heywood on 22/10/2008 at 14:44
Quote Posted by Chade
I don't see a flood of people declaring that playing BS without vita chambers "changes everything", the way Papy has. I think it's great that Papy has changed his mind on BS, but I haven't seen many others copying him.
Vita Chambers alone wouldn't change my mind. But if you also make resources appropriately scarce, make splicers less numerous but harder to kill, fix the sound propagation problem, make tonic choices permanent, and make the Adam difference between harvesting and saving meaningful, it would have made a huge difference to me.
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Also, I have seen people struggle to navigate through DX:IW's opening level (I have had to help people find Billie Adams apartment, and the lockers next to the basket ball court). You do need different levels. If you want to do it properly, at any rate.
It would be hard to make the Tarsus level in IW any more linear than it is. Even Doom and Halo levels are less linear than the start of IW. Billie's apartment is literally the only place you can visit at the start of the game, aside from your own apartment. What do you want, one single straight corridor with Billie standing at the end?
Exploration and multiple approaches to the same objective are key elements of level design for any DX game. Those elements will make it possible for some people to get lost. But hints, quest arrows, and other player aids can fix that problem. If instead you try to reduce the level design to a straight linear path so nobody can get lost, the result won't be anything like a DX game.
Chade on 22/10/2008 at 22:02
Completely ignoring everything else I should probably respond to ... (but this is more interesting!)
Quote Posted by heywood
Exploration and multiple approaches to the same objective are key elements of level design for any DX game. Those elements will make it possible for some people to get lost. But hints, quest arrows, and other player aids can fix that problem. If instead you try to reduce the level design to a straight linear path so nobody can get lost, the result won't be anything like a DX game.
Yeah I agree. It's just that it's a harder problem then you probably think. In this case, it was probably more about psychology then exploration.
It wasn't so much that the player couldn't explore, it was more that they were trained by the games they had played previously to behave in ways that didn't work for this level (and probably for the game in general: this guy also had worse problems with DX, which was understandable if you were there).
One big issue was confidence: with guys dying in front of them, and people telling them to hurry, and not having any weapons, the first thought was to panic a bit and rush quickly to where the game was telling him to go. This meant the player was not taking his time and looking around properly. The game didn't do a good job of explaining what the "rules" were (more on this later), and it made the player very uncertain.
Another big issue was lack of experience with the "rules" that go into these games. We play these games unconsciously knowing that the designers should obey a number of "rules" when designing levels. Rules such as: "exploration will have a net benefit on my resources", "I will be able to take my time, no matter what the game fiction may tell me", etc ... If designers break these rules we get angry and say the game is poorly designed. It is a confidence in these rules that enable us to take out time and explore when NPC's are dying around us and characters are telling us to "get to the deck quickly!". But if the player does not have previous experience with similar games, and therefore doesn't know these rules, they can get confused.
Another issue was not spending the time to listen properly to the in-game directions at the start of the game. I think this is a trained reaction after spending a lot of time playing games which obey one design pattern that games like DX don't: the appropriate action at any one time is made "obvious" at that time. Therefore instructions which are not directly applicable can be ignored. In DX games, on the other hand, it is common for the appropriate action at one point to be signalled to the player in a completely different part of the level.
None of this makes games like DX too fundamentally difficult. I actually think most people are willing enough to play intelligent games like DX (in fact, this guy's favorite game on my computer is Rome: Total War - which is not super intelligent, but it's a lot better then other options such as Need for Speed or Painkiller). But there is a lot of psychology issues and assumptions about the way games are played which need to be addressed first.
Papy on 23/10/2008 at 09:18
Quote Posted by DDL
If you want some nice clever multilinear cerebral stealth game you might be annoyed if you find that one of the ways through a level was unanticipated, and thus fucks the game as a result.
I'd like to answer to that but I'm not sure what you are thinking with "fuck the game". I'm not sure what is your point of view. Can you give me some examples of "fucking" a game so I can understand what kind of problems you are referring to (because there is a good chance that I don't view them as "problems")?
As for finding a "cerebral multilinear gameplay appreciating beta testers", are you kidding me? Developers have to constantly be reminded that they are not the target audience. Can you guess why?
