Tawmis wrote:adeyke wrote:
Tawmis wrote:adeyke wrote:
But it's not about hard vs. easy. It's about whether the game is fair to its player.
But what is "fair" to the player? Hand holding everything? Painting it out so it's obvious?
The Sierra manuals used to say something to the degree, "Try to pick up anything that isn't nailed down."
After figuring out a few puzzles and seeing the weird logic - I realized, "Ah, it's going to be THAT kind of thinking!"
It's like reading Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You had to think outside the box - because that is not a "normal" book and these were not "normal" thinking games. That gets established pretty quickly.
There's certainly some degree of subjectivity. But a player will have some expectations going into the game and will feel betrayed if those expectations aren't followed. There also have been attempts to more rigorously defined what is fair, such as the Bill of Player Rights in the
document linked by the article.
See, if the Sierra games were too easy; honestly, I don't think they would have left such a positive impact on me. (So for me, this is all going to be my point of view!)
I again don't think this is about easy vs. hard but about fair vs. unfair.
I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of managing to get past a difficult but well-crafted puzzle. In those cases, I can both both admire the skill that went into making it and be proud of my own skill in solving it.
There are other ways of making a game hard that don't improve the experience, however.
Just imagine taking a easy adventure game and, at the very end having a "Guess my number from 1 to 100" where if the player fails, their save games are reset and they're put back to the start. Suddenly, the game is much more difficult and most players won't actually be able to make it through to the end. It wouldn't actually be any more satisfying to players who enjoy solving adventure game puzzles, however, and it's just a very cheap way of adding fake difficulty. To me, a lot of the problems with adventure games are like that, though of course less extreme.
adeyke wrote:
adeyke wrote:
If the player can just unexpectedly die, that means the player isn't free to just explore the game, and the player is encouraged to just spend as much time in the save/load GUI as in the actual game.
... Right? And the problem is where? I have never had a problem with death in a game. Especially if it involves exploring.
If you don't have death, then where is the risk? You'll just run around and do anything and everything you can, even if it might logically kill you.
Try to walk off the edge of a cliff - oh, no, the game stops you and says, "Close call Roger Wilco. You almost fell 300 feet into the hungry maw of a thersariun pit below!"
Forget that!
That reasoning is very foreign to me.
Don't worry, I don't think you're alone!
While I am going all over the place with my rambling (like the paragraph before using a movie to make an example!) - here I go again - at least, this time, with another game.
So, eons ago, when the MMO
EverQuest first came out - that game was brutal when you died. You would lose experience points, unless you could find a cleric player to resurrect you (which was costly to the cleric). Not only that, when you died, you respawned, naked at your bind point. So you'd have to run back to your body, or convince someone to drag you body to the zone line so you can loot your own body and equip yourself. There were zones notorious for death (at lower levels, Crushbone was a zone everyone was all too familiar with dying and doing what was called a "Corpse Run"). I can't count, how many times, in EverQuest, I was in a party that got wiped out (sometimes because of me!), and I would laugh and laugh and laugh, despite all the trouble it was sometimes to get back to our bodies and recover them. Some - if not almost all - of my favorite stories in EverQuest have to do with the party or raid getting wiped out. And EverQuest was HUGE for an MMO when it came out. ABSOLUTELY huge. You could jump on ships that sailed between lands and jump off the ship and swim in random directions and find all kinds of islands that were populated with NPCs and usually monsters - even though there were no quests there! There was things to find by swimming underwater! EverQuest was huge! And brutal! It was VERY fun to explore - but you were certain to meet death by doing just random exploring.
Then comes World of Warcraft. Nowhere near as bit. You can't swim between lands. When you die, you respawn with all your weapons and gear. No XP hit for dying. There was literally no risk to doing something stupid in World of Warcraft. You can run into a high level zone with a low level character, and who cares? You died? So what? You appear with all your stuff back and your spawn point.
It took all the - what I would call - fun - out of the game, because there was no more risk. There was no more exploring. It seemed pointless.
So I am all for exploring stuff - and potentially having a character perish because I wasn't careful! I think that adds to the game. Especially, if like in Space Quest, I am rewarded with a silly comment, about how my stupidity led to my death.
I should first stress that the complaints I have are about adventure games. Different types of games work differently. So I don't think lessons from MMORPGs can so easily be translated to adventure games. For one thing, in MMORPGs, loot and XP mean that you can be rewarded for doing the same content repeatedly. The world is also much more alive, so you're not going to experience the exact same thing each you play through it. To the extent a corpse run would be fun (and I can't say I'd personally be in favor of that in games I play), it would be because it because it gives you a new challenge to overcome.
