Insomniac Games Lead Designer Mike Daly Says They Are Intentionally Creating Easier Games
Insomniac Games Lead Designer Mike Daly recently claimed the company is intentionally creating easier games in order to appeal to more people.
Daly and Insomniac Games’ Mike Fitzgerald recently spoke about game difficulty with Axios while promoting the recently released Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, where players now have the option to skip the game’s puzzle levels.
Fitzgerald claimed that the new mechanic to skip the game’s puzzle levels “would have been unthinkable three to five years ago.”
As for why players now have the option to skip puzzle levels in the game, Daly explained a change in philosophy, “We have sort of shed this conventional wisdom that games kind of need to be a hardass in order for you to get satisfaction out of it.”
Daly went on to detail that they made this change of philosophy to appeal to more people.
He told Axios, “We no longer think about, like, ‘What will make the most elite players feel good about themselves?’ And more like, ‘What will enable everybody to have the experience they want to have?'”
“Because that’s sort of the most important thing to us,” he asserted.
Not only does Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart allow players the option to skip the puzzle levels, but a PlayStation 5 exclusive feature called “activity cards” has been implemented to provide players help with in-game tasks and missions as well as show them where hidden items might be in the game.
On top of that, Axios details the cards can even provide players with “short how-to videos” so they can figure out how to more easily complete tasks and missions.
The cards even show players how long it should take them to complete a task. According to Axios, this time recommendation is customized for each player and based on a number of factors including the player’s current pace playing the game, other players’ average completion times, and an estimate created by the developers.
What do you make of Daly’s comments about designing and making games easier for players in order to appeal to a much larger audience base?
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