Adventure Gamers - Forums

For me there has always been a battle between these two styles, and iv never preferred the one-room-at-a-time approach. Lets take grim fandango for example. The 2nd chapter was a marvelous example of dynamic exploration with many locations. But a high % of the rest of the game was one-room-at-a-time and just not as good as that 2nd chapter. I do think its now part of the trend of modern games which strip everything down in favor of “story games”.. however.. if you look at all the best adventures of the last year:
technobabylon
broken age
fran bow
book of unwritten tales 2
life is strange
annas quest
dead synchronicity

Every single one of these use a very high amount of dynamic exploration with many rooms to explore at once. I dont see this type of exploration as an endangered species.. even if the bigger names like telltale dont care for it.

This is nothing new. (Good grief, is he going to be droning on about old design stuff again?) It was already a problem a quarter of a century ago (If he brings up the Ron Gilbert thing again, I swear I’ll scream), as evidenced by Ron Gilbert discussing it (Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.) back then:

A lot of story games employ a technique that can best be described as caging the player.  This occurs when the player is required to solve a small set of puzzles in order to advance to the next section of the game, at which point she is presented with another small set of puzzles.  Once these puzzles are solved, in a seemingly endless series of cages, the player enters the next section.  This can be particularly frustrating if the player is unable to solve a particular puzzle.  The areas to explore tend to be small, so the only activity is walking around trying to find the one solution out.

Try to imagine this type of puzzle as a cage the player is caught in, and the only way out is to find the key.  Once the key is found, the player finds herself in another cage.  A better way to approach designing this is to think of the player as outside the cages, and the puzzles as locked up within.  In this model, the player has a lot more options about what to do next.  She can select from a wide variety of cages to open.  If the solution to one puzzle stumps her, she can go on to another, thus increasing the amount of useful activity going on.

This is a difficult problem. The caging is frustrating, and reduces puzzle difficulty by reducing the number of options—while being awful when you get stuck on one puzzle and can’t do anything else. But the exact opposite if hardly better: if you have total freedom and non-linearity (King’s Quest I, Day of the Tentacle, Act 2 of Monkey Island 2, Leisure Suit Larry 6-7…), then you kill your plot. You can have little discrete bits of story here and there, but your overarching plot is necessarily at a complete standstill.

The usually-suggested alternative is the “string of pearls” design: you have a medium-sized pearl of non-linearity, then everything converges (which allows the story to progress) and you move on to another pearl. This is best exemplified by games structured in days (Gabriel Knight, Tex Murphy…) or chapters (King’s Quest VII, Books of Unwritten Tales…). But this has to be done carefully: it works in Broken Sword 1, but in Broken Sword 2 the “pearls” are so small (hardly ever more than 2 screens) that you’re back to the cages.*

Personally, I’m particularly fond of the “oil-spill” structure of, e.g., Beneath a Steel Sky and Hadean Lands: You start in a small environment, but the world keeps expanding and you have to return to old locations to solve puzzles that you couldn’t solve originally. That allows for enough linearity to tell a story, is never overwhelming because the world grows in size slowly, while allowing for a lot of freedom. I wish more games followed this model.

Anyway, with games having more story-telling pretensions than before, the caging model tends to show up a lot, but I’d hardly call it dominant. Anecdotally, if I look at the recent games I’ve played:

Memoria and Chains of Satinav are mostly string-of-pearls, sometimes veering towards caging.
Aviary Attorney is pure string-of-pearls.
Cognition is mostly strings-of-pearls (except episode 4, which is pure caging).
Prominence is oil-spill (yay!).
The Room 3 is blends oil-spill and string-of-pearls.
Dreamfall Chapters is mostly string-of-pearls.
Life Is Strange is caging. The Telltale games even more so.
King’s Quest 2015 ep. 1 is mostly oil-spill.
Forever Lost is oil-spill.
Technobabylon wants to be string-of-pearls but is too often caging.
Broken Age is string-of-pearls in act 1 and mostly total freedom in act 2.
Book of Unwritten Tales 2 is string-of-pearls.
JULIA is mostly string-of-pearls.

So it’s definitely a problem that exists, and the way some games want to do string-of-pearls but the “pearls” are so small that they end up doing cages is worrying. Still, there are plenty of games that do things right. Maybe you’re just not playing the right ones.

* People sometimes ask why BS2 is less highly regarded than BS1: well, there’s your answer.

