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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.
Don't buy it and don't play video games if you don't want to waste time.
Had to be said.
Young brings up the fact that many of today's games punish failure by wasting the player's time
I hear the Playstation 4 implements dual electric shock controllers, for more direct punishment of failure.
I haven't played the game, but that said, how much of the heart of great games was the thrill of just squeaking by? If you know that there isn't any way to loose, what you're left with is a empty shell. Nice to look at, and shows you some neat tricks, but nothing else later. Putting training wheels on a game isn't the future, it's just a gimmick to try and make a bland game that offends no one, and doesn't really try to solve the problem of playability. My 2c.
In Monkey Island, you could never die either. But it was still a lot of fun to play!
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I just finished this game and the lack of the death is fantastic. It makes it all about the awesome acrobatics and less about the stupid camera or dumb mini-boss killing me yet another time. Every time you fail is YOUR FAULT and not a big deal. I beat the original PoP games when they came out (and even harder games), so I can do hardcore ridiculous, but I no longer want to.
I estimate I spent about 10 hours on the game, and I would far rather have 10 AWESOME hours than 40 hours of padded frustrating crap. I'm old enough I don't want to waste my time on stupid sh@# just for the sake of being hardcore like an internet suicide.
The combat is eventually a bit tedious, yes. I'd prefer the game be even MORE stripped down. I'm perfectly willing to drop $40 for 8 hours of making you feel like a total badass.
Elika is amazing - she is never annoying (which is astounding for a companion) and the dialogue is interesting and funny. And the ending is just fantastic; it deserves a mention even separate from the lack of death. I can't say anything much without spoiling it, but I love how it asks you (and you likely comply gladly) to subvert everything you've done.
So yes, I've reached the age when I will gladly pay more money for less bullshit and more fun.
No the whole point is to have fun.
If you think the point is to waste time, go play World of Warcraft. And no, that isn't meant as an insult to WoW. It is just WoW is built around having fun by wasting time. However, that is not the only way to have fun.
If you don't want to waste time, I suggest to press "quit".
I have a better solution. If you enjoy wasting time, restart the game every time you fail in a task. Heck, you can even give yourself three lifes before you have to restart (or any other set of rules). Real hardcore players know how to challenge themselves. It is the hardcore whiners that try to force their idea of gameplay onto others.
The question as to whether time-punishing is a good part of the game is really posed very well here. But I imagine it's more a measure of the player than of the game. Two games come to mind, as radically diametrically opposed examples.
"The Curse of Monkey Island" (Monkey Island 3) is one of the old-school Lucas Arts adventure games where you can't die. The "puzzles" are simple combination-of-action puzzles. The game is extraordinary. Not because it's anything special, and not because it's particularly good in any capacity, but simply because it's very funny, and a smooth ride the whole way through. It's very much like a movie, and yo,u're never punished for anything.
"Left 4 Dead" is the big, huge, enormous time penalties. Die at the end of a thirty-minute attempt, and you get to start all over again -- with your three friends too. Play it on expert, and you'll likely be retrying levels dozens of times. Is it frustrating? Not in the least. You get the action of "ooooh, so close!" And it becomes a strategy game of how the next attempt could be done differently, what else can we try, and where else can we go.
It's important to note that the time-penalties discussed in the article, do more than simply force the player to redo things. It grants the player another opportunity to do something completely different. Now, when a game is completely linear -- as with super mario brothers the first -- then it's nohting more than a "do it again" concept, presented well by the article. However, when a game has many many many many freedoms provided to the player, and the player fails a challenge along the way, having the opportunity to change the past is a good thing. And being forced to do so gives the decision-making process some level of importance.
Is it a waste of time? That's the whole purpose of the game. Does it matter if you're wasting time at the beginning of the game doing the same thing over and over again, or wasting time at the end of the game going through the whole thing once? If it's different every time, then there's no difference -- except for the potential to have more game to play, which is a good thing.
The article uses a great example, that I felt was perfect. If people learned to drive the way they learn to play games, it wouldn't be by backing out of the driveway, it would be by driving a stick-shift in a rally race, and requiring many many humiliating failures before winning a single race.
I agreed with this example at the time. Now, I'm thinking it better serves my perspective. Sure, if you're learning to drive your grandmother's car to go to the movies, backing out of the driveway and not being time-punished for mistakes is the way to do it. But if you designed and built the rally car, and are trying to develop a car to win races, having the chance to make design changes between failed races is precisely what you want. What didn't work, what did work, what can be tuned to work better.
I'm thinkin', if you want to develop a car to win races, backing out of the driveway will get you no-where.
So, when I play a video game, am I developing a playing strategy of a grand quality to pass the level, or am I enjoying the progression of an in-line story? The answer is a fairly simple and direct mapping.
