Papy on 16/3/2012 at 15:36
Quote Posted by Yakoob
I never said you "miss" 80% of the game. I see you only see 20% of the game. There is a considerable difference between the two. Think about it.
OK... If a player only see 20% of the game and doesn't care to look if there's more, chances are he doesn't like the game that much and mostly want to go through it as fast as he can and be done with it. So how do you think this gamer will feel if you force him to see everything?
Yakoob on 16/3/2012 at 16:09
Why do you keep insisting that player misses content due to his laziness and uncaring, rather than exclusive choices, story paths, time constraints (funfact: most of us have lives outside of games), poorly designer / hard to find content, etc.
Briareos H on 16/3/2012 at 16:39
Is it so difficult to understand that for many among the immersive sim* public (Thief, Deus Ex, System Shock players), there is nothing more pleasurable than finding something unexpected, optional and apparently "for your eyes only" even after your fifth playthrough? Have you never felt the personal bond that such a discovery creates between the player and the game? Do you not agree that a new game "feels best" when it offers itself to you as exciting untrodden ground, when walkthroughs aren't up, when forums are empty, when memes aren't everywhere, letting you compare your experience to other players' and see that there is absolutely nothing in common? Isn't it logical then if developers want to make that experience as fresh as possible even after having finished it more than once?
"WHAAAT you can save Paul??!" / "Holy shit there's a group of players that just discovered a new ending 3 weeks after release" / "Yeah it's not easy but you can definitely reach that place using rooftops and crate stacking"
We get that you don't see such behaviour as more than anecdotal and that it doesn't make sense in your business view. But you don't get to deny this to others who find enjoyment in some games in ways you can't even dream of.
*Using that term originally made me feel bad, but at the end of the day it works. Pretty accurately, even.
Muzman on 16/3/2012 at 19:34
As a small aside, a lot of those kinds of things were apparently added after the game was finished (it was also a little annoying how mechanical Paul's thing was. If you don't exit via the front door he dies, even if you kill everyone. What sort of idiot goes out the front door of a surrounded building?). This seems to have been true of DX:HR as well, and a lot of the sidequests were the most interesting and well written things in the game.
So Dishonoured should finish the game and then spend six months tacking on new stuff, is I think the lesson here. (if it's a DX kind of game, which I'm not sure it is, but anyway...)
Jason Moyer on 16/3/2012 at 19:37
Quote Posted by Briareos H
"Holy shit there's a group of players that just discovered a new ending 3 weeks after release"
Which game is that referring to?
Papy on 17/3/2012 at 20:25
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Why do you keep insisting that player misses content due to his laziness and uncaring, rather than exclusive choices, story paths, time constraints (funfact: most of us have lives outside of games), poorly designer / hard to find content, etc.
Because I take for granted that people choose the game they play according to their taste. If someone chooses to buy and play a 50 hours long game which offer choices and different story paths, if he then complains that he wasn't able to see everything in 3 hours, to me it would be like someone who buys an expensive bottle of wine and then complains that the wine is not good because it doesn't taste like a better Coke.
june gloom on 17/3/2012 at 20:44
Yes, some people are morons, but that's not a valid counter-argument to what Yakoob is saying, especially with such an extreme example that you've given here.
Fafhrd on 17/3/2012 at 22:43
Quote Posted by Yakoob
Why do you keep insisting that player misses content due to his laziness and uncaring, rather than exclusive choices, story paths, time constraints (funfact: most of us have lives outside of games), poorly designer / hard to find content, etc.
Why do you keep insisting that a player missing content is automatically a negative?
catbarf on 18/3/2012 at 00:17
I can definitely see where Yakoob's coming from, I just don't think he's articulating his point very well. It's like, suppose you have two games with the same overall amount of content. If in one you see 80% of the content in one playthrough, and in the other only 20%, the latter is going to feel shallow and repetitive when you inevitably do it over again to see more, while the former may not take as long but is a more enriched experience.
Developers have to balance content generation. Every bit of time spent adding additional endings, story branches, or possible occurrences is time that could be spent making content for a single linear (that's linear in the sense of 'see everything in one playthrough', not 'corridor shooter') campaign. You could have a player choose one of four options, each leading to a different set piece. Or you could have the player go through each one in sequence, with no choice. Both contain the same amount of content and take just as long to make, but the second objectively has more content for a single playthrough, and won't force you to replay other parts of the game just to see all the content.
What we all want is a game with so much content that it takes a very long time to truly exhaust what it has to offer, whether that's in one playthrough or not- but when it comes down to a relatively shallow game with lots of divergence versus an engrossing but linear cinema-like experience, I can't personally say one is better than the other. For people like Yakoob who have other concerns and don't want to spend the time necessary to see a game in its entirety through lots of replays, a single awesome and more time-efficient experience is probably better.
Yakoob on 18/3/2012 at 00:32
Alright, lets cut the snide remarks since I'm clearly not as clever as I think I am in my wording. My point is that there is a difference between "replay value" and "bad design" which I think is distinguishable by a ratio of the repeated content to the "new" content on each play through.
If "replay value" means repeating the same 20% of the game to see 80% new stuff, that's great, you got me hooked, will play again. But if it means replaying 80% of the exact same story, characters, locations and gameplay, just to see 20% of new stuff, especially when in most games its just fluff (an extra response from a character that changes nothing overall), then is it really worth it?
As catbarf explains it well, if I sink tens of hours into a game, I already soaked in its world, I learned all the plot twists, I mastered the gameplay and I completed the story arch. I don't want to do it all over again after I finished (at least, not for a good while).
Lets make up hypothetica example where, in a 50hour RPG, you get a choice how to escape from an antagonist base, either using a spaceship and getting into a big dogfight, go through the tunnels and meet a whole underground society with its own questlines etc. or maybe instead go deeper into antagonist's base and destroy it. Each section is an awesome 3-5 hours of unique gameplay BUT you can only see one of them in a single playthrough. If you want to see the another one, you have to repeat the exact same 50 hours of gameplay to get to that spot.
I don't know, maybe to you that isn't a problem, but to me, I'd feel somewhat "cheated." Or more precisely - this isn't replay value, this is bad design. As a player, I would have actually preferred to have the option to do all 3 in a single play through.
