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Author Topic: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have  (Read 42913 times)

Il Palazzo

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #30 on: September 21, 2018, 01:46:18 pm »

Is it possible to laminate and frame a  forum post to save it for later appreciation?
Do you need a tutorial?
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KittyTac

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #31 on: September 21, 2018, 08:14:57 pm »

Is it possible to laminate and frame a  forum post to save it for later appreciation?
Do you need a tutorial?
Print it and frame it IRL.
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Eschar

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #32 on: September 30, 2018, 11:06:10 am »

Is it possible to laminate and frame a  forum post to save it for later appreciation?
Do you need a tutorial?
Print it and frame it IRL.

Are you giving hints?!
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overseer05-15

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #33 on: September 30, 2018, 11:20:11 am »

Is it possible to laminate and frame a  forum post to save it for later appreciation?
Do you need a tutorial?
Print it and frame it IRL.
Are you giving hints?!
lllllNllll\!/llllNElllll

Great, now he has a quest marker on his compass.
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Eschar

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #34 on: September 30, 2018, 11:26:49 am »

Joking aside, NetHack is not going to go well for you with no wiki.
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Senator Jim Death

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #35 on: September 30, 2018, 02:25:21 pm »

This was an excellent post. Its quality is so high that I considered actually reading it. Ultimately, I did not read it, instead opting to post about it.
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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #36 on: October 01, 2018, 11:02:47 am »

Spoiler: tone criticism (click to show/hide)

You are correct that the majority of the difficulty of DF lies in its clunky UI. You are presented with a pile of colored letters, and you interact with them by pressing keys. But once you understand digging, building, etc., you can survive indefinitely as long as you have mud. Turtling is incredibly powerful. Airlocks let you continue to interact with the outside world, but if you don't, you can make all the food and drink you need with a small farm, and that's it. The recent updates have increased the needs of dwarves, but the community fortress Rockfalls is a great example of this. It's really quite easy to Win once you understand the UI. And it's also quite boring. Beating the computer isn't that fun...

But that's not the point of DF! It was never intended to be You Versus Machine. As the creators have stated, DF is a fantasy world generator. It's all about making narratives. So you do something interesting and see what happens. You impose restrictions on yourself, or set your own goal. Do you want to make a tower out of soap? Feed your entire civilization? Never make anything out of rock, wood, or metal? Make the world's best library? Succession fortresses are fun because you collectively tell a story, and the rapidly changing overseer presents challenges (often in the form of crazy hodgepodge designs).

(The earliest versions were quite different. They were much harder IMO, and there was actually a chain of events that would inexorably lead to the downfall of all fortresses. Winning was impossible. There was no reward at the end. Although this seems opposite to the current version, it's actually the same in an important way. Winning is not the focus. It's the stories you create while trying and the friends you make along the way.)

I'm not saying this is the only good way to make a game. Each game has something that the player can gain from playing it, whether it's the satisfaction of beating a challenge or a memorable story. But keep in mind the differences when you compare games with different goals.



You claim that many things are bad game design, but you don't explain why you think that's the case. You just throw out a pejorative and move on.

