I just made this blog post on my website (http://alexjuice.com/features/gaming/244-video-games-and-accomplishment), if you want to see it with pictures check it out there (it looks nicer). But I want to also present it here. I am wondering if you guys can name any other video games that made you feel like you outsmarted them, even though that is actually the intended way to play.
Do you know what the best feeling a video game can give you is? Letting you feel like you outsmarted the game when, actually, you are simply playing as intended. It is a different matter entirely when you outsmart the game and the developers did not intend it. That is simply poor design, and although you can be proud of yourself, it isn't the same situation. Usually when its unintended, whatever it is you discovered, will likely ruin the gameplay and likely break the game. It takes real genius to give a player a key gameplay element, or method for beating a level, in such a way that he or she thinks they found some kind of secret or shortcut. Let me give examples.
Recently I have been playing some DOS games because, oddly, most of my most nostalgic video game feelings come from DOS. Mostly Master of Orion II (which I covered here), Prince of Persia and Dungeon Master 2. I haven't played DM2 for a very long time although I do remember getting pretty far into it. I played it again. Its still amazing. Most importantly the games cryptic magic system got me thinking about this very concept.
Dungeon Master 2 is a dungeon crawler RPG. The first thing you do is revive three companions from the "hall of heroes" where a bunch of random heroes are in cryogenic sleep or something. Then you begin your assault on Skull Keep. You find weapons and armor and kill monsters. The game is pretty awesome and atmospheric. I own the soundtrack. Anyway, back to the point.
The most interesting thing in this game is the magic system. When you click on the cast spell button you get a series of six symbol none of which make any sense to you. When you click on one, you lose mana, and it gets imprinted. Then the interface gives you six more symbols you can't understand. Then again, and then again! So a spell consist of four or less symbols in a certain order. Once you click cast spell you just get a weird symbol and nothing happens (Unless you lucked out and actually cast a spell). How the heck are you supposed to know how to cast any spells? Guess!?
You will pretty quickly discover that these magic runes are used throughout the game. Many heroes you revive even start with some items that have abilities which are displayed as a series of runes. The staff for example has a spell ability which is simply named (square, weird backwards n shape) and you have no idea what it does without trying it. Once you click it, the room you are in gets brighter. If you try to input these runes as a spell, it makes the room lighter! You just learned the "light" spell. Take a look at it, notice how the light spell uses the fire rune? Yeah! the spells actually make logical sense too. Once you know several spells, you can deduce additional spells just my understanding the symbols better.
Throughout the game you will find potions, weapons, shields, music boxes, rings, wands etc. Many of them will have spells on them for you to experiment with. The spells that are most useful (fireball, lighting bolt, guard minion, haste) you memorize and use constantly. The rest of the spells you better write down in some kind of physical spell book in case you need to cast them later. Because the game won't hold them for you.
The beauty of this system is the sense of accomplishment you feel as a player when you "outsmart" the game by "stealing" spells from items with limited uses. You find a staff that can only cast two fireballs, but you figure out how to cast unlimited fireballs off of it. For a good part of the game I still felt like I was going to find some kind of spell book and I am just cutting corners copy-catting these spells. Then it dawned on me that this is exactly how the designers intended that the player learn magic spells. But when I first started dropping attack minions all over the map I felt like I was the smartest kid in the world.
Portal was another game that gave me the same feeling except in portal instead of a gameplay mechanic, it was the level design. In Portal you use a special machine that can connect any two points together using portals. You shoot a portal "over there" and one "right here" step into the closer one and you come out "over there." The game takes place in a testing facility where you need to beat a series of puzzle rooms by using your portaling ability.
That is the feeling games need to provide. Less tutorials! So many games beat you over the head with their "genius" mechanics because they are too afraid you might miss something. There is no discovery there, no sense of accomplishment. Let plays discover things for themselves don't be afraid of letting players be stuck for a while. The way games are going now, soon it will be unacceptable for a player to have to concentrate at all. Everything will need to be served to them on a text-heavy platter. I bet there are spells in Dungeon Master 2 I have never even seen and I think that is a really good thing. Can you think of any video games that made you feel like you outsmarted them?
Having non-obvious game mechanics in a game (even if discovering how that game mechanic works is not strictly necessary to complete the game), such as the ability to create new items/spells/whatever by combining existing ones, is a double-edged sword.
