Dead Ends in Games
 

I realize this is a BAD thing in adventure games but I need to get some input from the players . . .

Here is a scenario:

You are in a room and you open a desk drawer and find in it a peculiar looking key. For some reason you decide not to pick up the key. You leave the room to explore elsewhere.

You pass through a mechanical door into another room with a locked door at one end. This door has a lock that matches the key you saw in the desk. You decide to go back and get the key.

The door through which you entered the room is mechanical (as already mentioned), and has a fuse panel by it. It closed behind you when you entered.

When you go to leave the room, you find that the door you came in through won't open. Examination of the fuse panel shows that a fuse has blown and you don't have any more good fuses left. Boxes of fuses are scattered throughout the game but there are none in this room.

Here is where I have the delima. Because the player did not pick up the key and did not have any fuses left, when they entered the second room, they created a dead end scenario.

Should I, in all fairness to the player, structure the game so that there is no possible way for them to accidently find themselves in a dead end situation?

Your comments appreciated

Not necessarily bad, but you do need to have a decent autosave feature so that if a player needs to go back a bit they can easily do so. Relyingy purely on the user to save his own progress often may still lead to frustration.

In my view dead-ends (not deaths) are always design flaws.

If the people who will play your game are anything like me, they first explore the rooms to their heart's content, sometimes even without opening drawers. I'm no programmer but how hard can it be to blow the fuse only when the player has picked up the key and has at least one spare fuse?

One of the biggest problems with dead ends is that you usually can never be really sure you are in one unless you cunsult a walkthrough. If you really want, you can create an endgame there, telling the player that he is locked out (or in?) forever, but not expect him to understand on himself that he is in a dead end and not just missing something that will allow him to continue.

Generally, I think you shouldn't be punishing the player for not behaving like you wanted him to, I found myself annoyed by these sort of things in a game.

I would not like to end up in a dead end (or being killed for that matter). If so there must be an automatic save just before I missed the vital item (or took the wrong path) to give me another chance to do the right thing.
I appreciate the LucasArt games (the ones I've played anyway) for never putting me in a situation like that.

My favourite example of this kind of thing in a LucasArts game (or at least how they found their way around it) is the fire extinguisher in Grim Fandango. They inserted a momentary, humourous cutscene in which Manny automatically picks up the required item if he doesn't already have it, ensuring that he has it later.

I'm sure that there must be a way to work acquiring the box of fuses into the game so that it has to have happened by the time the player reaches the situation in question :).

Hi all, first post here :)

I recently found a dead end in a really nice ADV. , The BLack Mirror.

LEt's see how to say it without spoilering...You have to front a "Blocking Thing", and you have a limited amout of objects needeed to pass that thing, and you collected them just a second before that moment.
You need to use those objects, and before doing that he says "i need to do this carefully".I supposed it was just a comment on that situation as always, and i just clicked on the blocking thing, as it was the only thing i could do \\ it's a scumm style interface..Wasted the objects without even understanding i had to really be carefull....and anyway, how could i be careful? It's point-and-click SCUMM-style, i pointed the objects with pixel hunting precision, but who knows what the programmer decide to be "the right spot"?

Well, i saved like 3 hours before the event, cause the game is easy and also has real time calculation, and had to replay it again.
On the boards, there were lot of peole frustrated with the dead end, stucked with a simple task that they couldn't understand it was at risk of being a dead end.

It was useless.It was not an ability trial, it was not useful for the story or the puzzles, it didn't add anything to the game at all, it didn't really clarify that there was such a risk, and it was more similar to a bug then to a gameplay feature.

I mean, if you make the thing clear - don't waste the fuse otherwise you'll regret it - ok it's my fault and i accept that, but if you put an *impossible to figure out before* dead end, then it's just a programmer trick that let you waste time and nerves only.

a dead end is almost useless in that sense.If you want to "punish" the gamer for wasting the fuses, then do this way: if he kept the fuses, he goes straight to the key.If he doesn't he has to front a major difficult painful puzzle or long series of things to reach the key.Game gains on repleyability and smartness.

Yes. Just make it so the fuse only blows if the player HAS picked up the key.

