It's coming out for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 and it was supposed to be a classic round-based strategy game... Of course it's going to be "dumbed down", for one to "reach further audiences" and in its basic design because it has to fit and be playable on a console, with controllers...

They're using words like simplified, cinematic etc. in their pitch and they added cover

The game even has some sort of console-centric Mass Effect-ish UI:

I wish people understood that there's a completely different process with varying limitations and entirely different design decisions being made based on the platforms a game is being developed on already...

"Dumbed Down" is a buzzword. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't have a definition that is agreed upon and most of the time when someone tries to define it and then apply it to something, they're wrong by their own definition.

Making something more intuitive is the essence of making it less challenging or intellectual. If something is totally intuitive then you don't have to think when using it all as nothing will cause you to stop and think or learn any new skill. But we don't normally buy a strategy game to learn a new complex system of cursor control and selecting units.

I can't see if I agree with what these horrible people are accusing of being dumbed down since I only have your word to go on but to say that you can never say that making something more intuitive is going to dumb it down is wrong.

Draech:
It is one of those comments that has been getting my grinding my gear lately.

I have been keeping with the development of Xcom: Enemy unknown (the Maxie one. Strategy. Not the FPS) and they talk about how they are streamlining some of the combat from the original so it would be less clunky. An expected response of purists who decided to rage out and use the "dumbing down" argument ofc happened. It is getting to me. I am sorry I have seen the use of "dumbing down" so many times before and like this time it is used wrongly.

Making gameplay more intuitive isn't "dumbing down". A games main feature isn't going through an absurd method of control in order to artificially ramp up the difficulty. The whole point of streamlining is to lower the gap between decision and in game action.

"Dumbing down" isn't the same as user friendly. As an audience who is relied on for feedback we need to do the best job we can making critique relevant and useful.

So much this. It's the worst trend in gamers apart from fanboyism.

to me dumbed down is the game features that are purposely designed to make people shut off their brains while playing.. quest markers for rpgs first come to mind

Sometimes things are dumbed down and you can't deny it.

Sometimes it's for the best (eg ME1 to ME2 could be argued, however ME3 hit the sweet spot),

Sometimes it's for the worse (Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age 2 FUCKING RUINED A PERFECT RPG GAME GRRRRR, and Crysis 1 to Crysis 2). It depends the level of dumbing down and whether it's needed. DA:O was streamlined enough to make sense and not have endless amounts of menus. DA2 took that, and absolutely ruined the charm of the original game.

It's not a fallacy if it actually happens and there is plenty of evidence that it happens. Streamlining an interface to make things more intuitive does not always mean the gameplay is being dumbed down although the two processes often get intertwined by both developers and players.

There are some genres that complexity is pretty essential to making an interesting game, tactical strategy, rpgs etc. If you start removing complexity in the name of streamlining then the gameplay is indeed being dumbed down.

In the case of Xcom whether or not it is a good game remains to be seen, whether or not it is a worthy successor to the original Xcom games will all depend on how much dumbing down they decide to do.

In many cases the developers try to hit a happy medium between old core fans and trying to capture a new audience. The success depends on how well they chose which gameplay elements to strip down and which to leave.

i dont think its dumbming down its stream-lining which i like.

for example in mass effect 1 you had to put pints into a huge amount of useless powers and weapon abilities to get the good ones and you would only ever spam the 3 most useful powers anyway and at time it makes no sense! how does one become a spectre if they cant shoot a sniper rifle straight to save their lives (literally) and why do you have to level up your assault rifle skill before you can train on your sniper despite not using the assault rifle most of the time. and why do i pick up dozens of useless mods for my useless sniper rifle every level!

move to mass effect 2 and i am proficient on weapons and can improve the weapons by buying upgrades and start with 3 useful powers and upgrade those, gets the same result but in a much better way

Draech:
Now the thing is you can have your cake and eat it 2. Chess is mechanically fairly strait forward. If you know how the movement of each individual piece works, then it is more or less straightforward. It doesn't have an fairly complex ruleset compared to a game like monopoly (here we have to write reminders of each value on every street), yet I think we can both agree that chess is by far the "smarter" game. The difference lies in what can be considered a calculation. Just that the variable you can control are easy to manipulate doesn't mean the reaction will be easy to calculate.