Current gamers are accustomed to everything given to them ready-made, without the player having to do much to learn any complicated game mechanics. The vast majority of games are either casual games (of the type which you could eg. play while sitting on the bus on your portable device) or straightforward run-and-shoot games with little to no tactical elements to them (such as the vast majority of first-person shooters).
Hence if you create a game mechanic that actually requires some effort from the part of the player, you are risking the player being lazy and giving unfavorable reviews.
In the 80's I played many text-based (but graphical) adventure games. The vast majority of them did not have an auto-mapping feature. You had to draw the map yourself on paper. Rather than being an annoyance, that was, in fact, an integral part of the gaming experience! You felt like an explorer who discovered new lands and drew maps of them.
Nowadays that would be completely unthinkable! (I mean having to draw a map yourself. Of course text-based adventure games are also unthinkable today, but that's another issue.) If a game where remembering a big map is essential didn't offer an auto-mapping feature, all reviews would score it negatively because of that. People are lazy. They want everything ready-made and they don't want to put any effort on it.
That's why non-self-evident complex game mechanics are a risk for game makers.
Sometimes, at least in my case, they can save the game from the "unfinished games" heap. For example, I bought Crisis Core thinking that Square Enix games are superb, but didn't realize that Square Enix seems to have had this slump in the past half decade or longer where they have lost the ball completely and most of their games suck. It turned out that the game is really boring. I tried two times to finish it, but couldn't.
However, the third time I tried it, I discovered the sub-game mechanic of combining items to create stronger items. It's nothing really fancy, but somehow it was so interesting that it kept me playing until the end.
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In Super Mario World, you can fly over entire levels. It feels like cheating, but it's actually a reward for keeping your cape. You don't feel like you're wasting the game away, either, since there are plenty of levels to play where this trick isn't possible. It feels like you outsmarted the game, and it feels wonderful.
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Location: Milky Way -> Earth -> Brazil
To me, outsmarting happens only when I find some glitch. Otherwise I'm just pushing the game to the natural limits, what is good but not reallly exciting.
Also gets old fast.
"Genuine self-esteem, however, consists not of causeless feelings, but of certain knowledge about yourself.
It rests on the conviction that you — by your choices, effort and actions — have made yourself into the
kind of person able to deal with reality. It is the conviction — based on the evidence of your own volitional
functioning — that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life and, therefore, are deserving of that success."
- Onkar Ghate
Bisqwit wrote:
I'd have to agree with you some there, pirate_sephiroth. Far from feeling smart, I think being tricked into figuring out a key gameplay mechanic long after I could have used it would only make me feel like a sucker for not finding it sooner!
VirtualAlex wrote:
It is a different matter entirely when you outsmart the game and the developers did not intend it. That is simply poor design, and although you can be proud of yourself, it isn't the same situation.
Darn right I'll feel proud of myself! What makes it even better is if the glitch accesses content that was supposed to have been locked away forever, whether deliberate or not. I bet everyone's heard of the glitches to allow capture of every species of Pokemon in the first-generation games, with no external devices needed, only well-timed actions, completely subverting the "social" (consumerist) aspect of the game.
I discovered such a trick when I tried the DOS port of DJ Puff's Volcanic Capers last month and got to a jump in level 5 which is fairly simple to make in other versions of the game, but proved to be impossible in this version, as I tried it over a hundred times with all kinds of different approaches and no success; DJ Puff would always bump up against an overhanging block that caused him to miss the next platform. So once I was out of ideas, I decided to kill off Puff's last life in a slightly more interesting way by having him attack a block as he fell into a pit, just to see if they hid a secret in that block for some reason. But I messed up and ran off the moving platform too late, and instead of falling into the pit, Puff got shoved forward halfway into the wall! It was far enough in that Puff was considered to be standing on the wall bricks, but since there's no upward terrain collision in that game, I was able to scale the wall by simply jumping straight up, taking me up to the remainder of the level!
So now that I've finished the fifth and final level, I'm only left to wonder, did the developers mean for me to do that? I mean, would they have changed the method of completing the level to that just for the DOS version...? Did they even test the whole game? To me what it feels like is some play-tester got to that part of that level, went through all the same stuff I did, and upon scaling the wall, said "Oh, so that's how it's done! Yup, game works!" and called it a day. I think when we talk about outsmarting games, we should really be talking about how we have to be so much smarter to win when the games are so stupid.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
In "Giants - Citizen Kabuto" there are several water-based levels where you're supposed to use a boat. But sometimes you can also use the "magic jump" ability to go over land; it turns out that the developers knew of that possibility and put some enemies in that part of the map.
