DOA series creator: "Hardcore players killed shmups"

[Ed Oscuro]

That's the main problem with that Itagaki quote. He acts as if they are dead and acts as if Shmups could have been saved. As if there could be tons of new, well selling shmups from triple AAA developers if gamers hadn't bought so many Cave titles. Now, does this sound realistic? I don't think so.

He's speaking from the perspective of somebody who sells games to make a living. I'm perfectly happy with the genre in stagnation if it means that quality efforts stay closer to some of the tried-and-true methods, but that doesn't bring us any closer to getting studios and players interested in the genre again. On the other hand, I still think there are lots of possible avenues for development of the ideas behind STGs. As they are, they're a bundle of good ideas, workable together or in isolation, but so many of those ideas are now pretty far outside the mainstream. Scoring systems? Top-down perspective? Spaceships, even? The developers of that befurred game thought they'd be clever and amp up the production values and add a story...that clearly wasn't enough.

That's the problem - self-professed guardians of the genre and money are so far apart that I don't see how they can meet unless somebody just grabs ideas and starts new.

I don't think Itagaki has to be any kind of wise sage to have seen this coming. I don't think for a second that we would have gotten better STGs if Itagaki had gone in and smashed up all the crockery. On the other hand, for a STG to really be mainstream again it would take somebody changing a bunch of the rules unilaterally.

[ACSeraph]

Itagaki is nothing but a one-hit wonder who's already way past his prime. When was the last time he did anything other than circlejerking on Facebook and acting like some sort of mistreated hero for pity points?

Hard to argue here. I love NG, but what else did he really give us? DOA only became a legit game after he left. And then he bitched about it because he's a salty scrub

---

Also just my opinion but, shmups are dead because retro is dead (art school shit doesnt count).

Sure we get people who don't play because the genre is intimidating, but do you really think making the games easy would increase the playerbase? If they were less hardcore than they really would just be the short simple time diversions uneducated reviewers make them out to be. Why play an easy 2D game when you can go play your easy big budget shiny 3D game instead?

Depressingly niche as it is, we would all be a lot worse off it the developers weren't catering to the tastes of the hardcore, and the genre really truly would die.

[iconoclast]

Hayashi didn't direct or design anything in DOA5. That's probably why it's actually decent (and the main reason why I'm willing to give it a shot).

[ACSeraph]

I can't say I'm a fan of Hayashi, his handling of NG3 says a lot, but I can say that Itagaki getting the boot was for sure good for at least DOA.

[system11]

I can't say I'm a fan of Hayashi, his handling of NG3 says a lot, but I can say that Itagaki getting the boot was for sure good for at least DOA.

I'll have to disagree, DOA5U is harder than DOA4. The low entry bar was one of the things which worked for the series but tuning it for pro players has made it less playable for everyone else. Talking specifically about the counter window/control, this is something which probably wouldn't have happened if he were still there.

[ACSeraph]

DOA5 definitely isn't any harder to get into than 4, it's just that the playerbase is a lot stronger so online play isn't casual friendly. This is a direct result of the game not being a complete mess for once; good players are actually sticking with the game and learning it. There's no way FG developers are going to be able to limit the level of online play, unless they just make a shit game that good players won't waste their time on.

Also I don't really see much difference between it and 4 on the counter window. The real issue is that good players bait counters by delaying their attacks, which is something that definitely existed in 4 but you didn't see as often because high level players were scarce.

[Cata]

Unfortunately I have never played any of Itagakis games but over the years he's always seemed like a very eccentric pissed off dude that sometimes has a point

[Satan]

I love the guy, the world needs more Itagakis.
Shmups should be download only for no more than £10 on all platforms with no region fuckery. If Cave or G-Rev, or any of the decent devs pumped out 10 a year each, I'd have bought them all. Another thing: the feedback I get from pals who've been into games since the 80's is they don't like the difficulty of the current shooting games, but don't like playing NOVICE mode, either.

[Bonus!]

On a similar note, easier shmups get mocked by heavy players & that can also be discouraging for newcomers. Some easy shmups still have fun gameplay, sound, & visuals. Storm Blade for instance. Someone could master that game & then proudly post about it here only to have their pride smashed by the responses.

Did you 1CC Storm Blade? The last boss is certainly not what I'd call easy, compared to something like BWR+, for instance.

