In Warcraft 3: Reforged, I was playing a mission where I had to defend my base for 30 minutes. I did well for the first 28 minutes, then a huge horde of enemies came and smashed me. Let's talk about it.
I do not agree with the design of the mission. Just defend the base as the goal says it is not enough. You have to attack the different bases of the enemies to get them weak in the last wave. Sounds obvious now, but if the goal of the mission it was to defend, I did as I was ordered to do it, I defended not attacked. My focus it was to improve my base and to defend it. I don’t mind to be punished to learn that, but I do mind to spend 30 minutes on that.
I confess I’m not the best playing strategy games. I normally want to build everything, upgrade everything, make the base pretty (or at least symmetric as possible) and because of that, I will die fast - and I'm ok with that. Also, I'm a casual to mid-core player. If a game has an easy mode, I normally go for it because I want to beat a game fast to move to another one. It is the way that I found to have time to play different games.
Back to the game, I had to restart the mission. 30 minutes again. I changed the difficulty level from Normal to Story. I started to play the mission, and it wasn’t enough for me. My Sixth Sense was on, and my brain was shouting to me I SEE DEAD PEOPLE! I opened the log in the game and typed iseedeadpeople. The whole map it was revealed to me. I smiled then I tried whosyourdaddy, and I became invincible, killing everything with 1 hit.
I remember to have a folder in my childhood full of cheat codes and walkthroughs for videogames. As I said, I’m not a hardcore RTS player, and maybe because of that the cheat codes that got stuck in my mind it was from Warcraft III and Age of Mythologies.
It was nostalgic to type the codes that I remembered. And I have to say, the game was still enjoyable, I did have a lot of fun with it. It feels nice to "break the rules", to test and have fun around.
I remember to watch an interview with Celeste developers where they said that they were completely satisfied with Madeline controls/physics only when they put the character in an empty room and it was still fun to control it.
Using the cheat to become invincible it was like to be in an empty room right? Nothing it was a threat to my troop. And God still felt good to play it. Call it Assist Mode as in Celeste, or Assist Block in Mario but it is important to be inclusive and let the player to “ignore” a level to keep progressing. It does not mean anything else besides being inclusive. The main target group of the game it will not use this “cheat mode” right? It just makes the game itself more accessible for the non-target audience.
If I think Dark Souls should have an easy mode? Well, that is another topic because the intentions of the design it is quite specific. But long story short, yes, I do think an Assist Mode would be nice. Or cheat codes, cheat codes are nuts! Please more cheat codes!
Well, this image is from the credits of the game. It is the same cinematic than the original game. I was a bit disappointed, but it was nostalgic so I guess it is ok?
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