That part of my old playthrough: 00:45-01:30
The cool part of the game is how often you "thought" you were taking a shortcut, doing something sneaky, discovering a path that is not the intended path and feeling smug. Well, that is how everybody felt, because that is the way you are supposed to go! For those of you that played and beat portal, trying playing it a second time, and avoid your gut instinct to take the shortcut and try it "the hard way." You will find out that there is no hard way! You found the only way but the game let you believe you outsmarted it.
Actually there are many levels in Portal 1 where there's the "intended" solution and then there's a significantly less obvious shortcut, which is nevertheless acknowledged by the developers (iow. there are many challenges where you need to solve the level with less portals than the "intended" route would need, sometimes significantly less).
Thanks for all you comments guys I appreciate it.
I have been thinking alot about this and I remember that Trine fits into my category of making me feel like I outsmarted it. You are never told how to beat puzzles in trine, you just need to figure it out.
I guess the general thought is I need to use all three characters to beat a puzzle, so when I do it with less than three I kinda feel proud of myself :D
@Warp: I agree with you 100%. It is totally a double edged sword. The further video games stray from letting players use their heads the harder it becomes to come back. I fear that this sort of "gameplay exposition" might be trapped in retro gaming, at least for the most part. Although games like Trine and Portal still give me a shimmer of hope.
It is a different matter entirely when you outsmart the game and the developers did not intend it. That is simply poor design, and although you can be proud of yourself, it isn't the same situation. Usually when its unintended, whatever it is you discovered, will likely ruin the gameplay and likely break the game.
Wrong.
Even the best designed games will have effective tactics and strategies (I'm not even talking about glitches here) that the designers never dreamed of. Take any advanced Starcraft strategy, a bunch of high-level stuff in fighting games, tactics in FPS's, or alternate solutions in virtually any decent puzzler. (Portal was mentioned already)
That's not "bad design" but rather an inevitably when you create a deep, interesting game.
VirtualAlex wrote:
That is the feeling games need to provide. Less tutorials! So many games beat you over the head with their "genius" mechanics because they are too afraid you might miss something.
As Warp correctly noted, that's just a product of the current gaming marketplace. Back in the day, little kids would spend weeks and even months playing a single game.
Nowadays, adults play games and want to get through them in a few days.
Not the developers' fault.
I do not think I am wrong. The examples you listed are not effective to dismiss what I said. Starcraft, and general RTS are developed in a particular way much like Magic the Gathering. The developers provide the player with tools, the player's job is to use the tools to create a stronger force than the opponent. In this case it is the dev's job to provide nice tools, but not necessarily to test every combination. You are not outsmarting the developers when you use the tools as intended.
Also if you DO end up outsmarting the developers and create something that is too powerful it is patched out of the game. That is the effect I am talking about when I say outsmarting the game in an unintended way.
I am not sure what you mean about fighting games unless you be specific, but each character in a fighting game only has a finite number of moves, all of which where intentionally put in. I can't even imagine what a player could do to outsmart a fighting game unless he found some awful exploit. I know in one of the street fighter games there is a glitch which lets you perform an invincible move if you do it right when you come out of a roll. It became a standard element of the gameplay however it is undeniably a glitch.
Tactics in FPS? I would really need specific examples of this. I am having a hard time thinking of something that the developers didn't intend being heavily used and not making the game worse for it.
I can see how you can be right about puzzle games. If you outsmart a puzzle with an off-beat solution then you did indeed outsmart the game, it was unintended, and it didn't break the game and it wasn't a poor design. So I suppose my statement isn't 100% true, although I think the developer/designers goal when making puzzle games is to be aware of all solutions (which isn't always possible of course)
There's a typo in the last paragraph on your blog.
Let plays discover things for themselves don't be afraid of letting players be stuck for a while.
Also, I enjoy games that have secrets in areas you normally wouldn't think was accessible or even existed like in Megaman X the location of the X-Buster upgrade that lets you charge your shots up even further is impressively well hidden, unless you researched its location you would very likely always think you can only get it from Zero.
In super Mario BROS., discovering the warp pipes at the end of each underground world was fun, at the time.
I... can't really think of many other examples D:
I wouldn't call this "outsmarting".
It's just the norm, hi-quality design (which sure becomes rare thing nowadays) - a design that doesn't require any explanations which would ruin the fun.
