>> Maybe it's just me, but given a game where you can do absolutely 
>> anything you want, my reaction is typically "so what are you supposed 
>> to do?"
>>
>> (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 don't play WoW, so I don't know quite how open-ended it is. OTOH, I 
gather that MMORPGs are all about the social element, so it would be 
really hopeless to design a single-player game along the same lines.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

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".

Post a reply to this message

Sabrina Kilian wrote:
> 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.

Well, I think most adventure games fall into that category. The point of the 
game is to figure out the point of the game, in part. I know it flumoxxes 
some people, but it *is* a form of game.

> It is hard to find the task if you do not have a clue how to find them.

The game *does* have to be structured well to make it obvious what the clues 
are.

> I have that problem with sandbox games, personally. I want some clue
> about the game, or some goal to reach.

I agree that if there's no actual goal, it doesn't sound very fun.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

Post a reply to this message

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.

> 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.

It's amazing how quickly that gets dull; no challenge. Yet at the same  
time if the game artificially ramps up the level of your opponents in line  
with your progress it makes it feel pointless trying to be powerful.

> Strangely, I have found
> that a good challenge is to find interesting ways to lose sandbox games.
> Dwarf Fortress taught me this one.

Hmm the closest I get to that is spectacular deaths.

> 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".

I feel the same way when I dip my toe into WoW "can you buff my dps so I  
can aggro?" what? :-)

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

Post a reply to this message

Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> 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 even sandbox type games need careful level design and planning of 
guidance.  Myst is an excellent example.

You can't get off the island, and that's obvious from the start. You know 
books have something to do with why you're there, but there's no real 
backstory you need to understand. The hints on how to proceed are in plain 
view (namely, the letter from Atrus and the pages next to the books in the 
library).

Once you figure out you need the other pages, it's clear you have to find 
the books, find a page in each age, and find your way back. The other books 
in the library give hints as well.

So Myst starts with a set of simple goals once you take more than a dozen 
steps, obvious limitations on where you can go and what you can do, with 
hints telling you how to solve the puzzles without them being obvious. In 
addition, the puzzles are logical within the game space, rather than just 
arbitrary "you find a locked door, go hunt down the key that won't be far 
away."  There's a reason for things to be locked, and a reason for the key 
to be available.

Riven is similar: A handful of clues, thrown into the fray to figure out 
what you're supposed to do beyond "catch Gehn, rescue Catherine, signal 
Atrus."  But as the game progresses and you explore more, there are more 
hints and story that come about, just as left-over artifacts from the 
civilization and all, that tell you what you're supposed to be doing and how 
to resolve the conflicts.

The individual levels of Thief also sometimes had a similar structure. You'd 
have a main goal or two, that may or may not change as the game progresses, 
but a big sprawling level with no hint as to which way to go, where the 
secrets are, or how to achieve the goals you've been set. Other than "steal 
lots of goodies", there weren't really any utterly arbitrary goals there either.

Black & White was probably a decent game of a type I'm not really into. I 
don't much like real-time resource management games, but it was open, 
sprawling, and had various goals you could solve or you could ignore. (And 
some you had to solve for the story to progress.) It was nice because you 
could solve stuff in lots of ways. I'm honestly not sure why I didn't really 
like it. Probably because there wasn't any real exploring going on. There 
was open, and everything was above-ground and evident before you started. 
Nowhere was closed off, and you could see everything, and it's just a 
question of setting off the quests you felt like doing. There was no 
discovery, but just plodding thru the game doing what it told you to do.

Most of the other "Myst-like" games that came right after myst completley 
abandoned the "open" format. There was even one called "lighthouse" where 
you start in a house maybe a quarter mile from the lighthouse in question. I 
spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to get out of the first room 
before I realized you had to listen to the answering machine before the door 
would unlock (eh?). Then to get the front door to unlock, you had to pick up 
the umbrella in the stand.  Then you couldn't walk to the lighthouse - you 
had to find the car and drive there. Totally not what an adventure game is 
supposed to be like.

So, in short, an open world with no hidden bits to find and explore and 
challenge is just boring. There have to be places where it takes thinking to 
get to them. And it's best if the thinking is real-world logic. To say "this 
door is locked, let's find the key" is not nearly as interesting as "this 
door is locked, but it's made of wood, and there was an axe in the forest, 
let's see if I can open the door that way."

