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The quest for a Wiki-less game

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Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#11

Post by fragmede »

seanhunter wrote: post #10

Really disagree with the hypothesis the author has, and especially don't think that the player experience is hindered (at all) by searching for things in an external wiki. Most of the games I really like (Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Subnautica, Valheim, Satisfactory, recently Shapez2 as examples) I enjoy partly because of the active community (and wikis are obviously part of that). I love seeing solutions that other pe…

Blame the dev all you want, something is lost by players cheating and just looking up the answer online.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#12

Post by fragmede »

JohnFen wrote: post #2

> The reasoning for this is that the player experience is greatly hindered by searching up answers to problems found in a game. This is an interesting statement to me, and I think the truth of it is debatable. It's certainly true if you're only looking at a specific sort of player experience, but there are other sorts of experiences some people want which is greatly enhanced by the use of reference material. Why woul…

> Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.

Because people don't have the self control not to do that and want to get spoonfed the answer, even if not cheating would be more satisfying for them.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#14

Post by kruczek »

seanhunter wrote: post #10

Really disagree with the hypothesis the author has, and especially don't think that the player experience is hindered (at all) by searching for things in an external wiki. Most of the games I really like (Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Subnautica, Valheim, Satisfactory, recently Shapez2 as examples) I enjoy partly because of the active community (and wikis are obviously part of that). I love seeing solutions that other pe…

> I would be really amazed if this person makes a good game when their focus is make players do A rather than B instead of "how do I make this game as much fun to play as possible".

Would you consider Terraria a good game? I think at one point it was the highest rated game on Steam. And yet that game is exactly this way - it makes players do A rather than B: it is pretty much impossible to play it WITHOUT the wiki, because of the design: there is no list of all craftable items in-game.

And because of this I could never really get into it, because I had to tediosly collect all my resources and then go to each crafting station one by one, simply to see what I am able to craft.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#15

Post by have_faith »

Does anyone remember the Horadric Cube from Diablo 2? Was there any mechanism in the game to discover all of the combinations? (I don’t think so). It was easy to work out a couple basic combos with gems and then you basically needed to look up the rest, which I always thought was a shame. Seems like it wouldn’t have been hard to make them all discoverable in-game without just guessing.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#16

Post by troupo »

The question feels wrong because it's out of place. First you have to ask "what game am I building, and for whom?".

Games with multiple levels of puzzles and meta gameplay wouldn't exist without an active community and wikis, and they are great partly because of that. Think Noita, Animal Well or even Binding of Isaac.

On the other hand, you don't need a wiki to play and enjoy Ori and the Blind Forest

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#17

Post by pm215 »

JohnFen wrote: post #2

> The reasoning for this is that the player experience is greatly hindered by searching up answers to problems found in a game. This is an interesting statement to me, and I think the truth of it is debatable. It's certainly true if you're only looking at a specific sort of player experience, but there are other sorts of experiences some people want which is greatly enhanced by the use of reference material. Why woul…

On the other hand I think there are definitely situations and play styles where the player resorting to a wiki is a failure of game design. I mostly don't use wikis, but if I get into a situation where I don't feel like I'm making progress or have any idea what to do ("how do I even damage this boss at all?"; "I feel like I spent the last half hour wandering over the map and I have no clue where I need to go next"; that kind of thing), then I'm likely to look up the answer. And once I've found a walkthrough or wiki I'm probably going to keep using it even when the next part is less annoying. I think in that kind of case both the player and the designer are likely to feel it would have been a better game if that resort to the wiki was avoidable.

There are also situations where I will happily look up a walkthrough because I've had enough "puzzle solving" fun and just want the "see the last bits of content" fun before I put the game down. I did the tail end of Tunic and Fez that way. This kind of thing I don't think is a game design failure -- it's just different players having different preferences for how much and how complicated they like riddle solving and secret finding gameplay.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#18

Post by Arisaka1 »

seanhunter wrote: post #10

Really disagree with the hypothesis the author has, and especially don't think that the player experience is hindered (at all) by searching for things in an external wiki. Most of the games I really like (Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Subnautica, Valheim, Satisfactory, recently Shapez2 as examples) I enjoy partly because of the active community (and wikis are obviously part of that). I love seeing solutions that other pe…

There's a category of games whose depth goes so hard that they assume engagement outside of the application, and then there's Mega Man games who were built under the assumption that the player will enjoy trial and error, and to attempt to push through making the wrong stage choice by learning how to dodge boss mechanics.

I firmly believe that the internet normalized metagaming as a side-effect (guides, talk to friends online, etc.) and that in turn affected the way games designed, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.

The vast majority of games should never, ever be designed under the assumption that the player has access to Google, and by extend ease of access to stuff like "the most OP Gundam parts", "most OP weapon for Elden Ring", etc.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#19

Post by thih9 »

seanhunter wrote: post #10

Really disagree with the hypothesis the author has, and especially don't think that the player experience is hindered (at all) by searching for things in an external wiki. Most of the games I really like (Factorio, Dwarf Fortress, Subnautica, Valheim, Satisfactory, recently Shapez2 as examples) I enjoy partly because of the active community (and wikis are obviously part of that). I love seeing solutions that other pe…

Agreed. In my case I enjoyed Vampire Survivors on iOS and my way of playing was 75% figuring out things on my own and 25% using the wiki.

The wiki-friendly community was a big plus to me, it let me adjust my gaming experience to what I felt comfortable. Without that it's likely that I would consider the game too difficult and I'd stop playing. As it is now, I completed the game and I recommend it to others (available on other platforms and Apple Arcade too).

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#20

Post by rspoerri »

The problem is that two different systems collide (in the example of Terraria). Having an open world game and a learning curve for the things the user needs to understand to progress. Looking up informations in a wiki most often happens when the game gets boring or overly complex for the player to have fun (check Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow theory on that).

Games that do that well, such as Zelda (which does this very well) introduce new mechanics and scenarios in an very iterative way. By having a linear structure. Other games use AI to control the gameplay flow.

A linear level structure could look like this: A & B are different types of enemies

| A (new enemy) | A,A (more complex situation) | B (new enemy) | B,B (more complex situation) | A,B (new combination) | A,A,B,B (complex new combination) | ...

This method works with lots of systems, such as level design elements, enemies or construction of ingame elements. The problem is that procedural content generation and open worlds make it hard for the game designer to introduce the content to the player in this order.

interesting videos on this topic:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMggqenxuZc (Half-Life 2's Invisible Tutorial)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnt5zxb8W0Y (Director AI for Balancing In-Game Experiences)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GV814cWiAw (Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?)

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