But Monopoly is a much more intuitive game than Chess. You put a piece on the starting square which is clearly marked then roll a dice to move.

With Chess without being taught the names of the pieces and what they can do and how the end game works then you can't play. You can't start to play to any semi competent standard until you have read and learned a book of opening moves.

Draech:

More Fun To Compute:
Making something more intuitive is the essence of making it less challenging or intellectual. If something is totally intuitive then you don't have to think when using it all as nothing will cause you to stop and think or learn any new skill. But we don't normally buy a strategy game to learn a new complex system of cursor control and selecting units.

I can't see if I agree with what these horrible people are accusing of being dumbed down since I only have your word to go on but to say that you can never say that making something more intuitive is going to dumb it down is wrong.

Now the thing is you can have your cake and eat it 2. Chess is mechanically fairly strait forward. If you know how the movement of each individual piece works, then it is more or less straightforward. It doesn't have an fairly complex ruleset compared to a game like monopoly (here we have to write reminders of each value on every street), yet I think we can both agree that chess is by far the "smarter" game. The difference lies in what can be considered a calculation. Just that the variable you can control are easy to manipulate doesn't mean the reaction will be easy to calculate.

I was about to mention chess.

An analogue to the good kind of "streamlining" would be replacing a complicated input system (for instance, typing in ne5xf7) with a more user-friendly interface where you click on the piece you want to move, then click on where you want to move the piece. Even then, you will have people who prefer to type in ne5xf7.

The problem is that a more common (or at least what feels like more common) style of streamlining is assuming that game inaccessibility stems from game complexity, and replacing the knights with pawns.

Draech:
Now the thing is you can have your cake and eat it 2. Chess is mechanically fairly strait forward. If you know how the movement of each individual piece works, then it is more or less straightforward. It doesn't have an fairly complex ruleset compared to a game like monopoly (here we have to write reminders of each value on every street), yet I think we can both agree that chess is by far the "smarter" game. The difference lies in what can be considered a calculation. Just that the variable you can control are easy to manipulate doesn't mean the reaction will be easy to calculate.

Monopoly's a bad choice, especially depending on what house rules you start playing with. For that matter, even the straight rules can get quite complex if a the people playing know when and how to properly mortgage. A more apropos comparison would have been Sorry or Clue. That Monopoly includes an element of chance does not make it any less intelligent.

As to the OP, I've played the original XCOM, and while many of the controls were clunky and there were multiple avenues that could have been streamlined it's pretty damn clear that the new one is quite dumbed down from the original.

endtherapture:
Sometimes things are dumbed down and you can't deny it.

Sometimes it's for the best (eg ME1 to ME2 could be argued, however ME3 hit the sweet spot),

Sometimes it's for the worse (Dragon Age Origins to Dragon Age 2 FUCKING RUINED A PERFECT RPG GAME GRRRRR, and Crysis 1 to Crysis 2). It depends the level of dumbing down and whether it's needed. DA:O was streamlined enough to make sense and not have endless amounts of menus. DA2 took that, and absolutely ruined the charm of the original game.

This is very very true. I hope they are not lying when they say they learned from their mistakes because i loved dao (and replaying BG right now). Dao2 was a good game but not nearly as immersive as dao.

I will agree that making an unintuitive system easier to use is not really a negative. I try to avoid using the term "Dumbed down" but when I do, I am generally referring to the fact that games nowadays tend to be shallower, easier, and played very safe, so as many people as possible can play it.
That is just how it is going with AAA games. I don't think it is really possible to argue otherwise. Of course, there are still a lot of ways to find deep challenging games through other channels or from more indie sources. This is all just from my own perspective from playing many games since the 80s and the trends I've seen developing more recently as gaming becomes mainstream and gaming budgets become more bloated and need to recoup more costs.