Anyway, I still insist that creating a game with more depth does not require a lot of money. System Shock 2 was made with 1.7 million and I guess the biggest part of it was still for graphics. If you go further in time, when $500,000 was considered as a huge development cost, you will find RPGs with as much depth as SS2, if not more.
To me, it certainly doesn't make sense when you are spending 30 millions on graphics to try to save a mere $500,000 (at most) which will probably end up infuriating most of your previous fans. Yes, they will buy the game based on reputation, so from a short term point of view it won't change much, but it will hurt the franchise and the name of your company a lot. 20 years ago, EA was to me a sign of quality. Now, EA means to me a dumb and uninteresting game. Same thing for Bethesda and a lot of others. As a result, I didn't buy Spore, I didn't buy Fallout 3 and, in fact, I buy overall a lot less game than 15 years ago. Am I the only one?
Maybe the real problem with the video game industry is the same as most other industries : incompetence from managers who are unable to see past the current fiscal year.
Quote Posted by Chade
In this case, it was probably more about psychology then exploration.
Yes, and that's why hand-holding is a bad thing. From a psychological point of view, a game is about learning. If you kill this need to learn, you may end up with a good entertainment, but not a good game. A slow introduction is not a bad thing, but the more you help people, the more they become passive. If you help them too much from the start, they will become asleep and you'll have to help them for the whole game. At the end of the game, they'll just yawn.
To illustrate how passive a player can become, I can use Oblivion and the people who got lost even with the quest arrow. The thieves guild quests began with you having to go to a meeting. Unfortunately, the path indicated by the arrow was blocked by the city wall. The pathway to go outside the wall was a few feet left, but there were still people who didn't get it and who posted message on the forum asking for help (actually, the reason people got misguided was more complex but Oblivion's flaws are not the subject here). I guess a solution would be to make the leading arrow more helpful by indicating the exact path to follow instead of working like a compass, but I fear there is no end to how much you can help people. If you try to always cater to the lowest common denominator, you will end up boring everyone.
You say that IW didn't do a good job at explaining the rules of the game. I agree, but the solution is not to make things simpler, the best solution is to explain those rules BEFORE playing the game. With Deus Ex, with System Shock 2, there were tutorial levels. I think they could have been better, but that's still a good way to do it (another one is to include a fucking manual to read with the game). There must be a clear line between the moment the player can trust everything the game says, and the moment he must act alone. I know most people find those tutorial levels painful, they want to have "fun" immediately, but for most story based game including the tutorial into the main game is a good way to break immersion. It's a good way to end up with the impression of being in a theme park instead of in a world
DDL on 23/10/2008 at 11:11
I thought it was pretty self explanatory, but I guess not: by 'fuck the game' I mean break it so you can't continue. It is fairly easy to do this with a lot of games out there, purely because they don't anticipate off-the-wall approaches.
I don't know about you, but I'd consider getting utterly stuck because of something the devs didn't anticipate..to be a problem.
Since we're in the DX forums: you can shoot and kill bob page at versalife. This presents no obvious errors at any point until fucking vandenburg, when he fails to turn up for a holo-convo, and the game is borked.
There are several ways of leaving Versalife that don't set flags indicating you've left, preventing Tong giving you further instructions.
And so on.
Ultimately I fear that we are simply...not the target audience anymore. We're old, we're far less numerous than the younger, more "instant gratification" crowd, and since we play games that make you think, and which often take a lot of time to complete, AND we have less time to devote to this than people in....say, school, then we go through fewer games per unit time.
So not only are we not a massive demographic, we're not even a terribly profitable one, proportionately.
You may have not bought spore or fallout3, but many, many people did. Games will now be aimed at them, not you. It's just the way it works, sadly.
Chade on 23/10/2008 at 11:34
Quote:
Yes, and that's why hand-holding is a bad thing.
Yeah, but these are "deep" unstated rules ... perhaps rules is not a great word: they are more like unconscious assumptions about the way the game will work. I agree with the broad thrust of your post, but I think you underestimate the effort involved in teaching people about these deep design patterns that have developed in this genre. A tutorial level isn't enough. I don't know what is, but I imagine it takes some very clever scaffolding for a considerable fraction of the game (note: scaffolding isn't quite the same as hand holding, but it's a grey distinction). That's why it takes a lot of testing and work to target these games to mainstream.
