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Have Modern Gamers Lost the Patience For Puzzles?
Brainy Gamer has an interesting reflection on old puzzle games and why their style of gameplay seems to be a dying art. According to the author modern gamers seem more interested in combat and seem to have lost the patience for difficult puzzles. "Despite my fondness for the adventure games of yore, it appears the days of puzzles in narrative games have come and gone. Puzzles - especially the serial unlocking variety found in the old LucasArts games - seem to have become a relic of a bygone era. Where they once provided a necessary ludic element to a—clever and often complex narrative - designed to add challenge and force the player to earn his progress through the story - few modern players have the patience for such challenges anymore."
Plenty of modern games are based around puzzles, they're simply more organic to the game environment and therefore not as noticeable. I don't think it's a matter of modern games not having enough patience, I think it's a matter of gaming evolving into a more immersive and holistic experience.
Or perhaps one called Portal? I hear some people played them in 2007.
I'd say that Portal by Valve pretty much dispels this argument. Gamers aren't tired of puzzles. They've simply gotten smarter and like being challenged rather than bored over mindless running around and pressing buttons to make doors open.
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Did you just totally miss Professor Layton and the Curious Village?!?!?!?!
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
Give it enough time and things will eventually come full circle, people will get tired of the same old shooter with amazing graphics and frankly thats what it's been for the last 7 years its been mostly about shooters with big guns and dazzling graphics. Today thats not good people want great gameplay mechanics, just look at the Wii, which reminds me of the good olde days of when my family and friends would crowd around ye olde Atari 2600. The good puzzle adventure games had their day after the Atari's sunset, give it some time and they'll be back.
That's why Portal was so wildly unpopular, right?
I think it might be a reaction to the highly arbitrary puzzles in past adventure games. Remember FFX and the arbitrary puzzles it forced you into every once in a while, they were maddenly arbitrary and added nothing to the game. Many of the Sierra games had random arbitrary puzzles as well. This is par for the video game puzzles. They add nothing and simply provide a barrier for people. There were a few interesting puzzles but largely they were senseless and distracting. I don't really want to play the towers of Hanoi every 20 minutes so I can open a locker with ammo. I'd prefer not to have to figure out that I need to insert a spatula into a anti-matter reactor so I can power a jar opener to access a gob of acid to eat through a door. If you left it optional, then maybe; but stopping the story and game to play some ridiculous puzzle or some arbitrary item combination is not fun.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Having non-randomized puzzle elements in games made sense before the easy availability of Internet boards and hint sites.
Today, any such content is rapidly bypassed by most. To some degree that is a pity - games like Cruise for a Corpse were great experiences. But alas, the genre just requires too much self-command to be viable.
Of course, randomly-generated puzzlers are still with us - perhaps with increasing computer power, and more sophisticated AI, we will see a revival of randomized puzzle-like adventures?
I have always thought that the old Sid Meier title Covert Action is the best blueprint to follow to revive the puzzle-based action-adventure genre.
The Longest Journey was a wonderful adventure / puzzle game. The puzzles were ingenious and generally pretty logical (with one exception that I recall). And the story line was fantastic... easily the best story of any game I've played. Came out about 8 years ago but well worth buying and playing if you enjoy puzzles that fit nicely into the story.
I loved Portal and I'd like to see more games like it. The key is a comprehensible and consistent set of rules. I don't mind trying to figure out a puzzle as long as it makes sense.
What I hate are those "puzzle" games that have you clicking on every goddamn thing on the screen and using every item on every other item to try to figure out what some designer decided should work based on some arbitrary reason or whim. Of course when you try some similar solution in another level, it won't work. That shit is just annoying. Give me more games like Portal!
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Zack and Wiki is a great puzzle game for the Wii. It's even pirate themed for a little of that old Monkey Island feel ;) :)
It's not a real adventure though, because it's a sequence of levels where every level is one big puzzle where you have to get to the treasure chest.
And the puzzles are great, not easy and requiring creative thinking. I bought it based on the positive reviews, and I love it
That fine, but a lot of puzzle elements in games are just incredibly badly done. Having grown up on King's quest and before that text-based games, I have to say there's no excuse for:
1. Get key from wizard's corpse
2. Have level 12 enchantress bless it with swamp water from a Super Troll
3. Carry it in magical satchel for 4 hours, constantly typing "USE KEY" at every opportunity.
4. Give it to talking vulture who swallows it and poops out the real magic key, thus going back to the beginning of the game.
Its just arbitrary absurdist trial and error. People rebelled against this and moved to shooters for a reason. Typing in "USE KEY" 100x doesnt really compare to Doom. Now the shooters have become stale and we're going back to puzzles.
Of course in D&D its a different but scripted computer puzzles have serious limitations. Its not the genre's fault. Its the people and technology's fault.
