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Old 07-12-2008, 01:51 AM   #1
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Default How important is difficulty? + Impressions on recent adventure titles

Hi there! Great site so I thought I would sign up. I’m actually working with a friend to create an adventure game and it got me thinking…how important is the difficulty to adventure gamers? I will be mentioning puzzles in Runaway, Still Life and Broken Sword 4 so watch out for some minor spoilers.

I think most people agree that puzzles are best when (A) you know your goal and (B) when they’re relevant to the story. It has been written a million times over, but these two points were made painfully obvious to me when I recently downloaded Runaway: A Road Adventure and Still Life from The Adventure Shop.

Still Life’s cooking puzzle was tough and I might have considered spending the time to figure it out if it was relevant in some way, but it was about the most pointless roadblock I had ever come across in an adventure game. There’s nothing like baking cookies for your father when you want to travel back to the 1920’s to catch a serial killer. As a side note, I thought Victoria’s father was the worst character in the game. However, overall I really enjoyed Still Life (and Post Mortem for that matter) despite some really hard puzzles, such as Still Life’s lock picking task. Is it just me or does Microid’s synopsis of Still Life 2 sound like it’s going to be half adventure/half stealth action? Let’s hope it turns out well.

http://www.microids.com/en/press/9/m...fe-sequel.html - Still Life 2 Press Release

Runaway: A Road Adventure really didn’t bode well with me as a new adventure game enthusiast. Within the first 10 minutes you’re welcomed by generic voice-acting, gorgeous back-drops mixed with ugly character models, a completely unclear objective, a window that requires you to check another object before you can climb out of it, a bag that decides when it wants to disclose its contents, a couple of items that require precision mouse-movement to reveal their 2 pixel by 2 pixel screen real-estate and…how can I forget, a marker pen that you need to inject with an alcohol-filled syringe in order to use. Aren’t these games supposed to be logical?

I read Adventure Gamers review of Runaway and the point they made about the game only allowing you to do things that seem logical at the time was very appealing. However, in practice it meant absolutely nothing because nearly everything the game wanted you to do was a poor assumption and seemingly illogical. Please keep in mind that I’m basing my opinion on the first section of the game only. As soon as I reached the museum and heard that woman’s grating voice (the one restoring artifacts) I had to turn it off. I figured there are much better adventure games out there.

Despite my enjoyment of Broken Sword 3 & 4, these are another couple of games that had me questioning the game design. There’s a priceless ancient artifact stuck in a steel cupboard. Why not wheel it out of a window and into the meat grinder below? That will surely destroy the cupboard and leave the ancient piece of paper to float to safety…yes? There was another set of puzzles in Broken Sword 4 where I felt I needed some type of French history degree to be able to figure out.

I think it’s all of these frustrations I’ve had with recent adventure games that make me want to create my own. I have an Advanced Diploma in Graphic Design, with a major in illustration. My friend has a degree in computer science and together, along with the help from a few others, we want to make a short 5 hour adventure. 2D and first-person as seen in Phoenix Wright, mixed with the gritty feel of mystery games such as Still Life. I’m currently writing the script and I estimate the game to take bloody ages to finish But I’m dedicated. I will be sure to post in the indie game section of the forum with updates.

Anyhow, I was just wondering, have you ever played an adventure game that you were certain you would have enjoyed more if it was harder? Personally, story and character development are the Holy Grail for me and if they’re good, then puzzles don’t mean much. A great example of that is Hotel Dusk.

As you may or may not have guessed, I haven't actually played any of the classic Lucas Arts or Sierra adventures but I'm getting on it! I'm a newcomer that was spawned from Phoenix Wright, Hotel Dusk, Trace Memory and my love for all things Shenmue. I recently purchased Secret Files: Tunguska and can't wait to play through that, too.

If you read of all of this then thanks very much for your time. Feel free to discuss anything and everything.
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Old 07-12-2008, 03:59 AM   #2
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Still Life’s cooking puzzle was tough and I might have considered spending the time to figure it out if it was relevant in some way, but it was about the most pointless roadblock I had ever come across in an adventure game. There’s nothing like baking cookies for your father when you want to travel back to the 1920’s to catch a serial killer.
I know the cookie puzzle is often spoken of as a pointless and difficult puzzle. I just want to add my 2 cents: as a middle aged woman who often bake cookies I have to say it wasn't very difficult at all (pointless perhaps, but still fun imho). Isn't it so, that the level of difficulty often is dependent on who you are and what you're good at. Some people are good at mathematical/logical puzzles while others have a talent for linguistics or have a good spatial perception etc.

