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integrating puzzles into plot vs. creating plot and main goals together

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I think i am not only one who has experienced this - player is so interested in what would happen next in plot that she doesn’t care for solving puzzles. How is this best avoided? Well integrated puzzles is very abstract answer because any pre existing plot doesn’t really have many puzzles so integrating them is always going to be putting obstacles before story developments. There is another way that would probably be unsatisfying from pure storytelling perspective -creating main goals and plot twists together mostly in same order they appear in game. This still leaves plot important in sense that plot both motivates player and game couldn’t continue without plot twists -if there is no plot twist after player reaching her goal then there is nothing to give player new goal.

     
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garbo - 06 November 2017 02:28 PM

player is so interested in what would happen next in plot that she doesn’t care for solving puzzles. How is this best avoided?

If I was that good at storytelling I wouldn’t try to avoid anything Smile

Otherwise, I wouldn’t know if there’s anybody who dislikes their puzzles intertwined with the story.

     

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badlemon - 06 November 2017 03:36 PM

If I was that good at storytelling I wouldn’t try to avoid anything Smile

As designer of traditional adventure games one probably would. If one can’t make player to care for puzzles there is no reason to put puzzles in game at all.

     
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creating main goals and plot twists together mostly in same order they appear in game

Could you give an example of what you mean here?

Excepting explicit puzzles, like the ones found in Myst or 7th Guest, the puzzles in adventure games are a proxy for the kinds of problems found in real life.  Games can’t simulate the experience of trying anything conceivable to open the lock or distract the guard, so a limited number of items and hot spots activated in some particular order stand in for the experience of actually carrying out the task in reality.

Good puzzles are nestled into stories in the same way that a choice is inserted into a CYOA book.  They are an artificial break from the narrative intended to make the reader/player feel like they are in the story.  But they are absurdly out of place sometimes, and they can frustrate the narrative.  There are some shortcuts, like a skip button or an easily accessible hint system, or maybe a difficult level selection that auto-skips or short-circuits puzzles.

There are games that have no narrative break for puzzles:  walking simulators, like Dear Esther.  These games do nothing except tell a story.

I tend to agree that these “puzzles” usually disrupt the story more than they add, which is why many adventure games appeal to people who like also puzzles more generally.  It’s a very specific type of puzzle-solving, which is just not very much fun to the uninitiated and unpracticed.

The solution is better puzzles, but designing good puzzles alongside a story is quite hard because the writer’s hands are bound by the user interface, which is far more primitive than the English language.

I think some interesting examples of new approaches to this are games with a completely unique puzzle-solving interface, like Papers, Please, Her Story, or Orwell.  Of course these games are also lighter on elaborate story, but I think this kind of thinking is fertile ground for better-integrated puzzles.

     
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I don’t think I have ever been in this situation.

It is more common that I am so invested in the puzzles that I don’t care to see more story and just want to skip it. I mean, all stories are basically variations of the same story. I read somewhere that there are only something like 12 variations of stories. We just want to hear the same thing over and over again, and it gets boring. I stopped reading fiction a long time ago when I realised the same thing.

     

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jordipg - 06 November 2017 04:31 PM

creating main goals and plot twists together mostly in same order they appear in game

Could you give an example of what you mean here?

Imagine that you are making sci fi game about saving world from evil scientist. You can either have plot first and then try to insert goals into it. Or you can start with only knowing where plot takes you at end without mediate steps and come up with first goal then with first plot twist then with second goal etc. until you have both all plot twists and main goals. And if you have all main goals you can create chains of puzzles letting player to reach those goals.

     
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jordipg - 06 November 2017 04:31 PM

I think some interesting examples of new approaches to this are games with a completely unique puzzle-solving interface, like Papers, Please, Her Story, or Orwell.  Of course these games are also lighter on elaborate story, but I think this kind of thinking is fertile ground for better-integrated puzzles.

Those games have found a unique, novel way to tell a story, but I wouldn’t call it puzzle-solving. Her Story does offer a kind of puzzle in the sense that you have to come up with words to search a database. I’ve played Orwell twice, as you can tell from my avatar(s), great game, but reading and making moral choices is all you ever do. In Papers Please you also make moral choices and follow complicated instructions in a limited time frame. Another example is the recent game Stories Untold, which combines text adventure input (no puzzles) with other forms of gameplay where the player just follows sometimes complicated instructions.

Other people may share your definition of “puzzles” though. For reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the subject of this thread, I analysed two dozen youtube playthroughs and live streams of Stories Untold. The overwhelming majority of those gamers talked about solving puzzles, even complained how difficult they were, when in fact they just followed instructions.

     

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I agree that those are all weak examples of puzzles, or maybe examples of weak puzzles?

However, I like to think of them as concept art, sketches of what else is possible besides point-and-click inventory puzzles, etc.  I love adventure games, especially ones with great stories and rich, clever puzzles, but I also think that it’s hard to deny that the puzzles, such as they are, are the weakest part of the genre.  Rare is the game that doesn’t have puzzles that feel tedious after a while.  But what genre of game doesn’t have grinding of some type?

To me, the power of adventure games lies entirely in the narrative, and the puzzles are important to the extent that they enrich the narrative and make the player experience the struggle of the protagonist.  This requires realism and it narrows the scope of what puzzles in a narrative might entail.  It might not be possible with the design tools available today, or it might not be enough fun, or maybe it’s just asking too much of a video game?

     

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