Don't blame GameFAQs, the puzzles have always been of the impenetrable use-live-weasel-on-airliner-after-setting-fire-to-cake-in-sweden variety that everybody hates. I recall some Elvira knock-off giving answers to adventure puzzles in CU Amiga and it bewildered me that people would start playing those games to begin with if "use the tuning fork on the harpy before, and only before, going to the west wing" was the standard of intelligence going into the gameplay. Good stories, but the "necessary ludic element" was so often the "obligatory irritating checkpoint". If I can get an equally compelling yarn with some enjoyable gameplay, of course I'm going to look elsewhere.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
That little toy is java, but it points us in the right direction. A lot of this stuff has moved to the web. There are approximately 8 trillion little flash puzzle games. Some of them are very clever and fun. There's a lot of variety, and various levels of quality and polish. But either way, there's plenty to choose from.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
I have a rule I use to distinguish good puzzles from bad puzzles: If the easiest method for solving the puzzle is a breadth-first search of the entire possible-solution space, it's a bad puzzle.
This conversation often comes up when i'm talking about games with younger people. I remember playing the same game, the same phase in that game, for weeks, sometimes even months! Remember the Kings Quest series where you had to find numerous ingredients to make some crazy potion and had to go through all kinds of weird places to almost score with a chick in Leisure Suit Larry. The increasingly difficult and hugely entertaining puzzles in 7th Guest and 11th Hour, and not to mention the fun hours playing Day of the Tentacle.
I am a huge fan of ScummVM and play some of these games still every now and then. Some months ago my wife and i re-played The Dig, the game that was supposed to be a movie but due to budget became a video game.
Yeah ..
And Zelda for the NES is just nothing compared to the one for Wii, i'm sorry. Must be because i'm an old fart (damn, i'm only 31!) but these newer games lack the fun and playability (playing for weeks and still finding it amazingly funny and challenging) that the older games had. Sure there are exceptions, but games like KQ,LLL.MI,DOTT and the like are classics which no modern game can top.
But unfortunately IMHO many of the later games (including some later offerings from Infocom) copped out and instead of eloquent puzzles they offered painful trial-and-error puzzles or puzzles so obscure and obtuse that you really had to buy the hint books, call the 900 number, or otherwise "cheat" or you were not going to solve the problems. Far from wonderful puzzles, these are just crude hacks disguised as puzzles from writers who either can't or will not take the time to design graceful puzzles. To come up with an absurd series of idiotic steps that a player must somehow recreate to accomplish the goal, with no logic behind doing these either in the real world or in the game world other than that's what the author has decided you must do, is hardly a valid puzzle. It's just an ego trip for the author and the reason for the decline in supposed puzzle games. And as at least one commenter here pointed out, there are still some good puzzle games, such as last year's Portal.
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The other problem is quality control. I just played NWN2 and the Mask of the Betrayer sequel. ... Oh, and the bugs were so plentiful that the walkthroughs had the script segements necessary to bypass the bugs.
I had to resort to the walkthroughs to convince myself that yes, the game had broken, yet again
I'd done all that was necessary to complete that particular quest and unless I wanted to hack past it I was going to have to restart.
One of the problems with the newer graphics/scripting engines is that more underlying complexity has brought more fragility. Complex annoying quests may irritate some players, but complex annoying BUGGY quests are a decent onto hell.
Honestly, why don't you just let those people have their shooters while you enjoy your Wii. I completely don't understand why people need to evangelize for whatever game system they bought.
It's not evangelism, it's the brutal truth that the Wii Remote is a *better* input device than two thumb sticks. It's easily almost as good as mouse. *That's* why everyone wants to see more shooters on the Wii, the system is screaming for better games that utilize the controls.
Sure, we live in a day of MTV attention spans but keep in mind that we speak a different language as well.
From years of Sierra and Lucas Arts games, we learned that balloons and bread might combine hours down the road to scare off pigeons and that if you miss a clue now, you'll have to backtrack 2 weeks from now and find it.
Thank god, a few designers in the past decade looked at these little "skills" and using many words such as "arbitrary" and "tedious" decided to slowly change WHAT gamers pay attention to rather than HOW MUCH attention they play.
Think back to a few of those old games and you'll remember an element of tediousness. Even though it may not have dissuaded you back then, you had built up a careful repertoire of knowledge to insulate you from the worst of the events. You knew that something disjointed was probably important. You knew NOT to leave items behind no matter how frivolous. In short, you spoke the language of the game writers enough to pick up on the clues about which today's players would be...well...clueless.
Yes, today's fast paced games are frequently faster paced, but there are plenty of players that enjoy the slower aspects of games. The problem is that modern players no longer have the same context from which to play the older games.
I also think Myst qualified as a puzzle game. Although it wasn't puzzles in the traditional sense, it still had clues and things to solve.
