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Looking for suggestions (Patreon)

Published:
2015-11-12 08:08:25
Imported:
2021-03

Content

Hey everyone! You were so helpful with my question about Tomb Raider footage (I'm going with the PS1 version), that I thought I'd put the call out there for help and suggestions with a couple upcoming videos.

The first is about open world games, and how they're a little overzealous with the helpful hints, map markers, compasses, and GPS lines during quests. Instead of really engaging and exploring a world, you just... follow the bread crumbs.


I'll be looking at some ways that game developers can mitigate this feeling.


Like the treasure maps in Red Dead Redemption/Skyrim/Black Flag, which ask you to find buried booty based on a crude drawing of a tree. Or the little mini-quests hunts in Fallout/Skyrim that aren't proper quests, so you have to track them yourself. 


Got any other examples? Played an open world game that doesn't hold your hand every step of the way? Tried playing an RPG with these quest hints/navigation turned off? (I'm trying it with FO4 and the results are... Interesting. I'm utterly engrossed in the world but I haven't found or finished any quests since turning them off!)


Any thoughts welcome.


The other video is about the way Tomb Raider's controls have changed - from the tricky, mechanical tank controls of TR1 to the loose and sticky automation of TR: Legend.


Because while the new controls are infinitely easier and more accessible, going back to TR1 - and really enjoying it! - made me think that perhaps we've lost something in the change to more simple controls. TR1 made platforming challenging and deliberate and an actual skill you could master. More modern TRs have had to focus on combat and puzzles because the movement is so slick it's almost not a mechanic anymore. 


(I haven't got Rise of the Tomb Raider yet - out tomorrow in Europe - so I'll need to play that to see if anything has changed. Hope so! (even if it would slightly scupper the video)). 


Played any games that actually make jumping and traversal a challenge (I've got the obvious ones like mirror's edge, grow home, and Mario)? Are you, too, dissatisfied with the easy and automated movement controls of games like Uncharted and Assassin's Creed? How many endangered tigers have YOU murdered lately?


All thoughts welcome here, too!


Anyway, sorry I haven't posted much lately. I've been nose deep in research on both of these videos. Hoping to get one (not sure which order I'll go with) out next week. And then the other on... probably Nov 30.


Otherwise I've been playing The Room 3 (a cracking series of mobile point and clicks, that even point and click haters will appreciate), and Mega Man X2. And I just got a review copy of the new Mario and Luigi, which I'm looking forward to playing... sometime. 

Comments

Anonymous

The first video seems really interesting! Bioshock had options for that kind of stuff, turning off quest arrow, glowing items etc.

Anonymous

Miasmata is an open world game where you had a map with nothing marked on it. You had to do the marking yourself using a highly original landmark triangulation mechanic I haven't seen anywhere else.

GameMakersToolkit
>>977869

Oooh, I've heard of that but never played it. Sounds like an essential play for this episode - thanks!

Anonymous

Witcher 3 - Treasure maps give you a general location, where you must use Witcher senses to find the general area where the treasure is hidden then wander around looking for the nook or cranny with the actual hidden chest.

Anonymous

Traversal - I still think Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands is one of the best examples. Everything is sticky and effectively straightforward in terms of steering you a fair bit in the right direction, but because of the complexity of the timings and effects you can achieve gradually introduced (e.g. freezing water to make surfaces you can jump through or unfreezing to open a path) make the platforming sufficient complex and requiring precision. They also become super-engaging and the sense of achievement when you execute a section requiring regular and precise timings is pretty damn awesome.

Anonymous

Shadow of the Colossus had a nicely vague method of directing you to your destination. Dormin would give you a vague clue as to how and where to find the next colossus: "Thy next foe is... In the land of the vast green fields... Rows of guiding graves... It is giant indeed but fearful, it is not." You would have to use this information to find the general region where the colossus would be waiting. You could also reflect the sunlight off your sword to point you in the right direction, but it wouldn't guide you around obstacles (it just pointed as the crow flies). I find methods like this keep you heading in the general direction, but traversal is up to you. I like this because I know I'm on the right track but I still get to enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to get there.

Anonymous

Kind of obvious but can't beat morrowind for having to find your own way through the world, and since all items were hand placed in the game getting lost and stumbling upon a rare artifact could be very rewarding.