With an adventure game, it's different. One possibility is that the player is compulsively saving the game (with the detriment to gaming experience that entails). In that case, they almost have the undo option I've been advocating, and there's no significant setback from dying. The other possibility is that player hasn't saved recently, in which case they just have to redo what they already did. There's no new challenge and no new experience. The only danger is that, because the continuity issues I mentioned, they might forget what they've already done for that previous save and thus end up missing something on the replay.
adeyke wrote:
To me every time you have to save/load (aside from ending and continuing a session) is a failure on the game's part.
So how do you play Quest for Glory?
That has got to drive you crazy?
QfG isn't a pure adventure game; it's an adventure/RPG hybrid. And I do view the deaths in the two genres differently. I still don't like the adventure-style instant deaths in QfG, but I'm much more forgiving of deaths in combat. In those cases, there's a real sense of accomplishment when you win a tough fight, and you actually get rewarded in loot and stats from doing it. You also often have the possibility to run away if you're in over your head. However, even there, there should be the undo option (like QfG4 does with its autosave). And even there, care has to be taken to ensure the game is fair: the player should be able to judge if they're likely to win a fight before engaging, and the player should be given ways to build up their character before they get the really tough battles.
adeyke wrote:
Saving/loading means that the player is doing something, not player, so when you do things like that, you're definitely thinking in terms of "how do I win this game?" and not "how does Roger Wilco save the day?". It also means that there things you did but which didn't actually happen (because loading the game undid them), creating confusion about the actual continuity of the current playthrough. It diminishes the protagonist's achievements if they were were only possible because an outside force intervened each time they messed up. And it means that no matter what the intended quest was, it instead becomes Groundhog Day. And I just don't think "F7 F7 F7 get it right F5" is good gameplay.
So you don't think that Roger Wilco, for example, should be able to walk off a cliff? (Granted, if it were a real person, they wouldn't intentionally walk off a cliff - and that degree, things like the Spiral Staircase in King's Quest 4 would drive me insane, because I'm like, "Seriously Rosella, how drunk do you have to be to not be able to walk up a flight of stairs?") So I can see your point! I guess it's never bothered me - like you said the groundhog day thing - because, I was usually entertained by the death messages, and would get a laugh, and remember not to do that next time, and simply restore the game and carefully avoid not picking up that sheet of metal in Space Quest 3 for example!
I would probably avoid letting Roger Wilco walk off a cliff, yes. The game is under no obligation to include possible actions that don't fit the character's motivations or the game's intended narrative. There are countless things that would be physically possible but that should be left out of the game.
The bit about being entertained by death messages brings up an interesting point though.
One could see the death messages as part of the game's content, in which case fully experiencing the game could include experience each of the death messages. Or one could see death as a negative outcome, a penalty for the player making a mistake or not playing well enough. I don't think those two views are really compatible.
If you're supposed to experience the deaths, that requires some separation between the player and the character. It's not "I'm going to die" but "I'm going to kill the character". And the death scene should feel like "Congratulation! You found another amusing way to kill the character". In that case, a supposedly dangerous situation is instead exciting, because it means you're in for a laugh.
On the other hand, if death is something to be avoided, it bring the player and character closer. It creates a stressful situation, and the player thinks "This place is dangerous and I need to be careful so I don't die". In that case, the death scene should feel like "Here's how you messed up and here's what happens as a result".
adeyke wrote:
adeyke wrote:
If the game has misleading clues, that means the player can't trust even the helpful clues the game gives.
Because everyone is always honest?
I'm not sure what your response means in relation to what I said.
Well, because you said the game has misleading clues. (I am trying to think what you meant by that?) And I just assume, things like in King's Quest 1 - the "Think Backwards" clue - is a little misleading. You have to flip the entire alphabet backwards. That, admittedly, drove me insane - but King's Quest 1 was my first exposure to Sierra games (we played that, then LSL1). But once I figured that out - and it took a lot of back and forth from Shawn (and I even think Shawn's dad weighed in on that one), I felt better for it - because I had overcome an obstacle that was blocking my ability to move forward. I guess it's like those athletes who do that running jump, and can't seem to get past 10 feet, when suddenly they do it and land 12 feet. You suddenly feel great!
I just really can't support the Ifnkovhgroghprm name puzzle. That's another one of those that always makes the list of bad puzzles in Sierra adventure games. I think it was a great move in the remake to change it to Nikstlitselpmur, is still be a tricky puzzle but a fair one.
But I don't think it's quite a case of a misleading clue. You
do have to think backwards. The game just needs an additional hint that you should think terms of the alphabet instead of the letter placement in the name.