I'm not sure I understand... Myst's "turn the knobs the right way and push the buttons in the right order to make the doohikey do its thing" style is pretty much what I consider the definition of traditional puzzles.
The enemies of Democracy are
I think you've confused PUZZLES with TEDIUM. Memorizing (or writing down) a map isn't puzzle solving. It's data storage.
paintball
ME: Pick up knife
Computer: I don't understand "knife"
ME: Pick up sword
Computer: I don't understand "sword"
ME: Pick up saber
Computer: I don't understand "pick up"
That's when I tended to eject the floppy and try to see how far I could toss it.
The fun in most adventure games comes from getting an understanding of the world that surrounds you in the game. The fun in a puzzle isn't getting stuck on it, but gaining an understanding of the underlying mechanic and finding the solution or just in interacting with the world. The hard part of course is the balance between frustrating the player and actually giving him something he has to think about, which however can be worked around quite well by always having alternative puzzles the player can solve and by having a world that is actually interesting enough to explore.
The problem with todays games is that most games don't even try to create a good puzzle, either they are so easy that they are hardly noticeable or they are so stupid and non-integrated into the game that they just annoy ("Here is a locked door, go find the key"). The classic LucasArts adventure almost never had any puzzle of such blunt stupidity, instead you had to figure out how to dress a mummy to win a competition and other crazy fun stuff that integrated seamlessly into the story. There was no "play the game" or "watch a cutscene" separation, it was pretty much all the same thing.
Also the thing to realize is that puzzles are not only there to stop you from making progress, but also a means to explore the world, to touch it if you will. In an adventure game you can grab things, smell them, eat them, open them, talk to people and a lot of other stuff. In most mainstream games today on the other side you have the choice between shooting people in the head or blowing them up with a grenade, you have no way to talk to them and no way to use items in a meaningful way. Its all just run and gun without ever stopping and looking around and getting an idea what really is happening.
Now of course not every action game needs to be riddled with puzzles, but most of them really could need some calmer moments that departure from the standard run&gun.
Seriously, the DS is has tons of adventure games with a lot of hard non-linear puzzles. Try the Phoenix Wright series or Hotel Dusk. Those have the same kinds of puzzles and problem solving that you'll find in the old Monkey Islands, Mysts, and similar games. Then you have the more epic Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami, and Zelda games, that offer a combination of adventure puzzles with action elements.
As a fan of really puzzly adventure games, I really don't agree that puzzle games are disappearing. In fact, I think they're getting more involved and more difficult. Sure, the puzzles are becoming more integrated into the setting, but I think that's a really good thing.
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Actually myst like most puzzle games were a waste of time for me. I could never figure them out. Infocom games were a good example of you had to be in the designers shoes before you even had a chance. I just was sick of wasting money on games I had no clue what they were getting at and that even just guessing didn't get me anywhere. FPSes and sims at least you could see a reference to do things with and didn't completely lock you out if you didn't understand something the way the designer did.
I miss the classic adventure games -- which were really puzzle games -- like King's Quest, Space Quest, and Monkey Island.
Those had great stories and lots of humor along with reasonable puzzles to be solved.
I think they'd do fine today but no-one seems to make anything quite like those.
Java.
Write once,
run anywhere.
Yeah. Right.
The promise of Java was never, "Write once, run correctly on any broken, incomplete Java clone that you inflict on yourself out of principle."
Enjoy your martyrdom while it lasts: fully free Java is right around the corner.
What I DON'T have patience for is WALKING. It's one thing to have to figure out how to unlock some complicated door puzzle, it's another thing to have to spend 20 hours walking back and forth gathering bits and pieces to "solve" a puzzle.
The problem with puzzles in games is that the nature of the puzzles deteriorated over time to be moe time consuming and tedious and less clever.
Get rid of the extraneous travel time associated with the puzzles and a lot of people will suddenly have a lot more patience for them.
Oh, and that will have the added bonus of stopping developers from artifically increasing the playtime of their games via incredibly long travel times.
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Strategy is mostly about managing resources (like ammos and health) in order to achieve a general goal (like killing ennemies). Puzzle is about finding one solution (not necessarily unique) to one particular problem.
What it means is that choosing a weapon instead of another depending on the resource you have and on the penalty for using a less adequate weapon is strategy. But using first a Hypnotize Big Daddy plasmid to lure him in front of a security camera and then using the Security Bullseye Plasmid to kill him requires close to no resources. It also requires close to no action skills. The only thing it requires is finding one solution to a single problem. The difficulty is finding THAT solution. This is a puzzle kind of problem to me. The only difference with the classical adventure game where you have to search through you inventory to find out what object to use on the "problem" is the game don't tell you explicitly it is a puzzle and it doesn't block you if you don't find a good solution.