The quest for a Wiki-less game • Hacker News Board

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#111

Post by Yawrehto » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 6:02 PM UTC

michaelt wrote: post #60

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…

> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore That might be true in some cases, sure. But in recent years I've noticed a lot of games adding things like crafting and alchemy mechanics that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own. If I've got to brute-force recipes? Or if there are hard-won ingredients and they might get wasted or produce something useless? Or if the developers, not wan…

>crafting an alchemy...that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own

Or it could be you have a minor goal (eg, 'what would X + Y be') but first you need to GET x and y. You're not spoiling what you're doing. The other day I was playing Infinite Craft and wanted to test something (what WOULD freedom + fries be; for those wondering, freedom + french fries is America), but first I needed french fries. I'm not too interested in figuring out how to get them on my own, so I looked that up.

In open ended games, wikis can be used to help accomplish goals you set for yourself, since they tend to have minimal direction. They take the place of, eg, hints on where to go next. Some games have official wikis (like Little Alchemy/Little Alchemy 2), even!

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#112

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Sep 13, 2024, 1:29 AM UTC

izacus wrote: post #29

stavros wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

[deleted]

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#113

Post by seanhunter » Fri, Sep 13, 2024, 7:55 AM UTC

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.

How is that cheating in a single-player game? What does cheating even mean in a single-player game. Seriously.

The only rule in a single player game is you should do whatever seems like it would be fun for you[1]. For some people the fun comes in working things out, for others the fun comes from "making progress" (whatever that means in the game). For me personally it depends very much on the situation. It's not generally fun if you're just stuck banging your head against a wall so I totally get people looking up answers to things to get unstuck. From my perspective that's really fine.

There have certainly been games (Subnautica is the most obvious example for me personally) where the sense of wonder and exploration was really a huge part of the experience for me so I didn't want to search external sources and spoiler it - I wanted to experience it all for myself, but even there if someone just wanted to have a map and know everything that was going to happen I would say that's fine let them do whatever they want to do.

The dev should be focussing 100% on making the game fun. That's it. Focussing on preventing your players from doing something they want to do seems like a step back to the days where games had a single way to move forward and you had to do things exactly that way. That's definitely not a good way to design a fun game.

[1] Multiplayer games are more complex of course because your actions affect other people so there is for sure cheating and other types of behaviour that I would personally consider unethical.