Do we have a thread for seperating them into tiers of difficulty? That would be pretty interesting.

Yes.

[system11]

DOA5 definitely isn't any harder to get into than 4, it's just that the playerbase is a lot stronger so online play isn't casual friendly. This is a direct result of the game not being a complete mess for once; good players are actually sticking with the game and learning it. There's no way FG developers are going to be able to limit the level of online play, unless they just make a shit game that good players won't waste their time on.

Also I don't really see much difference between it and 4 on the counter window. The real issue is that good players bait counters by delaying their attacks, which is something that definitely existed in 4 but you didn't see as often because high level players were scarce.

I could counter in 4, not 5 - the window has decreased quite a lot, there are also more situations where you can't counter at all, and success results in less damage. Countering was nerfed basically, but it was one of the things which made DOA the game it was.

[Doctor Butler]

Doctor Butler's suggestion doesn't disentagle the variable of genre. All games have been affected by this "entitlement," which really has allowed many games to find additional customers (at lower prices) and to sell for much longer (I mean, have you ever looked at the GoG catalog?) at the cost of some people feeling that $60 forever and Ultima Collection style scarcity was a thing of the past. So yeah, overall I view that as a positive thing. But look at the facts:
FPS + digital distribution = genre sales at their all-time peak
TPS + some digital distribution even on consoles = again, pretty sure we'll find an all-time sales peak here with new games like Dark Souls, Revengeance, etc.
Slumps + digital distribution = still more sales than you'd get selling CDs at comiket

The number of copies doesn't mean nearly as much as the revenue.

Let's use a $100,000 as an example revenue. Selling a game on Steam for $5 would require you to sell 20,000 copies, whereas selling at full-price will net you that same mount of cash having only sold about 1,600 copies.

10,000 sales at $5 a pop is $50,000
10,000 sales even as low as $30 is still $300,000 for the same initial investment.

Obviously these are hypothetical numbers, and I'm using the far extremes in pricing, but still, Steam's price-war has diminished the consumer's perception of value, and created this sort false-narrative that videogames are cheap to produce, and not worth much money.

Even if a developer refuses to participate in Valve's race-to-the-bottom - by setting reasonable prices for their products - the average joe still believes that particular devs game is worth far less than it is, and might choose to pass the game up entirely.

It's getting harder and harder for smaller fish to turn a proft in this industry

[JBC]

On a similar note, easier shmups get mocked by heavy players & that can also be discouraging for newcomers. Some easy shmups still have fun gameplay, sound, & visuals. Storm Blade for instance. Someone could master that game & then proudly post about it here only to have their pride smashed by the responses.

Did you 1CC Storm Blade? The last boss is certainly not what I'd call easy, compared to something like BWR+, for instance.

Do we have a thread for seperating them into tiers of difficulty? That would be pretty interesting.

Yes.

I 1cc'd Storm Blade in the arcade when I was like 14. It's only gotten easier with MAME not putting my quarters on the line. It's a great game & I love it but I'm not gonna pretend it's very challenging. In fact, I'd say it's leisurely approach was intentional.

Link?

[Lilium]

I love the guy, the world needs more Itagakis.
Shmups should be download only for no more than £10 on all platforms with no region fuckery. If Cave or G-Rev, or any of the decent devs pumped out 10 a year each, I'd have bought them all. Another thing: the feedback I get from pals who've been into games since the 80's is they don't like the difficulty of the current shooting games, but don't like playing NOVICE mode, either.

Having seen the wildly inconsistent quality of recent Cave titles and ports, i'd be shuttering to say the least at the notion of 10 of those every year lol. There's something to what you're saying about your pals though. A thing I have noticed around some gamers, some of which I know and others being through comments on forums and such is that playing the Easy mode is seen as a sign of weakness because we live in a generation where Very Hard translates into Normal mode and Easy mode is insulting.

Do you have any more input from those pals of yours about what is wrong with the Novice mode? I have yet to meet anyone who would give Novice modes a try simply because it to them sounds like they're pussying out.

[Shepardus]

There's something to what you're saying about your pals though. A thing I have noticed around some gamers, some of which I know and others being through comments on forums and such is that playing the Easy mode is seen as a sign of weakness because we live in a generation where Very Hard translates into Normal mode and Easy mode is insulting.