If the game is a comedy, then I want a straight story with no chance to fail. If the game is an action-adventure, then I want failure. Failure is a big part of action, challenge, and adventure -- it's all about the risk-taking. Failure is not a part of successful comedy. Actually, I guess that's slapstick. And I'm not a big fan of slapstick. But you know, if you could play a nice comedy, slip on a banana peel and die in a vat of goo, it could be funny.
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.
Other Console annoyances include:
Those really have little to do with consoles, PC games had plenty of all of them as well and the video in the last issue isn't even a real game, its a ROM hack meant to be nearly impossible to solve.
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.
One of the things I like about Puzzle Quest and Castle Crashers is that failure doesn't have much penalty. Certainly, you have to restart a level or boss fight, but any XP/gold/etc you've acquired stays with you so the "time penalty" is minimized. You may have lost but you've bettered your character in the process and can make another try incrementally better.
If you don't repeat the game's content, then how are you supposed to get good at the game?
Agreed. But what is the point of repeating the content you already mastered?
Lets say I kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[six more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, all flawlessly and then mis-time my jump onto the swinging rope and fall into a pit trap and die.
What do I need to get better at?
"make the jump onto the swinging rope"
or
"kill 3 guys, then jump through a window, land on the ledge, dodge the whirling blades, evade the fire trap, kill 3 more guys,...[6 more minutes]... jump onto the pole before the floor collapses, then make the jump onto the swinging rope."
???
Making me repeat the lengthy sequence of stuff I already figured out and beat just to take another shot at jumping the rope is just more annoying than anything. I've played games where I couldn't figure out the boss, but had completely mastered the 6 minute level to reach him... WASTING 6 minutes between each attempt to try a different attack pattern on the boss is just annoying.
People who want to prove their skills should have difficulty mode with one life/ no respawns/ etc. But while learning the game or the first time through... What's the point?
You get killed, you try again, and you get better.
You try again to get past what killed you. Why exactly do you need to re-do several minutes worth of stuff you've already mastered?
If you're not enjoying the challenges that the game is giving...
The primary challenge in such games is simply one of my patience. The enjoyment comes from beating the parts you got stuck on, not on replaying the parts you were good at. I don't mind taking several tries to figure out a boss or a jump or a puzzle, but I do get pissed if I have to spend hours replaying the parts I've mastered just to retry the parts I'm stuck on.
When I go mountain biking and have trouble with a section I'll back up a 100 meters and take another run at it, I don't go back and restart the entire fucking 10km trail. And sure, there is definitely a feeling of satisfaction upon reaching the level that I can do a given trail in one clean pass... but I certainly don't want to get to that level by restarting the entire fucking trail every time I have to put my foot down.
then the technical term for your state is "burned out"
No. That's the state I get to when I have to restart.
The way to improve playability in strategy wargames, and so-called 4X games especially, is to use variable degrees of abstraction to address issues of game scale. There is NOTHING more annoying than playing a huge game of, say, Sword of the Stars, with hundreds of stars and countless units and economic factors, AND HAVING TO DEAL WITH ALL OF IT PERSONALLY. So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point. Nowhere is this failure more evident than in so-called "real time strategy" games (which are almost all really "real time tactics"), where not only is the player forced to micromanage but the time required to do so costs him in terms of the game, because the computer AI opponents at least don't suffer from this problem.
Sadly, I know of no single game that employs this level of intelligence in the player interface, and the game I mentioned, Sword of the Stars and its sequels, is actually one of the biggest recent failures in this regard. It also has bugs that persist across sequels and a dev team with no coding discipline, which may or may not be related to the aforementioned failure.
Oh, I knew "the other side are whiners also" argument would come up as soon I had posted my first response.
There is a difference however. The "hardcore whiners" as I prefer to call them could easily restrict their actions to emulate a more difficult game. They however choose not to, because what they really want is everyone else to have as difficult a time as themselves. What they enjoy is to finish games when others can not. They are basically the "my car is better than yours" type of people.
The opposite is not true. Players who enjoys gameplay that flows along can't simply tune down the difficulty of a hard game. Actually, there is quicksave, but letting a hardcore player save once at the start of each level and then reload if the game doesn't "punish" him enough breaks immersion less than having the non hardcore player press quicksave every minute in a difficult game.
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.
It's the same as why watch a film when there's no risk involved in the outcome of the plot?
I play some games this way, I treat them as interactive stories, that doesn't mean I need risk, it just means I'm more immersed in the story than I would be a film and the stories usually last longer and are hence more interesting- many people hate film adaptations of books because they have to cut so much, this is less of a problem with games as the player creates large
Games don't have to be about challenge, they can equally be about story telling as movies and books are but with a form of interactivity and hence immersiveness that can improve the story telling. In a book you might get a description of a beautiful scene (coastal Thailand on Tomb Raider: Underworld for example) which is great, but in a game you can spend time looking round that scene and admiring it.
