SHP Forums

DeadPoolX wrote: Sierra's titles had a "know-what-I'm-thinking" and "you-should-know-something-is-dangerous-without-knowing-it" mentality, which to be blunt, is f*cking retarded.

The only thing I can think that really applies to that is Space Quest III (in the junk yard, like if you picked up that sheet metal and you died). Granted, that was pretty harsh. And back then they didn't have in place, to auto restore you before you made that fatal mistake (like they do in a lot of games now). But I guess, I was too ... oblivious (not much has changed apparently! ) because that never bothered me, as the death messages were at least amusing (and different, depending on how you perished).

Collector wrote:I don't think we are as far off from each other as you indicate. I did say that an intentional dead end can be badly designed. To work, it has to be logical and you should never have to restore to a much earlier point to correct it. It should also be obvious that it has happened before you have spent much more time playing. With these considerations, it should not be much different than a death scene.

Fair enough. Though I think that when that happens, the player shouldn't be allowed to save, and it should either then have a "death" scene shortly, or it should be painfully obvious there's no point on continued play. If it works like that, deaths and dead ends, the two issues that really set Sierra games apart from LucasArts games, become one.

I've been going back forth about whether death in adventure games is a good thing or not. I think Sierra generally handled it very poorly, but at the same time, LucasArts games did lack something; even if there seems to be imminent danger, you can relax, because you can't actually die. My opinion these days is that death can be okay, as long as it follows these guidelines:
1. There must be either a "retry" button or an autosave system, such that dying doesn't set you back a lot and such that it's not the player's responsibility to constantly save the game.
2. The time between death and getting back to where you were should be a matter of seconds. That means no long, unskippable scenes upon dying or between the autosave and where you were.
3. Every death should be expected; the player should never be surprised that an action they took was fatal. That just means that you need to use the graphics, music, and text to make a threat of danger clear, rather than just "it's dangerous because if you do it, you die".
4. Death shouldn't reveal information. Hints about how to avoid the death in the future are fine, but only if it's something the player should have known beforehand.
5. The death should somehow make sense within the greater context of the game. There has to be an actual reason to allow a fatal action rather than just giving a message that that action would be unsafe. Good reasons could include a challenge for the player to overcome or making the game more believable.

Sierra games didn't tend to follow these guidelines, to put it mildly.

adeyke wrote: Sierra games didn't tend to follow these guidelines, to put it mildly.

They didn't. But perhaps because I learned the wise words of Al Lowe, "Save Early, Save Often."

The deaths didn't bother me in Sierra, nor the dead ends. The only truly single thing that bothered me about Sierra games was Mask Of Eternity. No. Wait. While that DID bother me, that's not where I was going with this. For me, it was poorly done puzzles. And of that, other than the entire CodeName: Iceman game, over all, there's only one game that did this - and ironically, it's one of my favorites - except this part - which was Leisure Suit Larry 2 with the bottle and the bag. If you have played it, you already know what I mean.

The issue with that is just that something was changed at that last minute and they didn't test what the ramifications would be. That is, it's an issue with the parser, not the puzzle itself. When I think of bad Sierra puzzles, things like cat-hair mustaches and bridled snakes are what come to mind.

Sierra games are what introduced me to gaming, and I've replayed many them more often than I can keep track of. However, I do find that I enjoy replaying them more than I enjoy playing them for the first, and the deaths and, especially, the dead ends are the cause of that. Saving the game just becomes a compulsion, and even if I find an action that both gives points and seems to move the game forward, I still have to keep second-guessing myself, since I can't be sure that it's actually correct or that there isn't something else I should have done beforehand. So I'm often caught in a sort of indecision paralysis, rather than being able to explore the world freely.

I think a happy medium between Sierra and LucasArts is easy: allow death, but make the situations in which death can occur be logical.

My issue was never that I could die, just that I could die from seemingly innocent actions.