I see the same attitudes regarding Novice/Easy modes, one of my friends who actually got me into Touhou and shmups to begin with (or, more accurately, got me more into them after I had heard of them) doesn't even play Touhou on anything less than Lunatic and I'm not even sure he's ever gotten past stage 3 or 4 on any of them. I agree that part of it is how often "Hard" is normal and "Easy" is almost insultingly easy to anyone who's touched a computer before, as you said.

But I think a more important factor is how shmups nowadays are mainly treated as games to be played because they're hard rather than because they're fun, lumped together with intentionally sadistic and unfair games like I Wanna Be The Guy. If you're playing the game to show off how hard it is after seeing some video on Youtube and posting comments about Asians or dodging rain, you would probably see anything under the highest difficulty as missing the point of the game. Even fans of the genre (or at least the Touhou part of it, from what I've seen) misrepresent what makes the games worth playing when trying to promote them to others, focusing too much on the difficulty as the primary draw when it's really just one of many tools to make the game interesting for more than half an hour.

[Bananamatic]

retards only comparing games to each other according to difficulty without even playing said games are one thing (especially the people on youtube saying how touhou ultra is harder than X, ignoring the fact that the ultra hacks are fanmade and turn the game into unplayable crap)

novice modes being easy to the point of being boring is another

you could just add more extends or an autobomb to the novice mode with leaving the rest as it is

instead it's always stuff like futari novice where on top of making the enemies almost harmless you get 2 secret lives instead of one, 2 bombs per carrier and an autobomb that consumes only 1 bomb, not even counting the ridiculously tiny hitbox in that game or CCWI novice reducing the difficulty to nothing and giving you way more extends on top of that

ps2 mushi arrange is a good "novice" mode imo, just adding the autobomb makes the game much simpler and less punishing to play, no need to go overboard with everything

[Lilium]

I would like to look more at some input about the Novice modes from the POV of people who aren't very good at shmups rather than veterans who have played the genre for a long time have learned the ropes. I got into this stuff by playing Touhou games which basically have very beginner friendly lower difficulties, then gradually working my way up through those and then onwards to arcade games as the desire for more titles to choose from started growing.

@Shepardus
Playing a shmup for that reason alone is wrong yes and its important to get away from that. Just that a game is hard doesn't make it good by any means so its silly to promote them for just that. The point is not hard or easy, I can have fun with easy games sure. My problem with many modern games is the amount of handholding that is present in them. Maybe it would be smarter to paint the image of a fun game that doesn't hold your hand featuring modes of varying difficulty meaning there's a decent point of entry for players of all skill levels. I can mention some games that fit the bill but of course, not all would.

[Mimeslayer]

I would like to look more at some input about the Novice modes from the POV of people who aren't very good at shmups rather than veterans who have played the genre for a long time have learned the ropes. I got into this stuff by playing Touhou games which basically have very beginner friendly lower difficulties, then gradually working my way up through those and then onwards to arcade games as the desire for more titles to choose from started growing.

I guess I can throw in my opinion. Having played a whopping 2 Novice modes (DFK and CC:WI) I'd say my issue with them is less with the existence of Novice modes or that they "go overboard", but that there simply is no "middle ground" between them and the Arcade. In DFK this is less of an issue since the arcade game already gives you auto-bombs and bullet-canceling hypers, but with CC:WI I can see how it could be a larger issue. Playing the demo of the original doujin release I struggled to reach stage 3, and hearing that the arcade version is harder does not bode well for me. On the other hand, I played Novice mode once and got all the way to the the final boss before my blind run ended. Needless to say with a little practice I can easily beat it. The problem is the next step is the much, much harder Arcade Original mode. There's not stepping stone, it's a giant leap and then some.

That's what bugs me about "Novice" modes and such; it's not so much that they're too easy (though yeah I'd say DFK went a little overboard considering how easy Arcade loop-1 is), it's that they don't prepare you for what's next, and there's really nothing else that does so either other than practice modes. To me it's as if ZUN only had Easy and Lunatic difficulties, or BWR only had Heaven and Hell. Yes, you can simply make harder Novice modes, but then there are absolute beginners who never touched the genre before; that's what the current slate of Novice is good for in my opinion. It would be nice to see an "intermediate" difficulty in more commercial releases outside of doujin games (and properly balanced ones at that) but until then we're left with what experts "think" we want and can handle: a joke.

