I remember playing Skyrim for the first time. My friend and I were debating over the logic of the first puzzle in the game. "Hawks eat snakes, but hawks eat fish too. But the food chain should go, Hawk > Snake > Fish." After a few attempts, we wondered what we were overlooking. We looked around the room, then came the moment of realization.
The "puzzles" in Skyrim are not only ridiculously easy (perhaps preventing sleepwalkers and certain species of trolls from entering millenia-old tombs) but they also make NO LOGICAL SENSE. The "answer" was placed above the gate, the "puzzle" was that the middle part "fell." It makes one question the need for the tomb-builders to install such an elaborate mechanism, when they intend to simply carve the answer on the wall. Despite my hopes, it remained like this throughout the whole game. The puzzles were often so simple that I was challenged to come at it from the most elementary way of thinking.
Now, The Elder Scrolls is a popular series. They have a large playerbase, and they don't want kids and non-gamers getting quest-blocked at the entrance of a tomb. But I think of all the immersion we are missing by making EVERYTHING so beatable. Even the optional side-quests are the same. This extends to MANY modern games like the AC series, Thief, the ME series, Fallout, etc.
I think games need to reduce the hand-holding, because it begins to damage the game with "red carpet syndrome," where you have the uncanny feeling that the game will never let you truly fail at anything. The "last, precious remaining vial of Deathleaf extract" is never in any danger, simply because it is the last remaining vial of Deathleaf extract, and thus protected by plot armor. The game will never let it break. Consequently, the things players often find themselves excited about is "emergent content." A common example is keeping a pet in a game that obviously has no pet mechanics. The player often has to go to great lengths to protect it because the world is so cruel and indifferent to the life of their pet. There is no safety net to prevent their "friend" from dying horribly to a dragon, but instead of creating frustration, this creates an experience that feels much more real than "Oh, you lost your dog? You can re-summon him with a summoning document, or get a new one at any time."
Similarly, when every riddle is solvable, with numerous fallbacks and "hints" that pop up after X seconds of staring at the problem, we find the same thing happening again. The player never gets hindered, but he never feels smart either. I'm not saying place the major challenges in the main questline, just have them be optional teases. So much potential immersion is lost because the devs have already decided that YOU ARE THE HERO, and they will go out of their way to make you feel like one. Ironically, the only times I've felt like a hero in a game were in games that let you FAIL, and fail SO HARD that you look like a total idiot most of the time, so much so that to even briefly elevate yourself above the ferocity of your opposition is to feel like a god. Not because of whatever thing you kill in the storyline. No matter how much you prop up that big baddie in the lore, the player is not going to feel heroic if he doesn't feel overmatched, especially mentally overmatched.
Of course, a huge, towering problem arises nowadays, called "The Internet." After a certain minimum period of trial-and-rage, the problem is Googled and beaten. This is why it's important to create dynamic challenges instead of static puzzles, taking advantage of the gameplay to continuously force you to think on your feet. Hotline Miami is excellent at this. As four armed men come down the hall at you, you decide to throw your bat and knock out one of them, duck into the bathroom, snap the neck of the man at the urinal, take his gun, unload the clip into your pursuers, then drop the gun and finish the remaining survivor with a knife that was by the sink.
I know Dark Souls is a hot topic, but as another poster mentioned, we are still only exploring elementary strategy in single-player games. (Instead of running straight into room, run back out and shoot monsters in single file). I am amazed sometimes, as I watch someone else painfully BRUTE FORCE a level over and over rather than stop and think to change their approach. It's like gamers are so quick to fault the developer for something that they completely lose their capacity for creative thought. We don't have that problem IRL, where in the back of our minds we fully understand that some things aren't fair and you have to use your brains to bridge the gap, and there are no guarantees even then.
In multiplayer games, humans quickly bring the full force of their intelligence to bear on the problems their opponents confront them with. In RTS games, the complexity of the problems and elegance of the solutions is created by pitting mind against mind, stimulating the brain instead of spoon-feeding it. In most modern SP games, though, like Assassin's Creed, it is continuously being dumbed down until you can shank your way through the ever-thinning plot with little consequence. Again, I wonder if the developers are THAT hard-pressed to come up with logical worlds and stories, or if they think their audience simply isn't smart enough to "get it." Please, cut some of the puppeteer's strings and let us dance to our own tunes, even if we take a lot more tumbles. I'm getting very tired of games that don't dare to make their audience think.