I agree. Every time I hear that phrase it's referring to a simple act of removing clunk to make things more intuitive. It's an improvement. Further, the way it's said, "dumbed down", edges towards that other gamer fallacy, that of casual and hardcore gaming. You can guess which side anybody using the "dumbed down" argument thinks they're on.

Draech:

"Dumbing down" isn't the same as user friendly.

But it is. It really, really is. Streamlined, user friendly, simplifying, all euphemisms. Americans love euphemisms. George Carline will tell you.

Draech:

Tallim:
It's not a fallacy if it actually happens and there is plenty of evidence that it happens. Streamlining an interface to make things more intuitive does not always mean the gameplay is being dumbed down although the two processes often get intertwined by both developers and players.

There are some genres that complexity is pretty essential to making an interesting game, tactical strategy, rpgs etc. If you start removing complexity in the name of streamlining then the gameplay is indeed being dumbed down.

In the case of Xcom whether or not it is a good game remains to be seen, whether or not it is a worthy successor to the original Xcom games will all depend on how much dumbing down they decide to do.

In many cases the developers try to hit a happy medium between old core fans and trying to capture a new audience. The success depends on how well they chose which gameplay elements to strip down and which to leave.

I am not going to say "Dumbing down doesn't happen" I am trying to say that we often call things dumbed down when it isn't.
Complexity is not the same as difficulty or dept. I have 2 good examples Guild Wars VS WoW. Now I think a lot of people will agree with me when I say that Guild wars have the deeper combat, but WoW has the most skills available to you during combat (maybe even in total. Not going to do the math since it is kinda besides the point). Combat in WoW is needlessly complex in while being a "no-brainer" most of the time. Guild Wars focuses on a few skills picked in advance and forces the user to understand his enemies actions in order to calculate the best counter action.

Another example would be HoN VS LoL. HoN took its system and heroes strait from Dota, and that meant transferring the Agi, Int, Str, stat system over. This added an extra layer of complexity, but at the same time limited the game. LoL made everything from the bottom up. That meant rather than going Agi, Int, Str they went with pure stats like Health, Dmg, Mana ect. This meant that items ingame now had alternative users.

"Dumbing down" is a much more complex issue than people will let it be.

I'm sure those examples are adequate but I've not played any of them so it's kind of lost on me. The term dumbing down normally relates to removal of gameplay elements or things to consider in established franchises to me.
Given the Xcom example there are numerous ways they could streamline it which would be good but there are numerous ways they can dumb it down too which would be bad.

WoW Killer:
I agree. Every time I hear that phrase it's referring to a simple act of removing clunk to make things more intuitive. It's an improvement. Further, the way it's said, "dumbed down", edges towards that other gamer fallacy, that of casual and hardcore gaming. You can guess which side anybody using the "dumbed down" argument thinks they're on.

They're two different things. Super Meat Boy has a simple interface, but it is hardly "dumbed down" from more complicated platformers. There's difficulty that comes from the interface, and difficulty that comes from the challenges the game throws at you.

Draech:

More Fun To Compute:
Making something more intuitive is the essence of making it less challenging or intellectual. If something is totally intuitive then you don't have to think when using it all as nothing will cause you to stop and think or learn any new skill. But we don't normally buy a strategy game to learn a new complex system of cursor control and selecting units.

I can't see if I agree with what these horrible people are accusing of being dumbed down since I only have your word to go on but to say that you can never say that making something more intuitive is going to dumb it down is wrong.

