Phatose on 24/9/2012 at 19:56
You know, something occurred to me about the whole guard thing.
Guard say you can't go upstairs, so the player doesn't try. Now, this might be an imagination fail on the player's part.
But what if in the last 3 levels, there have been guards blocking off passages to places you actually can't go? It's not like it would be the first game to do that - instant death guards with nothing but a brick wall behind them, used to flag players away from unimportant places.
Believing the guard is only a failure on the players part if the designers haven't already trained them that when a guard says you can't go somewhere, you can not actually go there.
heywood on 26/9/2012 at 09:40
Quote Posted by Phatose
You know, something occurred to me about the whole guard thing.
Guard say you can't go upstairs, so the player doesn't try. Now, this might be an imagination fail on the player's part.
But what if in the last 3 levels, there have been guards blocking off passages to places you actually can't go? It's not like it would be the first game to do that - instant death guards with nothing but a brick wall behind them, used to flag players away from unimportant places.
Believing the guard is only a failure on the players part if the designers haven't already trained them that when a guard says you can't go somewhere, you can not actually go there.
Yes, and we also don't know whether a just few players had a problem or everybody. Developers should not approach play testing with the attitude that nobody should ever get stuck or be confused about what to do next. But if everybody gets stuck in the same place, then maybe you have a design issue.
I think if it's a good game and you haven't designed it nonsensically or with a really steep learning curve, average players aren't going to hold it against you if they have to check a walkthrough or consult a forum once in a while if they have brain block or miss something.
Bioshock was a good example of how to fuck up a game by trying to make it impossible to get stuck. With Human Revolution, I thought Eidos Montreal struck a decent balance between being noob friendly and not frustrating advanced players too much. Though I do wish you could turn off the radar.
faetal on 26/9/2012 at 09:50
Wish someone could come up with a way to have the amount of hand-holding as a scalable setting.
DDL on 26/9/2012 at 10:09
A lot of it depends on the type of game you're aiming for, too. Valve do a fuckton of QA for their HL/portal games, then go back and add visual cues to subtly help players work stuff out (like "some players didn't realise they were supposed to be going up through a hole in the roof, so we added some dangling sparkling wires from the hole to make it more obvious"), but then the HL series (and to a slightly lesser extent the portal games) are pretty much "go from A to B", so anything that makes B difficult to spot is a clear problem since there is no other way.
Thiefy-type games are more "go from A to X via B, C, D, E, F, G or even some letters we didn't anticipate", so if B is difficult to spot, it simply becomes a reward for the more observant. I guess the problem they're describing here is that some players aren't spotting ANY of the B-G options, or even realising that 'options' exist, so they just pick an obvious one and make it more obvious.
SubJeff on 26/9/2012 at 12:34
Quote Posted by Phatose
Believing the guard is only a failure on the players part if the designers haven't already trained them that when a guard says you can't go somewhere, you can not actually go there.
Nicely put.
Given the context it's highly unlikely to be the case though or they would have cited that as a possible cause, no?
If that is the case though then there are some very bad design decisions being made. Knowing who from TTLG is on the team though I'd think that concerns would be raised about this in-house quicksmart. I'd hope so anyway.
demagogue on 27/9/2012 at 06:54
Quote Posted by Mr. Tibbs
Here's an IGN playthrough with Dan Todd of one of the levels:
We can call him Digital Nightfall around here, since that's his TTLG nick after all. ;)
Edit: Really cool to see him talking about the game, and about the design process generally.
Mr. Tibbs on 27/9/2012 at 07:41
Quote Posted by demagogue
We can call him Digital Nightfall around here, since that's his TTLG nick after all. ;)
Edit: Really cool to see him talking about the game, and about the design process generally.
Good point. Dishonored's looking like a really special game. Hearing all the little details in the levels like randomizing the bone charms and guards being distracted by hotspots in the environment are such a great idea. I loved in the stealth playthrough when everything goes awry. Less than two weeks now!
