RANT - things that really put me off in games now...

[W65]

The chocolate ice cream example feels to me like a way for a developer to disguise a dice roll. If you have 3 flavors and no prior information as to which flavor is the correct one, then the ice cream choice is effectively a way to make the player to feel responsible for failing a random number pick.

I mean, yeah, it's rarely that simple. In the ice cream choice it isn't always clear to the player that they haven't been provided any clues--and some players will FIND clues even if they haven't actually been given. That would be something like, "well her hair is blonde so maybe I'm supposed to pick vanilla." It sounds dumb to type it, but you can't really blame the player for expecting to have some guidance.

And, no, it's not exactly like a random number pick. I remember a game that offered several storylines. Now, runs were, like, ten-twelve hour commitments. This was before rogue-likes, and you were literally picking which storyline you wanted to follow for the playthrough. The problem, though, was that they were offered to you at random. There was a chance that a certain character just wouldn't be able to start a certain storyline, and you wouldn't know that until you'd put an hour or so into getting the character off the ground. Worse, you'd be offered the quests to start the storylines more or less at random during normal gameplay. Not ready to start that storyline yet? Too bad!

It was a very fun game, except for that. Players don't like losing out on things at random, so I can understand why a developer would even sorta subconsciously try to avoid situations like that. I would even say that sometimes it's a valid choice to force the player to trust to luck, depending on the type of game and the specific situation. After all, some things really do just come down to luck. At the same time, it's probably almost always possible to rework a scene like that to at least nudge the player in the right direction..

 

[GuyFreely]

LOL I completely agree with you. While that model could be fun if done right. like Super powered, but most just feel like grinding and hope to god dev finish the so all that effort worth it. That why i choose a strait story telling with branch that lead to multiple ending... well that the plan anyway.

I've touched on this topic many times, but I'll do it again. I don't understand the point of grindy or repetitive elements in games. It always seems like a way to pad out play time to me. But it's padding out play time with things that aren't any fun. The best argument that I think you can make is that you have to "earn" the content. Okay, but making me do things I don't want to do to do something I do want to do isn't my idea of a fun time. That sounds like a job and I don't play games that feel like a job. You can have the grind or sim elements, but do your best to make that part fun too. I've given plenty of examples of how to do this before, I'm not going to go into them again. I think the test you can do is take out the reward. So let's say there is a game where you have to go through the motions to do a job every day to earn enough money to take some hot chick on a date and then you get to fuck her. Take out the date and the fucking, is it still an enjoyable experience?

You can draw inspiration from outside sources. Think about an amusement park. In olden days (and at cheapo parks still), you wait in a boring line outside in the hot sun for 45min with nothing to do to finally get on a 3min ride that was hopefully worth the wait. Now take a ride at a park where they actually give half a shit about customer experience. Maybe you put cover to shade people from the sun, maybe you add some fans to cool people off. You can put TVs around the line giving people something to watch. You might go crazy and have people wait inside a building with air conditioning and interesting decorations to look at. If you go really crazy, you take people in groups and have them walk through small encounters with a tour guide that tells a story or gives them something interesting to do while waiting. The goal is to make waiting for the ride more enjoyable. Sure the ride is still the fun part, but at least they tried to create a better experience.

 

[GuyFreely]

The chocolate ice cream example feels to me like a way for a developer to disguise a dice roll. If you have 3 flavors and no prior information as to which flavor is the correct one, then the ice cream choice is effectively a way to make the player to feel responsible for failing a random number pick.

I mean, yeah, it's rarely that simple. In the ice cream choice it isn't always clear to the player that they haven't been provided any clues--and some players will FIND clues even if they haven't actually been given. That would be something like, "well her hair is blonde so maybe I'm supposed to pick vanilla." It sounds dumb to type it, but you can't really blame the player for expecting to have some guidance.