By the way:
Link to video
There's a way to teach any non-obvious game mechanics. It's just that only a few game designers can do it without going down to awkward methods like text tutorials.
Oh, and TASing has nothing in common with the topic. TASing is about outsmarting a program, not about playing a game just as planned.
I do not think I am wrong. The examples you listed are not effective to dismiss what I said.
You're completely missing the point. Any game with decent depth and interesting mechanics will have tactics and strategies the developers never envisioned. If the game was so simple that the developers figured out the optimal strategies in beta testing, then it's probably not very good.
You know the best example of a legendary game that had hundreds, nay THOUSANDS of tactics/strategies its creators never envisioned? Chess.
VirtualAlex wrote:
Starcraft, and general RTS are developed in a particular way much like Magic the Gathering. The developers provide the player with tools, the player's job is to use the tools to create a stronger force than the opponent. In this case it is the dev's job to provide nice tools, but not necessarily to test every combination. You are not outsmarting the developers when you use the tools as intended.
Uh, no? In many instances, on a high level, the tools are being used in ways the developers never intended. Not just in terms of pairing them together in a different way, either.
And the idea that developers can simply provide "nice tools" and then sit back and relax is ridiculous. Ever heard of something called "balance"? It's absolutely vital for a game with a serious multi-player component. If the developers don't provide safeguards against someone using tools in a manner different than they intended (and it happens), the game can become severely unbalanced or even broken.
It's also why every serious multi-player game has numerous patches.
VirtualAlex wrote:
Also if you DO end up outsmarting the developers and create something that is too powerful it is patched out of the game.
I don't see how the existence of patches supports your original point that "outsmarting the game when the developers didn't intend it is simply bad game design". In fact, you're actually arguing against yourself by saying this.
Since every good multiplayer game gets patches, then according to you, they were all poorly designed upon launch.
VirtualAlex wrote:
I am not sure what you mean about fighting games unless you be specific, but each character in a fighting game only has a finite number of moves, all of which where intentionally put in. I can't even imagine what a player could do to outsmart a fighting game unless he found some awful exploit. I know in one of the street fighter games there is a glitch which lets you perform an invincible move if you do it right when you come out of a roll. It became a standard element of the gameplay however it is undeniably a glitch.
I wasn't even talking about roll-canceling in CvS2, which is what you're referring to. There are dozens of such glitches which the game developers never intended, by the way.
However, I'm talking about basic things, like Sagat's ridiculous zoning in vanilla SF4, or any of hundreds of tactics in MvC3. Most of these were never imagined by the developers.
VirtualAlex wrote:
I can see how you can be right about puzzle games. If you outsmart a puzzle with an off-beat solution then you did indeed outsmart the game, it was unintended, and it didn't break the game and it wasn't a poor design.
Your statement mentioned nothing about breaking a game. Only that anything not conceived of by the developers which is effective automatically implies "poor design".
Which, once again, is just plain wrong.
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I think the Halo speedrun on SDA demonstrates "outsmarting the game." The player goes outside the boundaries of the level and then proceeds to go though the level in the "out of bounds area"
The developers did not want that to happen. The AI tries to follow the player in the out of bounds area but was unable to follow due to the level design and pathfinding routines.
When TAS does Quake 1, SDA will declare war.
The Prince doth arrive he doth please.
This reminds me of a favorite game of mine: Spacechem.
The difficulty is ludicrous, but you always have clear goals and a full understanding of your tools, both from the simple instruction pages and from the fact that set pieces either are common symbols like arrows or normal English verbs.
There is exactly one level that tells you what to do, and it is needed, since it explains both how the interface works and lets you discover what each marker does.
The challenge there is not the game not teaching you the tools, it is the game not teaching you what to do with them. You are forced to discover designs on your own.
The tasks given to you seem impossible, but as you start thinking about them you realize how to do it.
The game is completely forgiving about mistakes too. There is no penalties what so ever. You just don't pass the level.
Do you know what the best feeling a video game can give you is? Letting you feel like you outsmarted the game when, actually, you are simply playing as intended. It is a different matter entirely when you outsmart the game and the developers did not intend it.
Okay... long explanation for this one. But since you wrote a wall of text, you can handle reading one, too, can't you?
There are many differences between a child gamer and an adult gamer, but the three most significant are as follows. In general:
1. The older you get, the harder it becomes to pick up new skills. This is due to the brain becoming less malleable around the age of 20. This is a very well-known effect in the education system, and it also applies to video games. It becomes much harder to quickly master new games after your teenage years are over, unless they resemble older games you have already mastered.
