Adventure Gamers - Forums

TimovieMan - 22 January 2017 03:29 PM

How about Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis’s optional intro, then a single 2-screen location before giving multiple areas to explore? Good example too, right?

I’d consider that a great attempt and maybe the furthest one should expect the developr to go in terms of assisting the inexperienced player.

Anything beyond that (like making a player realize the game requires intereaction instead of simply picture guessing) would be too much :-)

Bitano - 22 January 2017 01:32 PM

Kurufinwe - 22 January 2017 10:50 AM

Interesting wall-of-text

While I understand what you’re saying, it’s a daunting if not impossible task to accomplish this ideal learning curve in an adventure.

Not only is it a LOT of extra work / budget to implement all kinds of features to accommodate someone who barely has experience moving a mouse (if you want to take into account the most inexperienced type of player), but these features will also get in the way of the more experienced player who feels treated like a baby. It’s so much overhead and at what cost?

You may have misunderstood me. It’s not in addition to the game’s design: it’s instead of bad design.

I’m not talking about adding tutorials (nobody likes those). I’m talking about three things:

1) Designers having a clear evaluation of each puzzle’s difficulty, by keeping in mind both the skills involved in solving it and the complexity of the puzzle (which I guess can be roughly approximated by looking the number of items/clues/locations involved, and the number of concurrent items/clues/locations/puzzles that act as red herrings?).

2) Putting the easier puzzles at the start of the game and the harder ones at the end.

3) Ideally, trying to make players pick up the skills they need as they go.

That’s obviously a much better experience for less-experienced players, who get a chance to learn how they’re supposed to “think” about the game. But I strongly believe that it’s also just better design, which will appeal to all players. A few reasons for this:

1) It allows for harder puzzles in the end. Because you train your players in how to solve your puzzles, you make them acquire the skills that they’ll need for the harder ones. On the other hand, if you have a flat difficulty curve, then getting too hard is just going to push people away from the start, including more experienced players, so you don’t.

If I try to think of satisfying, memorable puzzles, they’re mostly late-game puzzles from games with clear difficulty curves. Examples include: Hadean Lands, Resonance, Discworld Noir, GK3 (excluding the temple stuff), Riven, Myst III, Beneath a Steel Sky, the Phoenix Wright games, RTMI, The Experiment, etc. And none of those puzzles would have provided a satisfying experience if they had just been put at the start of the game: they need the build-up provided by the difficulty curve.

2) It gives momentum to the gameplay. Adventure games are so bad at this. In most other genres, when you reach the end of the game, you feel like you’ve become better at the game; like you can now do things that you couldn’t do at the start. It gives you an incomparable sense of achievement. It also reinforces the story, which is usually constructed to build to a climax at the end. Most adventure games don’t do that, and it sucks. When the game’s final puzzles feel like they could just as well have been in the first act, it feels underwhelming. (And don’t get me started on games whose difficulty dives down halfway through, such as MI2 or Grim Fandango…)

3) Speaking of other genres: I’m not buying the argument that experienced players won’t like games with a clear difficulty curve, because most other genres do it and no one’s complaining. If it’s good enough for Zelda, then it’s good enough for point-and-click adventures.

A minimal (and acceptable) attempt - i suppose - was done in MI2, where as a player you could choose between an easy and a hard mode. Minimal because Dave Grossman’s grandmother would still be utterly lost in expectations.

Meh. Difficulty levels are a cop-out. It’s just “we don’t know how to teach players how to deal with hard puzzles, so we’ll give them the option to skip them”. Not a fan.

Kurufinwe - 22 January 2017 10:50 AM

The start of the game bombards you with puzzles and clues that you have no idea what to do with, until you randomly wander into the swamp later on and learn about the voodoo doll.

It’s true that MI2 expects the player to be independent and willing and able to explore. There were still relatively few areas in the first act to explore though.

It was complex. Here’s a simple test: before they have to solve any puzzle,
- how many locations can they visit?
- how many items can they pick up?
- how many clues can they find?
- how many puzzles can they encounter?

