SubJeff on 30/6/2010 at 00:28
In multi-player games it is fairly easy to do badly in a game that is easy to play, even if you are experienced, because there is a greater weighting towards luck (for the noobs). With tougher games noobs tend to be totally outclassed by an experienced player just because it takes longer to get used to/good at the game.
I can't see this be true of single player games though.
Papy on 30/6/2010 at 00:31
I'll answer to that with another anecdotal evidence. When I was 16, I had a French class teacher who was clearly asking us to do a lot more than the program set up by the government in order to get good grades. Midway through the semester, he got sick and he was replaced with someone else who thought our old teacher was asking far too much for students in high school. So the course went from very difficult to very easy. Did the grades got better, for a few student, yes, but for the majority nothing really change. The majority did exactly like me : they just worked less. Our true goal was not to get the best grade we could, but to do the minimum we had to in order to get the grade we found acceptable.
I don't think I'm an exception and I do think this behavior applies also to games.
Of course, it all depends on how the adaptive difficulty will judge the performance of the player. In the case of an arcade racing game, it's quite easy to do as everyone want to finish first. But for an action RPG, how do you know what is the expectation of the player? How can the game know if the player is frustrated or, on the opposite, bored to death? How do the game know if the player makes mistakes because the gameplay is too hard for him or, on the opposite, if he makes mistakes because he just don't care?
BTW, another interesting fact about my French class is that most of us thought our old teacher was a much better teacher than the new one.
Muzman on 30/6/2010 at 05:28
Quote Posted by Chade
I think you're confusing three separate issues here: what sort of difficulty is fun, how well the player can choose an appropriate difficulty level, and the belief that streamlined interfaces are an inherently good thing.
I'm not confusing them. I'm suggesting (reasonably, I hope) that they're all connected in how this situation arose.
Difficulty is...well, difficult. A huge design problem that will always be struggled with. Studios want games to be played, primarily, for as long as possible.
Failure became bad. People never tick the smiley box on the psych survey when they fail. It is possible to make happy failure, in the sense that peope keep trying, but see point one.
Designers have also wanted for a long time to reduce as many barriers to entry as they can and spend a lot of effort on that end of the experience now.
Skipping a few details (*cough*), numerous otherwise well meaning game design trends, philosophies/habits and technologies result in a pressure/desire to basically sand the edges off games entirely. Some manage to live in this space without it wrecking things, most don't.
But anyway, I'm only on this track because it was suggested modern gamers wouldn't want a multi slider difficulty system like
System Shock. Whether that was the point or not, I do think the industry would broadly agree and I reckon they'd be wrong. If when making your complex game the testing suggests it's too much to balance and bring players in comfortably, stop before whipping out the modern gamer belt sander. Dare to believe there's people who might like it like that and try another way to accomodate a broad audience. Here's one (yeah, it didn't sell very well the first time. But neither did
Deus Ex and somone's throwing millions at that for some reason).
(what does this have to do with the game I haven't played yet? ...ehh not a whole lot at this point.)
negativeliberty on 30/6/2010 at 06:53
Quote Posted by Nihilism
My problem is, either you're an angel, or you're a demon. There's no in between; it's black and white -- no grey area. Yes, it opens and closes quests; that's exactly what we expect if we've played previous Bethesda games. I think quests should be introduced and removed based on unrealized actions. That way, we won't know why things turn out the way they do. With the current system, a simple choice between detonating the nuke or not results in only two obvious outcomes. All the player has to do in their second playthrough is continually do the opposite of what they did in their first, and then they'll have experienced the entire game. If the actions culminating to the game's conclusion are unbeknownst to the player, the game will continue to be fresh and replayable.
Obviously, but I simply wondered why you didn't use Invisible War as an example? Considering it's not a sandbox RPG and is more related to the subject at hand. IW defined meaningless choice way before F3, the only choice you're given is to kill certain plot-related characters or not, how you go about it; and which variation of faction allegiances you try, the consequences of which might as well be as meaningful as choosing which magic-permitting robe to wear in a fantasy RPG. ISA obviously thought they were giving people more choice, but it turned out differently.
Fallout 3 didn't take choice far enough, but still farther than most games which claim to offer it these days. But then looking for 'meaningful' choice in a sandbox RPG is barking up the wrong tree, which is what I pointed out.
Eidos Montreal doesn't seem very eager to learn from ISA's mistakes with IW though, and from what we've seen and heard it's looking likely to be even more linear and 'on-rails' than IW, cutscenes and all.
Nihilism on 30/6/2010 at 07:14
Quote Posted by negativeliberty
Obviously, but I simply wondered why you didn't use Invisible War as an example? Considering it's not a sandbox RPG and is more related to the subject at hand. IW defined meaningless choice way before F3, the only choice you're given is to kill certain plot-related characters or not, how you go about it; and which variation of faction allegiances you try, the consequences of which might as well be as meaningful as choosing which magic-permitting robe to wear in a fantasy RPG. ISA obviously thought they were giving people more choice, but it turned out differently.