The problem with this is that, if the fuse blowing has any affect on the rest of the game, rather than simply being an annoyance, the game won't progress until you pick up the fuse. And picking up the fuse has no direct importance to the player (plus it makes no sense that a fuse should only blow once you have a spare), and so could prove annoying.

I'm strongly of the opinion that the fuse should either be available after it blows or some way should be found of ensuring that the player has the fuses. That shouldn't prove too difficult - require the player to use another fuse elsewhere in advance, or handle this through a cutscene in which a fuse blows if you have other characters.

I say the fuse only blows if the player has an extra fuse. Otherwise there'd be no incentive for the player to try and fix the door. Even if it's a very simple task, it just gives the player this idea that he's doing something important and that the door's fuse blowing was a very bad thing for him. (Momentarily, of course, because he has an extra fuse.)

What you need to appreciate here is that you, as the designer, created the dead end scenario, not the player. Unless the player had advanced knowledge that his/her actions will put them in this situation you are being very unfair on the player.

I also think that you are effectively having a double-locked door to bar progress and that while the two puzzles may be perfectly good, piling one on top of another in this way is not the ideal setup if the player down't have the means to solve the problem.

Forcing the player to restore a saved game, taking knowledge back that the character couldn't know, breaks the suspension of disbelief. The character is effectively using knowledge that he or she doesn't have.

Simply put, I think dead ends are an abomination.

Why lock them in the room in the first place?

EDIT:

That is, what purpose does it serve the story or the gameplay to have that door malfunction and lock behind them (thus possibly causing a dead end)? Is there a reason you don't want them to be able to go back to the previous rooms?

ABSOLUTELY NO QUESTION ABOUT IT.
I have beta-tested 2 dozen games (as you know personally) ... and am presently beta-testing 4 more :-

One of the worst bugs (after game stoppers & crashes) are dead ends of ANY SORT WHATSOEVER.
They are a deep & bad programming error and have to be eliminated by the Developer(s).

There is not the slightest excuse for any Developer(s) to release a game with a SINGLE dead end, and since there very frequently are 1 or more initially, it is 100% up to the beta-testers to discover any and inform the Developer(s)... who from my experience always 'repair' it.

There is no question whatsoever about whether the player "should" or should not have done ANYTHING (get key, save fuses, not exit the room ... all that is totally irrelevant)

If that key is essential at any time during the game, shortly after leaving the room for example, or only at the very end of the game (it makes absolutely no difference) it is up to the Developer(s) to ensure that EVERY PLAYER (since everybody plays the game in different ways & 'orders') can obtain it one way or another and WITHOUT THE NECESSITY OF RELOADING ANY SAVE GAME.

I don't see that there are any ifs or buts about it ???

I could write a lot more about the chaos & justified criticisms whenever a dead-end is found in a game ... but I think it is obvious to everybody !!

I'm sure I've played games that had dead ends, but was fortunate enough to not activate them....with one exception, and that was in the first Shivers. The situation was quite similar to the scenario described, in that, in a unique circumstance it was possible to be trapped in a location with no exit possible. If you had a recent saved game, great, but the only other option was to go back to a save that required replaying of a significant portion of the game.

To me ANY dead end is a design flaw.

I think the illusion of having reached a dead end is fascinating, but in any good game design, the trick is to merely conceal the escape hatch. There's always more than one way out of a situation. You simply have to apply logic to the situation and find the convenient but easy to overlook alternate route back to the place where they can get the key and the fuses and do it properly.

And incidentally, I don't remember any such dead end in Shivers. There was always a way out of every situation. You simply had to look around long enough. That's what made it better than a mere puzzle game. The exploration and the interaction with the environment was paramount.

That said, a true dead end that strands a player and forces them to restart is a dirty trick indeed. If nothing else, you should instigate a 'death sequence', and then send them back to the part before they entered the room, and give them an 'intimation' that they shouldn't enter empty handed, even if you have to give them sledgehammer hints.

The more traditional method is just to make them pick up the important item(s) in question. 'Oh, an arcane and unusually shaped key, sitting conveniently in this desk drawer, not far from the secret panel. I'll bet that will come in handy. Better take that with me now.' *picks up key, drops in inventory* usually suffices.

But the best is just to 'reveal' the hidden escape route.

