But I think the rest of this discussion belongs in more private, spoiler-friendly quarters. To MSN I say!

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

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).

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.

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.