Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Fri, 04 Jun 2010 16:35:16 +0100, Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> did
> spake thusly:
>> (I had this problem with Frontier Elite II, which is supposedly the
>> best computer game ever written...)
> 
> But it can work, look at the MMORPG like World of Warcraft. I recall
> reading something somewhere about development of some such game and they
> left it completely open and it bombed with the testers. Just as you said
> the attitude was "so what are you supposed to do?". The questions are -
> Is that because games have evolved such that the player is expected to
> be told what to do all the time and thus anything outside that is deemed
> 'confusing? Or is the case that we simply don't like such open-ended
> structures within the games that we are supposed to be playing for fun?
> 

If you approach a sandbox for the first time, with no toy shovel or
castle mold, and no clue about what sand even was, would you know of a
way to play in it? They are games, the universe has some rules to it,
but the player doesn't have a clue what they might be. So, they might
appeal to the game tester type who likes to push the engine around, but
that's it; the average player doesn't know what to do.

I don't know about early WoW stuff, but I have seen other games where
they expect the player to just drop players in and say "This is a
MMORPG, go be social." No information about your character, class,
skills, anything.

> I think the difference is that in one type of game you're presented with
> tasks and in the other you're expected to go out and find them yourself.
> In the former you know what you can do and can chose to ignore it, in
> the latter you get the 'now what?'
> 

It is hard to find the task if you do not have a clue how to find them.
I remember early days in Everquest, where the NPCs would only respond if
you were to /say the correct phrase to them. This worked well for the
times where the quest was obvious, or logical, or there was a reference
in something they said previously. In the worst cases, developers would
come back months and years later to say "oops, we misspelled something
in the trigger, now the phrase 'cookies' should work for that quest." Or
the rumor that there were 40% of the quests left unsolved by players, or
uncompleted by devs. Or quests that, after 11 years, still can not be
found that developers insist are active and in-game.

I have that problem with sandbox games, personally. I want some clue
about the game, or some goal to reach. Just exploring a world and
becoming all powerful isn't enough of a draw. Strangely, I have found
that a good challenge is to find interesting ways to lose sandbox games.
Dwarf Fortress taught me this one.

With no clue at all, all you have is the player community to fall back
on. Some have great player support, others have walls of obscure text
like "QQ moar, l2p newb".

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