Agreed 100% ... and a very serious design fault too!

In the worst circumstances it can cause a player to plough through almost a whole game and then be forced to return to almost the beginning.

If you bought the DVD of a whodunit film and the dénouement at the very end refused to play, or a similar book and the last 2 dozen pages were missing you would be furious and at the very least demand your money back (if not compensation for time wasted in addition).

So it should be with ANY game with a dead-end.
Only one difference maybe ... if the Developers are decent they will VERY RAPIDLY issue a patch eliminating the dead end ... this can usually be done without too much programming hassle !!

Speaking of dead ends, here is communication I had a couple of months back with Kheops Studio.

Spoiler:

From me: "I hope you don't mind, but I have attached my latest save game for secrets
of da vinci. No walkthrough or forum can help me on this problem. I asked
for help on a game forum because I could not get any further in the game. I
then sent my save game to someone who has completed the game before, and
that person also could not find any way to progress. I wonder if you might
be able to check my savegame to see if there is a problem? I need to get the
telescope lenses from saturnin. There seems to be no way to make more brandy
to give to him because I cannot empty the cauldron to put wine into.. I put
saltpeter and water in the cauldron which I cannot remove now! I have no
sugar, and I didn't buy sugar earlier in the game. I used the coins for
other things. I have now made 4 more gold coins. I cannot give the coins to
saturnin, the game won't allow me. I cannot find a way to use the sleeping
potion either. Is this a technical problem with the game, or is it something
I haven't done yet? Thank you very much for your time! "

Reply from Kheops:

" Hello Roman,
You have truly found a real problem. It is something that hasn't been
anticipated. We are now looking for a solution. At the moment, we are
thinking that the best one is to permit to empty the cauldron, but we have
to check if it doesn't lead to another problem.

We are all very sorry for you. But we will give you a solution. You can be
sure.

Best Regards,

Kheops Studio. "

A later email from them after I had to go back and play from an earlier save game and do things differently:

" Roman,

Happy to know that you have continued the game from an earlier save game.

Sorry again for the problem. He will surely be fixed in a future patch.

Best regards

Stéphane "

Kheops are very nice people, regardless of the dead end I encountered. :)

I think a simple way developers fix these problems is by having the main character not leave the room because he/she feels they're missing something.

Also, I was recently playing Blade Runner and was trying to get as many endings as I could with one save. In one situation

Spoiler:

I had decided to become a replicant and take off with the replicants at the moonbus. While talking the to replicant leader I took out my gun and started shooting at him repeatedly. The replicant next to him starting attacking me. I managed to kill both of them without dying and suddenly the game was stuck. Apparently, the amount of replicants in the room are depenant on how many you kill in the game. When I decided to shoot at the leader, it triggers all the replicants in the room to attack you and kill you. Since I had killed all the replicants in the game, I had no trouble staying alive. Because of this I was trapped in a room with no exit or anything. It would have been very disappointing if this happened during a normal playthrough because it happens literally at the very end of the game.

My friend also made a game with a dead end with a humorous solution. If you had managed to kill one of the monsters in which dying was required to progress, a message popped saying, "YOU LEET HAXZOR! U STUCK NOW! GAME OVER!" And then the credits game on. I laughed so hard when I saw it. On a normal basis it would have been impossible to defeat the monster, but he had placed an easter egg in the game that made it extremely easy to win ever battle.

As I said in a prior message, you can play a game that has dead ends without activating them, and you obviously didn't activate this one.

If, by chance you have half a wood chalice in your possession, and enter the room next to the horse puzzle, if you exit and the wood Ixupi is in the woodpile opposite the door, you can't move forward. You are at a dead end.

Now what is the chance of having this occur? Probably slim. But it is a dead end, because it can happen.

Undetected dead ends occur pretty obviously when one (or more) “unique” player tackles the game in a different or ‘unconventional’ way or in a different order from the ‘obvious’. Otherwise the dead end remains “dormant”.

Every player without exception is ‘entitled’ to play any game in whatever order or method s(he) chooses… provided of course that it’s ‘legitimate’. There are an infinite number of keystrokes which can be made in any game and if any single one produces a dead end then the game programming is faulty.

