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General Discussion / Re: [?] Always step on the nep-nep (Happy thread)
« on: June 01, 2018, 01:36:34 pm »Quoteif you fail, it should be he has a cut face for the game
Possible, but then that's another set of models / textures they need to make, and if nobody actually notes his face is cut, how important is it that you can go through the game with a cut face? And it wouldn't just be "cut face / not cut" you'd have to have a blend so that the cut recedes with time. This all costs money for virtually zero narrative benefit. Also, if you add a "face is cut from shaving but it recedes with time" set of texture blends, then that's specific to that one shaving event, and people will wonder why other potential injuries don't also have the same "scarring system". And that would be because each possible scar would need to be modeled as a separate texture overlay on the model, eating up the art team's time and reducing the rendering speed in the final game.
You say this as though they have no control over the narrative of the game and could increase or decrease the incidence of having to model these things.
The narrative benefit of the player cutting the avatar's face open during the tutorial would be that their actions have consequences within the world of the game. The tutorial tells you to gently push the right stick down, whereas I smashed it down and got the character to grimace, suck in air through his teeth and then try again. It would have been a great touch for the tutorial to then go "well you messed that up, can't fix it now though" and go on. Maybe have another character comment on it later to remind me as a player that the instructions on the screen are for the optimal outcome, other things may happen if you don't follow them.
And then remember, it's not just "cut face". That's just what you thought up. They'd have to anticipate every individual thing that everyone on Earth would have thought you "could" do at every point. Which is nonsensical. if they'd added in a "cut face" branch for just that shaving scene, then that would have just been an "on rails" pointless detail anyway. And all those details would cost a lot, and just delay shipping of the game and/or bring in countless chances for bugs or textures or models fucking up. e.g. going into that much detail on optional things would mean the project is a guaranteed failure before it's launched.
In this particular example, I have to disagree. There are only so many outcomes from someone shaving (unless you want to go extreme and say he could slash his throat open and die in a fountain of arterial spray in the bathroom
) ranging from not as clean a shave as you would like, to cutting themselves. Like I said before, the devs have control of the narrative so they would be able to hash out the details of any particular situation while writing so that they can limit the amount of work that coders and artists have to do in order to portray it in the game. I don't expect every little situation to have a possible branch into something else, but I would like my curiosity to be rewarded (or even punished!) if I decide to go off the rails for a bit.There's also the player's point of view. e.g. if an unimportant scene such as the shaving thing could cause a semi-permanent scar on the main character for the rest of the game, you'll get 1-2 people who think that's cool, for 99 other people who get pissed off and end up reloading the game from before the shaving event, until they get it first time without the scar. So, taking player psychology into account you can assume almost all people would just reload the game if that happens. So then, you design it so that it merely makes you do the shaving thing again automatically e.g. exactly what the game actually does. There's also another realism aspect here: most people don't fuck up shaving and walk around with a cut face for hours, even if they went "ow!" it's usually not an actual cut that would really be visible. So there shouldn't be e.g. a 50/50 chance of that happening to you each time you shave in the game, either. e.g. unless it's an actual plot point, then it should be less than a 1% chance, e.g. you cut yourself shaving 3 times a year. And since it's so unlikely, it just makes more narrative sense to prune the possibility down to 0%.
Now you're just being silly throwing numbers in that don't mean anything
I would imagine there are fewer players out there that would reload the tutorial to not have a blemish on the character model than would think it would be cool to be reminded that their ability to perform the QTEs has consequences for the characters they control, and the game world itself (as in if someone else commented on the consequent wound) but then I'm just arguing my perspective on gamers over your own, which is silly too.
Anyway, people like to play games differently. I used to be unable to deal with messing up in a game and would always reload for the "perfect" experience, but in recent years I've rather enjoyed messing things up and trying to recover from it. I might play through a game again for that "perfect" experience, but that would only be if I'm trying to do a particular thing, or to see what happens.
It's a bit of a dick move by a developer to say that a player needs to play a game in a particular way to get the best experience, particularly when that game is marketed as interactive drama. Not much point in the interaction if you're being told you have to interact with it in this very particular manner (on such a minor thing as shaving!) or you won't progress.
