Richard Hilleman, chief creative officer for Electronic Arts, has said during the D.I.C.E. Summit in Las Vegas that games ”are actually still too hard to learn,” citing that the average player spends ”two hours” learning.
That’s a ”big ask” for some, he says, what with family commitments and stuff. His remarks were in response to event host Pete Holmes who said he’d like controller layouts to ‘remain the same’.
”Our games are actually still too hard to learn,” Hillman said on-stage. ”The average player probably spends two hours to learn how to play the most basic game. And asking for two hours of somebody’s time–most of our customers, between their normal family lives…to find two contiguous hours to concentrate on learning how to play a video game is a big ask.”
Pete Holmes, a comedian and talk show host, said he’d like future games in a series to keep controller layouts and button mapping the same, and possibly across franchises. That’s not a bad wish for a franchise, providing it’s not at the expense of some decent new design ideas.
Meanwhile design director Michael de Plater for Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor has declared that ”every game is an RPG now,” and that games today aren’t made ”without progression and levels and XP. And I think every game is going to be a social game…good ideas propagate.”
Focusing on easing new players into a game is fine, as long as it doesn’t come at the expense of letting us discover more nuance and ultimately try to master it. If everything is put ‘on rails’ for the sake of not making us learn new systems then everybody suffers as mechanics get watered down to ‘casual’.
Is every game today more-or-less an RPG? Progression and XP can be great, but we’ve also seen the pitfalls of what happens when a shooter / racer becomes all about ranks and loadouts.