It is often extremely difficult (or nearly impossible) to eliminate every dead end. The Developer(s) and most of the (very good) beta testers are always likely to follow the “logical” path … but it’s the highly “illogical” BUT PERMISSABLE path which may produce the dead end for 1 player in a hundred (or more). And there is absolutely no question that this is an extremely bad flaw!

VERY recent example :- Al Emmo underwent 3 waves of very extensive beta testing by a large number of experienced beta testers for about 3 months.
The third and last wave of 6 testers (including myself) alone went through 6 builds, each time playing from the beginning to the end since ALL previous build saves were useless.

None of us (including myself) detected a dead end in the second half of the game.
Just about 10 days before going gold, a German beta-tester discovered a dead end. It was generated by a legitimate action which no “normal” person was likely to perform … but he did… and had every right to !!

Once it was discovered and reported, it took the Developers no more than 2 minutes to obviate.

This is typical.

I honestly can't recall if my friends or I stumbled across that one back in the 90s when we took turns with it. It sounds to me like you found a genuine bug in the coding, which to me screams 'not enough beta'.

Still, I guess you'd have to know it was there before you could fix it. Funny how that works in such things. It doesn't occur to you that it's there until someone more inquisitive or random than you discovers a coding flaw and loses hours of play in the process. Depressing.

Why not put a puzzle in the room in which you are trapped that allows you to open the mechanical door? For example, the player could hotwire the door by opening some wall panels, cutting wires inside them, and connecting one from a portion of the house which is powered to one for the door. This way, if the player already picked up the fuse they are rewarded by not having to solve this puzzle and if they did not they would not be stuck.

I don't like the idea of not having the door lock until you have acquired the fuses. As was already pointed out, this changes the obstacle from being believeable to being forced. Furthermore, it defies solid puzzle logic. The player would have no reason to pick up the fuses in the first place other than years of adventure games conditioning him to pick up everything.

That sort of puzzle design is useless because it does not cause the player to think. It is like giving someone a key and then showing him a locked door. Their likely reaction is "A locked door. Maybe I'll try this key." It's obvious and pointless.

It's better to create a situation in which you show the player a locked door and he has to search for the key. In this case they would probably have a reaction closer to "A locked door. How can I get out of this situation?" This leads to creative and analytical thought rather than simply going through the motions of trying out the key they already had.

Why not have another fuse blow waaaaay in the beginning of the game so the player has to pick up a box of fuses that he/she carries aroud with him/her everywhere afterwards?

Thanks for all your input. It is much appreciated.

The dead end scenario has been corrected but there was some discussion between my partner and I as to how exactly correct the problem without 'spoon feeding' the player.

I feel that I have been able to rectify this problem and still maintain the random nature of the game and its puzzles. I guess only time will tell . . .

I was a big fan of Shivers1. It remains one of my top ten favorite games. Because of my promotion of it on the old CompuServe GAMERS forum, Willie Eide invited me to beta Shivers2, which I declined. All of which is neither here nor there.

Re: the dead end "bug" in Shivers1, I can say that I probably played that game at least six times, and only encountered the dead end once. It requires three events. One, you must have half of a wood pot in your possesion; two, you must be at that location with the pot; and three, whatever random generator that decides where and when the wood Ixupi will locate itself decides that this is a good time to locate it in the scrap lumber pile. You are figuratively and literally at a dead end for, as you recall, that location is at a dead end of a hallway. There's no way to exit except via the way you came in, and repeatedly entering/exiting the room behind you did not cause the Ixupi to relocate. Ergo.....trapped.

As Len Green commented, I had every right to be at this location with this piece of inventory, so the problem was in the coding that allowed the Ixupi to be in that same location under those circumstances. If I had been carrying a different pot part, it wouldn't have been a dead end.

I should modify my statement that this was the only dead end I ever experienced. There was another in Beyond Atlantis which was even more infuriating. But this was due to a known video card incompatability issue. At a certain, and repeatable point in the game, the game would crash. The publisher/developer either couldn't or wouldn't issue a patch. At least with Shivers1, I could finish the game. In this case, finishing was impossible. Money down the drain.

I found Beyond Atlantis entirely frustrating for quite different reasons, but I'm not surprised you had hardware incompatibility problems. Very sad to hear they never patched it for you.

