Adventure Gamers - Forums

Thank you for spoiling a puzzle for me from the game.

Lambonius - 12 December 2013 09:52 PM

It’s essentially admitting that a hint system is unnecessary (because “the internet exists”)

That’s really the wrong way to think about things. A game should be a complete product, as enjoyable as possible.
You can’t keep bugs in and make the game easy to mod and hope users overcome it. Similarly, having poor or frustrating puzzles isn’t alleviated by the fact someone is going to figure them out and create a walkthrough.

**Disclaimer: Rage-filled rant below:

I couldn’t disagree more.  Putting hint systems in the game AT ALL is a crutch.  It’s not about “player willpower.”  It’s about developers pandering to the lowest common denominator of intelligence and patience.  They put that shit in there TO TEMPT YOU, and to appeal to people who don’t have what it takes to make it through otherwise.  It reminds me of the stories you always hear about the American education system, where instead of improving things so that more students succeed, administrators just lower the bar of success, to the point where borderline illiterate neanderthals are graduating high school with diplomas that they DON’T FUCKING DESERVE.

It’s no different from the new Super Mario 3D World, which has a special block that appears if you die 5 times in one stage, that turns you completely invincible and allows the player to just walk to the end of the stage.  Sure, you can opt NOT to use the block, but the very fact that they put it there is INSULTING.  It threatens to negate everything that made the older games GOOD.  The sense of practicing until you got good, then finally beating a stage, the rewarding feeling that came with knowing you had finally made it.  That block gives the player an out so that they DON’T HAVE TO LEARN.  SO THAT THEY DON’T HAVE TO WORK FOR IT.  FUCK THAT BLOCK. 

Those same rewarding feelings used to be present in adventure games, when you actually needed to THINK your way through puzzles.  When you occasionally needed to take a break and come back to a puzzle with fresh eyes, or talk it over with a friend.  All of those things made finally solving them and moving on that much more rewarding.

Gamers today are fucking lazy.  Nobody wants to work for anything.  Developers should quit the fucking pandering because they’re only making it worse.

End rant. 

@Lambonius

+10000000000000

It’s because now, more than ever, everything is polluted with the money-thirst.
It’s all about sales figures and how many copies will be sold. That’s the main reason why developers now are, as you said, “pandering to the lowest common denominator of intelligence and patience”.

Yeah, making games appeal to wider crowds is a terrible money-grabbing scheme. If you guys are typical fans, I can see why the genre died a while back.

I don’t use hints, because, like Lambonius and others here, I don’t enjoy these sorts of games if I’m not figuring stuff out for myself.

However, I think it is going too far to belittle those that do as if they are horrible human beings for doing so. The game is intended for entertainment, correct? It just seems presumptuous to condemn people for how THEY enjoy their entertainment.

When it comes down to it, if a developer IS going to try to widen their audience by making it accessible to people with a wider range of tastes in how challenging they like their ENTERTAINMENT to be, I’d far rather have an optional hint/help system included than to have the game as a whole dumbed down.

I think Revolution is trying to interest gamers who are used to playing casual adventures from sites like Big Fish. Adventure games without Hints often get very poor reviews there from people who complain they don’t know what to do next or that the game gives “no guidance,” etc. Since the casual game market is so much larger than the “hardcore” adventure game market, Revolution provides an option for in-game Hints for players who want them. There may or may not be walkthroughs on the Internet, but having to exit the game for a Hint is another thing for casual gamers to complain about. So as Diego pointed out, if you don’t want the Hints, you have to work on your willpower.

I’m all for Revolution providing Hints for casual gamers if it means they can sell more games, make more money, and make more games. But I’d also rather see a more difficult game with a Hint system than an easy game with no Hint system. If you’re going to provide a Hint system anyway, why make the game easy?

Who are you to judge how anyone else chooses to consume a form of media, after they’ve paid for it? If they opt to play a game with hints on permanently, while it’s not what I’d want to do, I wouldn’t deride them from getting enjoyment from it.

As others have said, the in built hint system is there to stop people switching the game off. In the modern world, the more a player switches something off, the less likely they are to start it up again - each time you lose them to the internet, it’s a time you potentially aren’t getting them back. The hints are optional and as long as the game plays perfectly well without it, I genuinely don’t see the problem.

The sign puzzle you cite as a problem does have similar in-game clues to the ones you suggest.

Edit to add: I’m always fascinated by a worryingly high number of Adventure Gamers who are of the opinion that they’re in some way superior to, say, ‘brainless *hack, spit* FPS fans’, and that by attempting to reach a wider audience, AG developers are pandering to ‘Lowest common denominators’ - and who are they to sully our glorious genre of choice?

It’s all disturbingly elitist. There are ways to frame the points being made, but the language chosen often has this ugly attitude behind it.

I was going to write something about hint systems and laziness, but the conclusion to Ron Gilbert’s genre-changing 1989 essay Why Adventure Games Suck And What We Can Do About It puts it better than I could:

The thing we cannot forget is that we are here to entertain, and for most people, entertainment does not consist of nights and weekends filled with frustration.  The average American spends most of the day failing at the office, the last thing he wants to do is come home and fail while trying to relax and be entertained.

I personally generally like solving puzzles myself and disabled the hint system in BS5, but I would have had no qualms about turning it back on if I had felt the need for it. Ultimately, games should offer each player the chance to tailor the experience to their own definition of entertainment. Those who like being challenged to the point of frustration should have the option not to receive hints. And those who want to try to work things out for themselves but don’t want to feel like they’re wasting their time getting stuck for too long should have the option to get nudged toward the solution.