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

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#91

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:05 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…

Z:BotW and Z:TotK got the open world crafting balance right. Ingredients are plentiful, experimentation is low risk, and you exploring new places really seems like exploring.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#92

Post by noirscape » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:10 PM UTC

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…

The difficulty with experimenting is that most powerful attacks in games like this tend to have some sort of limit associated with it.

Players won't for example feel the need to use this super powerful item they found and see how well it works because they only have one copy of that item.

The best way to avoid this is to give players access to low/zero opportunity cost versions of strong items so they can get a good "feel" of when to use stronger things in their arsenal. Players need to be able to safely experiment with their kit but that experimentation also has to happen in an environment where it can be meaningfully tested.

(You can see this with the dark souls formula on both ends; because death and healing are both low cost resources to manage, players are more incentivized to experiment, since the cost for a "dud" attempt at a tough boss fight/figuring out a weapon is much lower. Meanwhile rarer items like summoning allies have a much greater cost attached to them, meaning players don't feel driven to use them since if they die, they now lost a rare and valuable resource they could've used elsewhere.)

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#93

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:19 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#94

Post by have_faith » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:22 PM UTC

Fornax96 wrote: post #30

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

I think I was too scared of losing it so kept it in the stash the whole time. (is it even possible to lose it?)

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#95

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:26 PM UTC

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…

> Almost every decision has unclear outcomes

And to make matters worse, many of the outcomes are identical. It's disheartening to save scum through an exchange only to find that the exact same thing happens no matter which option you choose.

And then you'll see that you get some bonus effect for one choice for a d20 roll, which makes it seem more likely to succeed than the others, but then the number to beat is also higher, making it actually a worse option.

> Item and spell descriptions are good at least

I don't agree with this. Most item descriptions make no distinction between items you should definitely hold onto and ones that are just garbage to sell for gold, which you don't even need because there just isn't that much to buy relative to the amount of incense flooding the world. And finding out what it means for something to add e.g. "momentum" can be non-obvious. And dyes don't describe their use. And a potion/elixir might say that you can get the same effect from throw/splash vs drinking but not say that if you do then the effect goes from "until next long rest" to "for three turns".

But the absolute worst here is the character selection and leveling. You have zero guidance whatsoever on what it means to pick a bard vs a druid etc, both short term and long term. It just assumes that have a D&D character guide. Turns out that bards are actually really good at combat magic after a few levels. Who knew.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#96

Post by drw85 » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:46 PM UTC

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…

But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive.

I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in.

Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place?

I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#97

Post by drw85 » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:48 PM UTC

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 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.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#98

Post by Fornax96 » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 1:59 PM UTC

have_faith wrote: post #94

Fornax96 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I was too scared of losing it so kept it in the stash the whole time. (is it even possible to lose it?)

Not sure, it's been a long time since I played. But I don't think you could completely lose it.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#99

Post by Bjartr » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 2:01 PM UTC

drw85 wrote: post #96

Bjartr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive. I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distrac…

Absolutely, I 100% agree. Ubisoft especially is terrible at this.

Re: The quest for a Wiki-less game

#100

Post by rickdeckard » Thu, Sep 12, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

anotherhue wrote: post #87

rickdeckard wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. But modern games also evolved to appeal to people who don't like to be challenged and look for a casual rewarding experience. It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today. If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but if you Game Over in SMB you can resume from the same world by pressing A and Start. This is one of three things I would time travel to tell my childhood self.

No need to feel sorry. I never had a NES, I was actually thinking of Super Mario Land on GameBoy when I wrote this, but ultimately wrote it a bit more generic...

I do however have a vivid memory of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where I got stuck in a cave under a Venice Cafe for days, because I didn't know that I need to talk a guest out of his Wine-bottle using specific sentences, and use the wine to soften the mud of a lever in a wall...

But I guess that's too specific for anyone to relate to...