Nameless Voice on 20/7/2016 at 23:19

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A thing I've noticed a lot recently is how a lot of games have one single path designed by the developers to get through each scenario.

Some games make it blindingly obvious, such as Remember Me which has markers directly indicating where you're supposed to go next as part of the game world (and the same applies to the various quest arrows and path-showing mechanics in modern games), but in truth this isn't really a recent development. Certain genres, especially puzzle, platform, and adventure games, have always been like this.

An example: in Tomb Raider (any game in the franchise), you would often come to an area that you needed to traverse, with a clear starting and ending point, and you would need to make a specific sequence of movements - grab onto a ledge, fingertip-swing along it, climb up, jump across to an opposite ledge, climb up again, etc. - to reach that end point. There's generally only one path to reach that end point, and it has been carefully designed with your character's movement set in mind.
The puzzles in the franchise are usually also similar - you have a set of actions that you can perform (maybe pulling a lever, pushing a button, or using some tool such as a rope), and you have to use them in the correct timing and order as determined by the developers when setting up the puzzle.

The trend here is that you are often not trying to solve a challenge in the game world by finding a solution to it, but rather that you are trying to find the solution that the designers built for you to find.

Point-and-click adventure games were always an example of this, since they were basically a huge chain of puzzles with specific (and often moon-logic based) solutions.


As I talked about at length in (http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=145931) my earlier thread about the over-abundance of combat in games, combat is extremely prevalent in games, and one of the reasons given was that we're very good at the kind of spacial simulation that is great for combat.
Here's another thing I've realised: combat is one of the aspects in games with the most freedom and choice. There's no single fixed solution - instead, there's a single clear goal (kill all your enemies), you are given a number of different tools that can help you achieve that (different weapons that work in different ways), and are basically free to use any tool or combination of those tools that you want to.
Maybe the developers put an explosive barrel next to some enemies, but you are still free to either shoot the barrel, ignore it and simply shoot the enemies, toss a grenade at them, kick them into a conveniently-placed spike rack, or do something else entirely.
Combat is a really analogue system with tons of different ways to succeed (and fail), without the single designed solution that is so prevalent in most other game mechanics.
Stealth also has elements of this, especially if the player has a lot of tools at their disposal.



What I'm wondering about is how games could be designed in such a way as to allow the player more freedom to find their own solutions to the problems they present, rather than being about the player finding the one path that the developers intended?

One thought is that games with systematic approaches to their challenges - such as immersive sims where the problems are built using the simulation rules rather than set scripting - have an advantage here. If their systems are complex enough and the challenges not too specific or restricted, then players can often use unexpected combinations of those systems to find alternate solutions.
Portal is a minor example of this in a puzzle game - all of its puzzles are built with the same basic components, which sometimes allows you to come up with non-standard solutions - though often the puzzle areas are so carefully designed that there's only one possible solution anyway.

Another thought is that designers can at least give the illusion of player freedom by trying to always think up multiple solutions to all of their challenges, even if the solutions themselves are generally predetermined. Games like Deus Ex do this a lot (by offering multiple paths that are equally effective), though I can understand why it isn't popular since it takes three times as much development time to design a puzzle with three solutions - two of which a player may never use - than it takes to just design one with a single solution.


So, any thoughts on how this type of freedom could be offered in other genres, such as platform game and puzzle games?

Yakoob on 21/7/2016 at 06:04

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Honestly I've been bothered by it less and less lately and growing to appreciate linear games. Sure there are times i want to be creative and come up with my own solution, but there are also times when i'm tired after a long day and just want to turn my brain off and shoot things and not think too much about it. I abused the Bioshock quest arrow for that reason and had a blast (pun intended)

But there are also games where that approach just doesn't fit with the core principles. That's been my criticism of the early hitman games i mentioned on here, always felt like I'm just trying to figure out the 3 possible solutions designers put in the rather than being really free. I know the newer installments were better about that tho.

icemann on 21/7/2016 at 14:13

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The Metroidvania style 2D platformers are an even better example. They offer VAST non-linear gameplay, and often multiple routes to a destination (more as the game goes on usually). Add to that the fact that as you get new abilities/items that grant new abilities, the option to go back to old areas to get into once inaccessable locations for extra optional loot + optional bosses sometimes.

Pyrian on 22/7/2016 at 00:02

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Here are some of the challenges of designing games with more open solutions:

1) Balance. The more different ways there are to solve a problem, the more difficult it is to make those solutions similar in difficulty. IMO it can really become problematic when there's clearly one superior way to go about playing the game. Then all these different paths become mostly unused. Indeed, any easy solution can basically turn any interesting problem into a dull chore.

So, what are some of the solutions? Games like Portal (and indeed Mirror's Edge and The Talos Principle) are designed with the "easy" solution in mind; other solutions are fine so long as they're more difficult to execute than the "intended" solution (they actually talk about this in the Portal dev commentary). One approach I'm fond of - you see a bit of this in games like Deus Ex - is that certain problems are more amenable to certain solutions, so by mixing the balance around the player is encouraged to experiment. (Then there's the Bioshock 1 "here's your random plasmid for the next 5 minutes" that was initially incredibly annoying but IMO actually a lot of fun.)

2) Differential Fun - Combat and stealth are fairly well established mechanics, but a lot of FPS/RPG-style games include some form of hacking mechanic, and/or social challenges (hello DX:HR), with decidedly mixed results. You see a lot of variety here, with minigames ranging from Thief's lockpicking, through System Shock's not-even-really-a-minigame and Bioshock's pipe dream, to my favorite, the DX:HR hacking minigame which is actually kind of fun in itself. Obviously it's better done well than done poorly, but overwhelmingly it's IMO just not well fitted into the world. This contrasts with the combat/stealth (and in a few cases parkour) differential, where you're literally engaged with the same enemies in the same places. Instead you're dipping into a whole different game.

And in most cases, the hacking doesn't even really count as any sort of different way; it's usually just bonus items or easier stealth (occasionally you can bypass a side-objective, although if you're like me you probably do it anyway).

3) Triumph - This kind of goes with balance? I almost never get that feeling of accomplishment from solving a difficult puzzle (e.g. in The Talos Principle) when simply "finding" one of many ways through. I really think most many-way games don't put in sufficiently interesting challenges. Think about how puzzles are usually created. There's typically some key insight that has to be worked out to solve the puzzle. "In this puzzle, you have to cross certain beams, to prevent other beams from getting crossed." How would you even do something like that in a Deus Ex? Almost by definition, the "key insight" is disposable; so much so, that such moments are rarely even provided. And it's a shame, because that's a real intellectual delight from playing puzzle games that's often lacking in "multipath problem solving" games. Putting three or more "key insights" into each problem seems prohibitively difficult from a design perspective.

Jason Moyer on 22/7/2016 at 02:08

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In terms of exploring the physical space that is certainly true. I'm not sure I'd agree with that in terms of the combat (at least when you're not just fighting a bunch of mooks) or the memory reconstruction parts. Actually, one of the more entertaining parts of the game was finding all of the wrong ways you could manipulate someone's memory and seeing how the person responded.