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

Post a reply to this message

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();
}

<A HREF='http://www.daz3d.com/index.php?refid=16130551'>Get 3D Models, 
3D Content, and 3D Software at DAZ3D!</A>

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And lo On Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:17:29 +0100, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>  
did spake thusly:

> Phil Cook v2 wrote:
>> 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 even sandbox type games need careful level design and planning  
> of guidance.  Myst is an excellent example.
>
<snip>
>
> So Myst starts with a set of simple goals once you take more than a  
> dozen steps, obvious limitations on where you can go and what you can  
> do, with hints telling you how to solve the puzzles without them being  
> obvious. In addition, the puzzles are logical within the game space,  
> rather than just arbitrary "you find a locked door, go hunt down the key  
> that won't be far away."  There's a reason for things to be locked, and  
> a reason for the key to be available.

Exactly quest leads to quest with a natural progression that affects the  
world around you. Things make sense, kind of.

> The individual levels of Thief also sometimes had a similar structure.  
> You'd have a main goal or two, that may or may not change as the game  
> progresses, but a big sprawling level with no hint as to which way to  
> go, where the secrets are, or how to achieve the goals you've been set.  
> Other than "steal lots of goodies", there weren't really any utterly  
> arbitrary goals there either.

Again yes 'This is what you're supposed to do, go and do it'. And again  
the world would alter depending on your actions. One annoyance is that you  
couldn't lock doors behind you to stop the AI path-finding :-)
<snip>

> Most of the other "Myst-like" games that came right after myst  
> completley abandoned the "open" format. There was even one called  
> "lighthouse" where you start in a house maybe a quarter mile from the  
> lighthouse in question. I spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to  
> get out of the first room before I realized you had to listen to the  
> answering machine before the door would unlock (eh?). Then to get the  
> front door to unlock, you had to pick up the umbrella in the stand.   
> Then you couldn't walk to the lighthouse - you had to find the car and  
> drive there. Totally not what an adventure game is supposed to be like.

But it does highlight developer thinking. Imagine the same game and I'd  
devised a trap in that you were sprayed with a substance that drives the  
local wildlife into a killing frenzy. Get sprayed and you're dead. So you  
use the umbrella to stop it getting on you. Except the umbrella is back at  
the house you started at. So either I drop my wonderful trap (not going to  
happen) or I turn it into an annoying precog trap (I'm about to get  
sprayed, hey that umbrella back in the house might help) or I just stop  
the player leaving the house without the umbrella despite the fact there's  
no reason at that point for them to take it.

> So, in short, an open world with no hidden bits to find and explore and  
> challenge is just boring. There have to be places where it takes  
> thinking to get to them. And it's best if the thinking is real-world  
> logic. To say "this door is locked, let's find the key" is not nearly as  
> interesting as "this door is locked, but it's made of wood, and there  
> was an axe in the forest, let's see if I can open the door that way."

I'm not sure about hidden bits. Oblivion had plenty of those and it still  
got dull, InFamous had none and I loved it. I agree with the  
multiple-option 'door is locked', but that costs time and money to  
develop. Best to ignore the fact there's an axe and force you to go get a  
key.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

Post a reply to this message

Phil Cook v2 wrote:
> you couldn't lock doors behind you to stop the AI path-finding :-)

What, in Thief?  If you pickpocketed the key, you could unlock the door, go 
thru, lock it, and the AI couldn't follow because it didn't have the key. It 
totally worked.

You couldn't relock something you picked unless you found the key, tho.

> But it does highlight developer thinking. 

Exactly.  I'm not sure I'd call it "developer thinking", but yes.

The trick is to drive the gameplay without any invisible walls.

> I'm not sure about hidden bits. Oblivion had plenty of those and it 
> still got dull, InFamous had none and I loved it. 

OK.  Well, *I* find it dull. :-) Maybe that's just because I play every game 
like an adventure game. ;-)

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

Post a reply to this message

Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360. I couldn't resist the alluring
siren song of the console anylonger, given how many great games are
published only for the consoles and not for Windows, and given that the
Xbox 360 supports a VGA monitor with a cable.

