious commonalty is we both have huge floating energy spheres from Draconic Evolution which looks kinda out of place next to a greenhouse compared to inside a space station. "There's more than one way to do it" is a driving ethos in most of these packs.
For speedrunners though any sources of randomness are mostly just annoying. If it's 50 seconds faster to start on a hill, and your personal best is 40 seconds slower than the world record, you're not going to play runs where you didn't start on a hill. You're just going to reload.
I've seen the same thing in people I know who can pwn me at things like COD. It's 95+% knowing where to look and where to have your gun pointed no matter which part of the map you're on, so you can shoot before the pure-reflexes n00b even knows you're there.
CSGO is a fantastic example where someone with poor aiming skills but good gamesense (holding angles, using echo-location where you move your view to triangulate opponents based on how the sound moves and what type of footstep sounds are generated, timings, grenade throws, etc) can wreck opponents with poor gamesense and better aiming skills.
I have gotten reported for walling but people just need to realize how much damn noise they make.
The Shift key became infinitely more useful once my ears acclimated to the setup change.
In many ways it's not so different than billiards/snooker/pool. Being a good shot-maker helps but just about all the consistently performing pros focus first and foremost on position-play and thinking several shots ahead.
I'd say in most of my games I've got more playtime, trying various strategies, and learning from mistakes, than the other 9 people in the game put together. But at some point it all just comes down to who wins a trade, and I very rarely win them. Game's still fun though, somehow.
Always amusing when this happens.
I've noticed people who perform best are the ones who pick a strategy and stick with it rather than trying to get the glory.
Another thing is lower level players use nades poorly and are always caught off guard.
It obviously doesn't eliminate luck; but the person who doesn't understand strategy isn't going to do well either.
Also, that's all well and good for heads up play, but if you're at a full table, playing tighter for one person at the table is just going to see you winning a lot of nothing. (Players paying attention will just skip hands where you bite.)
A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it.
In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading.
Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
>"But don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do: and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot."
I played SSBB (Super Smash Bros. Brawl) competitively. I'd occasionally drop games to the worst players because they would choose one of several of the worst possible options available to them at any given time. I keep expecting them to react the "proper" way and so it would throw off my reads. Thankfully sets are best of 3.
SSBB is a game entirely based on reads due to the characteristic lack of combos and "neutral position" being popular since there aren't many scenarios where you can build momentum in a favored position (unlike the more popular SSBM (Super Smash Bros. Melee) which has combos that allow you to create favored positions to keep momentum.
(I’m not suggesting aimbots, mind you; the bot layer wouldn’t have more complete information to base its decisions on than the player does.)
What? Two of the top four~ most played games on earth right now are battle royales.
Yeah, I try to snipe someone, and they respond by building a 5-star hotel with WiFi.
The tactical opportunities in a fight that are available to a team with a gibraltar and pathfinder vs a gibraltar and pathfinder.. huge. Where does the shield go? Is claiming the high ground worth exposing yourself to the airstrike?
If you just moved around using the obvious controls then you would generally get destroyed by opponents who had mastered that unintuitive way to move fast.
I love Hollow Knight to bits.
It is one of these "hard but fair" games. My first playthrough 1 year or 2 ago has seen me die a lot of times. And it was indeed because I needed to learn how each boss (there are so many of them .. maybe 30 or 40 ?? ) moves and react accordingly. I quickly started to see it as a dance or a dialogue with the boss though. You have a limited but versatile skill set at your disposal, so for each boss, I had to think about how to adequately counter a move.
The end result is a beautiful dance of action and counter reactions.
I had a second play through a couple of months ago. Since then, the devs have made the game change A LOT. Some bosses had their entire move set rewritten. New areas were added, etc.
So I was not playing on memory.
I had still acquired a wealth of knowledge on how to control that little bug, even with its limited initial toolset.
So I beat most of the game without dying just by reacting quickly to whatever it threw at me, it was an awesome experience.
There's something un-fun to me that is hard to explain about all this. I don't like spending hours retrying a single challenge when I know there's a super precise series of inputs elite players or a TAS could use to get through in 5 seconds. I realize that's a very subjective thing and this is still fun to some players.
I've moved to playing mostly puzzle games like The Witness, puzzle platformers like Braid, and challenging "simple" platformers like VVVVVV. What I like about VVVVVV is that the inputs are incredibly easy to learn. You will die a lot, and there are people who can make it through the whole game in deathless mode, but I'm okay with that because it just means I need to get better at the game, not get better at memorizing a precise series of inputs and strategies.
But at least for me, the existence of this second game (and third) does not in any way detract from the quality or enjoyability of the first one. The speedrunners are basically playing a different game, and unlike most other video games, in Celeste this is by design.
These are the things I had in mind. It's quite astonishing to see a TAS or even some runners skip straight through an obstacle or jump off of a spike.
> You can jump straight through some obstacles, get additional dashes, etc. that the developers didn't originally intend.