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Anyhow, I was just wondering, have you ever played an adventure game that you were certain you would have enjoyed more if it was harder? Personally, story and character development are the Holy Grail for me and if they’re good, then puzzles don’t mean much.
Just like you I most often prefer a good story with interesting characters in a game. But every now and then (not that often I might add) I like a game with lots and lots of tricky, logical puzzles that I can really dig into. But generally speaking I want the game to have some kind of challenge. Preferably a good mix between doable/easy and tougher puzzles. I've just finished The Lost Crown: interesting story (although with an ending full of unanswered questions), OK characters and fairly easy puzzles. A couple were challenging enough for me so all and all I'm quite happy with that game.
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Old 07-12-2008, 04:22 AM   #3
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Originally Posted by orient View Post
Aren’t these games supposed to be logical?
Sometimes the logical nature of a puzzle can be misplaced, either through the designer not communicating the logic clearly enough or the designer's sense of what is logical not matching the general perception of what most of us would class as such.

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and…how can I forget, a marker pen that you need to inject with an alcohol-filled syringe in order to use.
This makes sense to me. Markers often use an alcohol base which helps the ink dry faster, so if the marker had dried out it would make sense to use the alcohol to make it work again. It sounds like the designer didn't make this clear enough so you understood it.

Sometimes the logic is non-existant. Forcing a player to pick up a non-related object before progressing always strikes me as a little desperate on the side of the designer. Having to get the pen before the game allows you to get out of the window in Runaway is a prime example of what not to do. The logical alternative (at a pinch) would be to have the window on the catch broken and you need the pen to release the catch before you can open it.

As a designer, you can become a little blind to the failings of your own puzzle design. It's easy to think a puzzle is logical because you know exactly how it works and the rationale behind it. You must put yourself in the mind of the player who is coming to a puzzle completely fresh.
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Old 07-12-2008, 09:05 AM   #4
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Anyhow, I was just wondering, have you ever played an adventure game that you were certain you would have enjoyed more if it was harder?
I can answer that with a very resounding "no". I'm no big fan of hard puzzles. It only distracts from the gameflow for me. Full Throttle and Syberia were some of the easiest adventures and also some of the best. Adventure games for me are more about the dialogue, atmosphere, and story. If you have hard riddles, I would suggest an in game hint system so people don't have to look up the walkthrough.
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Old 07-12-2008, 09:17 AM   #5
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I agree. I mean, i actually enjoy solving puzzles but the story, characters and atmosphere are far more important. I don't enjoy puzzles when they're too hard. That's the main problem i have with the Myst games with all those 'logic' puzzles. I'd much prefer the difficulty of the puzzles, in games, to be just right.
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Old 07-12-2008, 11:12 AM   #6
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I don't mind difficult puzzles. I actually feel somewhat cheated if a game is too easy and I breeze right through it. There's no sense of accomplishment in that, for me. I do have a problem with puzzles that aren't fair. If you had continued with Runaway, you'd have come across exactly what I mean in at least a couple more instances: puzzles that make no sense when approached with any kind of logic.

My ideal games have an excellent balance of story, characters, atmosphere and puzzles. If one of these elements is removed or underdeveloped, the game becomes mediocre. Too many games these days put all their energies into everything but the gameplay itself. Syberia, Dreamfall, and Culpa Innata come to mind. These games fleshed out their storylines and characters and atmosphere well enough, but when it came to actually playing the games, you had a woeful lack of interactivity in the first two games considering the many opportunities to have things to do, and in the third it all boiled down to a few random roadblock puzzles that were hammered onto the game world, rather than grown organically from it. The experiences left me somewhat empty.

A game that addresses the issue of challenge in an inventive way is Monkey Island 3. When you start a new game you can choose two different difficulty levels. Nice! What happened to that kind of approach?

The bottom line for me: challenge is good when it's fair and from the game-world.
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Old 07-12-2008, 03:28 PM   #7
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I think it boils down to whether a puzzle is fun or not. It could be an incredibly hard, even illogical puzzle, but if it's involving, enjoyable to participate in and rewarding to understand and overcome, most will stick with it without gripes.

Being 'involved' in a puzzle is key word here too. If you're that involved in a puzzle, you won't consider it as a block in progression, but part of a game's natural flow.

Amateria in Myst III is a good example. The puzzles were integrated into the world. More specifically, the world of Amateria was created around these puzzles, or 'teachings' to Atrus' sons.

