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Avoiding Wasted Time With Prince of Persia
Zonk pointed out an interesting video presentation by Shamus Young on the importance of the new Prince of Persia, calling it the most innovative game of 2008. Young brings up the fact that many of today's games punish failure by wasting the player's time; being sent back to a check point, the beginning of a level, or sometimes even further. This cuts into the amount of time players have to enjoy the meat of the game — the current challenge they have to overcome. Unfortunately, as Young notes, modern controllers are designed for players who have been gaming since they were kids, and have evolved to be more complicated to operate than an automobile. The combination of these factors therefore limits or prevents the interest of new players; a problem Prince of Persia has addressed well through intuitive controls and the lack of punitive time sinks.
that is the worst feature, puts the game on easy mode, plus PC games have had this forever, it's called the quick save button.
Actually there was a way to die in the first game, but you really had to suck (or do it intentionally). Early in the game guybrush makes claims about being able to hold his breath for 10 minutes. When you are thrown in the water tied to the idol you have 10 minutes to figure out the very easy puzzle before you drown and all your actions turn into float, bob, etc.
Anybody play Prey? "Death" was a mechanic used to get more ammo. That's a really good way to cheapen what's supposed to be a rather major mechanic of gameplay. In my opinion, Half-Life 2 got the perfect balance. *VERY* frequent auto-saves (and it keeps 2 of them) with the capability to quick save anywhere you want. Obviously things are different for a console game, but I feel that Half-Life 2 hit the sweet spot where you wanted to avoid death, but weren't frustrated by it.
Well, what made Braid one of the best games of 2008 was the fact that it continually expanded the scope of this feature in order to never allow it to be used for exactly the same purpose level by level.
I saw it as one of the most inspired uses of current generation of hardware (speed of caching and disk storage). The insinuation that it was "for the casuals" is off-base imo because even I, an extremely seasoned gamer was enthralled by the mechanics which pushed me to expand my way of thinking about games and level design (and story telling) in order to finish.
In Monkey Island, you could never die either. But it was still a lot of fun to play!
Monkey Island was all about the puzzles, and dying just distracted from that. Even the combat was a hilarious puzzle game, nothing to do with arcade skills.
PoP has arcade-style fighting and platforming, and the thrill there comes at least in part from avoiding death. I agree with earlier posters: where is the sense of achievement without that threat?
Now see... for me, the "fun" part isn't in defeating the hard part, though that is gratifying, it's in finding out what happens with the story line and the characters. The best game out there is going to come out with a really involving and interesting story line, and if it has challenging gameplay so much the better. That's why, on my Wii, I have spent *many* more hours playing through Bully than I have on Mario Galaxy. It's just a better story. (Mario Galaxy basically tells the same story of *every* Mario game since the original Donkey Kong) And I'm just not interested in games where the object is to run around killing things. Hell, the last shooter I played was either NOLF2 or Thirteen on the PC.
Different kind of gamer, I guess. I won't play PvP games at all, because there's too many 13-year old retards out there (mindset, if not physical age). And I get tired of people asking me to get on voice and cyber when they find out that women actually do play games. Closest I get is WoW, and I play on a non-PvP RP server. *shrugs*
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Prince of Persia is a huge bomb sales wise.
Now the question is why?
This analysis would lead us to understand that it was on the wrong console then.
Especially this tidbit from the OP: "as Young notes, modern controllers are designed for players who have been gaming since they were kids, and have evolved to be more complicated to operate than an automobile. The combination of these factors therefore limits or prevents the interest of new players; a problem Prince of Persia has addressed well through intuitive controls and the lack of punitive time sinks."
There is the problem. The audience to whom this was adressed, is not on PS3 or XB360. The game didn't solve anything, as the people scared by these modern controllers just won't buy the consoles that come with them. There's only one home console this generation that solved this, and this is the only one where Prince of Persia wasn't released. Go figure.
So basically, they published a game that solves only half of the problem, but unfortunately, they released it for the wrong audience.
The audience on PS3 and XB360 is not scared by these old mechanics, and don't want what they think are dumbed down mechanics. Those that are veterans but still wanted this to change also bought a Wii, but they're not the bulk of the audience needed.
This just shows this PoP was a very stupid move, these 3rd parties look more and more stupid as time passes.
One of the better ways to reduce the 'getting stuck' that I've seen was in the Simpsons Grant Theft style game Hit and Run. If you failed a mission around 10 or so times it offered to just let you continue on, or you could keep on trying.
I have played enough games that have 1 utterly painful level to appreciate a way to continue on without hours worth of repetition.
There is no sense of achievement, then
You've never played Monkey Island, I take it.
Just because you can't die, doesn't mean you can't fail. You can fail to solve a puzzle, in which case you'll never reach the end of the game.
'course in those days we didn't have gamefaqs.
Some of my friends picked up the Lego Indiana Jones game and this has the same issue, probably worse. They didn't seem to care that as soon as they died they just re-appeared and kept going, but within a few minutes I questioned why I would ever play it if you're just brute forcing through the story without consequence.
You've got to remember that Lego Star Wars is a kids' game. Just treat it as a ride. But there are challenges in there - you need to solve simple puzzles to make it through the game, and more complex puzzles to get all the collectible items.
My son has Lego Indiana Jones and I installed it on my computer this week just for something to do. #1, you are right that there are no consequences for dying other than a loss of Lego bits (and progress toward 100% completion). It really is a brute force children's game. What is completely frustrating to me is the lack of save points. You have to complete a whole section at a time in order to save. When we needed to leave on Christmas eve I was 3/4 of the way through a section with no way to save, so just had to abandon where I was. Very poor design that again rewards just plowing through a level.
I am not sure what to think about Assassin's Creed yet since that doesn't seem too difficult so far, but has some oddness with scattered save points. (memories)
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And very wrong too. It's simply in the nature of failure that the task is not considered done, in real life if you screw up and the only consequence is getting another chance that can't be called punishment of any kind, punishment is not receiving another chance or far worse things.
The problem is not death but instant death. Death should not be the consequence of a single mistake but the result of a chain of accumulated failures, by the time the player dies he should have a very good idea of why he died, he should feel he "earned" his death.
But there's more, different kinds of failure should result in different kinds of "punishment" for instance failure to aim results in reduced ammo in your guns, failure to grab healers results in reduced health, failure to kill some enemies results in those enemies coming after you.
The first reason is of course realism, the second and most important one is that it adds to the gameplay, the kind of tactics you use when you've got a full health bar and fully loaded plasma cannons of are different than the ones
you use when you are injured and using a kitchen knife.
The idea is that the player should follow a long curve into his deathbed.
It also gives the him another incentive to play well besides reaching the credits screen faster, overcoming his limitations don't just allow him to die less, but allow him to play more gracefully and enable him to attempt harder stuff, not just because he is alive, but because he is fully armed and more skilled.
And it goes without saying but, don't surprise-kill the player, its cheap.
Constant autosaving or simply making immposible for your character to die is not the solution, it only makes the game boring, it reduces the game into a movie, you may say that movies are still great but consider we're talking about a *video game movie*, since when any of those are good?
Immortality is only the solution when the game fails to proportionately "punish" the player, when all your blows are death blows and cheap kills then you may turn on god mode, but it will be boring.
And your son is an ass, Halo has co-op campaign, its a great trainer and builds team-ship.
But... the future refused to change.