"Faffing About" Creed...

[tsb247]

Sounds like World of Warcraft [...] the game in itself is the greatest grindfest since the invention of the pepper mill.

I LOVE that analogy! It's so true!

Ignorance is bliss, as they say. WoW is renowned for being one of the LEAST grind-heavy MMOs out there.

I disagree. Having played Wow from its release until about three and a half years later, I quit because it got boring. "Kill this," "Gather that," "Return this to there..." Not to mention the, "Kill this many of x," quests that are FAR too abundant. I would hardly call it free of excessive grinding.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

Sounds like World of Warcraft [...] the game in itself is the greatest grindfest since the invention of the pepper mill.

I LOVE that analogy! It's so true!

Ignorance is bliss, as they say. WoW is renowned for being one of the LEAST grind-heavy MMOs out there.

I disagree. Having played Wow from its release until about three and a half years later, I quit because it got boring. "Kill this," "Gather that," "Return this to there..." Not to mention the, "Kill this many of x," quests that are FAR too abundant. I would hardly call it free of excessive grinding.

Go play another MMO. Any. Other. MMO.

I never said that WoW is grind-free, I said that it's known for being the least grind-heavy.

 

[lacktheknack]

If the "faffing about" is fun to do itself (Assassin's Creed), then it's a great thing. If it isn't, then it's annoying.

 

[orangeapples]

It is more noticeable on a second play through a game. The reason they do back-tracking is to get you familiar with the world. The second time is annoying.

Some games are really bad though.

 

[badgersprite]

Ah, yes...Capture The Flag Creed. XD

To be honest, sometimes I buy games more for the opportunity to faff about than for the story. Grand Theft Auto is a great example of this. As good as some of the stories are, I often have more fun when I'm left to my own devices and just go peanut butter jelly with a baseball bat insane.

Same goes for Prototype and InFamous. I didn't get those to see how the game ended. I got it because I wanted to play in my sandbox. But then, I'm one of those people who loves to run around a big open ended world and poke everything until it either explodes or shoots me in the face. That's what makes those games fun for me. It's like the thing with old school Spider-Man games. I could care less about those piss-easy boss fights. I just want to web sling and use that epic Spidey Stealth. =D

But I guess that's the difference between faffing about by choice or doing it because the game forces you to. Sort of like Mass Effect, I guess. They didn't force you to go to any worlds except the main ones, but I did all the side missions because I wanted to. However, if they had FORCED me to mine those mineral deposits or find all those rare elements or ancient alien artifacts in order to continue the story, I think I would have thrown the game out the window in frustration.

 

[Twilight_guy]

Video games are founded upon arbitraly lengthing game by sending the player on a grand quest. Ofthen times it involves a number of smaller tasks like fetch qwuests. The alternate is to make a game where you immediacy fight the final boss. I don't think a ten minute game is such a good idea. Games did not need to have a story that explained the odd fetch quest years ago, that was simply the way it was. No one asks why Mario can't just go to world 8 directly or why link has to traipse around every bit of map to find the end, that was how all games where. Now games tend to focus around a story that assigns task as the plot progress but essentially the player is still just completing a series of tasks, go here, kill this guys, get this, fight him, take this, move that, etc. Games are still essentially a complex puzzle with clear obstacles that the player must overcome. Games have evolved and attempted to throw a smoke screen up to cover their true nature but it's still glaring obvious if you think about it. I suppose the best games can hope for is to make the quests fun enough that the player is to busy looking at the magician's hands to notice the wires that hold his assistant up. If they're fun, no one cares, if they bore then it becomes obvious how tedious they truly are.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

*text*

I disagree with this. Games are a medium for storytelling just like any other and if we are to apply your reasoning to movies or books then we would not need 1,200 pages or 12 hours worth of Lord of the Rings. Just have Frodo ditch the ring into Mt. Doom and be done with it after fifteen minutes. Because, what is the fellowship doing on their journey? They are travelling to places, killing the opposition, finding allies and moving towards the final goal. The kind of stuff that you'd expect to do in any fantasy RPG with a similar story.