The "puzzles" in Skyrim are not only ridiculously easy (perhaps preventing sleepwalkers and certain species of trolls from entering millenia-old tombs) but they also make NO LOGICAL SENSE. The "answer" was placed above the gate, the "puzzle" was that the middle part "fell." It makes one question the need for the tomb-builders to install such an elaborate mechanism, when they intend to simply carve the answer on the wall. Despite my hopes, it remained like this throughout the whole game. The puzzles were often so simple that I was challenged to come at it from the most elementary way of thinking.
Now, The Elder Scrolls is a popular series. They have a large playerbase, and they don't want kids and non-gamers getting quest-blocked at the entrance of a tomb. But I think of all the immersion we are missing by making EVERYTHING so beatable. Even the optional side-quests are the same. This extends to MANY modern games like the AC series, Thief, the ME series, Fallout, etc.
I think games need to reduce the hand-holding, because it begins to damage the game with "red carpet syndrome," where you have the uncanny feeling that the game will never let you truly fail at anything. The "last, precious remaining vial of Deathleaf extract" is never in any danger, simply because it is the last remaining vial of Deathleaf extract, and thus protected by plot armor. The game will never let it break. Consequently, the things players often find themselves excited about is "emergent content." A common example is keeping a pet in a game that obviously has no pet mechanics. The player often has to go to great lengths to protect it because the world is so cruel and indifferent to the life of their pet. There is no safety net to prevent their "friend" from dying horribly to a dragon, but instead of creating frustration, this creates an experience that feels much more real than "Oh, you lost your dog? You can re-summon him with a summoning document, or get a new one at any time."
Similarly, when every riddle is solvable, with numerous fallbacks and "hints" that pop up after X seconds of staring at the problem, we find the same thing happening again. The player never gets hindered, but he never feels smart either. I'm not saying place the major challenges in the main questline, just have them be optional teases. So much potential immersion is lost because the devs have already decided that YOU ARE THE HERO, and they will go out of their way to make you feel like one. Ironically, the only times I've felt like a hero in a game were in games that let you FAIL, and fail SO HARD that you look like a total idiot most of the time, so much so that to even briefly elevate yourself above the ferocity of your opposition is to feel like a god. Not because of whatever thing you kill in the storyline. No matter how much you prop up that big baddie in the lore, the player is not going to feel heroic if he doesn't feel overmatched, especially mentally overmatched.
Of course, a huge, towering problem arises nowadays, called "The Internet." After a certain minimum period of trial-and-rage, the problem is Googled and beaten. This is why it's important to create dynamic challenges instead of static puzzles, taking advantage of the gameplay to continuously force you to think on your feet. Hotline Miami is excellent at this. As four armed men come down the hall at you, you decide to throw your bat and knock out one of them, duck into the bathroom, snap the neck of the man at the urinal, take his gun, unload the clip into your pursuers, then drop the gun and finish the remaining survivor with a knife that was by the sink.
I know Dark Souls is a hot topic, but as another poster mentioned, we are still only exploring elementary strategy in single-player games. (Instead of running straight into room, run back out and shoot monsters in single file). I am amazed sometimes, as I watch someone else painfully BRUTE FORCE a level over and over rather than stop and think to change their approach. It's like gamers are so quick to fault the developer for something that they completely lose their capacity for creative thought. We don't have that problem IRL, where in the back of our minds we fully understand that some things aren't fair and you have to use your brains to bridge the gap, and there are no guarantees even then.
In multiplayer games, humans quickly bring the full force of their intelligence to bear on the problems their opponents confront them with. In RTS games, the complexity of the problems and elegance of the solutions is created by pitting mind against mind, stimulating the brain instead of spoon-feeding it. In most modern SP games, though, like Assassin's Creed, it is continuously being dumbed down until you can shank your way through the ever-thinning plot with little consequence. Again, I wonder if the developers are THAT hard-pressed to come up with logical worlds and stories, or if they think their audience simply isn't smart enough to "get it." Please, cut some of the puppeteer's strings and let us dance to our own tunes, even if we take a lot more tumbles. I'm getting very tired of games that don't dare to make their audience think.
