On 6/8/2010 7:19 AM, Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> And lo On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 03:22:44 +0100, Sabrina Kilian
> <ski### [at] vtedu> did spake thusly:
>
>> 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.
>
> So is it the case that we just expect the hand-holding and just gripe
> when it's not there, or that we don't like being left to fend for
> ourselves? Take Myst, what the heck are you supposed to do yet it was a
> massive sellout; was that despite its open nature or simply because it
> looked so good that finding tasks naturally occurred as you looked around?
>
>>> 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?'
>
> More thought on this. At their heart InFamous and Prototype are
> identical. You get to run freely around a city, there's story missions
> and side missions which you can take or ignore - pretty much identical.
> Yet I love InFamous and hate Prototype and the reason for this is that
> the majority of side-missions in Prototype have no connection to the
> wider world. Beat up 300 points worth of infected, defend these troops
> using only this power, run from point to point following these markers,
> collect the purple orbs; um why?
>
>> It is hard to find the task if you do not have a clue how to find them.
>
> Which is akin to the "how the heck was I supposed to know that?" moments
> that keeps GameFaqs in business.
>
>> 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 would count that more as a developer fault over a structural one, you
> know the quests exist you just can't get to them.
>
Definitely. There is something called "ProjectEQ", which provides you 
your own server, and a script that can run the same quests as EQ1 had, 
up to a certain point in the updates (just a bit after the introduction 
of Luclin), one of the first things I ran into, and helped fix with my 
own changes, was tweaking the Luclin "Citizen" quests, so you can get 
new items, including your stupid tablet you had to always have for 
getting more missions from the city, any one of which, if you lost them, 
would render it impossible to even gain information about your own 
class, quests from the factions for that class, or nearly anything else 
in the city.

I have no idea if Sony ever fixed those issues in the still running 
servers that EQ1 still runs on.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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