- No one design philosophy is better or worse for storytelling, just that linearity is probably more easy. That’s why a lot of times RPGs struggle in that department, but a good team can always make it work (Obsidian, CDProjekt)
- Dropsy and The Witness, some of the most open games recently released (at least, I think they are)

@Kurufinwe
- What games was Ron Gilbert talking about in 1989 with that problem? Weren’t most games open at the time (namely Sierra adventures)?
- string-of-pearls and caging can be very tricky to differentiate. Why do you call Room 3 a string-of-pearls. That series is all about caging, it doesn’t really get frustrating but it’s all about solving a room before moving on even if the player comes with a new piece to the central room.
- The problem might that now games tend to have small pearls even if they do give a some rooms to explore, the line to caging is often crossed.

wilco - 15 February 2016 12:22 PM

- What games was Ron Gilbert talking about in 1989 with that problem? Weren’t most games open at the time (namely Sierra adventures)?

I’m not sure. His own Indy 3 would definitely fit the bill, as would Loom. At Sierra, you have the first 2 Space Quest games, which are horribly linear. I doubt Gilbert ever played it, but Delphine Software’s mediocre Future Wars also follows the “series of cages” model.

And then you have all the text adventures, which I’m very unfamiliar with. I think The Wizard and the Princess was really linear (but I’ve only played it once and mostly forgotten about it). The very first adventure game I ever played (with my parents), which was a French illustrated text adventure called Orphée (and which is the single worst adventure game I’ve ever played), was also a series of cages; obviously, Gilbert wasn’t referring to that game, but I think it shows that it’s a school of design that existed in text adventure games in the 80s.

- string-of-pearls and caging can be very tricky to differentiate. Why do you call Room 3 a string-of-pearls. That series is all about caging, it doesn’t really get frustrating but it’s all about solving a room before moving on even if the player comes with a new piece to the central room.

You can solve certain rooms in any order. And in a given room, there are a few tasks to accomplish which you can do in whatever order you want. I mean, it’s definitely more linear than Monkey Island, but I definitely remember moving back and forth between the various parts of the house while solving the puzzles, rather than moving from one cage to the next.

- The problem might that now games tend to have small pearls even if they do give a some rooms to explore, the line to caging is often crossed.

Yup. Designers know in theory that they should do string-of-pearls, but in practice they’re not really doing that. (cf. certain chapters of Memoria…) Then again, BS2 suffered from the same problem 20 years ago, as did Kyrandia 2 and many others…

wilco - 15 February 2016 12:22 PM

- Dropsy and The Witness, some of the most open games recently released (at least, I think they are)

Yeah, I think as far as traditional adventures go, Dropsy’s world is possibly the open-est?

Though the Adventure Gamers reviewer didn’t quite agree, almost everyone else who has played and reviewed it counted the openness as a major plus. It doesn’t have to be a problem if you design around it. We used map markers for the critical path and a fast travel clown car (that you can use at any time after finding it by clicking the map, *cough cough*) to ease the pain.

I always thought the main reason for limiting the number of available options was to simplify the gameplay. The fundamental problem with classical AGs has always been that if you’re stuck, you’re stuck. You cannot try a different tactic, you cannot level up and come back later, you can just do a brute-force search through available actions. So if you’re reduced to trial and error, you can at least do it quicker if you have only a few items in the inventory and don’t have to move across many locations.

Today I simply wouldn’t be willing to spend so much time and effort on something like Monkey Island 2. In lots of places it wasn’t obvious what you were supposed to do and whether or not you had everything you needed to do it, and having several islands to move between didn’t help things. Ron Gilbert described his view here: “You’re going to get stuck. You’re going to be frustrated.” Personally I’m not over-excited about that.

A related problem is that it’s hard to fine-tune the difficulty to make the gameplay appealing to the majority of the players. One player will say that The Order of the Thorne is too easy, another player will keep getting stuck. Incidentally, it’s surprising how influential the Quest for Glory series turned out to be. Maybe its recipe for success was making the puzzles easier and making the exploration more interesting.

Roberta Williams said in an interview in 1999 that the demographics of the AG audience had changed. I guess I agree with it in the sense that the demands and expectations of the modern gaming community are different.

Yeah i should emphasize.. i know for me at least im not talking about sprawling non-linear environments VS structured exploration… im talking about games that stick you in one room and say “solve whats in front of you” and do that over and over. Ill be happy as long as games are sending me back and forth with several+ Locations to think about.. and thats disappearing from “the mainstream.” Plenty of devs still doing a good job though.

Discworld 2 did open style with a story brilliantly.