Balancing Challenge Against Frustration In Games 156
Game-ism has an article discussing the balance game developers strive to achieve between making games challenging enough to be interesting, but not so much that they are frustrating. The author points to Assassin's Creed and GTA IV as examples of recent major titles which may have suffered from gameplay that was too easy to master. Conversely, a minor title like Bionic Commando Rearmed achieved more success than expected in part due to the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing parts of the game.
Also (Score:5, Funny)
It is important to balance the difficulty of successfully trolling slashdot with the difficulty of moderation.
Another option (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Another option (Score:5, Insightful)
You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
Animal Crossing (Score:2)
You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
Nor SimCity, I take it. Does Spore end? See also Awesome Crossing (SWF) [newgrounds.com])
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You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
That is also the reason that most Atari 2600 games never interesting me.
Re:Another option (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Another option (Score:4, Insightful)
It's ok, Losing is fun [dwarffortresswiki.net].
How can anyone NOT love Dwarf Fortress though? (Score:2)
[One way to lose is through] Siege
Should hosts of goblins besiege your gates, drive your peasantry inside and force you to seal off from the outside world, you may have already lost the game. Although a dwarven fortress can be made to appear self-contained, with sources of metal, fuel, underground crops and even livestock kept within inaccessible tunnels, very rarely if ever can a fortress sustain such a state indefinitely. ... One fell miscalculation of your fuel reserves may leave you wi
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It's certainly worth getting past the simple graphics (a good tileset [staszic.waw.pl] helps) and somewhat wobbly controls. You'll soon go from not being able to work out how to dig to building automated goblin crushers and appreciating the detailed gibbage [mkv25.net] and realistic blood [mkv25.net] effects.
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The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
MMOs never define a "win" condition. They leave that up to you the player. But most players have misconceptions that "winning" in a video game means completing all content available in the game just because that's how the "old" video games started.
My recommendation to both players caught in an MMO treadmill and players who simply see ALL MMOs as useless are to reconsider what it means to "win" in a game. If you want to stick to the definition, "winning means completing the last level of the game" then fin
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You could define winning as hitting the level cap. You could define winning as killing the last raid boss. You could define winning as collecting each kind of mount. There's no credit roll, but you can certainly have goals. When I finished clearing Karazhan with my guild I had a choice personally of "say I've won and quit, or play the next 'level'". I went to the next level but later quit and picked up music, which you also can't win...
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You still have to balance challenge vs frustration. I don't know how WOW goes, but if level 1 players die with a stiff breeze, level 60 players kill anything in a 7 foot radius with mean aura alone, and you let the high-level users fight level 1 players as much as they like, no one is going to reach level 2 after a while. If the game is
"waiting to spawn...spawned oh wait no Killed by 1337master (level 999) waiting to spawn..." then I think most new users would quickly cancel their subscription. Maybe tha
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The starting zone for your race is always friendly to you and hostile to the other faction. You can't be attacked unless you initiate combat or flag yourself for PvP combat. The next zone is also friendly. Other zones are contested, so anyone can attack anyone. If you play on a PvE server then you can never be attacked unless you attack first or flag yourself.
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I sincerely hope that Blizzard doesn't add any aspects of WoW to Diablo III...
First things first (Score:1, Informative)
No more cutscenes. Especially long-winded cutscenes before a difficult combat. Even moreso cutscenes that can not be skipped by player before a difficult combat. Don't care if a game is difficult or frustrating but games are meant to be played, not watched. If I wanted cutscenes then I'd just rent the MGS4 machinima direct-to-DVD movie.
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A good story is one of the aspects of a good game. Good cut scenes can enhance the game's story and, done right, are an excellent enhancement. Blizzard has done especially well with cut scenes in the Diablo and Starcraft titles.
If you want point-click, hack-slash then play Doom.
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Disagree on your fundamental point: "no more cutscenes". Plot is a huge part of gaming for me and, to date, nobody has come up with a better system for conveying plot than non-interactive cutscenes. Some have tried (eg. Valve) but to varying degrees, they've all failed.
