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Too Human Meets Mediocre Reviews
Earlier this week, the long anticipated action-adventure game, Too Human, was finally released for the Xbox 360. After being in various stages of development for about a decade, the game made its US debut to overall lackluster marks. Gamespot weighed in with a 5.5/10, while IGN gave it a slightly more favorable 7.8. Developer Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights defended the game, saying players didn't yet "get it," and that it was "so innovative that we have put some people off." The game's reception in Japan has been similar.
If game players "just don't get it" then you have made a bad game.
Autoscaling has MANY issues.
Badly tuned autoscaling can result in the game progressing very strangely. You start good and kill enemies with a moderate challenge at the start. But the game believes that is too easy and ramps up the difficulty until you die a couple times, at which point it sets difficulty back to easy. You get a very strange cycle where difficulty progressively rises then abruply falls.
In games like Oblivion it manifests in a different way: It's hard to judge the player's power. For instance in Morrowind (Oblivion's predecessor) you can make items that will continously heal yourself and by performing certain tricks make yourself absurdly powerful at low levels, sometimes without trying very hard. Or, you can follow a very suboptimal progression if what interests you is say, commerce and roleplay. As a result, you get a game that's either absurdly easy or absurdly hard.
Another problem is that you get worlds where EVERYTHING gets harder. At level 1, a rat did moderate amount of damage. At level 20, it now also does moderate damage to a knight in shiny armor, and a keen vorpal longsword of burnination +5. The lowly thugs you had issues with at level 3 now level 15, wear shiny armor and have magical swords, and inexplicably demand your lunch money. It doesn't make any sense for a warrior in the top 1% of the world to hang around a crossroads and mug people. They could go hire themselves for a much better price.
Even the scaling is done well, the result is still strange. The cave where low life robbers are hiding is still challenging at level 15. The citadel is possible to storm at level 5. If it wasn't for the requirement of having the right items you could probably go fight the big bad at level 3, as autoscaling would ensure he'd be possible for you to defeat.
IMO, games like Oblivion should be planned differently. Instead of autoscaling there should be a progressive increase in difficulty as you get away from civilization. The rats in an inn's cellar should be doable at level 1. The bandits on the crossroads should be moderately challenging at level 5. The hideout in the woods far from the road should be pretty hard at level 10. And if you decide to storm a castle, you'd better be armed to the teeth.
It should be perfectly possible to make a game where you can explore even at low levels. Cities should be generally safe. Roads less so. The further you get from civilized places, the less safe it should be. It doesn't have to be frustrating, if you find you're barely surviving you should be able to return to safer places.
Between World of Warcraft and the Diablo series, Blizzard has proven that there are tens of millions of gamers who game SOLELY for the objective of collecting incrementally improving loot.
If Too Human fails, it means it's just a bad game.