2. The older you get, the more money and freedom you have. Children will play a single game for months or even years because their parents will only buy them a new one for Christmas or their Birthday. These are the games which children play inside and out, master, and value. But once they grow up, get a job, suddenly they find they have enough money to buy whatever games they want. A small, dedicated game library of a few dozen games usually balloons into a library in the hundreds, because a grown person will still feel value for gaming and want more of those feelings they had as a child.
3. Here's the big one: The older you get, the less time you have, and the more you value said time. When you become an adult, you have to provide for yourself, and a load of other things as well: work, college, a relationship, a family... all these things combine to destroy most all of your "free time", leaving little room for gaming. But there's also a little voice in your head constantly reminding you that you're mortal and that your time upon this earth will one day end, and that you'd be ashamed of yourself if you wasted so many hours of that limited life accumulating fictional accomplishments rather than real ones. While your mortality may dawn on you as a child, you're usually not as worried because you're still so obviously young and know you don't have to worry about dying of old age anytime soon. But as the years tick by, this worry starts to surface, as you start to realize that a quarter, or a half, or more, of your life is already gone. Your time becomes immeasurably precious and valuable.
So, to recap: adults have more games, which are harder to get into, less time to play them, and a nagging conscience telling them that games are worthless and it's time to move on.
What's a grown-up gamer to do?
Easy: they compromise. They hold their chosen games to certain standards, and look for value in them. Not just entertainment value, but long-lasting, significant, lifetime value, the same value one looks for in work or hobbies -- value which can mentally justify the time spent on video games, value which can be put on their proverbial résumé. Any games in which they cannot find this sense of value, they discard and ignore as pointless and boring.
So, what values are these which adult gamers look for? Again, there are many, but two which are most important by a landslide:
1) Contribution value
When you examine a game for contribution value, you ask yourself these questions: "Am I naturally talented at this game? Can I pick it up more quickly than other people? Can I impress other people with my knowledge and skills? Can I hold my own in competitions? Or can I play the game more creatively than other people? Can I contribute something to this game's community or the culture surrounding it?"
You'll garner much more enjoyment from a game if you feel that you are naturally talented at the game, that the game is easy to you but hard to other people. Some game developers have picked up on this particular trend, and are crafting their games to make the players feel that they are talented, when they really are just normal players. This is the effect you're talking about in the original post, as well as the most important factor in determining a game's popularity over the long-term.
See, it's not that you're outsmarting the game, it's that you're outsmarting all of the people whom you envision to be playing the game "normally". These could be real people, or just projections in your head, but these are the people you work to impress with your skill and dedication to the game, and this is where the true source of the fun comes from. As someone from Activision was recently quoted as saying, games are like relationships. If you feel that you're skilled at a game, that you can play impressively or uniquely or with mastery, that you can achieve and outlast where others would falter... you feel that the game is "yours" in some way, and that you are contributing something new to the game and its existence. You are effectively in a rewarding relationship with the game.
If, however, you feel that you have no place among the game's community of players, that you cannot do anything new and that you can never measure up to the masters, you will soon realize there is simply no more point to trying and the game will cease to be fun. The value in it will be lost, and thus your interest.
The TAS community is a good example of this. We as TASers strive to bend and break games in ways that have never been done before, contributing our parts to the games we play. There is no point in TASing a game unless you can beat the record, right? Nobody creates suboptimal TASs for fun, right? (Well, unless it's a playaround run, I suppose, but those are groundbreaking in their own right). The point is, we are all here to be contributors and to make groundbreaking entertainment for our audience, and so our hobby of TASing is sustained, as we feel competent enough to do justice to the games we play and make entertaining, technically incredible movies nobody else would make.
2. Experience value
Failing the above case, the adult gamer has a second way to justify their hobby: they tell themselves that their games are important life-experiences, significant accomplishments, and cherished memories. That they are somehow becoming more intelligent, more skilled, and all-around better people because of the games they play. This is fine and all, except for one small problem: experiences, accomplishments, memories... these are all things that are typically most valuable when they are in the past. Thus, for a gamer who is playing a game to feel proud or accomplished, the reward is truly in the destination rather than in the journey. These gamers may not have anything against the games they play, but they want to put the games behind them as fast as possible, so that they can move onto all those other games in their library, or to other real-life important things their conscience tells them they should be doing.