  Getting to finally play all those games whose covers I have only been able
to watch at the store is only one of the benefits, of course. From all the
Windows games I own, *at least* half of them present random crashing, hangups
or other malfunction (I don't know if it's a problem with the games
themselves, the different hardware drivers, the hardware itself, or a
combination), and my PC is becoming so old that it struggles running the
more recent games at even decent framerates with decent quality settings.
While I have never paid much attention to such talk, it is in practice so
that with the Xbox 360 it's just a relief that you can simply put the disc
in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics settings,
latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all. Microsoft
has also made a quite good work at demanding game developers to minimize
loading times even when loading from DVD, because it really makes a big
difference: Sometimes Xbox 360 games seem to load from the DVD *faster*
than they seem to load from the HD in the PC, as incredible as that might
sound... (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why they
don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
exist.)

  Of course there are drawbacks too. For one, games deliberately have no
support for mouse and keyboard, even though the console would support them
(eg. you can plug in an USB keyboard and use it to write in the dashboard;
I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally easy).
That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
next to impossible to play.) AFAIK this is a deliberate guideline by Microsoft
(or at least it was for the Xbox). Many of these FPS games are published for
both the Xbox 360 and Windows, and they don't have any problems in supporting
keyboard+mouse in the latter; they just deliberately don't support them in
the Xbox 360. Well, it's both their and my loss, because I won't be buying
FPS games (which is a shame really, because many of them *look* really great).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
>   Ok, this is a bit hard to confess, but I sold myself out, so to speak,
> kind of. I went and bought an Xbox 360.

Congrats!

What part is the sell-out? That it's a console, or that it's a Microsoft 
console?  Just curious.

The games look great in HD, too, btw.  Strongly recommended if you can 
manage it.

> that with the Xbox 360 it's just a relief that you can simply put the disc
> in and play without having to worry at all about crashes, graphics settings,
> latest drivers and whether your PC will be able to run it at all. 

Things do indeed "just work" much better.

> sound... (I don't really understand how they succeed in this, and why they
> don't use the same technique in the Windows ports of the games, when they
> exist.)

I think what's happening is there's a lot of background loading going on. 
The XBox doesn't have nearly enough CPU memory to load an entire large game 
at once, so the devs have to go out of their way to make that part work.

I'm not sure why the same techniques wouldn't work on a PC, unless the 
device drivers for the DVD on a PC are in some way too blocking or something.

Half Life 2 on the XBox has long loading screens.  Batman loads while you're 
crawling thru the pipes from one place to another, or during cinematic cut 
scenes that load while you're fighting, or something like that. I think it 
depends on whether it was written for a PC and then ported to consoles or 
vice versa.

> I'm assuming supporting USB mice is there or at least would be equally easy).

 From everything I've read, there's no mouse support on the xbox. Keyboard 
(discouraged), gamepad, chatpad (a keyboard that attaches to the gamepad), 
and camera.

On the other hand, there's clearly support for voice as well, but that's 
never listed in the "these are the input devices we support", so maybe I'm 
missing something.

Plus there's the IR remote for the media player, which I have to assume 
appears as a keyboard or something, but I'll be able to find out soon enough 
when I start running my own code on the xbox. :-)

> That means no FPS games for me. (Yes, I tried a few demos, and they were
> next to impossible to play.)

I've found it takes getting used to, and some games manage it better than 
others. I can't drive in GTA (which is kind of ironic), but shooting in most 
of the games seems OK to me once I play the game a bit, even tho I agree 
it's a lot harder than on the PC with a mouse.

> Well, it's both their and my loss, because I won't be buying
> FPS games (which is a shame really, because many of them *look* really great).

There's usually a lot of auto-aiming support for this reason. Did you 
explore the game options and see if auto-aim is turned on? It's a setting on 
the console.

Also note that if you buy a fast USB memory stick, you can copy the games 
from the DVD to the stick (which uncompresses some of the data as it goes, 
as they usually seem to wind up between 6 and 8 gig on the stick) and play 
from the stick, which can be faster.

I have an XBox HD, and saving a bioshock game went from about 20 seconds to 
about 3 when I switched to saving games on the HD.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
    Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
    that the code does what you think it does, even if
    it doesn't do what you wanted.

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