  • Difficulty settings: the point of many games is to present a challenge that can be overcome with effort. Difficulty settings make games accessible to more people, whether they're utter newbs or skilled veterans. Yes, you can choose Easy if your goal is only to Win. You will probably be disappointed, because people don't like Winning in and of itself. They like Winning through challenge. So know thyself, and choose the right setting. (What's it to you if somebody uses an easier setting? Elitism alone doesn't justify anything.)
  • Tips, hints, and tutorials: most games (except experimental/meta ones) don't try to put the difficulty into the UI and system. So it makes sense to explain how the system works so that players can move on to the actual playing part.
  • Cutscenes and cinematics: if the goal is to tell a story, this can be useful in moderation. Making them skippable opens the game to both story-based and non-story-based players. If story is fluff, you won't like cutscenes and cinematics. That's fine. Not everything needs to be built for people like you.
  • Compasses: actual objects that exist in real life. If your complaint is that you don't have to view a compass being pulled out of a bag whenever you check your compass... why? User interfaces exist for a reason.
  • Abstractions (maps, stealth meters, health bars): useful shortcuts to convey information more quickly and readably. If your goal is not to simulate the difficulties of keeping track of intelligence while fighting Nazis, but just to simulate the difficulty of not dying to Nazis, then you shouldn't focus on simulating the difficulties of keeping track of intelligence. Games don't have to be about everything.
  • Fast-travel: if your goal isn't to simulate the drudgery of traveling long distances, then you shouldn't simulate the drudgery of traveling long distances. I like it when I have the option not to fast-travel sometimes, but I wouldn't gain much from pressing w for an hour whenever I want to go to another town.
  • Predictability: if the main goal of a game is very predictable, then it can really only be played once or twice. That's better than zero times. If a side detail is predictable, then that's fine. Unpredictability can be good to a limit (the UI should remain constant, the basic concept of the game should stay the same, unless you're doing a very arty game), but predictability isn't the worst thing.
  • Turn-based games: just an abstraction, although one with wide-ranging effects. If your goal isn't to simulate being pressed for time as you do things, turn-based games work fine. In fact, you can still simulate it. It just doesn't extend to the physical player needing to move quickly. The adventurer still only has one minute before the demon is summoned. In DF, the abstracted player interactions with the world correspond to a dwarf making plans. Without a pause button, planning a simple boxy building could take more time than building it. It makes sense that realtime designations shouldn't run at the same ingame pace as when it's unpaused.
  • Birds-eye views: third-person is an abstraction that can help the game. Roguelike displays are minimalist. They're just a different way of presenting information.

The point of a game isn't always to learn how the UI works. That's almost never the case.

If someone wants to spoil themselves, they can do that. If you want to discover it yourself, you can do that. Nobody's stopping you.

The path of least resistance always exists. It may be more resistant in an absolute sense, but you can't say "having a path of least resistance is bad."

If nothing can be explained, you don't have a game or a challenge. Unless you mean "you can only learn it in an intuitive sense which cannot be explained with words".

I very much doubt that you have worked out a superior system to Dwarf Fortress v1.0 that you could code in a week by spending some time with graph paper.

You are not the only sane man in a sea of idiots. You're not even the only elitist and overconfident gamer.
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Reelya

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #37 on: October 01, 2018, 11:19:37 am »

The OP's ideal game would be shit.

An unforgiving and fast-paced unpredictable game, with no maps, compass or other direction-finding apparatus, which is designed to change the rules each time you play it, which also forces you to travel long distances in real-time in between the actually interesting parts. It would be confusion and sudden death interspersed with length walking sequences.

So, you spend 1 hour trudging through the wilderness,  not even sure of where you're going because of the lack of any map, compass or other navigation aids, then out of nowhere, some sort of mutant bandits jump out with weapons and spells you've never even heard of before and decimate you, because to give you any feedback about how those enemies actually work, other than your own death, would be hints/tips. There is also no save option, because saving and restoring is for pussies. So when you inevitably die, you start again, but each time we completely randomize how all the different types of enemies work, to keep it unpredictable and ensure you can't learn the game via hints or tips.

And, if you manage to work out how to survive the bandits in one area, then get to another area, the game is designed to ensure that anything you learned before is of the least usefulness possible, to ensure the game is "unpreditable" and cannot be learned or memorized.

To make it extra-good we'll have random pit traps everywhere, in completely unpredictable locations, and make sure they're not marked or labeled in any way that you could notice and avoid them, and give each pit trap a unique timing to that one trap, to ensure you can't just learn some timing to escape from all the traps. Game of the Year edition.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2018, 11:27:50 am by Reelya »
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Egan_BW

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #38 on: October 01, 2018, 11:34:04 am »

Either a very wordy troll or someone with far too much IQ for their own good. Entertaining either way.

Tip for the OP: it seems that you didn't want anyone to reply to this, due to hating any form of criticism that's directed at yourself. You can prevent people from posting in your thread by locking it.
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Reelya

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #39 on: October 01, 2018, 11:36:55 am »

The idea of randomizing the locations of secrets is especially fucking retarded (excuse the term).

Say you do that, then the way to find the secrets is to click on literally everything. So, you click on every piece of wall in every room, because otherwise you might just miss a room with a secret located in it (since they're entirely random and there's no pattern to where they are located).