Agree, however, than non-skippable cutscenes, particularly before difficult sequences, need to be consigned to the dustbin of history.
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Personally, I love the HL2 "cutscenes". Oftimes you don't even really realize you're in a "cutscene" since you rarely lose direct control of your character and you never leave the viewpoint. Some of the director's commentary talked about the various tricks and techniques they used to get the players to look where they were supposed to look during the plot exposition, and by and large it works. It's a lot better than having control of a game unexpectedly taken away and suddenly having an out of body experien
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Actually, yes, those are fun. Though they're not "interactive" in the same sense that HL2's are.
I'd forgotten about those.
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I found HL2's storytelling to be profoundly inadequate. Valve's techniques just about worked for HL1, which was in many ways quite a technically primative game. However, when you have the level of realism in graphics (particularly facial features) that you see in HL2, as well as the more complicated plot, then having a mute protagonist who can run around the room bouncing while people are talking to him is an immersion killer for me. A Deus Ex style conversation interface would have worked far better. Even
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Exactly, the frustrating part is almost never the challenge itself, but the non-challenging parts that you have to repeat over and over again to reach the challenge. If one would either allow a everywhere-save or have non-braindead reset points most of the problem with challenge would automatically go away, since the challenge never was the problem to begin with. I don't mind cutscenes itself, sometimes they fit sometimes they don't, but non interruptible ones are really one of the worst things one can have
there is no balance (Score:2)
Frustration should be zero
Challenge should be non-zero
Frustration is a bad thing, you don't want bad things in games (except for the villains).
Re:there is no balance (Score:4, Insightful)
Frustration means not having what you want NOW. A challenge is trying to satisfy frustration. A sense of accomplishment is when frustration ends. This implies that without frustration, there is no challenge and no sense of accomplishment.
The fact is you really want frustration in a game. That's a good thing. Otherwise it is not a game but a pastime. What you don't want is having too much frustration.
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No. Any frustration means that the designers have failed. You shouldn't have things handed to you on a silver platter, but that's not frustration. Frustration is "OH MY FUCKING GOD THIS GUY IS SO GODDAMN CHEAP WHY CAN'T I BEAT HIM I'VE TRIED HIM 50 TIMES!!!!". The instant a player experiences frustration like that, the designers have failed.
Unless, of course, your fans are masochists, in which case give them what they want, but don't expect anyone else to ever like it.
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Every person has different skill in video games.
For example, I didn't find Mega Man Zero 1 and 2 to be that hard. Challenging, yes, but not that hard. Yet almost every review of the games will tell you that they're hard as nails, extremely difficult to the point of utter frustration.
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No. Not Mega Man Zero 1
Mega Man 1. Elec-Man, Ice-Man, Fire-Man, Guts-Man, Cuts-Man, Bomb-Man.
Damn. It took still just to get on the second screen on Elec-Man's stage.
Now, Mega Man 2 wasnt as rude as 1, but hard mode screwed around with "cant hit the too low to ground enemies".
Those were the days.
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Don't worry; I played those too. Same experience. Challenging, but not extremely hard.
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I think you're confusing frustration with desire/needs/patience.
Emotional categories Re:there is no balance (Score:1, Insightful)
I think you're all confusing emotions with containers. Emotions don't have fixed boundaries. As such from varying perspectives frustration is or isn't a part of a challenge. However I think it can be agreed that the definition of a challenge is something that is hard to accomplish and requires personal effort. It can also be accepted that things are frustrating [wiktionary.org] when they are too hard. Essentially they're both areas on an emotional continuum with overlap (with frustrating events being covering those which ar
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Frustration means not having what you want NOW.
Not exactly, frustration for me means that you have to repeat the same pointless shit that you have already done dozens of times again. It doesn't really have that much to do with challenge, since even the hardest fight can always stay interesting, even when you fail. Look at games like Fallout, XCom:UFO, DeusEx or OperationFlashpoint, all those games can be extremely challenging at points, but they give you plenty of freedom and the ability to save everywhere, so even failing stays fun, because each failed
Ninja Gaiden (Score:5, Funny)
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Fucking Ninja Gaiden.