And, no, it's not exactly like a random number pick. I remember a game that offered several storylines. Now, runs were, like, ten-twelve hour commitments. This was before rogue-likes, and you were literally picking which storyline you wanted to follow for the playthrough. The problem, though, was that they were offered to you at random. There was a chance that a certain character just wouldn't be able to start a certain storyline, and you wouldn't know that until you'd put an hour or so into getting the character off the ground. Worse, you'd be offered the quests to start the storylines more or less at random during normal gameplay. Not ready to start that storyline yet? Too bad!

It was a very fun game, except for that. Players don't like losing out on things at random, so I can understand why a developer would even sorta subconsciously try to avoid situations like that. I would even say that sometimes it's a valid choice to force the player to trust to luck, depending on the type of game and the specific situation. After all, some things really do just come down to luck. At the same time, it's probably almost always possible to rework a scene like that to at least nudge the player in the right direction..

The game you're describing sounds like a nightmare to me. Randomness is a poor substitute for thoughtfulness. As with many other game design elements, it has a time and place and should be used effectively.

I'll use an RPG setting for an example. You have 1 HP left and swing your sword at the goblin. You can do 1-9 damage and the goblin is on 8 HP. Before you swing, you know there's a good chance you're going to die, but maybe just maybe you can win the day. This creates tension, not knowing what will happen, but knowing there's a possibility for success. In a situation like this, the law of averages will lessen impact of individual rolls. The majority of the time success won't come down to one roll. Even when it does it is often after many many other rolls and decisions that lead to that point. Maybe you should have healed in the last room, maybe you should have bought better gear before you got here, etc.

Now take a room with three doors. Two doors are death and one door is riches. You have no idea which door is correct. You're going to lose 66% of the time. Was there something you could have done? Could you have bought a better sword or earned more xp or spent your skill points better? Nope. Your fate rests on a random guess that has a good chance of failure. The chances of success here are slightly better than the sword roll I mentioned above, but the context of the randomness makes this situation feel like bullshit.

 

[W65]

The game you're describing sounds like a nightmare to me. Randomness is a poor substitute for thoughtfulness. As with many other game design elements, it has a time and place and should be used effectively.

I think the idea behind that game is that you would just sorta play it a few times and organically wind up taking various paths through the game. If you approach it from the angle of someone who knows nothing about the game, it sorta works IF the player is willing to go along with whatever the game wants to do.

After a few playthroughs, or as the kind of player that reads the wiki ahead of time, it falls apart pretty quickly as you try to get yourself down one of the paths you haven't done yet.

It's the kind of gap between "developer intentions" and "how players think and work" that influenced character generation in D&D. The original idea was that you would build stories with whatever kind of character you ended up with, and that whatever happened would be part of the experience even if your character was literally too weak to carry enough stuff to live through a certain adventure. You rolled the dice and your character sorta evolved from there, and the fun would be in seeing what happened. Losing AND winning were supposed to be fun, since it was really supposed to be the journey that mattered.

(I remember a series of kinda popular and usually well-designed gamebooks, in which one of the later books had this one boss. Certain character builds literally could not win against this boss due to the way character development and battles worked in these gamebooks. At least with a book you can always be your own DM and cheat.)

It ended up that most players want more control over what kind of experience they end up having and don't like feeling like they haven't won. Storytelling is still important, but gamers are still gamers. This sorta culminated in CRPG D&Ds (and company) where it's either critical (due to bad/limited design and no real ability to adapt the content on the fly) or optimal (due to players wanting to be able to access content and being generally twinky) to allocate stats in very specific ways. If the objectively best weapon in the game is an artifact flail, then once that becomes public knowledge you're going to have an unusual glut of flail specialists AND plenty of people complaining that there's "no point" in having weapons other than flails or characters that use weapons other than flails. It's just how a certain kind of gamer's mind works, although the accessibility of GameFAQs and wikis has really changed the landscape of video gaming.

Anyhow, I'm rambling now.