Again, just my personal opinion.

[Formless God]

I could counter in 4, not 5 - the window has decreased quite a lot, there are also more situations where you can't counter at all, and success results in less damage.

These are for the better. In 4 the risk of simply attacking the other person completely outweighs the reward. You can repay the damage tenfold with one successful hold. That's not a good idea no matter how you look at it. 5's hold system was right. It's a gimmick to punish predictable, button mashing scrubs and not something you do 4 times to win the round. Of course, I'm not one of those people who assume holds connect by themselves. But with that buffer window, effective window and damage, it's a legitimate tactic to just get slapped around while you fish for that hold. It makes the game shitty for both the attacker ("nope, ain't touching that porcupine; it hurts me more") and the defender ("y the fuck do i need a command list???").

[Shepardus]

I guess I can throw in my opinion. Having played a whopping 2 Novice modes (DFK and CC:WI) I'd say my issue with them is less with the existence of Novice modes or that they "go overboard", but that there simply is no "middle ground" between them and the Arcade.

Yeah, the closest thing Crimzon Clover has to an intermediate difficulty is the original doujin version. If there were a third mode in World Ignition with similar difficulty level to the original I think that would be perfect. It's one of the few things I feel that CC:WI is missing. Granted, the game already kinda has three difficulty levels in Novice, Arcade, and Arcade Unlimited, but they encompass such an enormous range of skill levels that one more between Novice and Arcade would be helpful. There's a huge gap between Novice and Arcade, and another big gap between Arcade Original and Arcade Unlimited though that gap isn't as much of a problem considering relatively few people even get to that skill level.

[Bananamatic]

if you want another difficulty between arcade and novice, you can just play type Z which makes everything much easier

[Shepardus]

That's actually a good point. I just tried Type Z for the first time in weeks and made it to Stage 5 on Arcade Original, which I've only done once before (on Type I), and no-missed Arcade Boost up to the Stage 3 boss. For some reason I tend to have a harder time scoring in Original mode with Type Z than I do with Type I, even though I survive longer.

I think if you're at the intermediate skill level where you can clear Novice fairly consistently, you should unlock Type Z around the same time you clear the game with the other three ships in Novice Boost and Original, which is around the time it's relevant to those players as a sort of easier way to play Arcade difficulty (and also relevant to the beginners who are starting to realize they need a bit of extra help clearing Novice).

Ships/characters balanced for different skill levels can actually serve as an alternative to offering easier game modes without rubbing it in players' faces that they're wusses. In Hellsinker, Minogame makes the game so much easier with all of his/her/its invincibility; in most Touhou games the default character+shot selection (Reimu-A) is the most beginner-friendly, with smaller hitbox, homing shots, and easy-to-manage movement speed; in Dimahoo the character selection screen says stuff like Karte is "for beginner." Difficulty can be adjusted to a certain extent by modifying the tools at the player's disposal rather than the challenges being faced, which is a point someone brought up earlier in the context of autobombs and increased number of bombs/extends.

[Ed Oscuro]

Steam's price-war has diminished the consumer's perception of value, and created this sort false-narrative that videogames are cheap to produce, and not worth much money.

I don't get what this discussion has to do with STGs, which don't seem to have ever been exceptionally difficult or expensive to produce, even at the end of Cave's output, especially considering all the discussions about targeting increasingly outmoded hardware and dealing only with slight refinements to venerable (but hardly groundbreaking) design rules. $300,000 x no sales = STILL NO SALES.

As for the "triple A" end, I'm calling that whole discussion a 1WP. There's obviously demand for flexible pricing and people are obviously looking for good price AND good content - "value." Sucks to be indie right now, agreed, but it's just natural that anybody trying to make a modern King's Quest (with King's Quest levels of "value") is going to have a rougher time of it. You might as well demand that the big title teams stop advertising blitzes, because that still has at least as much to do with making sales as the price!