Now the thing is you can have your cake and eat it 2. Chess is mechanically fairly strait forward. If you know how the movement of each individual piece works, then it is more or less straightforward. It doesn't have an fairly complex ruleset compared to a game like monopoly (here we have to write reminders of each value on every street), yet I think we can both agree that chess is by far the "smarter" game. The difference lies in what can be considered a calculation. Just that the variable you can control are easy to manipulate doesn't mean the reaction will be easy to calculate.

You can have your cake and eat it, but I think it's hard to pull off in practice. We don't exactly see a new board game with the popularity of chess every decade. When someone attempts to make a new board game with simple rules, they often end up being too shallow almost to the point of having a perfect mathematical 'solution'.
Also if you compare Chess to other classic board games like Go, Checkers or Backgammon the ruleset is quite complex. Chess has even been 'patched' many times to make it work better. How many beginning chess players know of the 'en passant' rule for instance?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/En_passant

Adding complexity to a game is a convenient shortcut that can be used to create better gameplay and depth. Since perfected simplicity is hard to accomplish, complexity is often a necessary trade-off.

xDarc:

Draech:

"Dumbing down" isn't the same as user friendly.

But it is. It really, really is. Streamlined, user friendly, simplifying, all euphemisms. Americans love euphemisms. George Carline will tell you.

No it is not.

an example with Xcom for user friendliness would be compacting the UI and streamlining it. Dumbing it down would be removing the ability to research because some fools might not be able to figure it out.

well..if they get rid of the godawefull inventory system of ME1 and replace it with something slightly better like in ME3, that's streamlining and intuitive, and good (even though in that particular case it could have arguably been avoided if the devs wouldn't have made the PC version an awefull console port and implemented a non-retarded interface).

but if we take for example battlefield 3 versus battlefield 2. if they reduce the number of factions from four to two, get rid of native voiceover support, toss the commander, essentially squadleaders and the entire command interface, the commo rose and give us miniature CoD-esque maps, all because either technical limitations of consoles or mental limitations of some console players that couldn't employ teamplay or something resembling even basic tactics to save their grandmothers life, that's dumbing down, and that is bad.

Draech:

Kahunaburger:

WoW Killer:
I agree. Every time I hear that phrase it's referring to a simple act of removing clunk to make things more intuitive. It's an improvement. Further, the way it's said, "dumbed down", edges towards that other gamer fallacy, that of casual and hardcore gaming. You can guess which side anybody using the "dumbed down" argument thinks they're on.

They're two different things. Super Meat Boy has a simple interface, but it is hardly "dumbed down" from more complicated platformers. There's difficulty that comes from the interface, and difficulty that comes from the challenges the game throws at you.

I think we can go even one step further. Removing certain elements can focus the challenge in a desired direction. If we go with the Super Meat Boy example the story is made ultra simple for a reason. To even further focus on the idea of execution.

Yeah, simplicity can be good, as long as the core mechanics can stand on their own. Most of the games I consider "good streamlining" either boil a simple genre to its core essence, or leave only mechanics that generate a great deal of emergent complexity on their own.

What I've heard of the new X-Com certainly points to it being dumbed down.
To me, dumbed down means the removal of features which results in the reduction of complexity and strategy.

For instance, in the new X-Com you only get one base; that's it. In the old one, setting up 2 or 3 bases around the globe to maximize your coverage, response time, and fuel limits on your ships was an integral part of the game. You also had to keep each base stocked with troops and weapons. This was part of the X-Com experience and now it's gone.

Kahunaburger:

WoW Killer:
I agree. Every time I hear that phrase it's referring to a simple act of removing clunk to make things more intuitive. It's an improvement. Further, the way it's said, "dumbed down", edges towards that other gamer fallacy, that of casual and hardcore gaming. You can guess which side anybody using the "dumbed down" argument thinks they're on.

They're two different things. Super Meat Boy has a simple interface, but it is hardly "dumbed down" from more complicated platformers. There's difficulty that comes from the interface, and difficulty that comes from the challenges the game throws at you.