That's not good gameplay, it's just repetetive busy-work and a boring "gotcha" if you just play through the thing without being a mega-nerd about clicking on everything.

"randomized secrets each time you play" sounds good on paper, except it doesn't take much actual thought to realize why the idea would actually suck in practice. Whether a game idea is good or bad is all about how it influences the way that people play it, and it would cause player-behavior of needing to have OCD about clicking on everything in the game.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2018, 11:41:30 am by Reelya »
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Senator Jim Death

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #40 on: October 01, 2018, 02:29:37 pm »

"There is one ideal kind of gameplay" is as stupid and uninformed a statement as "there is one kind of cancer." Gameplay is about allowing a certain class of person to enjoy having fun. That's it. Games are about fun. Perhaps if too many people are having fun with a game then more games will be like that one, but you can't roll a knock-on effect like that into a definition of what makes a game good. Successful games like TES, CS, LoL, PUBG and whatever haven't crowded out other kinds of games.

I know--in fact, it is certain that underlying the "stop having fun" mindset is a deep-seated fear that one's own variety of fun will cease to exist. Stop worrying! That won't ever happen. Or it will, and you'll just have to change with the times. I can't even remember what I was playing obsessively 15 years ago, unless it was Action Half-Life or something. I was a pretty good shot with that shitty little Ruger .22, mostly because it was fun to be at a huge disadvantage and still hold my own. You'd get these assholes flying all over the place like some Korean butterfly sword game thing. Just shoot them.

Anyhow, I guess what I'm saying is shut up and remove yourself from my lawn.

(I acknowledge the "games as art" stuff and have even appreciated a game as art in my time. That's secondary to this discussion and I don't want to talk about it.)
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Egan_BW

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #41 on: October 01, 2018, 02:44:41 pm »

Still, it's rather oversimplifying to say that games are only about being fun. Games can be about whatever the creator thinks they should be about! Though if you make a game about having no fun at all performing a repetitive task, it might turn some people away.
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《monty》

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #42 on: October 01, 2018, 02:56:34 pm »

Hm...Compelling points. At least DF can fix some of golf's glaring faults by procedurally generating the equipment for each world and giving them unfamiliar names. The player then has the fun of working out whether, for example, a Borik, which consists of an hourglass metal drum with a leather head, is used to strike the Jrilmis, a glass bell with a single low pitch and a full wavering timbre, or vice-versa.

This is a bismuth bronze driver. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is made from bismuth bronze. This object is adorned with rings of goblin bone and menaces with spikes of pitchblende. On the item is an image of Arnold Palmer in emerald cabochons.
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Reelya

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #43 on: October 01, 2018, 03:17:28 pm »

Still, it's rather oversimplifying to say that games are only about being fun. Games can be about whatever the creator thinks they should be about! Though if you make a game about having no fun at all performing a repetitive task, it might turn some people away.

There are opinions that the word "fun" holds back some of the understanding of the scope of the medium and can be used against the medium. For example, there was an educational game (an interactive fiction type) about being an African-American slave girl in the pre-civil-war South. It was blasted for "making oppression fun". In fact, the "game" was like a visual novel, and not really any different to say, watching a movie or reading a textbook about the history of slavery. It was merely an interactive way of presenting it. The critics complain about "winning points" in the game. They've clearly never played it and have an idea of "games" being "fun" and being about "scoring points" that's about 30 years out of date. The term "fun" doesn't help much to dispel those misconceptions about how and why interactive formats are used.

"engaging" is better than fun. Games can be downright depressing or scary as fuck. "fun" sends the wrong message.
« Last Edit: October 01, 2018, 03:21:14 pm by Reelya »
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Egan_BW

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Re: Suggestions About What the Game Needs to Not Have
« Reply #44 on: October 01, 2018, 03:21:07 pm »

Not that there can't be games that focus on fun over being engaging. They don't really advance the medium, but people like arcade games for a reason.
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Down at the bottom of the ocean. Beneath tons of brine which would crush you down. Not into broken and splintered flesh, but into thin soup. Into just more of the sea water. Where things live that aren't so different from you, but you will never live to touch them and they will never live to touch you.
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