 

[GuyFreely]

I think the idea behind that game is that you would just sorta play it a few times and organically wind up taking various paths through the game. If you approach it from the angle of someone who knows nothing about the game, it sorta works IF the player is willing to go along with whatever the game wants to do.

After a few playthroughs, or as the kind of player that reads the wiki ahead of time, it falls apart pretty quickly as you try to get yourself down one of the paths you haven't done yet.

It's the kind of gap between "developer intentions" and "how players think and work" that influenced character generation in D&D. The original idea was that you would build stories with whatever kind of character you ended up with, and that whatever happened would be part of the experience even if your character was literally too weak to carry enough stuff to live through a certain adventure. You rolled the dice and your character sorta evolved from there, and the fun would be in seeing what happened. Losing AND winning were supposed to be fun, since it was really supposed to be the journey that mattered.

(I remember a series of kinda popular and usually well-designed gamebooks, in which one of the later books had this one boss. Certain character builds literally could not win against this boss due to the way character development and battles worked in these gamebooks. At least with a book you can always be your own DM and cheat.)

It ended up that most players want more control over what kind of experience they end up having and don't like feeling like they haven't won. Storytelling is still important, but gamers are still gamers. This sorta culminated in CRPG D&Ds (and company) where it's either critical (due to bad/limited design and no real ability to adapt the content on the fly) or optimal (due to players wanting to be able to access content and being generally twinky) to allocate stats in very specific ways. If the objectively best weapon in the game is an artifact flail, then once that becomes public knowledge you're going to have an unusual glut of flail specialists AND plenty of people complaining that there's "no point" in having weapons other than flails or characters that use weapons other than flails. It's just how a certain kind of gamer's mind works, although the accessibility of GameFAQs and wikis has really changed the landscape of video gaming.

Anyhow, I'm rambling now.

Yeah, it's certainly a personal taste to whether you enjoy being "along for the ride" even if that ride is a car crash. It's hard to make a game with many variables all combining in random ways that produces viable results every time. So the player has to accept that the end result might be a total mess. To the D&D analogy, the stop-gap there is the DM. The DM's job is to reign in all the nonsense and provide a fun experience. It's sort of like one of those cooking shows were they give the chefs random ingredients. Except the DM has ultimate power, he/she can rearrange the world in whatever way makes it more fun. If an adventure path calls for a challenge that the group absolutely can't handle, the DM can fudge it. In the world of computers, you lose the ability to adapt on the fly. There are limitations to what adjustments can be made so you just have to start fresh some times. I've played a few rogue-lite/rogue-like games and they can be entertaining, but I don't have a particular affinity for them. Having a narrative version of a rogue-like just doesn't sound like something I'm up for.

 

[toolkitxx]

Since i started this one and 'choice' seems to be confusing: Any choice is fine by me. But having the single choice to 'open the door' or 'pick a dress' especially in a virtual novel to create artificial interactivity is simply bad design. Those are not choices but just unnecessary buttons that break the flow. It's like stopping a book in the middle and forcing you to pick up some other volume to continue. From where i sit it's not even intended design by most but the result of lazy copying what others did.

Choices - even badly chosen ones - like vanilla or chocolate ice and the results are actually proper examples of real choices. If the dev decides to handle the result in a surprising way or if the choice has no overall major impact on the storyline - that's also fine if intended design to keep the player in the dark about the weighting of their choices.

I was simply referring to a real real basic thing in game development. I play very different kind of games and dont mind clicking and pressing buttons a lot if the game requires it for the purpose of the actual game. A shooter requires more action than a strategy game. A turn based strategy game will not require the same pace as a non-turned base and so on. Buttons to click in a novel or other games require a real purpose if the same functionality cant be provided by other means. Especially in Renpy games there is simply no need to click buttons to forward the story - all that is intentionally build into Renpy. User interface is the keyword. Unless the dev makes every 'forward' a button to create his own UI those buttons i refer to are just a menace.

