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Should Gamers Use Smarter Problem-Solving?
Thanks to the IGDA for its 'Culture Clash' column exploring the effect of technical and gameplay advances on videogame problem-solving. A situation regarding Deus Ex: Invisible War is discussed, where "...testers approached a T intersection: to the right were laser tripwires and gun turrets; to the left was a locked door; and directly in front was a (usable) window. He said every single one of them, without fail, went to the right." The author explains: "One can imagine how frustrated developers must occasionally get when they watch gamers consistently employ Neolithic problem solving tactics when modern development tools make much more advanced techniques available." Is this a problem that developers or gamers should work to overcome?
I like some of the ideas that are put forth in the article, but I think that people will gladly come up with new and interesting ways to succeed in games as the physics and AI models become increasingly complex.
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but is it self-defeating in the sense that even IF there are multiple solutions supporting wildly different playing styles.. there will still be players who charge through every level, and there are those who prefer to take their time and explore all avenues of progression..
Personally I can't wait till we are able to play games that allow us utilise varying strategies... I don't mean open-ended games (if a plot is done well in a game I find it can be very rewarding working my way through) but rather games that present me with a problem.. and rather than doing XYZ to get through.. I can do whatever I might think could maybe work in real life.. (or might work in whatever imaginary world I'm currently playing in..) I'm really hoping that HL2 lives up to the hype.. although I sorta doubt that it will..
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Hmm, something I just thought of: why would such a protected installation have a perfectly usable window there allowing intruders to gain entry?
Anyway, the key should be that as games continue to expand the range of what is possible in their system they must help the users discover and explore these new possibilities.
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In Space Quest, that's the way to get to a (very short) scene from King's Quest.
I'm struggling to remember the dialogue. "Did you hear something...?" "Just the moat monster". Gadzooks, it's been many a year since I played that on a Apple //c.
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"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Part of the solution is to understand the game's audience. As many people have already stated, most gamers are trained to go for the NPCs to kill, or explosives to disable/sneak around, rather than for the (seemingly) easier solution. There are of course, audiences who would be more interested in problem solving. Such games as ATITD (www.atitd.net) have gameplay that would break down if the player base was that of normal MMOGs. ATITD, instead, has drawn a large audience of people who enjoy crafting and developing, and most importantly, working together with other players, and do not mind the lack of fighting. If the Deus Ex 2 developers wanted to get people to do more problem solving or exploring, they should have targetted the FPS audience less than those that enjoy theif, or perhaps fans of action-oriented adventure games (if there are any...)
When I play games I try to cover an entire contiguous area before moving through a door into another. I don't want to trigger a boss battle or a level exit knowing that part of the level is still unexplored, and in the worst case now permanently inaccessible. In the case of the article, even though the right path might have been difficult and straightforward, it might have looked like less of a commitment. I would have taken it just to see where it led. Once I saw it all I would decide whether I wanted to go back and jump in the window, or take the door I found at the end of right path. Forks in the path of the game are cool, but I can't resist exploring both branches as far as possible before making my decision.
I'm sorry, but this seems like Ion Storm's fault. They hired testers from a certain breed of gamers, the "casual hardcore gamers"; the type of gamer that spends a large amount of time with only a select few games, usually the most popular games at that.
If they had found people that had played similiar games, such as the original Deus Ex, Thief, or even Half Life, then 60 percent of the Thief gamers would go through the window while 80 percent of the Deus Ex and Half Life fans would have gone after the locked door expecting an item.
I'm sorry but multiple paths isn't a new conecpt, it was around in the oringal Deus Ex and Thief games, about 4 years ago. Invisible war being a sequal, I don't expect multiple solutions, I require that.
My personal problem with Invisible War was that the branching was pointless. All branches were shallow and did not require any special skills or abilities. If I'm given the option of blazing guns verse stealth I expect that choice to follow me for atleast 15 minutes, not the 30 seconds it takes to get past that one point. I wanted to feel like my actions defined the character, not always take the path of least resistance and then double back and make sure that nothing was missed with the second path that joined with the first after one room.
It's because many of the gamers of today were trained very poorly. The games they played through their childhood were like Resident Evil or Goldeneye. I played those too, but I was older then. I had been trained on things like Metroid, Mario 3 and Zelda. You know, before you knew where every secret was you bombed every wall, shot every guy, flicked every combination of switches.
Back in the day games required you to have advanced problem solving skills to win. In this day and age of arbitrary gaming and strategy guides it is very difficult to make a game that actually requires thinking. I'm glad the people are trying though, because that's my kind of game.
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EVER text adventure I've ever seen (bar none) is less "wide open way to solve a problem" and more "struggle with what can be done in the limited nature of the system."
There's no reason that a CCRPG couldn't be used that invoked the non-combat skills of any RPG on the market today--they just don't do it because it's a pain to program, and those that want creative solutions will ALWAYS be better off finding a real person and playing RPGs the right way.