These are the gamers that care about achievements and hundred percent completion. In fact, if one achievement or objective is perceived as too hard (or worse, glitched), it invalidates the entire gaming experience for them, and they will refuse to even start. It's because the entire fun in the game is the feel of accomplishment -- without the end, the journey becomes pointless, and the conscience quickly resents all the precious time "wasted" on the task.
Other times, you might choose to refine your goals, such as "100% completion is too hard! I'll just beat the game and forget about 100% completion". But really, we all start out playing new games with a mentality that we will stick through until the very end... we really don't know when boredom will kick in and we will start seeing the experience as pointless. And even after boredom does kick in enough to take a break from the game... if you were a completionist as a child, as most child gamers were, it's hard to mentally forget a game you haven't totally finished yet! As long as you keep that game on your shelf, it'll continually scream "Finish meee! Finish meee!" until you either break down and finish it, or get rid of it.
In the end, there really is no such thing as "just for fun", to put it flatly. "Fun" is merely the feeling of fulfilling an emotional need. Everyone has their reasons for playing games, whether it's to cure a spell of boredom, or to explore a new world with new physics, or to dominate other players in competition. Anyone who says they play a game "just because it's fun" is either ignorant of or covering up the reason they play, the need which the game fulfills in their life.
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CtrlAltDestroy wrote:
These are the gamers that care about achievements and hundred percent completion. In fact, if one achievement or objective is perceived as too hard (or worse, glitched), it invalidates the entire gaming experience for them, and they will refuse to even start. It's because the entire fun in the game is the feel of accomplishment -- without the end, the journey becomes pointless, and the conscience quickly resents all the precious time "wasted" on the task.
Sounds like someone I know very well... I am afflicted with this curse.
Anyone who says they play a game "just because it's fun" is either ignorant of or covering up the reason they play, the need which the game fulfills in their life.
Very interesting post, I really enjoyed reading it and agree with much of it. But I disagree with your conclusion. I fall into each of the categories you describe (at one point or another). However, I do fall squarely into the "just for fun" category with some games at some times. A good example of this is Mario 64. Here is a game that is so intrinsically fun to play for me that I will regularly revisit it just for the joy of playing. Sometimes I do not even try to achieve any particular goals (in-game or otherwise). I think that these sort of gaming sessions are really just "for fun."
These are the gamers that care about achievements and hundred percent completion. In fact, if one achievement or objective is perceived as too hard (or worse, glitched), it invalidates the entire gaming experience for them, and they will refuse to even start. It's because the entire fun in the game is the feel of accomplishment -- without the end, the journey becomes pointless, and the conscience quickly resents all the precious time "wasted" on the task.
Sounds like someone I know very well... I am afflicted with this curse.
There are three things in gaming that seem to be very popular but which just don't interest me almost at all: Achievements, real-time strategy games and online multiplayer games.
I have never understood the charm in achievements. Some people seem hooked to them, searching every single useless item in the game just to get some kind of "all items found" achievement, and so on. I don't see any reason to do so.
To be fair, though, I often get hooked to things that most other people deem boring. One prominent example is level grinding in many RPGs. (If it's well done and the awards are just right, it can be really addictive.) I do understand perfectly, though, why most people find it boring, so it's not like I blame them.
There are three things in gaming that seem to be very popular but which just don't interest me almost at all: Achievements, real-time strategy games and online multiplayer games.
Jeez, these are three of my favorite things in games. Online multiplayer is probably my overall favorite. Single player is usually tremendously easy and offers no real challenge.
What I love is playing people from all over the world, and gradually improving at the game. At the beginning, there will be many that are far superior to me, and will squash me like a bug. Over time, I learn new skills, discover new strategies, improve my play, and become good at the game.
For me, there is nothing more exciting and rewarding in a game.
I also love real-time strategy, although I prefer turn-based strategy as I'm simply better at it.
Warp wrote:
I have never understood the charm in achievements. Some people seem hooked to them, searching every single useless item in the game just to get some kind of "all items found" achievement, and so on. I don't see any reason to do so.
It depends how well the achievements are set up, but usually, I like them. It offers me a challenge more difficult and interesting than merely beating a game on the highest difficulty, which is (again) relatively easy these days.
Oftentimes, beating a difficult challenge is more rewarding and causes me to expand my skills far more than obtaining the best ending.
It's just the norm, hi-quality design (which sure becomes rare thing nowadays) - a design that doesn't require any explanations which would ruin the fun.