 

[RogueKnightUK]

It's a playstyle thing sometimes. If as a player someone tends to skip through to choices (at whatever speed), then those single-choice boxes still act as markers for scene changes or coming events. Such a player will likely deliberately create those sorts of markers and 'stop skipping' areas when developing a game.

Doesn't mean you have to like it, of course. There's a lot of games I avoid because they are built for a playstyle I don't enjoy (especially FPS games). But it doesn't necessarily mean the developer is 'wrong' either. Just the wrong developer for you, perhaps?

 

[toolkitxx]

It's a playstyle thing sometimes. If as a player someone tends to skip through to choices (at whatever speed), then those single-choice boxes still act as markers for scene changes or coming events. Such a player will likely deliberately create those sorts of markers and 'stop skipping' areas when developing a game.

Doesn't mean you have to like it, of course. There's a lot of games I avoid because they are built for a playstyle I don't enjoy (especially FPS games). But it doesn't necessarily mean the developer is 'wrong' either. Just the wrong developer for you, perhaps?

If you have to force the player's attention with such means your game already failed

 

[desmosome]

I also hate the single choice options, but they are probably doing that stuff to feign immersion into the character. "Open door" or "drink coffee" makes it seem like the player is doing those things instead of watching some guy doing it.

 

[toolkitxx]

I also hate the single choice options, but they are probably doing that stuff to feign immersion into the character. "Open door" or "drink coffee" makes it seem like the player is doing those things instead of watching some guy doing it.

This is where the circle closes . In a novel this is descriptive text as most also use the 'narrator' perspective. Immersion in a novel comes from the readers/players brain and imagination. Its probably also the main reason why it pisses me off so much. I get moved around in a story without getting choices at all and all the sudden those buttons pop-up and act like 'Hey Dude - you can actually do something now!' Until then i was forced to go along with whatever the dev had developed in the story without making any choices at all. Like you wake up and the only choice you get is to 'take shower'. For f.... sake just write 'after a good nights sleep you feel kind of sleezy and immediatley take a tour to your local waterfall...' or along those lines. That would immerse me actually

 

[RogueKnightUK]

Yeah, a shower that isn't immersive won't get you very clean...

 

[GuyFreely]

I'm from the all killer, no filler school of thought when it comes to story telling and game design. Everything should serve a purpose. The problem is that anything CAN serve a purpose. You can't make hard and fast rules of "never do this" because there might be a situation where it makes sense to do that. I think many devs know exactly what they are doing when they add grindy or sim elements that barely serve a function. It's a way to put road blocks or speed bumps in the way of the player to make them spend more time. They know they have five minutes of actual content (including dialogue, story, and sexy times) that they want to stretch to one hour of gameplay by making you jump through hoops.

Examples:
Specific Day Events. In a game where you play one day at a time, there are events that only happen on certain days and they are mutually exclusive. So if you want to do two events that only occur on Saturday, then you have to play the entire week in between these events to see both.

Stat Check Events. In a game where you bump stats (money counts) and you have to meet a certain threshold to progress. This is one of those situations where this can be done in a way that doesn't suck, but usually isn't. If I have to repeat the same activity many times with no variation for minor bumps until I hit the magic number, you are just wasting time. A good test is whether cheating makes you miss anything. If I go to the gym once and see whatever the "go to gym" scene is and then decide to give myself max Strength/Physique/Whatever will I miss anything? Does something special happen the third time I go or the seventh time I go? If I literally miss nothing by cheating to max my stat, then it was just a way to slow me down. If every time I go to the gym it's actually different, then fine, I don't mind it.

Energy Systems. This comes in different forms, it can be you can only do X things in a day or a literal energy meter that is depleted by doing things or both. I'm not talking about RPG things like mana or stamina used to do special moves. I'm talking about a regular modern setting for normal activities. This can also be tied to eating and/or drinking to get energy back which can be tied into spending money on these items. This means you have to do more of the money earning activities just to afford supplies to give you energy to do other activities. Sometimes there are activities that refill energy, but then you are using up one of your slots for that day just doing that. The basic goal is to make sure you don't get too much done in one day to stretch out the play time artificially.