Obligatory... (Score:2)
A Brief Index Of Difficulty [penny-arcade.com]
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If so, you brought up point #1 of what I was going to post here.
Back in the NES days, part of the magic was getting your but kicked by a game. You either retried the stage a hundred times or you didn't progress. I think it was partially because game designers were still thinking in the coinop mentality, but that is beside the point. The point I am making is that some NES games were super hard like Ghosts and Goblins, or MegaMan 1 Dr Wiley stage.
Today'
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It seems like NG's difficulty (I've just got to the end of chapter 2 on ninja dog) is cheap difficulty, the worst kind. The camera is so bad and close in you can't actually see who's hitting you most of the time, so you get trapped in a corner and lose half your health.
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Odd. I remember the game being named '7th Saga'. It was an RPG.
It could have inspired an entire generation of RPG designers with some of its innovative ideas if the game wasn't so horribly unbalanced that it was an exercise in frustration and patience.
For example, a dungeon's creatures could be easily dispatched, while the dungeon's boss would
Braid, challenge with low frustration... (Score:2)
Braid is proabably the best example of how to really do challenge while limiting frustration.
In particular, "you can't die" really changes platformers.
Assassins Creed (Score:5, Interesting)
Too easy? I beg to differ (you insensitive clod!) Sure, the assassinations and missions in the cities aren't that hard. But then... You first get a big battle (the 9th assassination) that is incredibly hard to win and cannot be avoided. After playing through it two dozen times I've finally discovered a tactic that worked.
Then you get another big battle, with about twelve templars, that is nearly impossible to win. And after that, instead of a chance to catch your breath or a checkpoint, you immediately get to fight a mega-uber-baddy! WTF were they thinking? Why is there suddenly such an incredible focus on combat, and why does the difficulty curve has to rise so sharply!?
Besides... The game cheats. Examples:
1. During the battle with the dozen templars, when you perform a countermove, mostly you get your weakest countermove - the one that doesn't do any damage. In normal battles, you get the weakest countermove far less often.
2. The computer plain refuses to let you target an enemy that is on the floor and therefore vulnerable. Very noble of it, let them all just stand up so they can kill me instead! And even if you point him in the right direction, Altair will think nothing of it to target someone meters away and exactly the other direction instead.
3. Maybe you can drop out of combat mode, switch weapons, saunter over to the guy lying on the floor, and stick your blade into him at leasure. But not while you are surrounded by enemies you cannot. You'll be long dead before that happens.
4. If you have a lock on one enemy and decide to attack, quite often it will attack _another_ enemy that is much further away.
5. Halfway through the dozen-templars battle, they all suddenly switch to their "hit your sword up, unblockable strike" move. That _really_ sucks.
6. Not having a checkpoint at the end of that battle is just criminal.
7. Even if you see it coming, there is precisely nothing you can do to defend yourself from attacks from behind. Those occur with regular frequency when you are standing in a circle. It is hard to _not_ stand in a circle when there is a dozen opponents.
I've won that battle with the templars three times, only to be killed by Robert de Sable each time on his first attack. Then I went to GCW and installed a cheat. That worked great.
And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved this game! I loved sneaking around, doing the missions (even if they repeated), just walking around town and enjoying the views (and finding flags and templars), the climbing, the chases, the assassinations. But I did not enjoy the string of battles at the end, and it would have been a better game without them.
Oh, and a quicker way to leave the game would have been nice (come on, it takes like two minutes!)... And non-skippable cutscenes? What is this, 1995?
Well, I'd better go and download some flame-retardant underwear from GCW so I can fight off the waves of 1337 gamers that are no doubt coming my way...
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Lamo.
Well maybe not, I recall that passage being tricky, but beat the templars first time. Yes, Robert is an asshole, but we got him too,
I'm with you on the unskippable scenes, they blow goats. That and the extremely repetetive nature of the body of the game.
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Eh? I loved the game, but it was easy as hell. Even the part you speak of. Just pary, instant kill. Oce I figured that out halfway through the game, fighting was almost pointless.
