Twist on 28/10/2018 at 21:23
I really don't think gating the content or breaking up the big 3D sudoku puzzle into smaller chunks is the answer here. Part of the game's core charm is its open, free-form, self-directed nature. I love how the last two fates I solve could be among the first 10 you solve. But when you watch some people play, it's apparent why you rarely see games be so open ended.
In various forums, I've seen plenty of people express frustration at being lost, or running into a wall on what to do next or how to solve a few fates. But you can't compromise the core design of the game to try to make it "just right" for
everyone. Given that the game is, at this point, still (
https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/year/pc/filtered?sort=desc&year_selected=2018) the most critically acclaimed PC game of the year
and it has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" aggregate rating from Steam players, I think the game works well
as is.
I do wonder, however, if he had more help making the game he might have been able to iterate more on some of its systems. I think tightening some systems could help people keep a clear head as they try to focus on what to do next, and it could quicken the pace of the game.
I'd most like to know why he forces players to find and walk to an exit door to get out of each death scene. Why not just use the timepiece to trigger a return to the present?
I just watched someone come up with an idea for where to go next based on what he saw in the current death scene, then use the map to figure out where he needed to go on the ship to trigger the appropriate death scene to follow his lead. But by the time he traveled to the exit door and teleported to the corpse he used to enter the current scene, he became a little disoriented about where he had wanted to go next and then kind of lost his train of thought.
I don't think that's all that common or entirely preventable, but he would have been fine if, after he decided what he wanted to do and where he wanted to go, he could have just used the timepiece to switch back to the present and be in the exact same location he was already standing within the death scene.
I also think somehow making it easier and faster to move between death scenes would help, but I'm not sure how to implement that. If you just let people jump directly between any death scene, you'd risk losing the game's vital sense of place or the purpose for having a whole, contiguous ship to explore. Maybe just let people jump between death scenes within each chapter?
It might sound silly, but I think a run key would help a little, too. I know if I were really on the ship for several hours and I was excited about a new epiphany, I wouldn't slowly trudge from one side of the ship to the other. Also, the game needs a jump key for frustrated people who'd rather just hop overboard and drown.
Sulphur on 28/10/2018 at 21:34
The more important questions here are whether the massive claims payout this would have resulted in for the ship, contents, and lives on board necessitated the company's actuarial and underwriting teams to include ghostly ephemera in their premium rate calculation and/or exclusion riders for future policies. Insurance is serious business after all.
While I'm getting that mechanically this is more or less a great game, a question I have is that, given you're sorting out the fates of 60 people, how's the storytelling? I assume a lack of directed narrative is par for the course and it'll end up a series of individual vignettes of varying quality and affect.
Also, this reminds me of The Sexy Brutale, a game I've yet to play, but one that sounds like it'd be at least in the same specific area of interest as this game. Anyone played that yet? Thoughts?
Starker on 28/10/2018 at 22:18
Well, the game is already gating the content in terms of where you can go. Sometimes you can do things in a different order, but the branches are closed off rather quickly. And there's already an entire chapter closed off behind a hard gate. Personally, I think smaller chunks of the "sudoku" would have had a better flow, but a more structured progression could have done it as well. And a lot of this could have been done with simple messaging even.
The problem I have with the game is that it does the opposite -- at times it actively discourages and hinders you from trying to solve things. For example, there's the timing mechanic that forces you out of the scene and into the solution page (often with incomplete information) and there's also the deduction rating tutorial that says you shouldn't try to solve the more difficult puzzles until later. For me, that was the sole reason I gave up on the brothers and moved on, even though I already had all the information to solve it on the spot and it actually made it harder to solve with more irrelevant spaces opening up after that.
Twist on 28/10/2018 at 22:32
Quote Posted by Sulphur
While I'm getting that mechanically this is more or less a great game, a question I have is that, given you're sorting out the fates of 60 people, how's the storytelling? I assume a lack of directed narrative is par for the course and it'll end up a series of individual vignettes of varying quality and affect.
Given the open-ended nature of most of the game, I think the storytelling is surprisingly strong. I believe pulling that off is a main reason it's doing so well with critics. The mechanisms for delivering the story, their execution and performance, are fantastic.
