How Intuitive Does A Game Have to Be?

[Rad Party God]

I guess you didn't grew up with NES level of cryptic games, one of the reasons why I love the Souls series so much

I like this level of convoluted solutions and the game not handing you everything, I like to work my ass off in these games to take the most out of them.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I like situations like the Hitman: Blood Money theatre level; the "true" solution seems simple but there's a lot of chances for mistakes between stealing a maintenance man's clothes and firing a single shot with an antique pistol from the scaffolding (or if you're really insane, swapping the actor's pistol with the real one)
There's no penalty for simply killing everyone between you and the target except the standard you hold yourself to and a newspaper article about either a massacre or a mysterious tragedy

What I am very highly amused by and also rather pleased by is the fact that you're saying a solution seems simple...a solution that honestly has never even occurred to me, EVER. Despite replaying that game multiple times over the years since it was released. I've never broken onto the scaffold and taken a shot with the antique pistol, never even occurred to me to try that.

I have, however, taken other 'simple' solutions such as:
- replacing the actor's gun with the real one
- replacing the ACTOR with myself and taking the shot on stage with the real one (this is particularly fun)
- going in with a silenced sniper rifle and taking the shot from a secured balcony
- straight up taking him out in the corridor
- massacring absolutely everyone (one of the easier levels to do this I found)


And so on and so forth. Says a lot for a game that even after all this time you can hear new ideas.

I also have to agree with the above comments with respect to Dark Souls' stat system. Its pretty damn impenetrable if you don't outright use the internet to look stuff up and you can severely screw yourself with it.

 

[Rad Party God]

Nope, though I did grow up with the Genesis and I remember that damn barrel from Carnival Night Zone act 2 in Sonic 3 all too well, I actually did manage to figure that one out on my own through trial and error, though it was still unnecessarily confusing.

God forbid dem vidyagaems make you use your brain!, can't play any without them holding my hand at every turn and someone telling me what button to press next and spoon feed you with answers to everything!

*Ahem* I respectfully disagree.

 

[crazya02]

Nope, though I did grow up with the Genesis and I remember that damn barrel from Carnival Night Zone act 2 in Sonic 3 all too well, I actually did manage to figure that one out on my own through trial and error, though it was still unnecessarily confusing.

God forbid dem vidyagaems make you use your brain!, can't play any without them holding my hand at every turn and someone telling me what button to press next and spoon feed you with answers to everything!

*Ahem* I respectfully disagree.

But that barrel thing is just unreasonable. As Yahtzee put it: "It's not fair if you don't make all the rules clear. If I'm stuck in a puzzle game, I prefer it to be because I'm a big thick-y bobo who can't figure out where all the pieces go, not because one of the pieces was still in the box. Forgive me if it didn't occur to me to near the bleeping explode-y death ball and repurpose it as a dessert trolley!"

Besides, nowadays if something is ridiculously unintuitive like that, then you just look it up on gamefaqs. Then you're not figuring things out, you're filling out a checklist. Better to strike a balance and encourage players to actually work things out.

 

[Batou667]

Hotel Dusk was obtuse. For example there is a puzzle that requires you to dust a pen for fingerprints. To remove the excess dust you

Spoiler

blow into the microphone

.

I quite liked Hotel Dusk's "meta puzzles" that involved the hardware. I remember similar ones included

Spoiler

using two fingers at once to pull two levers simultaneously... hold up, I didn't know this thing supported multi touch?

and

Spoiler

administering CPR by physically closing the DS

.

As for Yahtzee's broader question about how intuitive a game should be... that's a tricky one. In any game there will be a finite number of ways to complete a goal so there has to be some kind of signposting to avoid the horrible, immersion-breaking situation where the player is left clicking on every pixel in desperation, or shooting at the level geometry at random to try to find a breakable door, or bunny-hopping around wondering why the two-foot barrier is airwalled off.

I'd say that different genres (and within that, different individual games) have different sweet-spots of hand-holding vs abandoning the player to their own devices. Good level design plays a huge role here, as does the way a game introduces rules and then sticks to them consistently.

