Skandis said:
The whole issue with "journals, quest compasses that point directly to the goal and show you the route, auto-maps, etc" is literally non-existant. If I pay attention I don't need to use the journal or even auto map for that matter. If I don't pay attention I don't have to replay a segment of the game just to get a clue.
What seems more likely is that developers who can't program a game to be played in more than one way opts for the way that leaves most people satisfied. Even so we still have games with subtlety like La noire and Mass Effect. Given, it's not the same outlandish subtlety that Planescape showed; but the former two are also games that I've finished.
Well, sort of.
See, the focus right now is in creating games that a monkey can beat because your casual player doesn't want to be beaten by the game (so to speak). The thing with quest pointers and the like is that usually it winds up handing the solution to puzzles and problems to the players by making it immediatly clear what they are supposed to be doing even when the task shouldn't nessicarly be that straightforward. Such as when your heading into an unknown castle to open a gate or something and the game tells you exactly where the lever you need is, despite there being no way you should logically know this. This allows the casual gamer to head immedalty to the objective and feel like he accomplished something. Likewise there is no point in putting in a lot of dead ends, tricks, or traps if your going to tell the player where to go.
I've been of the general opinion that automaps that record your progress as you move is fine, it saves time with the graph paper. Quest pointers and breadcrumb trails are less so. I tend to think that such things should be dictated by the plot. I mean it makes sense that you might get a quest pointer to say the marketplace in a major city, or a well travelled village down the road, but when you get one to the epic lost ruins that nobody has visited in 1000 years or more, that is somehow so precise as to pinpoint the location of the Macguffin your after within the ruin... well yeah... that's kind of ridiculous.
See, part of the satisfaction of succeeding in a game is to do something that you could easily see stumping people, especially if know it has done so. When your simply following a golden thread from objective to objective and realize that anyone who wanted to put in a similar amount of time could do the same thing it tends to kind of ruin the excitement of
the whole thing and any feeling of accomplishment.
Of course then again in the era of Gamefaqs and other similar sites, it can be argued that casual hand holding is a surrender to the inevitability that anyone with the internet and 10 minutes can probably find a solution to whatever their problem is at a moment's notice anyway.
Don't get me wrong, casual games are fine, but the problem is that every game is being turned into a casual game, and things like RPGs which were one of the few refuges of
serious gamers are themselves becoming incredibly shallow, casual affairs. Casuals and serious gamers don't mingle as well as you might expect because the industry is focusing entirely on the larger casual market because of the potential money to be made there, while neglecting the non-casual fare. The idea is to try and make everything approachable and non-threatening rather than just flat out saying "no, this game is not for you" to the casual crowd and developing it entirely for the serious gaming market without those kinds of concessions.
In regards to the thread in general, I think there is no real reason why you can't have character generation and voice acting. I don't mind a silent protaganist, but at the same time games like "Saint's Row" (parts 2 and 3) have demonstrated that it's possible to have multiple voice scripts for the player character. Have say ten people do the dialogue for the player character and letting the player choose the voice they want to use does a lot of character creation.
Heck, even before "Saint's Row" I remember "Wizardry 8" which was probably the last great party-based Western RPG. That game had a decent number of personailities you could assign to your various created characters and they would chime in at various points in the storyline, and even occasionally dicker back and forth. Sadly nobody had the guts to really pick up where that game left off, probably because the company that did that game was in a rough spot at the time from some bad choices, and the game itself never got quite the release or circulation it deserved.