 

[GroPin]

When the first skin showed in the game is the MC looking at his own dick in THAT BATHROOM!

 

[RogueKnightUK]

When the first skin showed in the game is the MC looking at his own dick in THAT BATHROOM!

Oh, but that's just an 'inventory check'. First they tell you who you are and what your scenario is, then they show you what you have to 'work' with...

 

[GuyFreely]

The MC's dong is a character.

 

[GroPin]

Oh, but that's just an 'inventory check'. First they tell you who you are and what your scenario is, then they show you what you have to 'work' with...

LMAO, ok i kinda like your positive view of this atrocity. XD

 

[toolkitxx]

Oh, but that's just an 'inventory check'. First they tell you who you are and what your scenario is, then they show you what you have to 'work' with...

Your literary genius is really wasted in simple forum postings . You should offer your services as author to some devs

 

[RogueKnightUK]

Hahaha thanks. I just might do that at some point.

I actually do a lot of writing in my career, and pretty much all kinds of writing. Writing forum posts is a lot less pressure with a lot more freedom.

 

[RogueKnightUK]

I'm from the all killer, no filler school of thought when it comes to story telling and game design. Everything should serve a purpose. The problem is that anything CAN serve a purpose. You can't make hard and fast rules of "never do this" because there might be a situation where it makes sense to do that. I think many devs know exactly what they are doing when they add grindy or sim elements that barely serve a function. It's a way to put road blocks or speed bumps in the way of the player to make them spend more time. They know they have five minutes of actual content (including dialogue, story, and sexy times) that they want to stretch to one hour of gameplay by making you jump through hoops.

Examples:
Specific Day Events. In a game where you play one day at a time, there are events that only happen on certain days and they are mutually exclusive. So if you want to do two events that only occur on Saturday, then you have to play the entire week in between these events to see both.

Stat Check Events. In a game where you bump stats (money counts) and you have to meet a certain threshold to progress. This is one of those situations where this can be done in a way that doesn't suck, but usually isn't. If I have to repeat the same activity many times with no variation for minor bumps until I hit the magic number, you are just wasting time. A good test is whether cheating makes you miss anything. If I go to the gym once and see whatever the "go to gym" scene is and then decide to give myself max Strength/Physique/Whatever will I miss anything? Does something special happen the third time I go or the seventh time I go? If I literally miss nothing by cheating to max my stat, then it was just a way to slow me down. If every time I go to the gym it's actually different, then fine, I don't mind it.

Energy Systems. This comes in different forms, it can be you can only do X things in a day or a literal energy meter that is depleted by doing things or both. I'm not talking about RPG things like mana or stamina used to do special moves. I'm talking about a regular modern setting for normal activities. This can also be tied to eating and/or drinking to get energy back which can be tied into spending money on these items. This means you have to do more of the money earning activities just to afford supplies to give you energy to do other activities. Sometimes there are activities that refill energy, but then you are using up one of your slots for that day just doing that. The basic goal is to make sure you don't get too much done in one day to stretch out the play time artificially.

I think sometimes it is also a similar thing but based on pragmatism and value.

Example:
A developer could create about 5 days of essentially similar events to represent a progression properly, with unique attributes of slowly changing costume detail and dialogue, or, pragmatically, could loop one event 5 times, and spend more time on adding something more interesting that is more appealing to subscribers.

As you say: "You can't make hard and fast rules of 'never do this' because there might be a situation where it makes sense to do that". That 'sense' might be in terms of the narrative, or in terms of gameplay mechanics, or simply in terms of the 'business' of being a developer with limited resources in an increasingly competitive world.

 

[desmosome]

you know what I hate, navigating routes by picking seemingly inconsequential choices. You say hello to your neighbor, ask mom for some pizza, insult your sister, congrats you are now on the grandma route!