For Beneath a Steel Sky, the numbers before the first puzzle are: 1/1/0/1. There’s one location, one puzzle, one item you need to solve it. That’s all. And as you progress through the game, complexity increases, but slowly at first.

For MI2, on the other hand, it’s more like: a dozen (the whole island) / half a dozen / a dozen at least / a few. That’s a very complex start. It’s overwhelming, and it doesn’t allow the game to build difficulty as it goes—and it ends up running completely out of steam in acts 3 and 4 (who even remembers those daft puzzles on Dinky Island?).

If the player was brave enough to go ahead and try out stuff (s)he’d soon have visited all the available areas and picked up all the stuff available.

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Mark Rosewater: “It’s not the players’ job to find the fun: It’s your job to put the fun where they can’t help but find it.” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen players who don’t enjoy adventure games get blamed for “not playing the game right”, when really it’s the game that should be blamed for not teaching them how to. Starting them in a complex environment with no clear goal and no instructions, as MI2 does, is not the way to do it.

(The whole Rosewater speech is great, by the way; anyone with an interest in game design should listen to it.)

Advie - 22 January 2017 04:26 PM

...lots of valid statements…

It’s what’s happening outside the gaming scene as well. And in some respects i think it’s good. But it easily gets to a point where the user cries “bad interface” or “bad design” because (s)he had to try out some things before knowing what it does.

Interfaces are being simplified and made more user-friendly and understandable for those with very limited knowledge on computers.
But I do feel for games this is often being taken too far. Games spoil the gamer in a way that all self-exploration and creativity is sucked away.

As a developer it’s tricky to determine where the line’s drawn. Ideally you’d want a game to attract veteran players as well as those new to the genre.

Kurufinwe - 22 January 2017 04:34 PM

For Beneath a Steel Sky, the numbers before the first puzzle are: 1/1/0/1. There’s one location, one puzzle, one item you need to solve it. That’s all. And as you progress through the game, complexity increases, but slowly at first.

I agree. For most players experiences with gaming (not per se AG) this indeed is a nice build-up without it being in the way of the more experienced adventure gamer.

Kurufinwe - 22 January 2017 04:34 PM

This reminds me of one of my favourite quotes from Mark Rosewater: “It’s not the players’ job to find the fun: It’s your job to put the fun where they can’t help but find it.”

This quote applies to User interface (or experience as it’s called nowadays) in general. And while it’s true it doesn’t specify when as a designer you’ve done enough :-).

Looking at your Beneath a Steel Sky example this setup would work for most players i’m sure. comparing it to your Dave Grossman article there will be players who:

- Aren’t aware you have an inventory
- Aren’t aware you can interact with objects like loosening rod, the door or the little robot
- Aren’t aware that you can use items from your inventory with objects on screen

They’d say Beneath a Steel Sky is too hard. They’d expect those awful glowing icons and full screen bouncing arrows telling them what to do every step of at least the first act.
Or so it seems to me. How far to go, right? Is the designer still to blame when those indicators are left out?

Kurufinwe, as always your opinion is well-thought out and fascinating. My immediate reaction is to say as an experienced player, I would be turned off by games teaching me again and again, same as I don’t like to see the origin story of superheros in repeated reboots of their franchises.
Your Zelda example, or RPGs, isn’t exactly equivalent as the player character has less skills early on, so easier fights (stats-wise) are more challenging due to that. There is also the issue of learning the enemies’ attacks/weaknesses and the such.
I think AGs are the only example of a game where the player IS the character, so this teaching might be off-putting. The closest example I can think of from other genres is platform games, but there experienced players need to tune their reflexes to the exact responsiveness of the game’s controls, so again you need some “ramp”.

The other observation I have to share is escape rooms. I’ve been doing plenty of them, often with non-AG playing people. They require the exact same two skills (and the bad ones also require pixel hunting ) and people pick it up within the span of an hour without giving it too much thought. So, I think AGs might be inaccessible not due to not teaching those factors, but due to the other things you mentioned (such as being overwhelming at first or too wordy, etc).