By the way:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=8FpigqfcvlM
There's a way to teach any non-obvious game mechanics. It's just that only a few game designers can do it without going down to awkward methods like text tutorials.
I liked the parts about teaching game mechanics subtly, including making fun of Rockman Complete Works's unnecessary hint system, but I think when he was explaining the basics of MegaMan X, he missed an opportunity to compare and contrast X's dash ability to the original MegaMan's. You see, a player of the classic MegaMan games might see that and think, "'Dash'? Psssh, that's not a new ability, that's just sliding from Mega Man 3, only with the sprite flipped over." But the way they're used differs between the series enough to highlight the differences between the series in general.
Sure, the original slide mechanic may have seemed like a nice aid for slipping past fast-hopping bosses, escaping enemies that chase you, or just getting across flat, boring terrain faster. But at the same time, it introduced passages half MegaMan's height that force him to slide into them, where he can't shoot or stop moving, and they can also form one-way gates when the floor at the end of the passage isn't longer than the ceiling. Whereas X doesn't run into those passages all the time, the floors can be sloped instead of stepped to help him dash longer distances, and dashing can be combined with other actions to enhance their output: Jumping during a dash makes X jump at high speed to clear longer gaps; with proper button timing, X can even dash-jump off a wall to help scale wider rooms; and for some reason, shooting while dashing makes the lemon do twice as much damage, because suddenly acceleration really makes a difference in strength of impact now I guess!
So while the basic idea is the same, MegaMan's slide is used to create new hindrances for him, while X's dash is used to make him even more awesome in the hands of an adept player. You can see how this distinction was kept in mind when Capcom started making Bass a playable character in the platformers: Bass gets a dash move that, like X, makes him soar faster when chained into jumping (as if being able to jump off air isn't enough?), but only MegaMan's slide is able to fit into the thin passages leading to bonus goodies, as that was one of its original purposes.
For other ways X made the old game mechanics nicer, you could say the energy tanks were changed to make the player stop worrying so much about losing them forever, and also to make the scattered energy refills more useful if the player doesn't have enough trouble in the levels to need them where they are. Then the Buster upgrade seems to show a thought process of "Well, collecting another nine weapons is fun... And charging up one weapon is fun... So charging up all the weapons will be the most fun!" (I get the feeling that some of the later games may have ruined some of this good design, like how X 3's random empty boss rooms ruined the feel of boss rooms in general, but that's getting into complaining about games I haven't played yet.)
But have you seen the previous video in that series, the Castlevania 1 vs. Castlevania 2 one? In short, Castlevania 2 was an example of how mixing two good game concepts doesn't always work, as they can end up emphasizing each other's weaknesses rather than their strengths. But then Castlevania 1 was also a good example of how a more limited control scheme can actually make a difficult game fairer and more interesting, as you have to be creative to work around the limitations, yet there's less wiggle room for error once you've worked out a winning strategy; and that's how I explain the appeal of games like the Dizzy series.
Warp wrote:
I have never understood the charm in achievements. Some people seem hooked to them, searching every single useless item in the game just to get some kind of "all items found" achievement, and so on. I don't see any reason to do so.
I haven't played a lot of games with achievements myself, but I can understand how they could take the fun out of coming up with your own achievements when there's already an official list of them. To use MegaMan X as an example again, many players will eventually say "Forget turning into that Mary-Sue Zero! I'm a bad enough dude, I'm gonna beat the whole game as plain vanilla X!" And that would be exciting, since it's something you're not really expected to do, and at certain points you may have to re-evaluate how feasible it is, get some discussion going about what's possible. But if it were on a list of achievements, you might be saying "Oh, great, so I have to go through the whole game all over again, but forgo all the upgrades this time, just to complete my list of tasks? This is gonna be torture..."
I think there could be some Mark Twain theory of work vs. play going on here.
put yourself in my rocketpack if that poochie is one outrageous dude
I haven't played a lot of games with achievements myself, but I can understand how they could take the fun out of coming up with your own achievements when there's already an official list of them. To use MegaMan X as an example again, many players will eventually say "Forget turning into that Mary-Sue Zero! I'm a bad enough dude, I'm gonna beat the whole game as plain vanilla X!" And that would be exciting, since it's something you're not really expected to do, and at certain points you may have to re-evaluate how feasible it is, get some discussion going about what's possible. But if it were on a list of achievements, you might be saying "Oh, great, so I have to go through the whole game all over again, but forgo all the upgrades this time, just to complete my list of tasks? This is gonna be torture..."