My experience was different: when you are fighting the templars, most of your parries only result in the templar being knocked down. As far as I can tell this doesn't do any damage to them. I counted how many of my parries actually resulted in a kill, and it was maybe one in 7. Once they start their "knock your blade away, guaranteed hit" routine, you are pretty much done for.
What system were you playing on? I was playing the PC version...
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But in the final battle it is really hard to run anywhere: the arena you are in is tiny, walled off on each side by transparent walls. And while running you can still be hit in the back, so you lose energy faster than that it regenerates.
The lone templars earlier in the game were fair game, quite easy to sneak up on and eliminate. But the big group at the end - well, I did beat them three times. But de Sable always got the better of me in the end.
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Yeah, the unskippable cutscenes are pure idiocy.
I liked the stealth action, and after finishing final boss I wanted to re-run through a few of the assasinations once more to try a different approach at them. I did the first one, suffered the long cutscenes once more with the aid of a few beers, and uninstalled the game.
Unskippable cutscenes = replay value of less than 0. This means I go to a used game store to sell the game instead of keeping it and replaying sometime afterward.
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Wow, I must be awesome for beating that whole battle sequence on my first try. I even switched to using the sword (my least favorite weapon) to make it more challenging.
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Hey, wait a second. Point 7. You can totally defend from attacks from behind. As long as your are in your ready stance you can do a counterattack from any direction.
Frustration = Luck (Score:2)
I never understood why games try to "randomize" experiences based on luck. "Hit anywhere from 3-300!". The key point of frustration is removing luck, and requiring skill. If your player doesn't have skill, then they will get frustrated eventually anyways (otherwise you would have to make a game that 2 year olds can beat). Everyone will be on their o
Interesting article, but things are more complex (Score:4, Insightful)
As with most subjective media, people rarely manage to assess games with an even hand. They will criticise one game for something, then praise another for doing the same. This is partly right, some things work in only certain types of games, a lot of the reason for this lack of objectivity is for other reasons though.
I would take a lot of stuff written about games like Bionic Commando with a pinch of salt, because everybody is so caught up in feeling all cool and retro and indie they rarely come up with a judgement unclouded by those feelings. There are a lot of reviewers that wouldn't dare criticise such a game for fear of harming their gaming credentials or angering some fanboys.
Yes the article does hint at the idea that big games, especially open world ones, are harder to tweak difficulty wise. But I think the author falls into the trap of having seen a cool small indie game, and going - why can't massive muli-milion dollar productions with 175 team members be just like this?
Firstly you generally have a tighter demographic for small indie games, despite their sometimes casual appearances, most of the people making them know exactly what their target players are going to like and dislike. GTA4 is played by multiple demographics, tweaking it to fit all of them is a much bigger task. Yup in Braid you can simply rewind and that mechanic works great, but it is much easier to come up with something like that when you have a much smaller, tighter, controlled environment.
Adjusting the difficulty on the fly is a lovely idea, but often hard to put into practice. It can sometimes feel like punishing the player for doing well. Max Payne used to adjust the damage enemies did to you according to how well you were doing. Playing through it, I quickly got to the point where the difficulty adjustment had clearly reached the maximum level, meaning getting caught out just once and taking a few hits killed me pretty much instantly. This gave me no chance to get the difficulty back down, because every encounter I either got through unscathed or died horribly.
A good article notheless, but it's not as simple as looking at small indie games and saying, we need things to be more like this! Different types of people want different levels of difficulty, and some types of games can be harder to adjust than others. Once AI has progressed a bit further, maybe we can do more complex things in FPS and RTS games than just adjusting how much damage enemies do to you.
You know what needs to die? (Score:3, Insightful)
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I finished Crysis this morning. Are you referring to the segment where you're defending Prophet? Except for the very first battle, I didn't find it to be difficult.
Escort and defense missions provide variety.
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>
Escort and defense missions provide an opportunity to show off just how bad the AI is
Fixed that for you. Damn you, Rurik Jenkins!!!!
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I didn't have any problems with the AI.
This story comes at an opportune moment... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm just on my twelth attempt this afternoon to get past the Kikimore Queen in The Witcher. OK, she's a 'level boss...', an end of chapter monster (and yes, I do know about collapsing the cieling on her - I just haven't yet timed it right).
