Interestingly enough, I noticed from the angry player’s posts that while he was getting more and more angry, he was also making progress, getting to the later levels and eventually beating the game. This convinced me that the difficulty was not itself the problem, and that I was right to not include an easy mode in the game, since it would have become an unnecessary crutch for players like him. The real culprits were all of the aggregate smaller annoyances that made interacting with the game more difficult. Spelunky did get easier with each update, but in a way that improved the core
Interestingly enough, I noticed from the angry player’s posts that while he was getting more and more angry, he was also making progress, getting to the later levels and eventually beating the game. This convinced me that the difficulty was not itself the problem, and that I was right to not include an easy mode in the game, since it would have become an unnecessary crutch for players like him. The real culprits were all of the aggregate smaller annoyances that made interacting with the game more difficult. Spelunky did get easier with each update, but in a way that improved the core experience rather than watering it down. So in some sense, that angry player was right: The game was too hard. But not for the reasons that he or I assumed. If we were talking about the game of tennis instead of Spelunky, it’s as though this player asked me to remove the net because he was having trouble hitting the ball over it, neither of us realizing that the real problem was that I gave him a racket with broken strings. Another way to think about interpreting a player’s feedback is as a doctor diagnosing a patient. A patient brings his or her symptoms to the doctor (“My stomach hurts!”) and may even offer a possible solution (“I think it could be the flu!”). In that scenario, it’d be a bad idea for the doctor to either dismiss the validity of the patient’s symptoms or to blindly accept that they have what they say they have. Like patients, players are often most in tune with how they feel ...
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
about the problem rather than what is causing it. Doctors and game developers, with their experience and knowledge of their field, need to ask questions, perform tests, and eliminate possibilities in order to zero in on the correct solution.