Most of these techniques were intended; the game was designed to have them in. The game actually teaches you most of this tech extremely late in the game. It's a replay-ability thing. There's an extremely good talk at GDC a few years back about Celeste level design, incidentally...
There have been a few situations where runners did find an actual glitch, and the devs patched them out, because they weren't intended. There have also been one or two where they've left it in, because it's healthy for the running community overall.
I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste? Or is it Celeste's lack of randomness that makes it worse for you; I thought VVVVVV didn't have any randomness either, but it's been a few years.
As another reply reminded me, I'm thinking of stuff like demodashes that definitely weren't intended. In any case, the comment I'm replying to is also criticizing design styles that benefit speedrunners over the average player, so my comment is kind of a reaction to that.
> I haven't played much VVVVVVV, but isn't it basically the same as celeste?
The difference with VVVVVV is that the controls are simple, instead of having runner-friendly combos that get extremely long or involve glitches. The game is played with arrow keys: up / down flip the direction of gravity, and left / right move the player character at a constant speed to the left or right. That's all there is to the controls. Similarly, Super Hexagon has exactly two inputs: left and right, which move an arrow around in a circle.
In contrast, games like Celeste put an enormous amount of complexity behind input combos. The air dash mechanic alone took me hours to learn with any precision. The complaint I have (and maybe the parent comment too) is that as a casual player it's hard to shake the feeling that these games were designed for someone who has a lot more time to train finger memory on a bunch of precise input combinations than you do.
So it's not the existence of speedrunning that bothers me (I watch a bunch of GDQ, actually), it's the experience of playing games that are easy to exploit and "beat" if you have time to practice frame-perfect inputs, but aren't so rewarding casually. As I said in my comment you replied to, I realize this is all very subjective and probably won't bother most people (and I actually, I like Celeste quite a lot). But it's also the reason I find games like Smash very frustrating as a casual.
On the other hand, though, I've seen friends of mine who are less experienced with video game controls struggle with all of the above actions. I could watch my friend manipulate the controller and see that she was only able to handle one button input at a time, so for example in order to jump right, she had to break it down into the discrete actions of: hold down the right button, hold down the jump button, release the jump button, release the right button, with maybe half a second to a full second in between each action. So for this friend, pressing any two buttons at the same time clearly was an "input combo" that was a challenge to execute.
The interesting thing to me is that in my mind, the basic controls of Celeste feel very simple: it's "only" run, jump climb, dash (until 7B and 8C teach you wallbounces and hypers). But all of those basic actions have so many subtleties. For example, jumps can also be wall jumps, and there are even two kinds of wall jumps: straight up the wall if you hold climb, which consumes climbing stamina, or away from the wall if you don't hold climb, which doesn't consume stamina (not counting the other wall jump type, neutral wall jumps, since those aren't taught or required to complete the game). Somehow all of this complexity felt very intuitive to me, even at the beginning when I still hadn't learned to execute it all consistently. So I never felt during my first playthrough that Celeste was somehow catering to speedrunners at the expense of the casual experience. In fact, my impression was that Celeste does a very good job of providing the smoothest possible ramp up from casual play to speedrunning.
Anyway, if there's a point to this meandering comment, it's that variation in the way that people perceive the complexity of video game controls is very interesting. The same friend I mentioned above, who had trouble stringing together two inputs in Celeste, can give me a run for my money in Mario Kart, managing steering, mini turbos, and using items all at once.
I find Smash difficult too. Wave dash in Celeste? I’ll do it all day. In smash? Dunno, just doesn’t work. Humans are funny :)
Seriously though, what does this even mean? I love platformers, but strategy and muscle memory pretty much sums up most action oriented games.
I will never be a chess grandmaster. That doesn't make chess unfun.
You might like my game. Bomberman meets RTS. https://youtu.be/Zr0A8VcBnYk
I think what you say is probably true of most platformers and other games like Sekiro (a successor to dark souls which was one of the original non-platformer games like this) but definitely not all games.
It depends on the exact context and goal. To an extent, I would consider "map painting" the equivalent of a speedrun. It's usually measured in elapsed game time rather than play time, but there's a similar effect.
Especially with some of the more difficult OPMs, there can certainly be an element of memorization and optimizing starts. This falls off as the game goes further, but it definitely can be present. I recall some years back reading an EU3 byzantine guide that described many of the nations as being every bit as much puzzle game as strategy, where figuring out the tricks and traps of the opening years can mean the difference between a thriving growth and early defeat.
Not that anyone ever has to play the games that way, but that's true of everything that gets put through a traditional speedrun as well.
What recent games are you thinking of?
Competitive Quake players knew the maps down to the pixel, along with the location and respawn times of every resource. Lots of modern 'hardcore' platformers have randomization and don't depend on pure memorization.
[0] To be clear, I'm talking about multiplayer as it's unpredictable.