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The quest for a Wiki-less game

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Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#101

Post by jrootabega »

kruczek wrote: post #54
bilekas wrote: post #47

This is a funny one. I am reminded of Elite Dangerous and how such an amazing game, concept and game loop (mostly) is top tier and exactly what I was looking for. The only way to play it properly or in any way usefully is to use third party tools. For example, markets statistics to see live market information in game for trading, you have to use a user created website. Want to see what components will get your ship i…

That's an interesting example, because I never felt the need for 3rd party tools while playing Elite Dangerous. I did some upgrades to my ship, mainly based on what I found in store of stations I visited. I did a bit of mining and was able to sell it for some profit. I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's…

I think this is a game that demonstrates especially well how online gaming discourse goes wrong. I believe that this game and Frontier have always deserved harsh criticism all throughout the past 10 years, but that criticism needs to be fair.

Online gaming discourse favors instant gratification, min/maxing, low thought, and low complexity. Reddit, forums, and youtube create feedback/echo chambers that give the impression that there is only one correct way to play a game. Tribal thinking reinforces those bad viewpoints and drowns out, or even punishes, anyone who questions it. People participate in these patterns to feed their own ego more than explore the game. And a lot of people don't know any better; they're told that this is the best way to play, and they believe it and spread that misinformation, getting tribal approval and warm fuzzies for "helping" newbies.

In most cases, Elite now has enough in-game information to let you become broadly knowledgeable and competent, but you have to pay attention, think, experiment, record, persist, and be patient. The high skill ceiling does not just apply to flying, but to understanding the world itself, and it can take a long time to approach it. Most things will take days to get comfortable with, and some things weeks or months! Its philosophy is at odds with reddit and youtube thinking, where the loudest signals you'll receive by far are how to min/max, how to obtain as much as possible as fast as possible, and what the "correct" ways of thinking about the game are.

And certain aspects of the game were meant to be discoverable by the playerbase as a whole, rather than every individual player. Finding barnacles, Thargoids, and Guardian artifacts originally happened because someone in the large number of players searching for them just got lucky. It's frustrating that any given player has an infinitesimal chance of finding that kind of stuff, but that's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#102

Post by jshaqaw »

cyrnel wrote: post #90
jshaqaw wrote: post #73

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3. I remember being very proud of winning BG1 without looking up hints. Now I find myself on the wiki. Why? I’m almost 50. I’ve got kids, businesses, life, etc… I can’t play a game for hours on end of immersion every night. I get to game in an hour here hour there slices through the week. If I spent 8 of those slices looking for some random nugget instead of moving the story forward th…

I've been playing BG3 for over a year now and it breaks pretty much all the rules in the accepted answer. There are puzzles that are only skippable with non-obvious cheesing. In-game knowledge is heavily relied upon. The quest journal is overly vague (and buggy sometimes). Item and spell descriptions are good at least, but many of those come from D&D anyway. The absolute worst offender is "Don't give choices with une…

The choices thing is interesting. I go both ways on this. Some of the story choices lead to places you don't want and didn't foresee. Part of me wants the story to go where I want it to go and thus I will wiki the conversational choices. Part of me loves that this is a story and stories can take your characters where the story takes them. In life we make all sorts of "conversational choices" where the ramifications long in the future are hard/impossible to foresee but profound.

Overall though I love the game. Nothing is perfect but this game is a blast and kudos to the developers more making something so deep, interesting, and fun.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#103

Post by scotty79 »

I look at wiki when I'm faced with seemingly important decision.

I think Papers Please did a great job with their checkpoint system.

Basically each important decision creates a checkpoint you can start the game from right before that decision so you can check various scenarios yourself without extensive replaying of the same parts in the same way.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#104

Post by johnnyanmac »

drw85 wrote: post #38

I also think this signals a change in how games are played these days. There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complete tasks and get rewards. Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards. Some of my friends are like this, they blast through games without looking at anything…

> Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards.

Trophy/achievment-oriented gamers. Focused more on their profile than the particular game. Not to be confused with Trophy hunters, who tend to target harder or popular games for achievements.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#105

Post by johnnyanmac »

Bjartr wrote: post #89
Cyberdog wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget the Yellow Paint Epidemic. Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.