It's interesting to compare the initial opening sequences of DX:IW and Bioshock, actually: both DX:IW and Bioshock have an opening sequence where a person is killed and you are asked to proceed with no weapons. But Bioshock, which is meant to be the scary one, actually provides people with more moral support (Atlas saying "he won't leave the player twisting in the wind"), more prompts as to what the player should do (get out of the cab, seek higher ground, pick up that wrench, etc), and delivers those prompts to the player at the moment he needs them.
Need we guess which developers re-designed their game after watching mainstream gamers play the game?
Papy on 23/10/2008 at 18:01
Quote Posted by DDL
Since we're in the DX forums: you can shoot and kill bob page at versalife. This presents no obvious errors at any point until fucking
vandenburg, when he fails to turn up for a holo-convo, and the game is borked.
I wasn't aware of this bug (BTW, how can you kill him?) and I find it quite strange. If he doesn't appear in Vandenburg, then it's because there is a test to know if he was killed or not before the conversation. If this test is implemented then it would mean developers knew he could be killed before.
Quote Posted by DDL
There are several ways of leaving Versalife that don't set flags indicating you've left, preventing Tong giving you further instructions.
Since there is a single point of entry, I also find this strange. Can you be more specific? Anyway that sort of problems happen when relying on a spatial trigger instead of relying on an event trigger.
Quote Posted by DDL
We're old, we're far less numerous than the younger, more "instant gratification" crowd
No, we're not. Under 18 years old are now only 25% of the market and the average gaming experience is 13 years. There is a lot of us and in a few years, there won't be much more newcomers to sell simple games to. The potential market for simple games will shrink.
Quote Posted by Chade
I agree with the broad thrust of your post, but I think you underestimate the effort involved in teaching people about these deep design patterns that have developed in this genre.
The first time I played Thief, I didn't have any experience with that kind of gameplay before. The tutorial was good enough to erase all those deep design patterns.
ZylonBane on 23/10/2008 at 18:54
Quote Posted by Papy
If he doesn't appear in Vandenburg, then it's because there is a test to know if he was killed or not before the conversation. If this test is implemented then it would mean developers knew he could be killed before.
Not quite. If any AI class in Deus Ex has been flagged as killed, the engine will refuse to spawn them. For example, if you set the NSF trooper AI class as dead, you will never see any NSF troopers in the rest of the game.
When this system works, it's awesome, because any characters you've killed will automatically be prevented from appearing again later, all without any explicit checks by the mapper.
However, as noted, it can cause problems if you somehow manage to kill a character who wasn't supposed to be killable. Normally they protected plot-critical AIs by just making them invulnerable, but since Bob Page is behind bulletproof glass at VersaLife, they apparently didn't bother.
DDL on 23/10/2008 at 18:55
Quote Posted by Papy
I wasn't aware of this bug (BTW, how can you kill him?) and I find it quite strange. If he doesn't appear in Vandenburg, then it's because there is a test to know if he was killed or not before the conversation. If this test is implemented then it would mean developers knew he could be killed before.
You can shoot him through the edge of a window. And the game checks for any named character being dead at the start of every level: it's not Page-specific. They could've made him invincible, or not 'important' (this is what sets the checkflag for death), but they never expected it.
Quote Posted by Papy
Since there is a single point of entry, I also find this strange. Can you be more specific? Anyway that sort of problems happen when relying on a spatial trigger instead of relying on an event trigger.
Tunnels vs Versalife offices: one works, one doesn't. Actually, you could probably grenade climb out into the subway area too, but that's just being silly.
Quote Posted by Papy
No, we're not. Under 18 years old are now only 25% of the market and the average gaming experience is 13 years. There is a lot of us and in a few years, there won't be much more newcomers to sell simple games to. The potential market for simple games will shrink.
Depends on how the actual demographics break down: if they're 25% who buy any old handholdy shooter crap on a very regular basis, and the other 75% is broken down into smaller subgroups of game devotion, many of which only rarely buy games (but very good ones) and then play them to death, then that 25% is the best market to target. Of course, if you've got the statistics to hand, it'd be interesting to know. And if you're right, then that's something to look forward to. :)
heywood on 23/10/2008 at 20:00
Quote Posted by Chade
Yeah I agree. It's just that it's a harder problem then you probably think. In this case, it was probably more about psychology then exploration.