Anonymous

Funny you mention the treasure maps in Red Dead Redemption, that’s a great execution by Rockstar and I just realised GTAV is probably the game that is the least playable of all without markers/GPS. Good luck finding Michaels house on your first repo as Franklin! Got to give them some slack for the setting though with regards to player expectations. Also, some of those RDR treasure maps are super difficult/impossible to find if you go looking for them, but they made sure other content pushes you into the same direction or increase the chance you ’stumble upon it’. What MMO’s, like World of Warcraft, do a lot is working with easily predictable stories or cultural references that players will recognise and know how to respond to. For example from one of the starter villages. In the Inn you hear monsters have been spotted near the lake and later the farmer’s wife at the farm next door tells you her husband is missing. Players can deduct the missing husband is probably at the lake and if not they might find him while hunting the monsters there (as a fail safe). Not really a traditional open world game (not a sandbox game for sure), but I think Dark Souls (1) does a great job of guiding a player without markers. Using intricate level design and enemies (placement / strength / appearance) to guide a player in certain directions. Other clues are hidden in item descriptions a player might or might not read. It all adds to a sense of discovery and achievement. With the controls I would say there are 2 big trends at work. 1) Switching buttons around on a controller is not fun gameplay.
The longer we play on similar controller layouts, the more we grow accustomed to certain button configurations. Any console shooter now would be weird if the left and right triggers are not for aiming down sights/shooting. I believe the Uncharted collection for PS4 changed the controls of Uncharted 1 to match those of the new games for this exact reason (haven’t played it myself, but read it somewhere). 2) A general move away from controller handling as a ‘skill’. Though timing and dexterity used to be the basic skills required to play games (like Super Mario). The dexterity part is being pushed out over the past years. I would say this started around the Playstation 1 era because of the bigger audience. I guess the dexterity is harder to learn? It’s harder to tell why you fail at something due to your dexterity while ‘pressing a button on time’ is pretty easy to communicate (and combat). The birth (and popularity) of Quick Time Events!? Hmm i typed a bit more than I intended, a well, /ramblings!

Anonymous

Here's some of my input =) 1. As you've mentioned yourself, Far Cry 2 does a pretty good job of throwing you into a hostile environment with a physical map that you can't pause the game to check. The thrill of finding diamonds on a detour is so good because it's unguided. 2. Don't Starve, while I wouldn't exactly call it an open world game, does a great job at making the players discover everything themselves. If you commit to not reading the fan wiki, it'll truly be an exploration to play this survival adventure. Plus you actually have to remember stuff like which two wormholes connect, where that Beefalo herd is, and whether that tree was actually the tree guard you spawned half a game-year ago! 3. Anti-Chamber is a complex open-world puzzle game without individual levels. You find and obtain ways to get past obstacles you may have seen before (kinda reminds me of how you talked about Toki Tori). It's quite easy to get lost in this game, figuratively and literally.

Anonymous

The best I've played for this is the first Shenmue - obviously the world is small (and has to be because of the density of content in it) but I like the non-gaminess of the rewards you can get from exploring the world. So ringing up other characters doesn't get you more health or items or anything, you just learn more about them and Ryo's relationship with them is filled out a bit. It's like the action itself is its own reward. And stuff like just looking in Ryo's drawers and cabiinets at home was something you could do if you wanted (& the interface was horrible, so it took effort), there was no gamey reason to do so. It just made the world feel less like a constructed game environment. And when you're looking for information on the next story quest you don't just go to a big glowing marker - often you get some vague piece of information and have to speak to people until one offers something useful. Sometimes it makes you look at characters differently - sizing up how likely they are to know about a topic like what goes on at the docks ('I bet so-and-so will know about this..') rather than them just being a repository of needed game info. & often there was more than one way to get the information you needed, which made the experience of exploration feel more meaningful (as you found your own way through it).

Anonymous
>>977896

+1 for The Witcher 3! I love the way that game just puts question marks on the map, and it's up the player entirely to figure out how to get there and then discover what happens -- almost every single one of them leads you on some kind of adventure.