That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun. The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing" It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On…

it's a very interesting divide when you have games that worry about this, and then genres/subgenres like the "soulslike" that take pride in its difficulty and precise maneuvering involved just to beat a boss.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#106

Post by johnnyanmac »

drw85 wrote: post #97
moduspol wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out. I understand this is very common, but for me: "discovering and figuring things out" in games often becomes: "guess what the game devs want me to do." Oh, is there something on the other side of that hill? Meh, not really. What about at the top of that cliff? Oh I can only sort of climb it? Should I keep trying or am I just going to hit an invisible wall? Is…

I agree that the busy work in todays open world games are mostly boring and not providing any kind of experience. But that's also part of the problem of modern game design. Side content is mostly boring and useless.

People voted with their wallets for more hours per dollar instead o focusing on the quality of that hour, so that's the way the game design went.

Until people stop being sold on "over 200 quests!" not much will change in the AAA world.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#107

Post by johnnyanmac »

lmm wrote: post #81
sfn42 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, this is mostly about what kind of information a player expects to find in a game. For example in Overwatch 2, there are no numbers on abilities. It's just something like "fires a rocket at the enemy" - how much damage does the rocket do? How long is the cooldown? Can it crit if it hits an enemy in the head? In other games there might be items or talents with tooltips like "increases your damage" - how much? I…

> I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good. Isn't that even more immersion- and game-breaking? Figuring out what kind of attacks have what kind of effect on what kind of enemy is generally part of the gam…

it's a bit of an issue experimenting in PvP early on. Because odds are that vets have already distilled out that discovery and know exactly what each attack does, who counters it, and when and how to maximize synergy. Someone already did that legwork and will use the knowledge against you.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#108

Post by johnnyanmac »

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…

really depends on the game. I don't think I should need to resort to a wiki/guide to find some random missable in an RPG because I didn't talk to this exact random NPC in this very narrow time slice, as an example.

>I enjoy partly because of the active community

I wouldn't conflate community with guides. Community are people sharing expriments, tricks, and optimizations within each other. guides is some lurker googling a speciic issue, finding that info, and going their merry way.

I interpret the author aiming to address B. Because you can't control A no matter how good your game is. Sometimes the community of this cult classic RPG community is mostly 2-3 people digging deep and 10 other people clapping in awe.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#109

Post by moduspol »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #106
drw85 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that the busy work in todays open world games are mostly boring and not providing any kind of experience. But that's also part of the problem of modern game design. Side content is mostly boring and useless.

People voted with their wallets for more hours per dollar instead o focusing on the quality of that hour, so that's the way the game design went. Until people stop being sold on "over 200 quests!" not much will change in the AAA world.

Honestly I think every year that goes by in which the entire market is not consumed by F2P, battle royale, microtransaction-ridden shovelware, we're lucky for whatever we get left.

Though perhaps I'm just a bit cynical.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#110

Post by bilekas »

jrootabega wrote: post #101
kruczek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an interesting example, because I never felt the need for 3rd party tools while playing Elite Dangerous. I did some upgrades to my ship, mainly based on what I found in store of stations I visited. I did a bit of mining and was able to sell it for some profit. I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's…

I think this is a game that demonstrates especially well how online gaming discourse goes wrong. I believe that this game and Frontier have always deserved harsh criticism all throughout the past 10 years, but that criticism needs to be fair. Online gaming discourse favors instant gratification, min/maxing, low thought, and low complexity. Reddit, forums, and youtube create feedback/echo chambers that give the impres…

I agree with you here, and I should add to my original post that I do love the game for all that it is.

> That's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.

This is completely true, but its also extremely annoying to me, because when I send the game to friends who I know would love it if they get over the learning curve just seem to bounce off it because they think "is this all there is". And it's a very hard game to explain.

With this in mind, its very easy to see Frontier not getting the playerbase that they deserve and so it being an online only game, will be eventually shut down sooner than it should be. Its really unfortunate.

I have had success with 1 friend and we've sinked well over 300 hours together which co-op play in itself changes the game up so much.

For me it's the exploration side, I love spending a week or so going out to colonia and having that true 'lost in space' feeling.

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