But, as you might tell from our discussion here, it is a case where your mileage may vary. If at some point you get stuck or feel overwhelmed with multiple, different leads, the pace might feel bogged down.
Also, since the experience is largely self-directed, how you choose to take in the story will vary. Starker wanted to complete as many fates as possible before he opened new death scenes, which in turn may have made some new death scenes more meaningful when he experienced them for the first time. I think I preferred to open up as many death scenes as possible in a kind of information gathering phase, then review the story and narrative with those scenes revealed and organized within the in-game journal. Neither approach is wrong or right; it just depends on what works better for you.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Also, this reminds me of The Sexy Brutale, a game I've yet to play, but one that sounds like it'd be at least in the same specific area of interest as this game. Anyone played that yet? Thoughts?
That's funny: The Sexy Brutale is among a few games I'm considering playing in the next few days (although I'm leaning more towards Detention). It looks pretty different to me, but I haven't played it yet either.
Starker on 28/10/2018 at 22:57
Quote Posted by Sulphur
While I'm getting that mechanically this is more or less a great game, a question I have is that, given you're sorting out the fates of 60 people, how's the storytelling? I assume a lack of directed narrative is par for the course and it'll end up a series of individual vignettes of varying quality and affect.
Also, this reminds me of The Sexy Brutale, a game I've yet to play, but one that sounds like it'd be at least in the same specific area of interest as this game. Anyone played that yet? Thoughts?
Some of the story in Obra Dinn is what you see and hear directly, but a lot of it comes from what you piece together based on that. It's fairly coherent, though. The vignettes in one chapter follow fairly close after each other and the chapters themselves tell a bigger story of the whole voyage. And it tends to keep you on your toes in terms of twists and turns.
Sexy Brutale felt different to me. In that game, you're solving a specific set of puzzles of how to make things happen in a certain way and a lot of it has to do with being at a certain place at a specific time in order to get some information or an item or a power. And of course everything in the mansion is unfolding at the same time all at once. So you are unlocking and observing the pieces of one big happening, one by one, but that doesn't really relate to how you solve the particular puzzle you're working on. You just open the place up more and more and gather more and more powers.
In Obra Dinn, however, it's more about observing the scenes and drawing conclusions based on the knowledge available to you in the book, so it's closer to Gone Home in that sense, actually. The scenes themselves are the puzzle.
Twist on 29/10/2018 at 01:55
Quote Posted by Starker
Well, the game is already gating the content in terms of where you can go.
Yeah, but that's very light gating, not unlike how Gone Home slightly gated where you could go in the house at the very beginning. The game is basically over before the hard gating at the end.
Quote Posted by Starker
Sometimes you can do things in a different order, but the branches are closed off rather quickly.
Hmm... I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I don't remember any branches closing off (other than at the very end). Do you mean when it ropes you into discovering certain death scenes in sequence? Because those are just temporary, and after those sequences end you have
more to explore and discover. Honestly, I have so little idea what you're referring to here that I'm preparing myself to feel embarrassed when you point out something obvious I'm forgetting.
Quote Posted by Starker
For example, there's the timing mechanic that forces you out of the scene and into the solution page (often with incomplete information)
Yeah, I didn't like that all. Ironically, I think that was an artificial attempt to push you forward and improve pacing.
Quote Posted by Starker
...and there's also the deduction rating tutorial that says you shouldn't try to solve the more difficult puzzles until later.
It didn't say you should try to solve the more difficult puzzles until later... it just said some people's identity would be harder to deduce than others. Maybe you're conflating the deduction ratings with the earlier fuzzy image tutorial? I've read that some people believe they could have deduced some of the fuzzy photo people before the game let them, but even on a replay I don't understand how that would've been possible without having played before.
I ignored the deduction rating, partly because I forgot about it, but also because:
When it was introduced, the person it showed as an example "high" difficulty rating was really easy for me to identify right at that point (Emily Jackson: only two females left at this point; one was named "Miss" and the other shoved a big ol' wedding ring in your face in the Escape chapter), and then when I looked at Brennan's photo, it identified him as a "Low" difficulty when I still had no idea who he was at that point. So I didn't put much weight in those deduction difficulty ratings.
