04.14.08
Helpful Hand-Holding
If there’s one game design lesson I can take away from The Nameless Mod, it’s this: It’s impossible to overestimate how much help the player needs.
Among the fan community of games in the Looking Glass tradition (System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, etc.), there’s a widely spread belief that games should trust their player to be intelligent and independent. Bioshock’s quest arrow and highlighting of important objects is often considered condescending and unintelligent - redeemed only by the fact that you can toggle it off in the game menu.
But the people who complain about that obviously hasn’t observed a playtest. If you make a game and let somebody else play it, it becomes painfully apparent that your player is always more stupid than you expect. If that sounds really bitter, it’s because I desperately wanted to create an intelligent game that trusts its player to be resourceful, yet ever since we started playtesting it, all I’ve been doing is to insert more hints all over the place.
The funny thing is, when I picked up Russian turn-based cold war spy RPG Hammer & Sickle last month, I was immensely frustrated by how it refuses to tell you what to do. It just lets you loose in this hostile world and expects you to figure out how to solve your mission on your own. It’s fantastically difficult - I got stuck because I had to pick up a radio one of my enemies dropped in the forest, and I hadn’t even seen it. Here I am, grumbling about my stupid testers, and when I find a game that treats me like I’m treating my own players, I get completely and utterly stuck.
So the sad truth is, it doesn’t really seem like you can hold the player’s hand too much. It was a good call to make the quest arrow and the object highlights in Bioshock optional to please the more advanced players, but if you want to make a game most people can enjoy, you have to make sure they always know what to do. The enormous Deus Ex mod Redsun 2020 provides a perfect example of this. The whole premise of the game is that you’ve been abducted to Tokyo and must escape your captors and make your way home. There’s a game that really trusts its players, throwing you into a completely strange futuristic environment and expecting you to work it out for yourself. And what is the number one point of criticism when it comes to Redsun? Why did I never manage to complete the mod? I have no idea what to do next.
Gelo said,
April 14, 2008 at 15:24
My tireless advocacy of the Dunce Gamers League has paid off :-D. Obviously I agree with you; you can give players the option to make the game less transparent, but it has to be an option otherwise you will turn off a large portion of your audience.
Same goes with purposefully sadistic game design (”heheh, this’ll make them suffer!”) but that’s a different post :-P.
Casper said,
April 14, 2008 at 15:51
I agree with you Jonas. Because there is nothing more frustrating than when you play a game and get stuck, suddenly you aren’t playing the game, instead you get frustrated, and irritated on the game, instead of enjoying the game, and that can’t hardly be the point with making games(At least for 99% games, I think I can come up with a few gamedevelopers who must hate the player).
Also it’s a good thing that the help are optional, because if you get to much help, well then I could just have put a movie on instead. There’s a really fine line between helping the player way to much, and not helping the player.
I like the way they do it in Gears of war, with the Point-of-interest button, thou they use it very few times. Actually EA implemented that thing really good in Army of Two, where you push a button, and you get the GPS, a really smart GPS which can point out objects/doors you need to interact with.
Jonas said,
April 14, 2008 at 16:10
Actually I personally think the GPS in Army of Two is pushing it a bit. That’s basically an in-game walkthrough. Since AoT is a mostly linear action game where the challenge is in working together and utilizing group tactics to defeat the enemies, it’s not that big a problem that the game pretty much leads you by the nose through its levels, but in a game like Bioshock, a feature like that would ruin the nonlinear level design.
Of course puzzles are a different matter entirely. If you get too specific in the quest log in a game that relies on puzzles as a core type of challenge, what’s the point of even including puzzles at all? I think that’s the problem. I was trying to implement certain investigation-based missions in TNM, where the player had to follow clues and question witnesses in order to progress, but most players just don’t want that sort of challenge in a game like Deus Ex, even though in my mind the game has a lot in common with the typically exporation/investigation-based adventure genre.
And I bet if I had actually been the one to design these challenges, I wouldn’t appreciate them either. By now, they are really quite hand-holding.
Casper said,
April 14, 2008 at 16:55
Maybe I should correct myself a bit about Army of Two, the thing I like about the GPS is it’s ability to point out objects, the marking on the floor wit arrows about which direction to go is really pushing it to far imo.
Jonas said,
April 14, 2008 at 22:05
Ah yes I agree. And of course Army of Two really depends on those co-op moves scattered throughout the maps - without the GPS to tell you where you can lift each other up to another ledge or work together to push a heavy object, you’d spend an incredible amount of time just running around looking for the way forward.