Sure, but the implication is there. To say "dumbed down" is to label those who prefer it as more casual than those who don't. But I reject the whole casual/hardcore thing anyway. I mean Angry Birds is casual. Nothing that ever gets referred to as "catering for casuals" in regular gamer discussions is actually casual.

Not that I've ever seen anybody called SMB dumbed down. The most recent one that I've heard is Diablo 3. I think people must be mad to throw around hate over this game. Every change introduced seems like an improvement to me. Less clunk in the levelling and controls, and stuff like resources and cooldowns to make ability use more strategic and less spammy. Yet people call it dumbed down.

The main problem is that streamlining often makes it so you can do less in a game. Streamlined games are much more closed. Usually when a problem comes up in one of these games there's only one or two solutions, the ones that the developers specifically made to do. Usually this results in the game being much simpler where difficulty comes more from reaction and memorizing combos than actual strategy.

I'm not saying this is bad, I'm saying that a game doesn't need to be efficient. They're games, they just need to be entertaining.

I don't really get why "Dumbing down" is a bad thing. I guess a lot of people like big impenetrable games that rely solely on numbers and take 5 hours to understand what the fuck is going on but personally, that's not my thing.

AC10:
What I've heard of the new X-Com certainly points to it being dumbed down.
To me, dumbed down means the removal of features which results in the reduction of complexity and strategy.

For instance, in the new X-Com you only get one base; that's it. In the old one, setting up 2 or 3 bases around the globe to maximize your coverage, response time, and fuel limits on your ships was an integral part of the game. You also had to keep each base stocked with troops and weapons. This was part of the X-Com experience and now it's gone.

If it really is the case that the new X-Com only allows one base, I agree that is an example of dumbing down. The multiple bases in the original made real gameplay variants possible and was an important feature.

Changing the action point system to a simpler format on the other hand can be a simplification that will be worthwhile. Sometimes complexity can detract from the gameplay, and this might be one of those cases.

AC10:
What I've heard of the new X-Com certainly points to it being dumbed down.
To me, dumbed down means the removal of features which results in the reduction of complexity and strategy.

For instance, in the new X-Com you only get one base; that's it. In the old one, setting up 2 or 3 bases around the globe to maximize your coverage, response time, and fuel limits on your ships was an integral part of the game. You also had to keep each base stocked with troops and weapons. This was part of the X-Com experience and now it's gone.

Only one base?!?!?

Okay yeah, dumbed down. I am a big fan of streamlining interfaces and making things easier to use, but removing something like the construction of multiple bases would decrease the value of the game in my opinion. Now doing something like allowing you to set up automatic reorders on troops or supplies, or set up templates for new bases- that would be an effective streamlining. God knows that xcom games could drag on later if you were always caught up ordering new clips for the rifles.

The argument that games are being dumbed down seems to get thrown around in the same circles as the 'games were better ten/twenty years ago' bullshit.

My biggest gripe with the current gen of games isn't that they are over-simplified at the core, but that every single game now has to come with a painfully slow training level that teaches you things anyone would pick up within literally a minute of playing. QED: Mario Galaxy 2 comes with a DVD showing you how to play it...IT'S FUCKING MARIO.

For all the things I disliked about it, I respected Skyrim for throwing you into the world and never explaining the majority of features. I mean, I played the entire game without ever knowing you could use the horse carts to travel to other towns, but it made the game so much more fun every time I discovered a hitherto unknown ability that would change the game.

I suppose the argument in defense of all this is that people who want to just pick up and play will get annoyed if they don't know what they're doing and keep failing, eventually abandoning the game, but from my experience people who don't really care about gaming will do exactly that even if you tell them specifically what each button does.

Streamlining is simplifying or automating those tasks that required little or no thought to perform optimally anyway. It speeds things up.

Dumbing down is removing or simplifying those tasks that did require some thought. It makes games too easy as a mental exercise.

To deny either of these things ever happen, is to know nothing about older games.