Pyrian on 27/12/2011 at 18:47

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I found the minigame okay, but then I always entered the code if I had it. It bugs me that the game in-effect punishes you for finding and using the keys. Rewarding the player for performing tedious actions predictably encourages players to perform tedious actions, which has the side-effect of making the game less fun for those players who are susceptible. I'm still firmly of the opinion that in-game rewards should be based on accomplishing goals rather than on how you accomplish those goals, and that should go doubly for games in this mold where they're designed to be challenged in numerous styles.

june gloom on 28/12/2011 at 05:31

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It honestly takes more effort to find/use keys than it does to actually hack the damn locks.

heywood on 29/12/2011 at 16:38

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No, didn't forget. But it doesn't make DX hacking suck any less.

The problems with hacking in Deus Ex is that it's a "press the button to win" affair, there's no risk of setting off an alarm unless you ignore the timer, and you can pretty much hack any computer regardless of skill as long as you can speed read. Aside from the limited reading time, there isn't much difference between hacking a computer in DX and reading a datacube.



Agreed 100%

Human Revolution encourages XP whoring even though it's not necessary. It took me until 2/3 of the way through my first game to realize I was killing my own fun, over-using hacking and takedowns for the sake of XP which I didn't need. If you max XP, you can get all the good augs 1/2 way through the game. With minimal use of hacking and takedowns, it may take 3/4 of the game to get all the good augs. That's about the only difference.

Papy on 31/12/2011 at 13:51

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Two things. First, unless you're handicapped, typing a code is not a challenge. Second, finding the code and hacking the lock are not mutually exclusive.

Should the player be rewarded for finding the code? Yes (proportionally to the difficulty of finding it). Should he be rewarded for entering the code? No. Should finding the code remove the possible reward for hacking a lock? No. What I mean is if the player find the code, but still decide to hack the lock, I believe he should get both rewards (the one for finding the code and the one for hacking the lock). Do you agree?



Medal of Honor: Allied Assault was one game which made me suffer. It was not particularly difficult, but although there was some aspect I like about the game, I found the gameplay to be really annoying. Did I find the game rewarding? Not at all. So no, when I "suffer", I don't find something rewarding.

The thing is, for me, playing a video game has no intrinsic rewarding feeling in itself. I don't feel proud of myself simply for playing a video game. This means that although I don't have to "suffer", I do need a challenge (which imply efforts and temporary frustration) to find something rewarding. And the greater the challenge (the greater the effort and frustration), the greater the rewarding feeling when I finally succeed. In fact, that's the whole reason why I don't play all video games at the easiest difficulty level. What about you?


That's mostly true for me, but reading what other people post, I'd say that I'm an exception.

One thing is for sure, a little girl playing with a Barbie doll face no challenge at all, yet, she has a lot of fun. To use another example, I'm someone who thought Little Computer People was a pointless and utterly boring video game (as in "no fun at all"), yet I knew people who played a lot with it and who thought it was a really fun game. I could also take games like FarmVille as an example of unchallenging game considered as fun by a lot of people.

Anyway, when I say that "a game can be either fun or rewarding, but not both at the same time", you should guess this is an hyperbole. It is a reaction to all those people who are always complaining that games should be more "fun" and that they should not "punish" the player.

Pyrian on 4/1/2012 at 01:37

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Nobody claimed it was. Find better strawmen.

Yes, but it might be better if they were, although that's not what I proposed.

Note that the game we're discussing does NOT do this (other than the option to bypass the hacking - and its associated in-game rewards).

I disagree. I think there should be one reward for bypassing the lock, and it should be rewarded more-or-less the same* regardless of how the bypass is performed. (*: I.e. same value, but I'm open to the idea that the nature of the reward might be different in games where that's relevant, although in H.R. specifically the various bonuses are mostly interchangeable.) Furthermore, I have very good reasons for disagreeing on this point specifically, as I've already discussed. Allow me to repeat myself:



Like who?

Right here I think you fundamentally fail to understand sandbox creativity as a pursuit. In sandbox play, the player sets their own goals and is challenged by the task of accomplishing those same self-established goals. It may be a complete lack of outside challenge, but calling it a complete lack of challenge is, in most cases, not entirely true. (There is a tendency to move the goalposts in progress, normally kind of a no-no.)

I would instead call FarmVille, past a certain level, a startlingly challenging game that's not much fun at all, even to many of those caught in its webs. :p It is a terrible offender in the "rewarding the player for tedious actions" problem.

Oh, Papy. From someone else I might very well have done exactly that. But I could never guess at when you're being absurd intentionally. :cheeky:

I wish you would address my argument on its own merits rather than constantly simplifying it to a ridiculous strawman. I don't think I've seen anything in this thread that genuinely suggests that you understand what I'm proposing. You just want to slay your own strawmen. Okay. They're dead. Now...

What do you think of goal-accomplishing based XP as compared and contrasted to task-performing based XP? The latter is certainly more realistic, but in real-life that's ideally mostly accomplished through training rather than during-mission (which isn't to say that real-world experience isn't valuable!). But the former IMO both better mimicks realistic actions in gameplay and is less tedious in gameplay, as people do not find themselves feeling the need to perform unnecessarily repetitive tasks in the middle of dangerous missions just to min/max their attributes.