Suppose, though, that the game and the puzzles were exactly the same, but instead of that note, there was one that said "Wearing a magic hat will let a person see others' true names" or "The gnome is a good friend of the elf". In that case, you'd be spending time trying to find a magic hat or interrogate the elf, both of which are futile. That's the sort of thing that's a problem. And the article's example from Uninvited is just such a case: the game is very clearly hinting that the player should try to understand the bouncing creature, but that isn't actually possible.
Tawmis wrote:adeyke wrote:
For people who know that, that can explain why the puzzle is the way it is. For someone just playing GK3, however, all they see is a really unreasonable puzzle.
I could see that. I just assume, folks are like me - they'd play GK1 and GK2 before they played GK3, but that's not always the case. Someone who doesn't know Sierra or GK, might just see the cover to GK3 and think, "This looks cool! I will play it!" And get reasonably stuck on that cat mustache.
I would say that even GK1 and GK2, and even experience with a variety of Sierra games, couldn't prepare you for that puzzle.
adeyke wrote:
That's just one particularly notorious example of a "How was I supposed to figure that out?" puzzle in a Sierra game. The snake/bridle puzzle in KQ2 is another one,
Isn't there an alternate to passing the snake in KQ2, though?
Yes. You can instead kill it with the sword. However, if you do that, you don't get the sugar cube, so you're vulnerable to the poison thorns later on. And that means the poison thorn puzzle is a quite painful case of "F7 die F7 die F7 take a step successfully F5".
adeyke wrote:
That sort of things already exists, for types of books that need it. See the
Mystery Reader's Bill of Rights (another
incarnation of which had an even more presumptuous title). The interactive nature of games means that there more things that games can do wrong, however, so games benefit from it more than other art forms do.
I don't think a Bill of Player's Rights is at all absurd, and there have been many proposed over the years. You could also just call it Game Design Best Practices.
One could say, for example, that player are
entitled to a game that doesn't just randomly crash and that it's wrong for games to do that. That's already universally accepted, however, so there's little point in writing it into one's manifesto. It's instead about things the author thinks
should be accepted but aren't yet.
My main problem with someone who has a "Bill of Rights" type thing is the arrogance about it. For folks who say, "THIS is the seven steps every - EVERY - adventure game MUST follow!"
I say, "Shove off and go make your own Adventure game and see how easy it is!"
And if they do, more power to them! Wish'em the best, I do!
But that arrogance is the same kind of arrogance I get when someone knocks on my door, Bible in hand, and says, "Follow my God, my way, because it's the ONLY way, otherwise you are going to Hell."
I simply smile and say, "I'll tell the Devil you said hello."
The Bill of Player's Rights was actually written by Graham Nelson, who both created the Inform system for writing interactive fiction and wrote several such games of his own. It's not from the perspective of a petulant player but from a game designer trying to help other game designers avoid common pitfalls. I think such best practice documents are very useful to have, in that the let the game designers know what players expect and can make them fulfill those expectations as they're making the game, rather than wait until beta test (or worse, reviews of the released game) to see what they did wrong.
The same sort of thing can apply to other genres as well. For example, if a player buys an FPS, they have a certain expectation of the control scheme the game will have. Mouse to look, left-click to shoot, WASD to move, space to jump, R to reload, mouse wheel to change weapon have become a rather firmly established standard. That standard means that an FPS player can just jump into a new FPS game and can focus on the game's content without needing to worry about the controls. If someone was unaware of this standard and created an FPS with a completely different control scheme, players would be rightly confused by this. The same goes for an RPG with a blue life bar filled with blue potions and a red mana bar filled with red potions (instead of the other way around), or for an RTS that doesn't let you drag a box around units to select them and then right-click to move. Some things have become standard expected features in a genre, and it's good for game designers to know this when they're creating a new entry in it.
And I really think the "arrogance" is sometimes called for. For example, suppose I say the following:
1. A game should absolutely not randomly crash.
2. A game should absolutely not wipe the player's hard drive.
3. A game should absolutely not require the computer to be restarted in order to quit it.
4. A game should absolutely not send private information found on the player's computer to the game's creator.
5. A game should absolutely not consist of just staring at a blank screen.
Is that arrogant of me? Should I leave the door open that some games doing the above is legitimate? Should I have to make my own game if I don't like games doing the above? If the answer is yes, then I don't know what to say. If the answer is no, however, the fundamental idea of a Bill of Player's Rights is acceptable, and the disagreement is just about what things should be on it.
). I don't think it's necessary for the standard use case of a player just wanting to play through the game sequentially, though. Oddly, KQ7 does also have a chapter selection option, and I'm really not sure who those are intended for; it's not granular enough to serve the purpose of traditional save games, but it's not useful for someone just playing through the game.