Gameplay styles people said would not work on a platform
So recently it was revealed that the upcoming Mario Party would eschew an online multiplayer mode of the full classic gameplay style. It was a move some found to be quite questionable, however others contended that the gameplay style was inherently unsuited to internet play and it was the right move from Nintendo. Despite the efforts of some in that thread it is still a notion I can not begin to fathom, or at least have it go beyond "if you don't like it then don't play it but to omit it is at best terribly lazy of you".
In previous times some said that Diablo style dungeon crawlers were unsuited to consoles, particularly around the time Diablo 3 console ports were announced. I had played Diablo 1 and 2 on PC, then no small amount of time doing co-op dungeon siege on PC. Moving onto co-op in Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance and similar games on the gamecube and xbox felt completely and utterly natural. The insistence some brought to such discussions left me wondering if I had experienced some kind of shared hallucination with my friends and family during such times. It was not even like a mouse and keyboard vs controller for FPS games where even middling players will often beat or seriously worry high end players of the console varieties, and even I can certainly appreciate mouse aiming at times.
There are cases where one device or the other is in some way ill suited, the movement of real time strategy games from the roots in things like Dune II to games where actions per minute and micromanagement of more modern games being a great example of things that routinely fail with a controller. Though somewhat amusingly, not to mention bringing it back to the idea about Diablo style games above, the DOTA/MOBA style of gameplay may be something of an answer to that.
Echoes of something similar also happened in the discussion of the game focused phone from Asus but that might be reaching for the purposes of this thread.
Another you may see this in is in fighting games on the PC. Some seem to feel that it is unsuited to it, and it would seem historically publishers have as well.
Controllers will obviously be a big part of this but screen architecture, the "community" for a device and other hardware limitations may also play. On the matter of "community" I once heard it said that consoles tend to keep multiplayer games active for longer where PC will drop them like a hot potato after a month or three.
This is part of a series on GBAtemp where we consider game design, aspects of play and game industry concepts. Previously we discussed the value of online play.
emulation vs hardware, a favoured game style that might have become less common in recent times, skills one might have learned or honed because of a game, games on the PS4 and Xbone that will stand the test of time, games that got better after launch, cancelled games and shuttered devs, and story canon in games.
You are then invited to discuss any of the things above, or similar things where people have insisted a game or style of game was ill suited to a given class of device, either to your puzzlement or history ultimately coming to argue otherwise. You can also try for the opposite and attempt to argue that all attempts at a given style have been flawed and that future game developers would do well to not try.