I think there could be some Mark Twain theory of work vs. play going on here.
I think the most rewarding approach might be to treat achievements as "suggestions". Some achievements I find interesting, and obtaining them really forces me to push my skills to the limit and get more out of the game. Other achievements are brain-dead and repetitive and thus, I simply ignore them.
I think the most rewarding approach might be to treat achievements as "suggestions". Some achievements I find interesting, and obtaining them really forces me to push my skills to the limit and get more out of the game. Other achievements are brain-dead and repetitive and thus, I simply ignore them.
This is my opinion as well. Sometimes, you'll look at an achievement list and see something like "Beaten the death gauntlet without using the rocket launcher", and you will realize, "Wow! That actually sounds quite fun, you'd have to be really strategic to pull that off, I think I'll give it a try." If the achievement wasn't there, you would have considered the game complete when you finished the death gauntlet for the first time, and never even considered such a self-imposed challenge.
Now, you might say, "Why don't you just put it into the game proper as a challenge mission? Why does it have to be an achievement?" Because, well, there's no real reason to. Your own goals will always be in your head, whether or not they match what is in the game, on the achievement list, or on some text file you found on the internet outlining fandom-created self-imposed challenges. In the end, they're all the same.
Warp wrote:
To be fair, though, I often get hooked to things that most other people deem boring. One prominent example is level grinding in many RPGs. (If it's well done and the awards are just right, it can be really addictive.) I do understand perfectly, though, why most people find it boring, so it's not like I blame them.
Ah, another fascinating topic.
I read a very interesting article about level grinding a long time ago, shame I cannot find it again. But here's the gist of what it said: RPG stats were first used in tabletop games before they appeared in video game format. In tabletop RPGs, all those numbers were not actually gameplay mechanics so much as they were storytelling mechanics. Dice rolls and character sheets gave the interactive story universe a reasonable sense of consistency above and beyond just "let's pretend", and also helped to balance the story to make it more interesting and keep all the character actions in line with their in-universe ability. Case in point, you wouldn't commonly see players "level grinding" at a tabletop RPG, because that wasn't the point. And if they tried, the game director would probably keep them from getting too powerful.
When RPGs became video games, experience points and stats were turned into a game mechanic. However, they had an ulterior motive aside from just "slay more monsters, get stronger". See, oldschool RPGs such as Dragon Quest had a free-roaming open world design -- no stages. You didn't see things like "World 1-2" as in Mario games, because the game progression was open and nonlinear and you could choose wherever you went. Even older games like Rogue had a certain open-world elements like this, as you were allowed to go down stairs to revisit areas you've already seen. However, gameplay still has a very clear progression due to the EXP systen. Ready for your mind to be blown? Higher stats and character levels aren't there so much for the sake of making your character stronger, they're there to make parts of the map more boring, giving you the inkling feeling that it's time to move on from your starting point and press into new areas of the game. It's a subconscious cattle prod to go to the next area. Voila, now you have "Levels", in a game that has no "Levels", and they're ironically called "Levels"!
Unfortunately, this design philosophy didn't make it very far past the oldschool RPGs, as gamers soon found that level grinding was strangely addicting, and game designers began to design their games around it. Missing the entire original point of leveling mechanics, they find themselves faced with this question: "How to make it so that parts of the game don't become boring? We want to encourage leveling, because it's the key component of gameplay. However, we don't want the character to get so strong that parts of the game become boring. We want all parts of the game to be exciting, all the time! So how do we make our players continually strive for strength, yet never truly give it to them?" Thus was born all those cheap tactics such as rubber-banding enemy strength to match the player, or adding stronger monsters to old areas later in the game, or reducing the EXP dropped by lower-level monsters as you gain levels, or capping your strength based on the area you're in... The list goes on and on, because the original truth behind video game RPG mechanics is simply lost to the ages, never to return--the truth that staying in one area and aimlessly grinding was designed to be boring to give you an idea of what parts of the map you're supposed to be at what time.
Ready for your mind to be blown? Higher stats and character levels aren't there so much for the sake of making your character stronger, they're there to make parts of the map more boring, giving you the inkling feeling that it's time to move on from your starting point and press into new areas of the game.
Can you back this up with evidence? I have always thought they were implemented to slow you down so that you don't rush through the game "too quickly."