But there is a critical difference between 'game design' and 'story telling'. In a game, it's OK to set a challenge that the player may repeatedly fail to get past. But in story telling, if you break immersion you have failed. And every time the player dies - or even has to explicitly save - you are revealing the artifice, breaking the immersion, failing.
In a good game, the player may try again, repeatedly. In a good story, he must never die. When designing an RPG, you have to make up your mind whether you're designing a game or telling a story, because the needs of the two objectives are very divergent.
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If you would like to see a unique way of dealing with this problem, check out Planescape: Torment [wikipedia.org]. If the main character dies, he simply wakes up someplace else. This condition is part of the plot, and having amnesia, he initially doesn't know why.
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I don't recall it being so hard to kill the Kikimore queen.
The one baddy that hurt me many times until I got strong enough to waste it was the red plant eater thing that jumps off the ground.
Overall I found the witcher to be really good balance-wise.
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That encounted is heavily scripted, and the script tends to... well, fail. I assume you've read somewhere what you're supposed to do (if not, SPOILERS: go to the tunnel, Aard the support beam behind you, pick up the rune from the body, run as fast as you can, killing as few kikimores as possible (stick to the right) and then at the right time turn around and Aard the beams twice or thrice). So, just keep going - the important bit is not to get bogged down fighting all the kikimores, as the queen will catch you.
I've played the game through five times on medium, so I know how to do it. I've tried it once before on hard before but got fed up trying to beat the Beast (the chapter one end of chapter monster). This time I decided I'd try on 'Hard' right through...
And since posting that I've got past the Kikkimore queen (twice, actually, since the first time the game crashed at the Adda cut-scene...) When you get the timing just right that Kikkimore Queen sequence seems easy, but getting it just right is the trick.
But t
the demographic has changed (Score:5, Interesting)
Personally I'm as hardcore a gamer as they come, and I'm just plain bored of spending more than 5 min on a single challenge. I don't mind if it's hard, but once I start spending 15 min at a time to get past different parts of the game because they are ramping up the difficulty, I'm so bored. I have a job, and I can easily afford to buy a new game at that point, but what I don't have is a ton of free time. The core audience got older and games have to adapt.
After the third time you fail a particular challenge, "skip" and "easy" options should be available. It is that simple. Then they can make it as hard as they want. I paid good money for the thing, why can't I play it the way I want? Sure, keep track of the stuff I skipped and add it to a menu so I can go back and finish it if I want to claim to have completed the game. Heck I don't mind if I have to go to youtube to see the final scenes if I don't feel like finishing every damn' thing.
Seriously. How is GTA too easy? The gameplay gets so repetitive before it is half way over, you wouldn't want to spend entire evenings grinding through it!?!
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Then you're not hardcore.
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You are not a "hardcore" gamer at all. When I was a teen, one of the game I loved was "The Last V8" for the C64 (do a search on youtube to see a video if you don't already know it). It takes less than 2 minutes to finish a game, but in order to be able to finish it, it took me more than 10 hours of retries. (It was a great game)
Oh, and I don't consider myself really "hardcore", only an "enthusiast" gamer.
As for the core audience getting older, well, I am obviously getting older, and I do have a job, but it
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Yes, and this is why I think adventure games are the best way to tell a story in a video game. But, there's still no reason why you should remove the story
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Press to reload blablabla" breaks immersion
While on the surface this sounds plausible, I think it is actually the other way around. In a game like DeusEx or Gothic2, or basically most games I would call immersive, I did a ton of load/save cycles and by ton I really mean a plenty, like at least two orders of magnitude more then say in a Zelda:TP. However those load/save didn't break immersion, instead they allowed it to be created in the first place. While in a Zelda:TP game every enemy is a pussy and requires no skill to be killed, in Gothic2 every
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Without any consequences when your hitpoints are reduced to 0, there's no point in paying attention to a character's health,
The characters health is important to succeed in combat, which is why one keeps it up, you don't keep it up to 'not die', because death is something that save/reload fixes. Save/reload however doesn't kill the monster, so the challenge remains the same even if death itself can be undone.
