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The quest for a Wiki-less game

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Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#21

Post by Timshel »

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…

Yeah this statement absolutely does not apply to me and I like that one of the answer point that the use of a wiki might be a failure from the game.

Good example for this is the Witcher 3 ending. One of the ending which I would consider the most favorable is almost an easter egg and rely on specific answer in barely related dialogs. Easter egg are nice but don’t put the ending I’m most interested in behind some "choice" I made ...

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#22

Post by haunter »

Arisaka1 wrote: post #18
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 friend…

>The vast majority of games should never, ever be designed under the assumption that the player has access to Google

Yet in the 90s/2000s we had games coming with full manual books with all the info printed, an offline wiki.

Like HOMM2 my all time favorite http://homm2.free.fr/dl/pdf/Heroes%20of%20Might%20and%20Magi...

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#23

Post by haunter »

rspoerri wrote: post #20

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 v…

>introduce new mechanics and scenarios in an very iterative way. By having a linear structure.

A lot of games are also ruined by this handhelding style of design where 20 hours in you are still seeing tutorials

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#24

Post by PrivateButts »

For me, I run to wikis most often to get numbers. It's frustrating how far some games go to hide exactly how much faster an upgrade will make you, or what the fuck a status effect means. Dead by Daylight had this problem for a long time until they finally put numbers in perk descriptions. Risk of Rain 2 half implemented a good solution- tooltip style descriptions when you hover over items or terms, but it's not applied universally or more confusingly, not on the status effect icons that appear in a run.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#25

Post by PeterStuer »

Water runs downhill. Players will max out convenience. The only way is to make the ingame info easier to access, more convenient and complete than any 3rd party.

E.g to beat a youtube video that shows you how to complete a quest, you can have a ghost of your character frontrunning the player and doing exactly what needs to be done.

Most gamedesigners abhore even the thought of adding such a thing as they want players to explore and discover. And some will, but the majority that pay your bills will just use youtube or wikis or addons to just tell them what to do.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#26

Post by codetrotter »

fragmede wrote: post #11
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.

I’ve done both. I cheated my way through a single player game following a walkthrough all the way from start to finish. Only at the end did I realize that this took away a lot of the fun from the game.

But I’ve also used a wiki to find crafting recipes for Minecraft back when I started playing. Looking up crafting recipes helped me find out what things I could craft. And it didn’t remove any of the joy I got out of playing Minecraft at all.

And then there are other cases where I’ve looked at walkthroughs again but learning from my mistake I make a point of only looking when I’m really really stuck, and to only read as little as possible to get unstuck.

So my opinion is yes it’s perfectly possible to ruin a good game for yourself by looking up info online. But if you learn from doing that to yourself you’ll probably learn to only use it when you really need it. And then the game remains fun to play.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#27

Post by notTooFarGone »

kruczek wrote: post #14
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, b…

You entirely base your opinion about what you know the game CAN LOOK LIKE.

If you don't have an expectation of Terraria, you don't know the depth and therefore play the game as it is.

The only thing that is harming your fun is knowing how it could be by watching videos, streams whatever.

Saying "it is impossible to play without a wiki" is entirely self inflicted by wrong expectation management. Of course people want shortcuts but a person without internet access wouldn't call Terraria unplayable without a wiki.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#28

Post by izacus »

fragmede wrote: post #12
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.

"Given the choice, players will optimize all the fun out of their game." - this is a quote attributed to Sid Meier and it's very true.

And reading Wikis is pretty much one of things that really fits this.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#29

Post by izacus »

stavros wrote: post #9
musicale wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It really depends on the player and the game. I could imagine being disappointed by a player who uses a game guide to speed through the shortest path in a game and then complains that the game is too short (or that the puzzles are too easy.) Or by MMO players who spend 200 hours completing quests in a new expansion and then complain that there wasn't enough new content.

> I could imagine being disappointed by a player who uses a game guide to speed through the shortest path in a game and then complains that the game is too short (or that the puzzles are too easy.) Sure, but I doubt this straw man actually exists.

If you read the game reviews and message boards you will see a lot of people do just that and then complain very loudly.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#30

Post by Fornax96 »

have_faith wrote: post #15

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.

I just used the cube as a backpack for extra inventory space, haha
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