[Feedback] A New Player's Perspective (Will update if there's interest)

[Iscah]

This seems to be unfortunately true (at least up to level 50); I'm not sure if it's a good selling point for the game though. Or if it's just the way games are trending now- I noticed a commercial for the new Mario game that had a line "And if you can't beat the level, that's fine! Just skip it and try a different one". Or the mobile "This game will grind for you while you're not playing it!" games.

Unless you're dealing with a pure gameplay, escalating difficulty game like Pac-Man or Tetris, I would definitely rather that the developers err on the side of letting players access everything, or at least a range of things – whether that means being able to get through the story or just have access to more than one puzzle (or platformer level) in a hub instead of having to do them all sequentially.

Obviously there's some kind of balance to be struck, and it depends on the exact nature of the game, but I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to be able to skip over a difficult puzzle and move on with the story. Either your personal drive for completion will bring you back there, or you won't care and nobody has lost anything.

I have a feeling I've played at least one game that let you skip levels, but with a limit on how many you could have in skipped status at a time, so you eventually had to clear at least one of your previous skipped levels before you could skip a new one.

I don't see the point of "game plays itself" games unless you're getting some specific enjoyment out of seeing the numbers go up, or whatever it is that they actually do. I'd be happy if a game played the grindy parts itself – in FFXIV terms, if I could set my character to automatically rack up hours of EXP in Bozja so I could come in to play the story and do each FATE once instead of ten times each, but not for it to clear the whole thing from start to finish so I never do anything with it. (Although even then I wouldn't mind start-to-finish for alts... but it's a bit different for something like FFXIV where you have essentially a set of different games bundled up alongside the main game. I wouldn't independently choose to play a Bozja-type game and then not actually play it.)