I don't like a race to the bottom of the barrel, but (as a gamer) the critical problems in gaming seem to be related to the content and gameplay, regardless of price. I'm sure I'd see things differently if I was trying to make a go of selling games for a living, and I sympathize for that, but realistically I don't see indie capturing the imagination of the world terribly often unless its offerings really hit it out of the park or get lucky (not sure how we'd categorize Super Meat Boy and Minecraft here). Reality and dreams don't always work together.

Steam surely doesn't come in for blame here, at least as you've put it - if there's a false narrative, maybe it's that putting a cheaper-to-make game on Steam and lowering the price will lead to success eventually. But if you aren't hitting profitability with the price you've chosen, how does that get blamed on consumers or Steam? That's marketing and research's responsibility. And if you say "well it shouldn't be so random what gets it well and what doesn't," welcome to the marketplace of ideas, where nothing is new under the sun and excellent works of everything are always being ignored.

[Satan]

I love the guy, the world needs more Itagakis.
Shmups should be download only for no more than £10 on all platforms with no region fuckery. If Cave or G-Rev, or any of the decent devs pumped out 10 a year each, I'd have bought them all. Another thing: the feedback I get from pals who've been into games since the 80's is they don't like the difficulty of the current shooting games, but don't like playing NOVICE mode, either.

Having seen the wildly inconsistent quality of recent Cave titles and ports, i'd be shuttering to say the least at the notion of 10 of those every year lol. There's something to what you're saying about your pals though. A thing I have noticed around some gamers, some of which I know and others being through comments on forums and such is that playing the Easy mode is seen as a sign of weakness because we live in a generation where Very Hard translates into Normal mode and Easy mode is insulting.

Do you have any more input from those pals of yours about what is wrong with the Novice mode? I have yet to meet anyone who would give Novice modes a try simply because it to them sounds like they're pussying out.

Sample

"That's far too fucking hard."
"Play it on Novice then."
"Fuck off."

[LordHypnos]

I don't really know why, but I tend to feel more like a cheater or bad at games or whatever when I'm using an OP ship than playing on easy modes. Easy modes feel like just a good way to learn the basics of how the game plays, while an OP ship is OP...

I'm not saying this is in any way a reasonable way to feel, mind you.

[Skykid]

Let's Plays are shit. Everything else is gravy.

Absolutely true. Especially when 'Lets play' videos have to involve some total retard who hasn't made it out of the recesses of his bedroom corner for ten years narrating garbage over the top of it and doing his best to show everyone he can pronounce things in Japanese.

Mute buttons at the ready.

On Topic: Not so sure how much I agree with the DOA man's comment. The accusation is hardcore players killed shmups because they became too difficult and ostracised a large portion of the market?

But shmups were always difficult. Games like Last Resort, Image Fight and R-Type etc were never exactly cakewalks compared to the genres that co-existed around them. Shmups are pure arcade affairs: designed to eat a credit, designed to be mastered on a credit: I think the demise in their popularity is linked more to the death of arcades, 2D gaming as a prominent/popular format, and lack of interest in the face of games with more graphical depth and evolutionary hardware.

[Satan]

Let's Plays are shit. Everything else is gravy.

Absolutely true. Especially when 'Lets play' videos have to involve some total retard who hasn't made it out of the recesses of his bedroom corner for ten years narrating garbage over the top of it and doing his best to show everyone he can pronounce things in Japanese.

Mute buttons at the ready.

I quite like STG Weekly.

[Ed Oscuro]

The accusation is hardcore players killed shmups

No, the accusation is that developers ignored all markets but the hardcore players.

[Squire Grooktook]

The accusation is hardcore players killed shmups

No, the accusation is that developers ignored all markets but the hardcore players.

Might be some truth to it, but I think the hard truth is that all arcade styled games are necessarily for a hardcore demographic.

[Doctor Butler]

Might be some truth to it, but I think the hard truth is that all arcade games are necessarily for a hardcore demographic.

[KidQuaalude]

The accusation is hardcore players killed shmups

No, the accusation is that developers ignored all markets but the hardcore players.

Exactly, some of you are missing the point entirely. It's not that hardcore players 'killed' the genre, (how could they?) but the likes of Cave were trying to appease ONLY the hard-core, and alienated anyone else who might wish to try those games. I personally know a lot of players who would shiver at the thought of playing a 'hardcore' shmup but would still approach Galaga, for example. These games simply look too hard to the casual player, and that alone is enough for them not to even give the game a try.