Too many games these days swing to the side of hand-holding, which runs the risk of trivialising the in-game context. For example, I think I recall a section in one of the Splinter Cell games where you're asked to find a code on a terminal, and then use that code to open a door at the other side of the level. Very bog-standard scenario, you'll agree. A reasonable degree of hand-holding here would be to record the key-code once discovered, to avoid the risk of the player forgetting the code and having to backtrack to remind themselves. However, IIRC the game also took the liberty of automatically pulling up the code and entering it for you when you returned to the locked door, meaning the 4-digit code actually wasn't needed at all - the whole "fluff" of accessing a computer and discovering the code was just window-dressing for "press button, unlock door". It utterly trivialised the process and made the immersion as shallow as an ant's grave. This really leapt out at me, because the SC games are usually very good at exceeding player expectations of problem-solving and interactivity.

Just my rambling 2 cents.

 

[And Man]

But that barrel thing is just unreasonable. As Yahtzee put it: "It's not fair if you don't make all the rules clear. If I'm stuck in a puzzle game, I prefer it to be because I'm a big thick-y bobo who can't figure out where all the pieces go, not because one of the pieces was still in the box. Forgive me if it didn't occur to me to near the bleeping explode-y death ball and repurpose it as a dessert trolley!"

Besides, nowadays if something is ridiculously unintuitive like that, then you just look it up on gamefaqs. Then you're not figuring things out, you're filling out a checklist. Better to strike a balance and encourage players to actually work things out.

I didn't think that puzzle was that bad, as the puzzle in question had a raised platform near the bombs so you could approach them and experiment without being in danger. A better example IMO is one of the two stars in A3, which cannot be obtained without using sources and equipment outside of the game itself (or a ludicrous amount of trial-and-error), and also involves "one of the pieces was still in the box" logic:

Spoiler

So there are QR codes scattered around, and when you approach them, text will show up. This text is usually just "flavor text", thoughts written down by other people that were in your position. In A3, on the back of a clock, there's a QR code that doesn't display any text when you approach it. You have to physically scan the QR code on your computer monitor, and it reads:
"THE EAGLE HAS LANDED 31 39 36 39 2f 30 37 2f 32 30 20 32 30 3a 31 38 Now is the time of tranquillity , and I shall rest and observe the Earth.
-- Uriel4"
You then either have to recognize "THE EAGLE HAS LANDED" as a reference to the Apollo 11 moon landing and look up the time of the moon landing, 20:18 on July 20th, 1969, or convert the string of numbers from hex to ASCII, which yields "1969/07/20 20:18". Then you have to press two buttons on pillars to make the clock read 20:18, and a path to the star will open up.

So not only do you have to use physical resources and information outside the game, but you also have to realize that the QR code is significant to solving the puzzle, something that no other QR code has been up to that point, and then try and solve some obtuse "puzzle" that's contained in the message of the QR code (though honestly, if you actually did scan the QR code, chances are you're invested enough that you're gonna try and derive some meaning from the message it contains).

Braid is Unreasonable. The Secret Stars required for the best ending are so secret that they are never mentioned in the game whatsoever, and to get the complete set you need to wait for 2 hours in one level for a cloud to move into position. Even if you've somehow worked out that the Secret Stars exist, the cloud moves so slowly that it's practically immobile, and there is no way a player is going to hang out in one level for that long since most can be beaten in under 15 minutes.

I actually didn't mind the stars in Braid, since you're pretty much *not* supposed to find them, and I wouldn't really consider it the "best" ending, just a different ending, since it takes an entirely unrelated approach to and interpretation of the game.

 

[Batou667]

I did grow up with the Genesis and I remember that damn barrel from Carnival Night Zone act 2 in Sonic 3 all too well, I actually did manage to figure that one out on my own through trial and error, though it was still unnecessarily confusing.

That (*^%(^(%! barrel is the epitome of game-breakingly poor level design. The hours I spent trying to hammer it all the way down with a bubble shield, only to glitch myself into the wall and then having to wait for the timer to run down to restart the checkpoint...

 

[shintakie10]

Dark Soul's unintuitive-ness doesn't come from gameplay or exploration.

It comes from it not fucking explaining how any of the stats or upgrades work, and not giving you an option to respec after you've critically hobbled your character with 40 Resistance and a +5 Raw Mace.

