Hooray for Nintendo!

WoW Horde Guide

In regards to putting the game on "auto-pilot," one thing that worries me about this approach is that if other developers follow Ninteno's lead, they may spend less time and money on playtesting/revising and just release their games with uneven or unreasonable difficulty with the justification that "it's okay, players can just skip over those bits." I personally would be offended if I felt like I learned the skills the game wanted me to, but had to use the help system to get past a spike in the difficulty due to poor game design.

At the same time, it would be really nice, if implemented properly, to broaden the range of acceptable skill levels so that people who don't play games much wouldn't have to fear crushing failure.

Then AGAIN, if you use the help system too much in the early stages of a game, you may not develop the skills required to succeed later in the game, creating an ever growing dependency on the help system.

It will be interesting to see if this goes anywhere, and what a successful implementation will look like.

Nintendo will make a lot of money licensing this useful yet common sense technology to developers that have been struggling to capture the Wii audience.

Sounds like a load of old balls to me. Personally speaking I'd prefer to not be given the solution so easily. I'd prefer to work stuff out myself. Sounds like another nintendo tactic to neutralise the core gamer even more

With this, Nintendo's level designers can create dungeons in Zelda with puzzles that don't insult our intelligence. I swear, since OoT, the dungeons have been dumbed downed a bit by either brain-dead puzzles or hand-holding - even if masterfully designed (save for Wind Waker dungeons). Master Quest was a breath of fresh air though. We know they can still design some truly ingenious puzzles when they want to instead of 'light-all-the-torches' over and over.

What surprises me is that you guys think this is a new idea. None of this is new to gaming. The only reason I can think of for Nintendo to file a patent like this is to protect themselves against lawsuits from one of those patent-holding companies.

Ditto - a fantastic idea!

As a big kid who's been playing games since the Nascom1 days of the late 70s, I have an unadmirable talent of having played hours and hours of games over the years while still remaining completely bloody average on most things.

One problem I have - one which is grossly overlooked - is that I'm a disabled gamer. Although there are indeed many forms of disability, the majority are physical disabilities and I'm no exception here. I have spina bifida, albeit in a mild form, which affects my mobility, grip, and a number of other things. The upshot of this is that I have good days and bad days.

Paradoxically, the bad days - when my gaming "skills" are at their worst - are the days when I'm normally incapacitated/in bed, and I want to play games the most. So for some years, a personal bugbear of mine is the inability to be able to complete a game by being unable to drop the difficulty level down a notch. Also, it's annoyed me when you can't access some of the rarer game elements (think Resident Evil, for example) without going through the hardest difficulty mode. I do think there should be some sort of kudos for having the wherewithall to get through a tough challenge, but Gamerpoints and Trophies seem to have covered this angle now.

So, I hope that this innovation signals the start of universal employment of being able to select what difficulty level is applicable to you personally. Let's face it, some of the difficulty settings I've encountered (even on some of the better games) have been little more than a guessing game employed by developers anyhow.