NukeTheMoon;n9370881 said:
Video games are supposed to offer a set of rules and restrictions than are meant to be worked within or worked around. Telling the player of a video-game to accept a crappy dice role in a outcome is like putting a gambler in-front of a slot machine with no cost to play and expecting them to only pull the lever once.
So... what your saying is that anyone who likes games like the old "UFO: Enemy Unknown" ( "X-COM: UFO Defense" for you American's), and "X-COM: Terror from the Deep", or the new "XCOM: Enemy Unknown/Within" and "XCOM 2", and a huge amount of people who like certain kinds of rogue-like games... are gambling addicts? XD
No... accepting crappy dice rolls has got almost nothing to do with being a gambling addict or anything. For the most part games of this nature is all about dealing with bad situations and rolling with the punches and what not... how to overcome the fact that you just had a mission in for example XCOM where you just lost your 6 best soldiers in a mission due to X reason.
Many games like this is built around that you can actually lose, and still keep playing, and potentually still win in the end... where as most games out there tend to be
"If you lose this, then you have to reload and do it all over again untill you succeed".
Losing in a game like Skyrim means that the "gameplay flow" is broken and you have to constantly start over at your last save... it's like a vinyl record with a scratch on it which when you play it will constantly jumps back and replayes the same part over and over again untill it somehow manages to get past the scratch. Where as with XCOM 2 if you lose a mission the gameplay flow is not really interupted as you can continue playing... sure you probably just lost a bunch of soldiers and potentually equipment as well (which sucks), but you can keep going and in the end still manage to defeat the aliens. Of course, have enough of those bad losses happen in XCOM and you will eventually reach a permanent "fail state" in the game... but it does take a lot more effort to reach that point in games like XCOM, vs most other games out there where that fail state will happen as soon as your character dies or you failed in some mission to protect civilians from death or what ever, where you then have to start over from your last save.
Yes, you can essentually do the same with XCOM... reload each time something bad happens... but you don't always have to if you don't want to, since the game is built in such a way where it is possible to keep going even though you lost a mission or something.
A lot of games like this is all about "managing your luck", where you in various ways work your self around the fact that dice rolling can effect what happens. In Blood Bowl for example, a tabletop- and video-game which has a huge amount of dice rolling (almost every single thing you do in that game involves rolling dice), you can pretty easily see the difference between the good vs bad players, and/or the veteran vs newbie players. And the way you can see this difference is usually by a few factors, like their Win/Loss ratio obviously... but one of the biggest ones is by how much the player complaines about the games RNG. I can almost garantee you that almost every single person, who has ever complained about the RNG in Blood Bowl, has either been a newbie, had poor understanding on the game and it's game mechanics and rules, or is essentually a bad Blood Bowl player in general... because these players have failed to learn the simple truth of that the absolut best skills you as a player can learn when it comes to BB is the skill of
"Manage your luck", the skill of
"Plan for the dice always failing you", the skill of actually knowing all of the games rules, and other such things. Yes, good and/or bad luck can win and/or lose you a BB game... but you can not rely on luck for you to be a good BB player, to be someone who fairly consistantly wins most of their matches... to be such a player you have to learn those vital element of managing your luck, plan for failure, knowing the games rules, and other such things.
You see the same with a lot of the XCOM stuff... where a lot of players complain about how the game cheats with the RNG, or that the percentage that the game shows you is false (that if the game says you have a 90% chance to hit, it's actually more like a 50% or less or something... or other such rediculous statements), or what ever else it may be. And usually this comes from them either being newbies, or have a poor understanding of all of the other things I have mentioned befor, or just a general lacking understanding of how things like chance works (like even if you do have a 99% chance of hitting, you can still miss 10 times in a row... each new roll of a dice or RNG or somehting does after all NOT take into accound what any previous roll was). Generally people who can't accept that they them selves might actually be the problem in the equation as to why they failed.
I am not saying that you can't get screwed over by a bunch of subsequent bad rolls... where you have done everything right, and still you failed due to the RNG... but that is not evidence of a game cheating, or the game somehow being badly made, or that it is a bad game mechanics, or what ever else people might say... those things are just evidence of that
"shit happens"... and that they are the exceptions which proves the rules kind of a thing, that the "skills" of managing your luck, planing for failure, learning the games rules and things which effects it, and accepting that shit happens, and all that, actually works for the most part in these games.