Like, it's cool that they didn't throw in some hand-holding tutorial or something, but just put a little blurb on the goddamn level up screen that says what each stat does, instead of a bunch of arcane-looking numbers and percentages next to icons I can barely even see much less make out what they're supposed to represent.

If I have to spend three hours on the wiki before I understand enough about the game to build a character capable of making it to the final boss, that's bad design.

I was thinkin that while readin the article. The gameplay of Dark Souls was super intuitive. You could figure out anythin by really examinin every situation. That was great.

The stats were unintuitive as fuck though. You have absolutely no idea how any stats work except through ridiculous amounts of trial and error. That was outright stupid.

 

[Zio_IV]

Dark Soul's unintuitive-ness doesn't come from gameplay or exploration.

It comes from it not fucking explaining how any of the stats or upgrades work, and not giving you an option to respec after you've critically hobbled your character with 40 Resistance and a +5 Raw Mace.

Like, it's cool that they didn't throw in some hand-holding tutorial or something, but just put a little blurb on the goddamn level up screen that says what each stat does, instead of a bunch of arcane-looking numbers and percentages next to icons I can barely even see much less make out what they're supposed to represent.

If I have to spend three hours on the wiki before I understand enough about the game to build a character capable of making it to the final boss, that's bad design.

In Dark Souls, you can see a blurb for what stats do what. Hitting the Select button (or Back, for Xbox) brings up those very descriptors you're looking for, and you can do it for all the stats on the screen, not just the 8 primary ones. To top it all off, the game lists that help button at the bottom of the screen, so you've no one to blame but yourself on that one. Personally I never found any of the stats confusing, but the blurbs were there nonetheless.

I'd also like to just put out there that you can never "critically hobble" a character in Souls. You can level up as much as you want, and even then it's never necessary. Thanks to a joke vid I once saw, I once did a playthrough with 99 in resistance, and base stats in everything else. Did perfectly fine. The same is true for all of them. You could go through without leveling up, naked and bare-handed if you've got the time and grit.

Can't comment on the whole wiki thing. I personally never felt the need to use one.

I'll just say that while I am in the camp of "Souls games are good at intuitive game design", and feel that most complaints I see about the series are ones born from impatience rather than the game's failings, I know that they're not infallible; they definitely do fail in some areas. The upgrade system got more and more streamlined as the series went on, but I'm willing to point out, for example, how Demon's Souls' upgrade system was pretty cumbersome at the beginning. It really was. The World/Character Tendency aspects also didn't give any indicator as to what they did without purposeful trial, so that can be added to the list. Overall though, the Souls games do a far better job than most other titles coming out these days in this regard. Has that blend of classic design from the 80's and 90's while eliminating most of the parts from that era that were genuinely incomprehensible ('cause there were, no denying that). Again, not perfect (what game ever is), but damn good at it.

 

[Coruptin]

Dark Soul's unintuitive-ness doesn't come from gameplay or exploration.

It comes from it not fucking explaining how any of the stats or upgrades work, and not giving you an option to respec after you've critically hobbled your character with 40 Resistance and a +5 Raw Mace.

Like, it's cool that they didn't throw in some hand-holding tutorial or something, but just put a little blurb on the goddamn level up screen that says what each stat does, instead of a bunch of arcane-looking numbers and percentages next to icons I can barely even see much less make out what they're supposed to represent.

If I have to spend three hours on the wiki before I understand enough about the game to build a character capable of making it to the final boss, that's bad design.

The level up screen clearly tells you what each stat does. You can even highlight the stats for a description. If all that fails, the first blacksmith should make scaling fairly clear.
In the early hours of the first play through, souls are precious. Thus, people are inclined to be cautious of how they spend their souls. Thorough inspection of the mechanics is only natural.
Personally, everything clicked into place once I got to Andre.

 

[PuppetMaster]

I like situations like the Hitman: Blood Money theatre level; the "true" solution seems simple but there's a lot of chances for mistakes between stealing a maintenance man's clothes and firing a single shot with an antique pistol from the scaffolding (or if you're really insane, swapping the actor's pistol with the real one)
There's no penalty for simply killing everyone between you and the target except the standard you hold yourself to and a newspaper article about either a massacre or a mysterious tragedy

What I am very highly amused by and also rather pleased by is the fact that you're saying a solution seems simple...a solution that honestly has never even occurred to me, EVER. Despite replaying that game multiple times over the years since it was released. I've never broken onto the scaffold and taken a shot with the antique pistol, never even occurred to me to try that.