The diffrence is that the game is interactive. So that the obstacles posed by the story are things that I as the player must take care off whatever it is by twitch reaction, puzzlesolving, etc. The problem poised against a game developer is not too far off from that of a movie director. "How do you make the journey towards the end fun enough that people doesn't up and leave?" In the cases of well made games (say, Baldur's Gate II for the sake of it), all the quests you are sent on must feel relevant and the way they play out must be engaging and not too annoying. In the case of a bad game these side quests could be totally irrelevant or just not make you feel as it is truly necessary for the plot to continue. (Need For Speed Underground: "You can't proceed until you have 25,000 drift points. Drift some more!"... Why would my RACING opponents care how much I have drifted?) Or they could be in the line of Assassins Creed and be relevant but so repetitive that you simply don't get any joy from doing them.

Just as movies can have a bad script or bad screenplay, so can computer games. The screenplay must be substituted for gameplay however.

 

[Twilight_guy]

*text*

I disagree with this. Games are a medium for storytelling just like any other and if we are to apply your reasoning to movies or books then we would not need 1,200 pages or 12 hours worth of Lord of the Rings. Just have Frodo ditch the ring into Mt. Doom and be done with it after fifteen minutes. Because, what is the fellowship doing on their journey? They are travelling to places, killing the opposition, finding allies and moving towards the final goal. The kind of stuff that you'd expect to do in any fantasy RPG with a similar story.

The diffrence is that the game is interactive. So that the obstacles posed by the story are things that I as the player must take care off whatever it is by twitch reaction, puzzlesolving, etc. The problem poised against a game developer is not too far off from that of a movie director. "How do you make the journey towards the end fun enough that people doesn't up and leave?" In the cases of well made games (say, Baldur's Gate II for the sake of it), all the quests you are sent on must feel relevant and the way they play out must be engaging and not too annoying. In the case of a bad game these side quests could be totally irrelevant or just not make you feel as it is truly necessary for the plot to continue. (Need For Speed Underground: "You can't proceed until you have 25,000 drift points. Drift some more!"... Why would my RACING opponents care how much I have drifted?) Or they could be in the line of Assassins Creed and be relevant but so repetitive that you simply don't get any joy from doing them.

Just as movies can have a bad script or bad screenplay, so can computer games. The screenplay must be substituted for gameplay however.

Yes, games are a method of telling a story. I'm not saying that they are not. I'm explaining that games at at their core a series of puzzles the same way a movie is a series of images and a book is ink printed on pages. Games go beyond this component part, but when one's mind is not occupied with entertainment this nature becomes more apparent. A game that fails to adequately tell a story/provide entertainment leaves the user's mind to wonder and that leads to "this is repeating" or "this is broken"(about the game) rather then "Look at that" or "look out for that sword"(about the story).

Games are fundamentally puzzles and that nature is just more apparent and less well hide in bad games. Thus when the OP sees repetitive tasks in games and asks why these seem to be a facet of bad games, he is just seeing a common element that is not entertaining in bad games. A developer didn't say "lets put in this boring quest" they followed standard procedure and bumbled the execution, making the quest become boring.

 

[atol]

I disagree with this. Games are a medium for storytelling just like any other and if we are to apply your reasoning to movies or books then we would not need 1,200 pages or 12 hours worth of Lord of the Rings. Just have Frodo ditch the ring into Mt. Doom and be done with it after fifteen minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yqVD0swvWU

I often electively faff about in AC type titles. I do get bugged a bit when it is forced on me excessively to faff.

Yeah, I would have climbed the towers and eavesdropped the locals if it weren't required to advance, but since it was, I was pretty annoyed by it. I felt less like an assassin in control and more like a grocery shopper with a check list.