I don't think that a 'soft' death where you only lose items/money would change much, since even a very basic setback would give you enough reason to just save/reload instead of depending on the death mechanic or at least tha
One thing that bugs me (Score:3, Interesting)
Games where you have to string a dozen random actions together half of which are timed actions (oh and the controller has eight miles of slop) that need sub pixel accuracy just to get to the next part.
Folks when you design a game do me 3 things
1 put some logic into the puzzle (how does actions a-j fit together)
2 make more than one solution (example have a switch that reveals a ladder to bypass a climbing puzzle)
3 make it worth it to do the hard way BUT NOT REQUIRED
it's simple (Score:5, Insightful)
It's All About Control (Score:2)
You have hit the nail on the head, for the most part. A lot of frustrating experiences in games are not a balance issue. It's a control issue. If I fail to keep making the same jump, which should be very simple to make, all because the camera wants to swivel to some fucked up angle, yeah, that's certainly not a balance issue. It's a frustrating design issue that should have been weeded out during testing.
And that's something you really run into in a lot of games these days. While companies concentrate on ma
Balancing challenge and frustration (Score:5, Insightful)
The elements that make a game frustrating are often quite different from those that make a game challenging. There are a few very simple design tweaks that can be made to promote the latter at the expense of the former:
1) Make difficulty tweakable and make it a genuine skill range. Gamers these days have wildly diverging skill levels. What's challenging for one gamer is completely impossible for another. Ninja Gaiden is an illustration of how this can go wrong. For me, it was very, very hard. I know a few people however who took it back to the shop because they couldn't get past the first level. By all means, lock achievement points or other inessential goodies away on the harder difficulties. The original Baldur's Gate had the most broken difficulty system ever. Not only did reducing the difficulty level reduce the xp you earned, but if you had to load your game to retry a fight multiple times, the game would spawn even more enemies to make things harder.
2) Do everything you can to avoid making the player replay lengthy sequences. For the most part, this means allowing full quick-saves. I will, grudgingly, admit that there are a few types of game where quick-saves don't fit well. In these cases, regular check-points are the way to go. Even generally very easy games can become frustrating if a single silly mistake means you have to replay 10-15 minutes (or more) of stuff you've done already - perhaps several times. Rockstar games are good illustrations of how not to do this - too often, a mistake that occurs due to the somewhat craperific controls means you need to replay an entire 20 minute mission. Even Bully, which is their easiest outing by far, is prone to this. If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them. Note that I'm only suggesting sacking them because killing them is probably illegal.
3) Give the player at least something of a clue as to what he's supposed to do next. There's nothing worse in an fps than patrolling the same few sections of corridor for an hour because you can't see where you're supposed to go next. The AvP games were awful for this - the Alien campaigns were completely ruined by the amount of time you spent searching for some air-vent or grate you're supposed to go through. If I'm playing a 9 foot tall armour plated acid blooded killing machine, I want the option of tearing down locked doors - not hunting for a slightly differently textured great that I can mysteriously break, unlike the 99 near-identical others I passed.
4) If your game is based around "equal" struggle between two or more participants (eg. in RTSes or 1 on 1 brawlers), then make sure that AI opponents are bound by the same rules as players. One thing I absolutely hate are RTSes where I can completely cut off an AI player's resource flow and yet he can still pump out tanks faster than I can.
5) Cutscenes are great, but they should always be skippable. 'nuff said.
Autosave (Score:2)
If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them. Note that I'm only suggesting sacking them because killing them is probably illegal.
What about games that save every five steps, including after you die? Should the designers of roguelike games (or their real-time elaborations such as Diablo II) be sacked?
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A Grue? I don't give a damn about any stinkin' Grue. Unless it happens to be a MSLE Grue.
But only in 1.09, after that it was high HP FEs that you worried about.
Cut scenes required by law (Score:1)
5) Cutscenes are great, but they should always be skippable. 'nuff said.
