Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The quest for a Wiki-less game

gamedev.stackexchange.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 113 posts

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#61

Post by keyringlight »

moduspol wrote: post #53
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…

> 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'm reminded of one of the developer commentaries on one of the Valve games, that designing games is as much about teaching as it is 'making fun'.

It's not just about setting up start and end points, a challenge between them, and informing the player of the mechanics involved at least once beforehand. For any teaching on a topic with a broad audience there will be different attitudes from the students and how much prompting is needed, they may be returning to it after a long break, you might be drawing from lessons a long time ago. Then most games try to put that in an immersive world without breaking the 4th wall more than they can help it and have the challenge fit and be plausible within it. Graphics and detail levels are constantly increasing, and may be variable depending on the user's system which can obscure/reveal any hints/prompts or deliberately hidden elements they needs to see to progress (and similar with other senses).

And after all that, the range of players need to hit a Goldilocks "just right" amount of resistance so it feels like a fair challenge to conquer, not be drawn out of the experience, and whatever extra goals are laid on top such as slowing pacing so story/lore/character conversations can play out.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#63

Post by kruczek »

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.

Unfortunately it's not so simple, if you need wiki to search for the most basic information, because they game doesn't provide it. It's what the author actually describes as "terraria problem" and I fully agree with that sentiment: in Terraria you can craft things, but the game doesn't show you what you can craft, unless you are near the correct crafting station AND have sufficient resources on yourself to craft it. So in order to play without wiki you'd need to:

1. stuff your inventory with all possible resources you'd otherwise store in various chests

2. go to each of your crafting stations

Needless to say, it is extremely tedious and still you might not see that some item can be crafted at a given station, because for example you only have 99 pieces of some resource and that item needs 100 pieces of that resource.

So I'd say it's fine for some cryptic or more advanced mechanisms to be covered on wiki. But when I need to go to wiki simply to get a list of craftable items, then there's something seriously wrong with the UI design in the game.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#64

Post by WhereIsTheTruth »

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…

Perhaps your friends don't like video games and are just wanting to kill time out of boredom

Expecting that all games should become like this because that's how "you" like them is selfish and dangerous

There is room for all kind of games

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#65

Post by chii »

haunter wrote: post #23
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

> you are still seeing tutorials

that's just bad game/level design - the player should never be aware that they're being lead on by a tutorial.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#66

Post by Kiro »

yreg wrote: post #49
cloogshicer wrote: post #33

The game that does this best is Outer Wilds. All the information in this game is discoverable on your own, driven by curiosity.

And I think the game is so captivating that very few Outer Wilds players would let themselves be spoiled by reading the wiki unless they get absolutely stuck or after they complete the game.

I didn't like it and ended up watching a playthrough on YouTube instead.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#67

Post by chii »

yreg wrote: post #49
cloogshicer wrote: post #33

The game that does this best is Outer Wilds. All the information in this game is discoverable on your own, driven by curiosity.

And I think the game is so captivating that very few Outer Wilds players would let themselves be spoiled by reading the wiki unless they get absolutely stuck or after they complete the game.

you might want the wiki to get every single possible ending.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#68

Post by rozab »

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…

I put a lot of hours into ED and this is one of the aspects of the game that really annoyed me. Couldn't the devs recognise that the existence of these tools represented a massive failure of the in game UX? They had this huge galaxy map view, a fantastic technical achievement, but it was barely even searchable! So you had to tab out of that pretty view to eddb.io to do anything at all.

The same applied to so many different mechanics. Sure, Road to Riches was cheating, but it only existed because there was no mechanic in the game to make exploration more profitable than random chance.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#69

Post by Cyberdog »

drw85 wrote: post #46
an_ko wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has that really changed recently? Different people have always enjoyed different things, and some don't like puzzles. That was as true a hundred years ago as now.

Yes and No, i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest. I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are. You just get used to these things, but i also think they ar…

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.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#70

Post by kibwen »

techdmn wrote: post #56

The thing that strikes me about the question is the underlying desire to control the user. The creator wants people to figure things out rather than look them up. For a good game, make it the way you want. That's your choice. If someone solves the puzzles themselves, great! If they get stuck, or just want to blast through the game and use a wiki or guide, so what? That's their choice. As an author or creator you can…

I'm sympathetic to the idea of people choosing to enjoy art however they like ("death of the author", etc.). However, I'm also sympathetic to the idea that an artist can have a certain specific sort of experience in mind, and that they're welcome to tailor the art in order to nudge people in the direction of that experience. I don't think it's creepy to attempt to guide viewers towards a specific experience, because that's basically just the process of making art in general; if you're making a horror movie, you shouldn't feel bad for not appealing to people who wanted to see a romantic comedy.
Post reply on HN