What did mcote mean with...
That this game is "supposed to be frustrating"?
Because. If a games frustrating someone just won't play it .
Is it an attempt to let people connect to the characters they play via the shared feeling of frustration? I doubt Jed Olsen gets frustrated with laggy console menus that constantly freeze up on the bloodweb screen.
Trapped getting frustrated because he was stunned by a pallet isn't shared. We're frustrated that we got stunned from 2m away. (Seriously hating the pillboxes right now. You don't even have to be touching a pallet to get stunned by it)
The grind is frustrating, and I don't think I've heard anyone saying that's a major reason as to why they play the game....
And yet in the ruin/doctor rework the goal was to make things less frustrating.
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I think he worded it poorly, he didn't mean frustration literally, he meant frustration more as tension and what comes with it, the spiteness, the "arghh" (as he called it). It's a part of every competetive game, but I do agree that in dbd especially it fits great, it's just unfortunate that quite often the frustration doesn't come from the other players directly (as it should), but from the game itself, nowadays more than ever with dedicated servers being the way they are.
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Honestly i believe its him just wording it poorly. i believe he meant like the give and take of winning an loosing, i.e. like for example the "frustration" of missing a hit because the survivor juked it properly, or for the opposite side loosing a mindgame against a killer because they legit tricked you. things like that that are give and take in the matches depending on how well you are playing.
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He probably meant "engaging".
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probably something he said to save the poor game balance.
he said also that demogorgon would be a "very strong killer".
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I think you're right.
In games, there's "positive frustration," which is good and encourages players to improve. It's created by challenging gameplay that's still rewarding enough to make players feel like their efforts are worthwhile.
However, players are complaining that DbD creates negative frustration that is a result of poor game design. Stuff outside of the player's influence, like the crazy amount of bugs, creates negative frustration. If a game is too easy, it's boring, but the same goes if it's too challenging. If players feel like the odds against them are insurmountable, they get bored and angry. That's negative frustration, not positive.
When I'm put up against survivors way above my skill level, it feels like nothing I do matters. I feel bored with it and I go afk for the rest of the match. I don't feel the "arghh," there's no desire to beat them, I just feel listless; I can't care enough to continue. Who wants to play a game where it feels like their involvement has no effect on the outcome?
Being unable to hit survivors in a chase because of the ridiculous frame drops is another great one. I dread Bloodlust due to the effect it has on the game's frames. Or every time a grab fails. Or, playing survivor, I have watched killers swing and their weapon goes through the other survivor but has no effect. I've seen it happen multiple times, both players were standing still, and the weapon just passed harmlessly through the survivor's body. What the hell is that?
Cote for some reason interpreted players' frustrations with this game as the positive kind, and it comes across as out-of-touch with the playerbase when so many players are on the boards saying the game is negatively frustrating due to poor game design and a crapton of bugs.
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Most likely he means what every competitive game has. If you get invested into the game, you get frustrated if you lose or at least most people will.
What he obviously failed to notice is that this game tries hard to not be competitive, at the same time they organise tournaments in a non-competitive game and do nothing about obvious imbalances in the game.
Game can be frustrating if you lose in the game against a better opponent for example to god like nurse. I usually take it as a loss and carry on because I've been bested and I can learn from it but then I go against nurse with mori or swf with toolboxes and a key and I feel robbed. Or I get ormund as a killer and can very well just write off that game as a unfair loss.
It's frustrating when you can't do anything to beat your opponent and as always Mr.Cote is completely ignoring these cases.
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I'd assume he wants that frustration-fueled will to improve that's pretty common in games. Not surface-of-the-sun temperature seething rage, but the little moments of "grr, I'll get you next time!"
And they totally exist, to anyone that doesn't just write off better players as "no life tryhards" or something anyway. You get juked or 360d and you think to yourself "grr, I'll get you next time!". You get mindgamed and downed, and think to yourself "grr, that won't work on me next time buddy!". You get frustrated at getting outplayed, and that frustration motivates you to not let it happen again - to learn something from the experience.
I really don't think it was ever intended to excuse legitimate balancing woes or obnoxious player behavior.
He's a game director, so it would make sense for him to mean something like that. He's not a programmer leaving frustrating bugs in the game because he wants the game to be frustrating, and he's not a map designer that goes out of his way to put god windows or deadzones on maps because he wants the game to be frustrating.
That's my take, anyway. There's obviously less "healthy" sources of frustration in the game (bugs and map design are both examples of this, but there's more), but I don't think that's what he meant at all.
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Interesting, where did he say that?
As others said above, it's possible he just worded it badly. Impressively fluent though he is, I don't believe English is his first language.
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He said it sometime around the stranger things DLC release, maybe at a convention or interview. It had the stranger things DLC art in the background so was probably directly after the release. I saw a clip of him saying it but it didn't sound like in a bad way. I think he tried to say that this game invokes real emotions or something along those lines
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In the King interview. Lemme just find the timestamp
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Theres too many interviews. But in space coconut's most recent video the timestamp is 2:55 - > 3:15
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Right. I went and found the interview because Space Coconut's video doesn't really give enough context.
(For anyone else who's interested, here is the link to what the OP is referring to:)
As for how I would interpret his comment, to me it sounds like what he's talking about is what might otherwise be described as "competitive spirit". It's boring when everything in a game always goes your way and it's not a challenge. I think he's wrong to imply that perfectly balanced games are boring, because if that were the case no one would ever have played, say, Starcraft (a very popular and famously well-balanced RTS, for those who aren't aware), but I think that for some people, what keeps them hooked on a game like DBD is probably that sense of striving to succeed in spite of uneven or unfavourable odds, which could be described as "frustration". The more difficult or unfair the challenge feels, the better the player feels when they manage to beat it regardless, and that can be quite an addictive feeling.
Dark Souls is another example of a game that could be said to "thrive on frustration" in a similar way. It's not for everyone, but for some people that feeling is a strong motivator to keep playing. In that sense, "frustration" can be a good thing because it spurs you to do better, which I think Coconut is missing by incorrectly conflating frustration with being "pissed off", which is not the same thing.
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I wouldn't pay too much attention to what MCOTE says. After all, he was the one who suggested that killers should play civilisation. I like Mathieu, but sometimes he says things that outrage the players even though he didn't mean to.
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