Anonymous

This video immediately pops to mind (<a href="https://youtu.be/jPqwDGXxLhU)" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/jPqwDGXxLhU)</a> talking about navigation in Theif: The Dark Project and they way they prompted the player to be an active participant in understanding the level. This feels similar to the way the MGS encourages you to spend time identifying threats with the binoculars (only to mitigate this challenge with your buddies down the road...:). Anyway, worth checking out the video just so you're not rehashing trodden ground :)

Anonymous

Been working on something similar to this idea. A good example I found for organic exploration is Morrowind. If you haven't played it you should If you are gonna talk about open world. The game doesn't use a map or HUD. Its all done through environmental design

Anonymous

I know this is not quite what you asked for, but I wanted to share my perspective on the navigation thing. Most articles I've read on this subject don't acknowledge that navigational aides are an accessibility concern, and I didn't want to see you fall into that trap as well. I have a terrible sense of direction. I get turned around really easily and it's very hard for me to figure out how to get from one place to another. Locations like home, work, and that restaurant a few blocks away may as well be different dimensional planes and directions like "turn left and walk three blocks" may as well be a magic ritual to move between them. In real life I rely heavily on GPS, and in games I rely heavily on maps and whatever other navigational aides are present. While I agree some games can overdo it, for me it's much worse for it to go the other direction. In highly-spatial but non-linear games, I NEED a good map (surprisingly many maps aren't nearly good enough) or I'm guaranteed to get lost early and often. I hate backtracking because I don't remember how to get back to wherever I need to go - I don't play metroidvanias because when I get that new ability that's gonna let me get through the ice cave or whatever, I have no idea where the ice cave was. It's also really frustrating when it takes multiple buttons/clicks to get to the map because I'm going to be calling it up a LOT. I've occasionally seen articles about turning off maps for a new experience or ones decrying that games don't let you get lost anymore. I always roll my eyes at these articles. I'm not going to tell you to check your sense-of-direction privilege, but I do feel like these writers don't realize that not everyone has the same easy time finding their way through worlds, virtual and otherwise. There are a LOT of games that still let me get lost, and if I turned off maps then my new experience would involve wandering around trying to find the content I was playing for until I got frustrated enough to quit. I do dislike the general handholding trend that some games are showing, but I'd argue there's a very important difference between "providing enough information so that the player knows what to do or where to go" and "telling the player what to do or where to go."

Anonymous

Just Cause is really awful about bread-crumbing you during missions (ie: it sets a GPS marker and draws lines on the road), but when you're not on missions there's a lot of reason that it gives you to explore. There's the obvious ones (towns to blow up for chaos) which really ask you to just explore, but they give you some other, non-explicit things to seek out and blow up. Windmills are passive items in the world which give you chaos for blowing them up. However, they're not tied to a specific town and instead, contribute to the overall chaos of the world. When you take down a windmill however, you get a popup in the corner that reads x/total windmills destroyed. The windmills are not explicitly marked on the map (to my knowledge) so you can't just hunt them down and self-mission it, you actually have to just come across them as playing or slowly search them out, one island at a time. The second passive thing that I can recall is upgrade parts, which you can often find underneath overpasses. These are marked on the local minimap, but not the global map so you still have to explore on your own. Another one of these local-only type items is the Faction Items (Skulls, Black Boxes, Drug Drops). These items will show up on a proximity radar (flashes if one is in the vicinity) but I don't recall them being explicitly pointed out - you kind of play a game of "hotter, colder" until you stumble upon them.

GameMakersToolkit

Hey everyone. Wow, thanks for all the great suggestions, ideas, and opinions. I will ask for this sort of stuff more often! So I'm going to be working on the quest marker one first. I played Morrowind on your suggestions and I was taken aback by how complex and deep that game is. I've only been playing Bethesda games since FO3 and boy things have changed, right? But yes, a great example of how to do open world navigation organically and in world. Will definitely be talking about that. Miasmata, too. I really like the triangulation mechanic on the map. As El says, sadly turning off quest markers/GPS just doesn't work if the game wasn't explicitly designed for that way of playing. You just get lost. That Thief video was great, thanks Alex, and touches on some things I'll be discussing. I'll make sure to link to it in the description for further viewing. Dan - I see your point, and thanks for sharing it! I agree that good maps can really improve the accessibility of a game. But I think devs sometimes go too far where the navigational information is so upfront and centre you have little choice but to blindly follow it. I'd like to see more of that stuff be optional, or left in a menu. But yes, I don't plan to suggest that every game removes its map - it's more about offering some optional side quests for those who want a navigational challenge. Thanks for all the other ideas too, everyone! You will, of course, know the second the video is released.