Adventure Gamers - Forums

Iznogood - 13 August 2015 02:44 AM

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Murdered Soul Suspect, The Tesla Effect and at least for one puzzle Dreamfall Chapters, to name the ones I could think of. The problem still exists, but it seems like it is only 3D games that uses this now.

Now that you mention it, I do remember encountering this problem in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, but since the game does not come to a complete halt every time you miss one of these interactable objects, it didn’t bother me as it did in the Runaway games. It still definitely sucks to miss some interesting and extra clues about the story just because you can’t see the interactable objects.

One of the worst and hardest pixel hunting for me was in Torin’s Passage where you had to get across that hill.  You had to wait for the voice to tell you “that’s it” or “yes” or whatever.  That took me a long time and was quite pointless.

Antrax - 12 August 2015 03:58 AM

It’s another of those things game designers had back before people knew how to make good games.

Actually I don’t remember it being much of a problem before HD graphics. When every item on the screen looks like it is relevant (Runaway is a definite candidate here) then you have to wade through them all by default. Daedelic also suffers from this.

In the Monkey Islands or Space Quests the pick-uppable items always stood out. And I would much rather items standing out than item-finder buttons.

Well, I remembered in a previous discussion about this someone mentioned it was a part of a design philosophy, same as allowing dead ends.

It was tedious as early as Maniac Mansion (remember the “what is” verb and scanning the entire screen to find the light switch in the basement?), and I remember instances in the first Gabriel Knight. I’m sure if I were to spend more time recalling I’ll come up with more examples from the classics.

Agreed! I already dislike the more obtuse “guess what the designer was thinking” puzzles, so don’t want to add “guess what the artist intended” game on top of that ugh.

How do you guys feel about item hilights? When bioshock came out I hated the loot glint (coming as a fan of system shock 2), but in recent years been finding myself enabling this feature more and more and feeling like I just can’t be bothered hunting and want to move on with the game.

i prefer hotspot reveals, but if a game chooses not to use them, then its the devs job to make it reasonable to find them on your own. I dont want to play a modern game where i have to guess if a tiny smudge is a point of interest or not. I just finished technobabylon and it had no hotspot button, but i hardly missed it, as for the most part the hotspots were designed fine.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys pixel hunting (as opposed to searching for usable inventory).
Having to keep trying to get your cursor on the exact pixel isn’t very interesting.

I think my first real pixel hunt was in Gabriel Knight 1—the snake scale in the grass.
I never did see it. It just happened to be under one of the very many places I clicked.

Antrax - 14 August 2015 02:09 AM

Well, I remembered in a previous discussion about this someone mentioned it was a part of a design philosophy, same as allowing dead ends.

It was tedious as early as Maniac Mansion (remember the “what is” verb and scanning the entire screen to find the light switch in the basement?), and I remember instances in the first Gabriel Knight. I’m sure if I were to spend more time recalling I’ll come up with more examples from the classics.

I agree it’s the design philosophy. The hunting doesn’t have to be pixel hunting though. Take Hotel Dusk. At one point you have to search the entire hotel for someone who’s hiding somewhere, with no clue where to look. That is tedious as hell.

^thats a good point. It isnt really about pixels. It could be called tedious-hunting. And you (probably) never hear somebody call something pixel hunting when it was well designed, only if it was a problem.

Iznogood - 16 August 2015 01:26 PM

I haven’t played Hotel Dusk so I can’t comment on that. But there is imo nothing wrong with a bit of a search puzzle, at least not as long as you know what you are looking for, and it is easily visible when you get to the right place.

What makes pixel hunting so annoying, is when you can visit the same place 117 times without ever noticing the object that you need, or even without knowing what object you need or that you need some object.
But having to spend time searching for something or somebody is not something that bothers me in itself.

Of course. The problem is when after everything you do you’re left wandering the halls to find something new to pop up, of which the game gives no clue to what and where it is. When you have already explored every item in every scene, it’s incredibly tedious. Quest-hunting, I call that. Much worse than pixel-hunting.

Yeah, I call those event triggers. And while nearly every game has some use of event triggering sometimes you get a game where practically everything you’re doing is wandering to bump into the next trigger. And then rechecking every place every time. Trigger hunting.

That’s a good one zane: “Trigger hunting”, I like the term. Trigger hunting can take various shapes and forms. Back to Runaway (which seemed to incorporate every type of hunting in its gameplay), they introduced a new mechanic, where a container object (like a dresser or a closet) does not trigger and give you an inventory object unless you get to a certain point in the game. It also might trigger multiple times at different points in the game. In the real life, it does make sense to only carry objects that you need but this was a huge fail in Runaway because:
1- You still carried some crap you didn’t need at the time so the implementation was not consistent.
2- How am I supposed to know what objects the designers deemed useful for me in the game? If I knew before hand I needed a wrench and there was a toolbox there, then maybe looking in it makes sense, but looking in a doctor’s bag, to find an object that will aid me in opening a safe? That is just really poor design.