Some cut scenes are required by statute, regulation, or industry practice, such as exclusive right notices ("Player likenesses are used by permission of the NBPA"), safety notices ("don't let go of the controller"), and ESRB rating notices ("online interactions are not rated"). Would you make an exception for those, especially if the alternative is a blank "NOW LOADING" screen?
Some cut scenes are required by the laws of physics. If it takes fifteen seconds to load data from a game disc, and a mission's o
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...
What? He's obviously talking about the sort of cutscenes you see in the middle of Final Fantasy. Also, there's no law of physics that requires a game to have cutscenes. Don't be ridiculous.
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Intro screens are usually not considered cutscenes, the "cut" part is understood to mean "cut away from the game".
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- An intro to the game = not cutscene
- An intro-warning about how much time you should spend outside = not cutscene
- A necessary pause in play while loading takes place (e.g. opening door in Res. Evil) = not cutscene.
When Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield take time out from killing zombies to rehash their pasts, or to explain in extremely earnest tones that they must press on and find the jade mannequin so they can escape the rhododendron maze and capt
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If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them.
A game with restricted or no saved games needs to be designed differently than one that does. The same applies to games that are meant to be played where you aren't supposed to reload saves more than once.
For example, Angband gives the player an infinite amount of time to become as powerful as possible (ignoring the Ironman setting.) Because of this, the player is generally expected to collect as most resistances and also have means to get a second wind (e.g. healing potions.) Giving free saving/reloadi
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That makes me think of nethack, which has a save mechanism I really like; it's tantamount to C-z'ing the program: it saves all state, and when you start the program again it loads your save file up for you. You only have one savegame slot, so the next time you save and load, you start where you progressed to during the last session. Similar to the first Diablo game.
I think that would work fine for Angband too; it's bad if something as trivial as a system shutdown means I lose my progress, but it's equally
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For 2, just cut voice acting.
In games like Paper Mario and Legend of Zelda, all the scenes were based on dialogue; only in some small cases (ie a ship needs to sail for the next guy to talk) would it get slowed down at all. Otherwise you just cut right through smoothly. Saves are also frequent in zelda games. Not so much paper mario but every "level" had at least 2-3 blocks.
For 3 I can't remember what game I was playing but there was a fortune teller who'd tell you where to go next. Some games like Tales of
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I can't remember what game I was playing but there was a fortune teller who'd tell you where to go next.
Probably Zelda: Twilight Princess
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Never played it. Can't find the gamecube version anywhere. :(((
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Nope, if you don't like having a quick-save option, the answer is... don't use it.
It's only a badly designed game that relies on trial and error so much that you *have* to use the quick-save function for every battle. However, the option should always be there. Players who don't like it can just not use it. You mention yourself that you played WC3 without allowing yourself to save on any mission. Good for you, I'm glad you found a way to enjoy the game. But don't inflict your own tastes on others, in a fash
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I do agree, but it would still be nice if I could disable the possibility of quick saving in a configuration menu. It's easier to resist once the temptation to cheat, than to resist it every 2 minutes. Even if I don't save, I still think about it sometimes and I find it distracting.
It's particularly true for games where you automatically respawn. I certainly want a way to disable that feature.
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The problem, I mean its effect, is more psychological than functional. Even if I change the binding, I KNOW the possibility to save before something dangerous is still there. That's what is distracting and somewhat break immersion.
Anyway, you seem to be against an option in a menu. Why? I must admit I never understood why people were against those little options that cost basically nothing. For example, in a lot of games there is an option to change the look of your character. Personally, I don't care at al
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I think you failed to understand what I mean with an option in a menu. I view those options as the rules of a game. I'd like to select options I like, and then play the whole game with those options. Basically, I want those option (including difficulty level) to be changeable only at the start of the game, not during the game. That's the difference.
To me, the ability to change those rules whenever I want is exactly like if I suddenly said that deuces are wild in the middle of a poker game.
Of course, I don't
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Yes, allowing partial success is a good move. You put some optional goodies for those who can do a sequence perfectly, but to the average gamer, you say "good enough, you can go to the next section".