I have, however, taken other 'simple' solutions such as:
- replacing the actor's gun with the real one
- replacing the ACTOR with myself and taking the shot on stage with the real one (this is particularly fun)
- going in with a silenced sniper rifle and taking the shot from a secured balcony
- straight up taking him out in the corridor
- massacring absolutely everyone (one of the easier levels to do this I found)


And so on and so forth. Says a lot for a game that even after all this time you can hear new ideas.

I also have to agree with the above comments with respect to Dark Souls' stat system. Its pretty damn impenetrable if you don't outright use the internet to look stuff up and you can severely screw yourself with it.

Thanks for assisting my point: We were never forced to play a certain way to get the same result. While I don't mind games like Assassin's Creed doing the whole "I don't remember it happening quite like that" to get 100%, and to my shame, I haven't played the souls games, but I did play a couple Dragon Age's
:Origins pissed me off when a few hours in I realized I leveled myself into a corner and started over (Spellweaver, anyone?)
2 sucked hard, but the real kick was missing out on dialogue options because I didn't have so and so in my party for such and such event

tl;dr games that make a player wiki the solution can blow me

 

[El Camino of Rampage]

Nope, though I did grow up with the Genesis and I remember that damn barrel from Carnival Night Zone act 2 in Sonic 3 all too well, I actually did manage to figure that one out on my own through trial and error, though it was still unnecessarily confusing.

God forbid dem vidyagaems make you use your brain!, can't play any without them holding my hand at every turn and someone telling me what button to press next and spoon feed you with answers to everything!

*Ahem* I respectfully disagree.

There's using your brain, and then there's systematically trying every possible thing in a level, or just giving up and doing exactly what the internet says to do because I have limited game time and I don't want to spend it all on one puzzle.

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

Not sure why so many people are talking about how they "have no idea what the Dark Souls stats do". As has been said, you can press select to get a description. Sure, they don't always give you a good idea how much of an impact the number has, or are even adequately descriptive, but they're there.

I really dislike Guide Dang It ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GuideDangIt ) elements of games, but I'm more acceptable of them if they aren't permanently missable.

If they are, screw you.

Pretty much what I was gonna say. Honestly, fuck missable secrets in general, especially the ones that require you to do something extremely boring like "click on something fifty times".

 

[Oldcodger]

Well, taking all my clothes off and slowly sitting down on a slightly warmed-up birthday cake is obviously the best option but, if that's not available, I'll take a game where I can figure it all out on my own through intuition. I'm a loner. I played WoW mostly solo for about 7.5 years. I now play AoC and D3 solo. I love lurking around the edges of society which I need but hate. I need a hug but don't touch me.

 

[Chimichanga]

Cave Story actually does give you a hint on the first play through as what to do about the jetpack. In hte Pre-fab housing before the fight with Misery, The Doctor and etc. there's a journal that states that he would be able to make the Booster v2.0 "... If I live."

It still doesn't explain much and is still rather unintuitive, but saying your game differed by dropping slight hints as to what to do in the next play-through is kind of disingenuous.

 

[StreamerDarkly]

I believe a game needs to be just intuitive enough to preclude the purchase of a hint book which tells you to rub berries on yourself to get past the swamp monster.

 

[Naldan]

You couldn't save Solaire after a certain point. And it was pretty unintuitive to know how and when to save him. So, even Dark Souls commited that sin. Also, to unlock a certain covenant, you had to do some weird stuff. And that as well, if I recall correctly, wasn't reversable later on in the playthrough. But I'm not that sure about the covenant.

I hate that. I really do. You have games, where you're not able to think outside of the box. Imagine that in a CoD. My mind would explode. So it becomes a given. OK, let's narrow it down to RPGs. Normally, that is the point of the genre - to tailor a bit the story here and there. So RPGs get a pass from me.