And lots of games don't let you shoot out windows and go through them. If you want to let people do this, make it clear in the tutorial, or make it the only way to get through a section earlier in the game.
If you really want to make people go through the window and not through the war zone, make the war zone so incredibly difficult that nobody can get through. Eventually, people will look for another way.
I would take the laser tripwires path because I know when I'm being herded: the game continues in the direction that's the most-defended, everything else is always a dead-end. :)
I am sick of locked doors, unscalable short piles of office furniture, and unbreakable glass. I have grenades, you have technology. Stop making things indestructable! For gods' sake, I have a fucking CROWBAR, shouldnt I be able to pry something open?
As "interactive" and "dynamic" as half-life 2 claims to be, I know that it doesnt matter that "if it looks like wood, it splinters like wood!", because I'll still be herded along an unavoidable path full of enemies and scripted events. I would appreviate having the alternative method of reaching the end of the level by way of obliterating the entire building, thank you.
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First question: if I enter the T to examine the window, will I come under fire from the turrets?
Second question: Can I look through the window into the room beyond without breaking/opening it? I've not played Deus Ex, but in some games windows can be astonishingly opaque until smashed open.
In a fire situation, you neutralize the threats you can see first, then you look for the threats you couldn't see at first.
Here's roughly how I'd approach something like this:
At this point, if I start taking fire from the turrets I will HAVE to deal with them. IF this is how the setup worked it is little wonder most people dealt with the turrets first!
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When I am employed on a project, I work a lot. When I come home, I like to unwind playing games a bit. Maybe I'm missing the point, but sometimes I just don't _want_ to solve a problem the subtle, elegant way--I played Deus Ex once, and after being told that it was possible to solve it without firing a shot, I resolved to finish the game in as violent, confrontational a manner as possible.
Why? Pure fun. From listening to friends who finished it, I believe there are plenty of intelligent, thinking gamers out there who will not put their head through the wall figuring out how to finish a game. Not me--that's (usually) not my style. I like the fact that less ham-handed ways of solving games are available, for the rare times when I feel like doing the intellectual thing, but usually, well, thag smash crush.
That said, Deus Ex 2 licked the sweat from a dead man's b***s. The plot, the dialogues, the voice acting, the characters were cheesy and contrived and the developers should look to themselves before criticizing the gamers. Maybe the people blowing up the turrets were just annoyed that they'd just spent 40 bucks on such a crappy game?
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"...testers approached a T intersection: to the right were laser tripwires and gun turrets; to the left was a locked door; and directly in front was a (usable) window. He said every single one of them, without fail, went to the right."
Do you have any idea how many games I've played where "going to the right" really was the only option to the player, how many game publishers I've had to deal with that believe that a game has to do nothing more than be time-consuming to be any fun? How many times have you come to a difficult spot in a game, told yourself "There's got to be an easier way to do this," looked around, and found no easier way?
If the publishers want gamers to use more subtle solutions they should put those subtleties into their games more consistently. In the example given, I wouldn't be surprised if the window wasn't used because it was the only time such a simple solution was put into the game at all, a gesture for the programmer to say "Ooh, look! I'm clever!" before going back to giving us nothing but hack-and-slash.
The games that I've played that do not place excessive amounts of useless doors look a bit less realistic in urban environments, but they actually feel that they are a better game. However, the game designers have to favour graphics rather than gameplay because of the noisy demand overshadowing the popular demand.
I'm annoyed by windows as well - In games that implement breakable windows, I normally look to them as an alternate route, but yet there is almost no way of telling which Window is breakable and which one isn't. At the very least, there should be 25% opacity to at least imply that the glass is thicker than normal (or even better, place metal reinforcements in the glass as Red Faction does.)
Even with games that allow opening windows, there is very little insentive to do so. Deus Ex implemented exploration bonuses to allow your character to become slightly more powerful, but most other games simply place an item that you can find elsewhere or a simple health pack - something you can note later but nothing to really spend time looking at.
Linearity, although another problem with games, is extremelt difficult to fix. As you know, the more options available, the harder it is to make sure that the plotline is consistant. For example, Deux Ex has three endings which appear to be mutually exclusive - merging with Helios, joining Illuminati, and destroying Area 51. It's sequel had to make a decision about which ending was official (all three of them combined, even if it creats questions such as "How did Alex Denton survive?").
As always, its developers not knowing how to write a game - or developers not having enough time or resources to write it properly.
This is exactly what good game designers do really well. The original Deus Ex excelled at this, and Half-Life had it down as an art (HL2 sounds to be even more in line with this philosophy: they say that a lot of the times playtesters didn't even know that they could do certain things, so Valve had to script the NPCs to do it occasionally as part of the story just to demonstrate the basic techniques)