And Shivers is one of my top ten, too. I remember that scrap pile and the door behind you (lead into that storage room with the fortune teller, right?). I think I only ever found the Ixupi in that pile once in three or four plays. I used to be paranoid about running around with any jar for too long without the right lid, so I tended to shuffle everything closer to one another as soon as I located things. Lots of note taking, which I don't really like to do for modern games, but sometimes, just sometimes, I miss it. These days, games that need note taking usually turn out to be unfathomable even witht he notes (Schizm comes to mind).

So, how do you feel about the HHGG text adventure? That has huge dead ends. They are relevant to the game, though.

I think dead ends can be hugely frustrating, but they aren't necessarily bad. The OP indicates that the reason the player would be in a dead end situation is from being a moron, if I read it right. One of the key tenets of adventure games is pick every single thing up. If the player ignores this and gets stuck as a result, I don't think that is shoddy programming, I think it is just a bad player. I do think the puzzle should let you know it is a dead end by killing you off, though. Deaths in video games are not fun, but if it is a situation where you go in the room, door closes, and you get a message saying "you died, blah blah blah, maybe you should make sure you have a key next time...would you like to try again?" And then it shifts you back one move...that would be fine.

The original premise as stated was that the key was in a drawer.

What if you didn't see the drawer? It's easy to miss hotspots sometimes. What if there were other things in the drawer that partially hid the key? It's not uncommon for key (if you'll pardon the pun) items to be obscured. What if it was possible to walk through the slamming door without even entering the room with the drawer and key in it? Is it fair to call someone that just happens to choose the wrong direction to walk in a moron?

The problem with the original scenario (which I understand has now been rectified) is that the dead end arose without warning. The person that opens the hold door at the start of Prisoner of Ice knowing a hideous monster is loose inside is a moron (or, as in my case, has just made a save game and is curious. To save you time, the monster steps through the door and kills you) A person just stepping through a door is not.

Unfortunately that was not the definition of the dead end posited by the game developer. In fact, the scenario you describe is anything but a dead end inasmuch as the programmers had the foresight to see you might do this, and thus gave you a second chance.

A dead end is a dead end, i.e., no alternative but to quit the game and start over from the last save. And that, I think most have agreed is faulty programming.

And that there underscores the biggest problem with AG design: complacency with a known inconsistency. If the immersion in a game is broken by the necessity of behaving in an unconvention (for mainstream people; adventure gamers march to a different drum, thanks to precedence) manner to achieve resolution, then the game has not been designed properly.

Understand, it's not 'real world' logic that dictates that you pick up everything not nailed down, whether you realize it or not. Pockets in the real world are only so big. We'd need to be wearing some military-standard cargo pants with half adozen pockets and a knapsack to carry all of the things we run across in the average inventory-intensive AG. This is a known peculiarity of AGs, and confounds most folks who haven't run across it a half dozen times or more.

Just because it's an accepted convention of the games, and all experienced AGers 'know' the unspoken rules ('Inspect everything; take everything not nailed down') does not make it acceptable design philosophy. It's the sort of thinking that makes AGs the marginalized genre it has become.

In common parlayance, we've crawled up our own asses and disappeared.

Until such thinking is eliminated from adventure game design, AGs will always be treated as a marginal niche market with fewer new players every year. Whereas, if you just put something into the game that introduces the idea that 'you may need this item later; pick it up', you have a feature that does not defy common logic.

Immersion absolutely requires that every choice you make be internally consistent with the narrative and the nature of the environment. As soon as you start making decisions based on genre conventions, you are breaking down the fourth wall. The self-consciousness destroys the imemrsion, and only a veteran gamer who has had to accept these lines of 'game logic' can proceed without losing their place.

Ultimately, it's up to the game developer to decide if they're making a game for new gamers as well as old, but the key is to remember that new gamers have not played Monkey Island, and are not steeped in the luddicrous pseudo-logic of the adventure gaming universe. As well, the laws as such are bogus, and should never have come into common practice. It's laziness on the part of game devs that has allowed this attitude to become so prevalent. The best games I've played deliberately prevent this sort of gaming logic to be necessary. It's something more game devs need to come to grips with.