Felix said,
April 15, 2008 at 08:51
I frequent a forum for a puzzle game called DROD, and one of the interesting things that I discovered there was how easy it was for players to figure out solutions to puzzles that the author had never thought of, sometimes harder but often easier. What I’ve learnt from this is that no matter how hard you try, you can’t rely on other people to think like you do, and thus you should always try to accommodate for as many different possibilities as possible
Jonas said,
April 15, 2008 at 13:04
Yeah absolutely, that’s why I generally don’t like puzzles (I prefer problems, because they usually have more solutions). In this case, however, the problem isn’t solving puzzles but simply figuring out how to proceed.
The main investigation mission we have occurs the first section of the game for one storyline and much later in the game for the other, and involves tracking down the hideout of a terrorist cell. You don’t actually have to follow the leads and talk to the people who can help you find them - if you can guess the way or if you know it from a previous playthrough, you can actually skip the whole investigation and just go straight to their hideout.
But I found I had to make the trail of breadcrumbs leading to their hideout really easy to follow (by, for example, telling you explicitly in your quest log who to talk to next
). As soon as the player isn’t told exactly how to find the next clue, the player is very likely to just give up. It’s easy to condemn the player for being stupid in such situations, but the fact is that not a lot of people enjoy not knowing what to do, and actual independent investigation is really difficult.
I was quite disappointed every time I had to scale down an investigation mission, but I feel that TNM is generally better for it. There are still a few very minor details you need to figure out on your own though, because I just couldn’t get myself to simplify the game completely.
Gelo said,
April 15, 2008 at 13:58
I think the key problem is training. If you want your players to play a game a certain way, you need to train the to think that way. With DX/TNM I think the main issue (at least for me) is that it isn’t a puzzle game and then to suddenly require the player to play the game in a different way half-way through is jarring. If it had been a constant theme throughout the game (starting with a few basic elements and then leading to more complex situations as the game progressed) I don’t think it would have been as difficult.
Jonas said,
April 15, 2008 at 14:48
Yeah but the problem is that an investigation mission is completely in line with how I play Deus Ex: I play it as an action-adventure game, meaning I spend a lot of time wandering around the big levels, exploring every corner, looking for hidden goodies and exploration skillpoint bonuses. To get a mission requiring me to go look for a particular hidden base is really perfectly in line with my play style.
I guess the problem occurs because exploration and character interaction is the only way to solve those missions, so players who prefer to just follow the directions in their Goal menu will be confused. There is really no way to just break out the big guns and blast your way towards the objective when the only challenge is to find the objective in the first place. Well, except of course if you shoot your contacts instead of talking to them, in which case you’ll pick the clues off their corpse instead, but it would still require some creative thinking just to find them if we didn’t actually write who they are in your quest log.
Gelo said,
April 15, 2008 at 15:07
In that case I would say that you trained yourself to play that style of gameplay. For people who didn’t go looking under every nook and cranny (which like you said is optional), it’s a big change in the gameplay.
But I think in the case of TNM, even outside the gameplay training issue the investigation scenario was a bit tough. There’s nothing like it for the rest of the game and up to (and after) that point you are not required to interact with NPCs’ in any similar manner (that’s the training issue). It takes place in the largest single continuous space of the entire game, and you needed to run around to exactly the right people to get the exact right clues and then figure out the exact right geographic spaces and then put them together into a solution which one requires you to do something which isn’t totally logical (I don’t want to spoil anything, but the resolution, while slightly humorous, is nonsensical in that no normal person would react in the way that the to-be-left-unnamed NPC does).
Jonas said,
April 15, 2008 at 15:17
Yeah I’ll be the first to admit that mission still needs some work. I’m thinking about opening the resolution up to one or two easier but more resource-demanding solutions (so you can bypass the “optimal” solution if you’re willing to expend several items to do so). I’m also thinking about ways to make the solution (crap, it really is a puzzle, isn’t it? I suck so hard
) a bit easier to come by, for which I have some ideas.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this entire mission is actually a remnant from the first TNM design (I stopped revising the design document after version 4) which called for the whole mod to be very adventure-like and open-ended and rely a lot on character interaction and investigation. But you are absolutely right that this gameplay only works if you either know exactly who to talk to (eg. by having each NPC tell you exactly who to talk to next, which is how we do it now) or if you can get the info you need from several different characters (perhaps with some kind of information bonus if you pick the most logical NPC to talk to, eg. the guy who would logically know the most about what you’re investigating). Of course if you kill all the people who were supposed to lead you in the right direction, it’s your own fault for making things hard for yourself - you can expect to only get the bare minimum of information then, which means you probably shouldn’t kill everybody until your second playthrough
Gelo said,
April 15, 2008 at 15:26
This is why it’s good to have a dunce gamer around sometimes :-). I think your idea to open up other solutions is a good thing, and fitting with the DX gameplay style too.
Jonas said,
April 15, 2008 at 16:05
Exactly. Puzzles suck.
But I think the rest of this discussion belongs in more private, spoiler-friendly quarters. To MSN I say!