Now, you have Dark Souls. Is it an RPG? Puh... Now, I love it. For me, Dark Souls is the third coming after Terranigma and Silent Hill 2, but... is it really an RPG? Is Final Fantasy an RPG? It has elements. Final Fantasy has an mostly accepted combat and character developement system. But story-wise? It's linear.

It's like food. Those games, Dark Souls and Final Fantasy, are dishes you order in a restaurant. It's premade, you may choose to exclude the champignons from the pizza. But the restaurant has created this pizza with its own recipe. That's why you mostly avoid that restaurant if the pizza dough is shit in your opinion, instead of telling the chef how to set up the dough.

Then you could make your own pizza at home. You have a recipe, but you can vary it. Even though, If it's a special pizza, you couldn't fuck around that much in order to get that special pizza. You couldn't, for example, put meat on that pizza if you would want a meatless pizza. Makes sense.

So, if suddenly a game like Dark Souls tells you that, oh hey, if you had phoned in 3 hours prior to your arrival, you could have told us how we should make the pizza dough, and they'd tell you this right after you've finished that pizza, then fuck them. Especially if it was a shit pizza to begin with. If now for example FallOut 4 told you that it would have become a even more linear cover-shooter, and nobody would have known that, like if everytime you would make a pizza at home, the pizza GeStaPo would arrive at your home to tell you how to make that pizza at gun-point, then I were pretty surprised. And disappointed.


Then you have Cave Story. It's like a chocolate bar. You eat it, it maybe even was a Snickers 10 times as big, it was made of WunderBar and rainbows, done. You wouldn't even think of making one of these at home. How should you know that? That if you perform a special ritual, an owl flies by to drop you the secret recipe to make a Snickers in a micro wave? How should you know that this was possible? CaveStory is a jump'n'run sh'm'up. It's a bit metroidvania, maybe even a bit more. And the differences are no joke, either. New weapons, a new ending. And you had to do such unintuitive shit. You don't expect that. How is one supposed to *even think of that* after 72890239047 jump'n'run sh'm'ups told one otherwise, that there IS ONLY ONE OR TWO ENDINGS, that there IS JUST THIS AND THIS AMOUNT OF PATHES THROUGH THE GAME, and that there IS MAYBE JUST ONE OR TWO REAL SECRETS like the slightly altered ending to Super Metroid, where Samus saved the animals? How should one expect that and anticipate it when it's *SO* illogical?
---

TL;DR: If it's in an unexpected genre and totally illogical, as well as significant, it sucks.

 

[Llarys]

Here's the deal, from my perspective: A game that forces an "open discussion" because the game is not intuitive isn't a game that is being clever.

It's just a poorly designed game.

Going with puzzle games, for example, a good puzzle game should rely on the player's wit and knowledge of the game world and mechanics in order to solve the puzzles and progress the story to the next stage. Something fun, yet challenging. The idea of the puzzles being purposely "non-intuitive" in order to provoke player interaction is a cop-out. Rather than simply designing a well made puzzle, we can do the lazy thing and slap shit together and call it quits for the day. Afterall, the Infinite Monkey Theorem applies here: "if enough players do enough random inputs into the game, eventually one of them will discover the solution." Let's say, instead of making the traps in Dark Souls have noticable pressure plates, create noise when you set them off, or had any sort of markings on the floors and walls that notified their position, there were just seemingly random places in the game that killed you if you touched them. After all, it's a lot easier to make the traps without having to make all those unique sound, physics, and lighting stuff in the game. Who cares about good level design?

Like your example with Cave Story: the game didn't specify that getting the Jetpack would ruin the future (because the guy needed to work on it more)...and literally all that needed to be said was one sentence on the matter. Obtuse for the sake of being obtuse.



Now, this isn't to say that non-intuitive stuff doesn't have a place in games. I still think NON-ESSENTIAL bonus stuff is the home for ridiculous nonsense. Remember Eltonbrand, from Morrowind? Become a Vampire and bring the Goldbrand and exactly 11171 gold with you to a mage of the Mage's guild in Vivec. He reminds you that the North Carolina (which is now a canon location in Tamriel) Tarheels should go to hell, and upgrades your DAEDRIC ARTIFACT into the Eltonbrand. 10/10.