That's not to say I don't play games with risk as well, I always play through the Call of Duty series on veteran difficulty for example. I find games with little risk nice to relax to sometimes though and unlike playing Call of Duty on Veteran you're not stuck in the same place over and over for 30mins+ so the story flows much better and is much more suited to those of us who don't have 50 hours to burn on a single game. Dead space was a good example of this, as was Bioshock- I didn't find either game very hard at all (even on hardest difficulty) and hence I would say these are games with little risk, (certainly there was no part that required repeating more than once which is in contrast to Call of Duty on Vet.) yet they were still absolutely excellent.
I agree with the article, punishing people for a minor slip up is not something that should be implemented in every game, nor is it something that should be taken too far. An example of an excellent game, completely destroyed by the risk of an improper save system is Dead Rising- the gameplay was superb, the story was good, the graphics were great, but the save system made the game simply too frustrating to play. Even autosaves/checkpoints have made gaming so much better than it used to be without them- I recall the frustration of losing hours of play if you forgot to/couldn't save all too well.
Lego Star Wars has been doing this for years... Even my wife can play and beat the game.
No. Games are for wasting time ENJOYABLY.
Significant difference there.
Those elaborate 6 minute timesinks are just for frustration/stupidity. It is an elaborate game mechanic to simply waste time. Kinda like not giving you an option of skipping a stupidly long cutscene before fighting a boss in a game.
"Not to start a flame war, but this is one of the reasons I prefer PC games. They typically allow for quicksave and/or a sane autosave."
Flamewars generally start when people say something that's inflammatory or outright false, not if they have a valid opinion. Unfortunately, judging by your comments below and the fact you posted AC you were surely fully aware that your comments were inflammatory.
Not one of the points you cite is in any way related to console gaming vs. PC gaming. The majority of my gaming life has been on the PC and every issue you mention occurs in PC games equally, even when the game was built for the PC or was PC exclusive.
"I didn't mind so much when these issues only affected console games, but now with all the ports that are being done, us poor PC gamers are forced to suffer through these issues as well (plus really bad controls)."
Console gamers have equally had to suffer bad PC ports.
Your issue isn't with consoles, because not a point you made is specific to console gaming, it's with general game developers and game design and even then the issues you raise are pretty uncommon on both console and PC. It does however seem that you have an axe to grind with consoles for some reason. The reasons why developers have moved to console gaming have been discussed on Slashdot previously, but it comes down to the fact they can make more money there. If you buy games (rather than pirate them) console gaming is no more expensive than maintaining a gaming PC at a level you can play the latest games and is so much more hassle free to boot- there's good reason PC gaming is losing out to console gaming, making up outright lies isn't going to magically change that.
How about predictability?
I understand and agree with the analysis made by the author, but it seems to be based on the idea that the enjoyment comes from the discovery within the game. The first time someone plays a game, it's a new experience. After that, they learn the topology and it comes down to refining your ability to reflexively work through the game. I believe the rise of multiplayer gaming has in part driven more people into games since it's a slightly new experience every time you log on. Sure, you can learn the map and objective, but you never know quite what you'll get.
I can only think of one title in Video Game History that had both dynamic maps and interactive elements that were different every time: Larn. It's a 20 year old DOS title that used nothing but ASCII characters. But hey, it rocked since it was new every time.
Can you imagine what a typical shooting game would be like if the enemies were moved around on the map every time? How about a driving game where the road was always different?
Did you watch the video? It's evident that mashing buttons would never get you past an obstacle in Prince of Persia.
Stupid casual gamers and their dumbing down! Rarrrrgh! If you can't operate a modern gamepad you might as well start doing crossword puzzles and reading the obituaries instead.
There is a thing called good sportsmanship, apparently you've never heard of it. If either of you called each of names, rubbed it in each others faces, or took your ball home- you've failed. Teaching good sportsmanship is good parenting.
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.
So-called "micromanagement" is fine in the early game, when a single less-than-optimal action could decide the game against the player, but later in the game it simply isn't practical, nor is it a reflection of reality: if the player represents an emperor or five-star general, such a figure would NOT be dealing with all that minutia personally at that point.
Hm. The way that ought to work is that the player gets to appoint "subordinates" to various jobs, each of whom has an identity and a back story. The subordinates all have different personalities and decision styles; some favor military action over negotiation; some don't. Some are bold generals; some overprepare on logistics. (Do you want Montgomery or Ike in charge?) The player has to monitor how they're doing, and be prepared to fire or move around subordinates.
This is what a CEO of a big organization really does. It's a good skill to teach.
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends."
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