It wasn't so much that the player couldn't explore, it was more that they were trained by the games they had played previously to behave in ways that didn't work for this level (and probably for the game in general: this guy also had worse problems with DX, which was understandable if you were there).
One big issue was confidence: with guys dying in front of them, and people telling them to hurry, and not having any weapons, the first thought was to panic a bit and rush quickly to where the game was telling him to go. This meant the player was not taking his time and looking around properly. The game didn't do a good job of explaining what the "rules" were (more on this later), and it made the player very uncertain.
Another big issue was lack of experience with the "rules" that go into these games. We play these games unconsciously knowing that the designers should obey a number of "rules" when designing levels. Rules such as: "exploration will have a net benefit on my resources", "I will be able to take my time, no matter what the game fiction may tell me", etc ... If designers break these rules we get angry and say the game is poorly designed. It is a confidence in these rules that enable us to take out time and explore when NPC's are dying around us and characters are telling us to "get to the deck quickly!". But if the player does not have previous experience with similar games, and therefore doesn't know these rules, they can get confused.
I believe the designers intended to have the player go straight to Billie's apartment, and then down to meet Nassif. That's why there weren't any other areas open to explore at the start of the game. The whole Tarsus level was linear, so players really have only one way to go and one objective at a time. It wasn't until you exit Tarsus into upper Seattle that the game opens up. So, I think that people who struggle through the first level of IW would also struggle through the first level of almost any FPS that didn't have player aids.
I have an anecdotal story too. I watched my wife and my brother (separately) try to play IW on an X-Box. My brother found Billie's apartment door quickly but got stuck until I pointed out to him that he needed to use the intercom to talk to Billie to get in. He was fixated on the number pad to the right and thought he was stuck because he didn't know the combination. He didn't notice that the button/panel left of the door was usable. My wife fared worse; she didn't know which door was Billie's until I reminded her that the messages she got at the beginning told her which apartment to go to. Then she had the same problem my brother had. It was really pretty sad to watch, but both of their problems could be solved with player aids such as objective/object highlights, quest arrows, and periodic voice reminders of your current objective.
In fact, the only difference I see between the difficulty at the beginning of IW compared to the beginning of Bioshock was the player aids in Bioshock. Fortunately, those are things that experienced players should be able to turn off so it doesn't feel like hand holding.
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Another issue was not spending the time to listen properly to the in-game directions at the start of the game. I think this is a trained reaction after spending a lot of time playing games which obey one design pattern that games like DX don't: the appropriate action at any one time is made "obvious" at that time. Therefore instructions which are not directly applicable can be ignored. In DX games, on the other hand, it is common for the appropriate action at one point to be signalled to the player in a completely different part of the level.
You're absolutely right that a lot of FPS players expect to be able to jump straight into the game without reading the manual or following in-game directions. If you want them to keep playing, you have to hold their hand or dumb-down the game. I'd prefer to keep the complexity but offer optional aids and hand holding.
And no matter what, people who are used to playing a linear FPS are going to struggle at first when faced with having multiple objectives at once, some conflicting, some optional, having multiple paths to achieving an objective, and having to manage an inventory and develop a character. But I think that's natural and acceptable because DX was not a FPS. The problem is one of player expectations. Some players assumed that since DX is first person and has guns, that it's just another FPS, and then proceeded to complain about all the things that differentiated DX from an FPS. These same players would probably struggle with Oblivion for a while if they hadn't played an RPG before, but the difference is that they wouldn't expect it to play like an FPS.
So, one way to deal with this problem is to manage expectations. Another way to do it is to offer game options which streamline the RPG elements. Air combat and racing games usually have arcade and simulation modes. The same concept can apply to a FPS/RPG hybrid.
Chade on 23/10/2008 at 21:30
Heh, this guy had exactly the same problem with the intercom! :)
Papy: I've spoken to a number of people who were confused when I talked about stealth in thief ... "err, but isn't it just a bad FPS with bows instead of guns?" "Oh yeah, it had stealth, but it wasn't really important ... was it?"
This is all about player psychology, so clearly it varies a lot from person to person. I think if you are here then you are probably a pretty highly motivated experimental sort of player.
(BTW, sorry about not really responding to all the points that have been made recently, but I am posting from work and it was starting to eat up more time then I should really be spending.)
