Speed kills

After talking to some friends about different games and their 
respective designs, I realized something that is obvious in hindsight 
-- game speed controls difficulty almost exclusively, at least in 
action games.  This means fighting games, shooters, platformers, you 
name it.  The slower the game is, the easier it is.

In fact, this is so obvious that several games have used slow-mo as a 
power up -- Max Payne 1/2, PoP, and Viewtiful Joe.

And yet games today still insist on using the most idiotic variables 
to control difficulty.  From the immensely stupid "number of saves" of 
Hitman 2, to the standard fare like "enemy damage", "hitpoints", 
"health and ammo availability", they never just adjust the speed of 
the game to match the response/reaction capabilities of a typical 
player.

And that's really what separates great action players from mediocre 
ones, their recognition, decision making and response.

The one game that could be improved the most with this is Madden 2004. 
 Instead of just affecting the speed of the game by, say, -40%, -25% 
and 0%, and keeping everything else constant, they tweak a bunch of 
variables that make it tough for a Rookie player to advance to 
All-Pro, because the crutches they had on Rookie disappear.

In fact, in the NFL it's even an adage that the difference between an 
experienced player and a rookie is that "the game slows down" for the 
experienced player.  This is also true of full contact sparring -- 
experienced fighters "see" the fight at a much slower rate than 
someone who isn't used to fighting.

Would Soul Calibur be more approachable if there was a novice setting 
that simply moved 25% slower?   I would argue "hell yes".

Obviously there are "fun factor" issues to consider, like obviously 
don't make it slow ALL the time, but the general notion is there.

-Hook




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