Quote Posted by Starker
Personally, I think smaller chunks of the "sudoku" would have had a better flow
Obviously you're just trying to skew the game towards a younger audience. :thumb:
(But seriously, I've been impressed with your ability to tolerate and endure the temperamental complain train over there.)
Starker on 29/10/2018 at 04:15
Quote Posted by Twist
Hmm... I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I don't remember any branches closing off (other than at the very end). Do you mean when it ropes you into discovering certain death scenes in sequence? Because those are just temporary, and after those sequences end you have
more to explore and discover. Honestly, I have so little idea what you're referring to here that I'm preparing myself to feel embarrassed when you point out something obvious I'm forgetting.
Yeah, I just mean the chains of memories you can go down until there are no more corpses to follow. Like A Bitter Cold would be one chain, Loose Cargo would be another, etc. Sometimes you have multiple corpses available at the same time, but one the corpses leads down a very short chain and closes off fairly quickly.
Like in the captain's cabin you have the option of either finishing The End or starting a new chain, and during Escape, you have Murder available, which is pretty self-contained and closes off after three scenes. But other than that, there's a definite progression from The End to Doom to Escape to Soldiers of the Sea to Unholy Captives to The Calling.Quote Posted by Twist
It didn't say you should try to solve the more difficult puzzles until later... it just said some people's identity would be harder to deduce than others. Maybe you're conflating the deduction ratings with the earlier fuzzy image tutorial? I've read that some people believe they could have deduced some of the fuzzy photo people before the game let them, but even on a replay I don't understand how that would've been possible without having played before.
Well, it said something along the lines that you should try to uncover the people with easier deduction ratings first, which amounts to the same thing, basically. And because it pops up when you try one of the harder ones, it's comes across like a warning or at least I took it this way.
Quote Posted by Twist
I ignored the deduction rating, partly because I forgot about it, but also because:
When it was introduced, the person it showed as an example "high" difficulty rating was really easy for me to identify right at that point (Emily Jackson: only two females left at this point; one was named "Miss" and the other shoved a big ol' wedding ring in your face in the Escape chapter), and then when I looked at Brennan's photo, it identified him as a "Low" difficulty when I still had no idea who he was at that point. So I didn't put much weight in those deduction difficulty ratings.
Right, another good example why the warning is counterproductive, IMO. And I've seen a couple people give up on someone because they were "high difficulty". The rating also sort of encourages people to hunt around the ship for the easy ones to find the "weak link in the chain".
Anyway, this is all rather hypothetical and this sort of armchair designing can easily fall apart in actual playtesting. It's just an area where I felt the game could have been improved further.
Quote Posted by Twist
(But seriously, I've been impressed with your ability to tolerate and endure the temperamental complain train over there.)
Eh, there's some good criticism too among all the hand-wringing. The amount of vitriol towards the devs really does surprise me sometimes, though.
Sulphur on 29/10/2018 at 08:13
Sounds good, thanks for the explanation both. Probably picking this up in the near future on the strength of its design and execution.
Al_B on 30/10/2018 at 22:49
Picked this up at the weekend based on feedback here and elsewhere and although I've not completed it the narrative storytelling is very well done and it's definitely grabbed me. I'm definitely going to have to replay it or spend a lot of time going back over all of the scenes to fill in the blanks - at times it's quite overwhelming to process everything that's happening in any one tableau and a lot doesn't make sense until the context is revealed later (it reminds me of the film Memento in that respect). I'm also struggling a bit at times where there's a lot of ambiguity about who is talking in the audio section prior to the scenes - I realise it's part of the puzzle but it would still be great if there was an indication that the conversation participant was someone you'd correctly deduced their fate. (At least you can tell who's the main subject for any scene but that was something I only realised an hour or two into the game!)
Overall, really happy with it and the deductive aspect sets it apart from other "exploration" style games. Having to get involved with what's happened to each character pulls you in far more than being a passive participant despite the slight niggles with a couple of the game mechanics that have already been covered above.
PigLick on 6/11/2018 at 14:35
playing it with my son and I must say, having someone else there watching is much better, discussing clues etc, good fun!