With regard to actual difficulty, as opposed to the topics I comment on... well... having to retry a difficult sequence 20 times because it is difficult doesn't annoy me too much. The feeling of accomplishment when I beat it is worth the reward. What annoys and frustrates me is having to replay the previous 15 m
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Auto-saving in Oblivion is not arbitrary, it can be set to happen when you: fast travel, sleep, or open a door.
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The balance depends on the market (Score:1)
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What made System Shock 2 and Thief fun for me was the feeling of fear and the sense that there was no help coming from anything in game. It wasn't about the challenge, it was about the atmosphere created by being set in a place where you're the only creature on your side. You start to feel like there are enemies around every corner, and the way that SS2 was designed there was a random chance of an enemy spawning on the level you were playing. This reinforced that sense that you're never safe. Then there wer
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What was the average age of an SMB player? I'd guess it's much younger than an average gamer these days. As a kid I was prepared to slog away at a level 10 times to get through it, these days I've got better things to do.
Gods has a good solution (Score:2)
The Bitmap Brother's game Gods had a good solution to this. If the player got stuck on a level, the game would eventually start to give them hints and free items, and if that didn't help the actual key they needed to progress. That way you couldn't get stuck as such, but it was clear that you could get a lot more points and power-ups if you managed to figure it out.
Prince of Persia series (Score:1, Insightful)
What's a good game all about anyways? (Score:3, Interesting)
When I think of games, for me, I think either adventure, first person shooter or arcade, because to me, that's what I like most on computer games.
What I want in an arcade game is: fast, fun, you should be able to start easy to play, but must become skilled in order to reach higher levels, and must have a strong level of unpredictability in the game. Avoid games designed in such a way where one can learn patterns in order to beat the game. (original PacMan comes to mind..)
What I want when I play an adventure game is: a compelling story, a diverse world to play in, the complexity comes with experience of play, the rewards are new skills and most of all, the ability for the game to expand into new modules, allowing you to bring your characters into them. if You can play a game where you don't need to be forced into any scenarios, but can explore the "environment" and play based on the encounters, even more fun! :)
For a first shooter game: wicked weapons, all kinds of abilities to display and use, incredibly hard odds to beat, amazing graphics and sounds, the visual and auditory offers clues to the environment, out of the box effects and storylines.
It would be fun to have your character evolve and take him to future levels, but most of the time, the whole point of a first shooter game is to start with modest abilities and weapons and acquire more as you go.
But, if a Doom like game would create expansion packs which would actually build on the experience and game play you have, and your character starts with whatever he's finished with from a previous module, thus, getting into even harder game play, that would be wicked too!
So many frustrations (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes the game engine is a little bit broken - it used to annoy me no end in Perfect Dark that sometimes (just sometimes) a weapon would be at your feet and you simply could not pick it up. Maybe the boss monster has an unusual attack pattern and is only vulnerable to having acorns thrown at his toes, while, mysteriousl
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Good challenge is good (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is not so much balancing the difficulty itself but removing sources of frustration such as trial and error gameplay, tedious gameplay parts, control issues, etc. If your game is good enough to keep the player engaged you can have a lot of difficulty, if the game's a fairly monotonous slugfest even moderate difficulty can become frustrating. Especially the death setback is important: What do you have to redo? A long but easy autoscroller before you get to the hard part? Maybe you lose experience that must be regained by repeatedly killing some weak monsters? Maybe it's a difficult platforming section with swarming enemies that knock you off the platforms? A long and insanely hard autoscroller before you reach the even harder boss (welcome to the machine)? What's important is that the parts you redo are not boring, that you don't have to redo them too often, that you have a reasonable chance of progressing through an area without wasting several tries on it just to see where all the invisible spikes come out of the walls and that you can see what went wrong (it doesn't help when you keep dying and don't understand why).
The actual difficulty is less important than the game around it. Of course it can be too easy or too hard but often it's just too sucky instead.
X-Com (Score:2)
Play Xcom but only save the game before you quit. Completely changes the game and for the better imho.
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oh gods... Awesome game, but IMO it kind of crosses the challenge/frustration threshold when you're in the level towards the end where you're racing the rat to the bombs...
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