Fallout 3 didn't take choice far enough, but still farther than most games which claim to offer it these days. But then looking for 'meaningful' choice in a sandbox RPG is barking up the wrong tree, which is what I pointed out.
Eidos Montreal doesn't seem very eager to learn from ISA's mistakes with IW though, and from what we've seen and heard it's looking likely to be even more linear and 'on-rails' than IW, cutscenes and all.
I never bothered to play it on account of its overwhelmingly negative reaction in comparison to the original. I bought it on Steam when it was on sale not too long ago, so I'll eventually get around to it.
With that said, Fallout 3 isn't even 2 years old yet, so it is a recent example of meaningless choice. IW, being much older, would represent a primitive system.
DDL on 30/6/2010 at 11:39
Well...at least with fallout3 the choice DID make a difference. By blowing up megaton, you HAVE removed a whole load of other quests, so when you play again you CAN play as an angel (to use your terminology) and do those quests instead. You're still playing again, note.
In IW there was essentially no difference whatsoever between choosing to side with one faction or another, at any point, up until the end. There was no reason at all to replay the entire game. A simple save on the last level would allow you to explore all possible endings in about half an hour.
negativeliberty on 30/6/2010 at 13:10
Exactly.
Quote Posted by Nihilism
I never bothered to play it on account of its overwhelmingly negative reaction in comparison to the original. I bought it on Steam when it was on sale not too long ago, so I'll eventually get around to it.
Sorry I see you only got round to DX about 3 months ago. But if you bought both on Steam then why would the metascore put you off playing IW, or are you still replaying DX currently?
Quote Posted by Nihilism
With that said, Fallout 3 isn't even 2 years old yet, so it is a recent example of meaningless choice. IW, being much older, would represent a primitive system.
But it's just a bad example of meaningless choice, because
considering it's a sandbox rpg, there's not much to complain about in that department. Unless something entirely weird happens, the 'industry' is not going to produce a sandbox RPG that isn't filled to the brim with cookie-cutter kill-or-don't-kill quests and narrative. There's an inherent conflict between the limits of development time and resources, the "freedom of choice" to kill-or-not most people in the game world, and the influence of those choices on the narrative, it's a trade-off between choice and narrative, the trick is in finding the right balance, and in a sandbox RPG, most likely the only part which has any meaningful choices is the main quest, and most sidequests won't go beyond do-or-don't. Again, Fallout 3 did have at least a "third way" (or more) in a lot of quests, which makes it a bad example for your argument.
However, the mere fact that there are often only two options is
not what makes these choices meaningless, it's that they are mostly choices without consequences, which causes the real disillusion of choice.
With regards to the kill-or-not choice DX actually didn't go further than IW, but it appeared to make those choices mean something (as the script would respond to how you played, in addition to what dialogue choices you made, contrary to most RPGs). Funny story: ISA actually implemented the script consequences of the dying-or-not of characters like Paul, Anna and Gunther late in development, to paraphrase Spector or Smith, it was only at that stage that they "discovered" they could do that - have something like that influence the narrative later on in the game, precisely because it was secondary to the bigger choices-and-consequences in the game. Nonetheless it was one of the numerous cherries on the cake.
EM is taking matters in the wrong direction entirely with DXHR, and the heavy use of cutscenes will not only break immersion and make this a cheaper Hollywood B-experience instead of a deeply immersive interactive first-person game, but also take away more choice and with that their consequences. I get it, non-linear non-binary interactive writing and scripting is hard, and it takes an incredible amount of skill, hard work and a bit of luck to pull off, which is why no studio since has surpassed DX in this, even though parts of its gameplay mechanics have found their way into many games.
Jason Moyer on 30/6/2010 at 14:33
Quote Posted by Chade
Final Lap may well have had an implementation that was over the top, Papy, but in general the mechanic has been very successful for racing games.
Among whom? Rubberband AI is the first thing most reviewers, not to mention genre fans, bitch about if a racing game implements it. It's also lame as hell, but there's only really been one racing game with decent AI anyway.
Jason Moyer on 30/6/2010 at 14:34
Quote Posted by DDL
A simple save on the last level would allow you to explore all possible endings in about half an hour.
Why specifically limit that observation to the sequel?
I don't understand negativeliberty's argument about cutscenes somehow changing the ability of the script to have choices and consequences. The choice/consequence aspect of saving Paul wouldn't have changed if they had put a cutscene showing him escaping if he survived or being mowed down if you went out the window. Alpha Protocol is, in a way, almost nothing but cutscenes with short missions inbetween, and the script is far more complex than Deus Ex's.
DDL on 30/6/2010 at 14:49
Because the sequel went out of its way to constantly throw and lampshade these 'meaningful choices' at you.
>DO X for the order!!!
>NO! DO Y for the templars!!!
whereas DX barely made references to choices, they simply were there. The sequel actively tried to sell itself on the whole choice/consequence thing, but ended up exactly as consequential as its predecessor, which didn't.