Figuring the puzzles out meant having to explore the surroundings that gave me the chance to admire the beautiful visuals at the same time. Experimenting with the puzzles meant lots of eclectic visual movements and pretty sound effects. Instead of just bland buzzing sounds and lights turning green and red, it felt like I was effecting the world I was in.

Basically; it didn't feel like work.
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Old 07-12-2008, 04:52 PM   #8
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I love hard puzzles, because one gets a great sense of achievement upon solving them. There are for me, however, two caveats to this position. Firstly the game must be deserving, if I'm playing a game and the world's most ingenious puzzle is there, if I don't care about the story or like the environments, it won't matter. I'm not going to travel back and forth through some dull locations trying a solve a puzzle in the midst of a story I'm not at all compelled by. I'm just going to head straight for walkthorough so I can progress. Secondly, the puzzle has to be logical. That doesn't just mean standard logic, it can also be abstract, but as long as I can look at the available information and the solution, and conclude that one could reasonably deduce this, that is okay.
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Old 07-12-2008, 06:33 PM   #9
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Originally Posted by Jelena View Post
I know the cookie puzzle is often spoken of as a pointless and difficult puzzle. I just want to add my 2 cents: as a middle aged woman who often bake cookies I have to say it wasn't very difficult at all (pointless perhaps, but still fun imho). Isn't it so, that the level of difficulty often is dependent on who you are and what you're good at. Some people are good at mathematical/logical puzzles while others have a talent for linguistics or have a good spatial perception etc.
That's very true. I can understand why some people would find that puzzle fun to figure out; I just wished it was more relevant to the goal at hand.

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This makes sense to me. Markers often use an alcohol base which helps the ink dry faster, so if the marker had dried out it would make sense to use the alcohol to make it work again. It sounds like the designer didn't make this clear enough so you understood it.
Yeah, I understood it, but only after I did it by accident. Maybe if the syringe was already filled with alcohol, or you didn't need the syringe at all, then it would have been more obvious for me, but you had use the syringe on the alcohol bottle, then use that combined item on the pen. It was all a little far fetched for me to catch on to at the time.

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As a designer, you can become a little blind to the failings of your own puzzle design. It's easy to think a puzzle is logical because you know exactly how it works and the rationale behind it. You must put yourself in the mind of the player who is coming to a puzzle completely fresh.
That's exactly what I want to avoid with my game. We'll be play-testing a lot and making sure there are enough hints throughout so you know what you're supposed to be doing at all times. The real challenge is keeping it clever without making it too easy.

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I agree. I mean, i actually enjoy solving puzzles but the story, characters and atmosphere are far more important. I don't enjoy puzzles when they're too hard. That's the main problem i have with the Myst games with all those 'logic' puzzles. I'd much prefer the difficulty of the puzzles, in games, to be just right.
That's how I feel. Although, I think it's easier to make an "interactive novel" than it is a game. Naturally integrating good puzzles into a game world is something I really respect and want to accomplish with my own game.

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Originally Posted by Kazmajik View Post
Too many games these days put all their energies into everything but the gameplay itself. Syberia, Dreamfall, and Culpa Innata come to mind. These games fleshed out their storylines and characters and atmosphere well enough, but when it came to actually playing the games, you had a woeful lack of interactivity in the first two games considering the many opportunities to have things to do, and in the third it all boiled down to a few random roadblock puzzles that were hammered onto the game world, rather than grown organically from it. The experiences left me somewhat empty.
I agree. Interactivity is key. Even if the puzzles in a game are lacking, the player should be able to explore and interact with their surroundings in some way or another. If all you're doing is walking across lovely backdrops, going from one NPC to the next then no matter how fleshed out the characters are, you start to feel a slight disconnect with the world.

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I think it boils down to whether a puzzle is fun or not. It could be an incredibly hard, even illogical puzzle, but if it's involving, enjoyable to participate in and rewarding to understand and overcome, most will stick with it without gripes.
I would also like to add that originality in puzzles is important. I'm sure you've played a game or two where you could have sworn that you've done that puzzle before. I think people tend to like certain types of puzzles, but it's always worth trying to keep them fresh and exciting. I would use Broken Sword 3's crate puzzles as an example of exactly what not to do if you want your puzzles to remain fresh.

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Originally Posted by Jat316sob View Post
I love hard puzzles, because one gets a great sense of achievement upon solving them. There are for me, however, two caveats to this position. Firstly the game must be deserving, if I'm playing a game and the world's most ingenious puzzle is there, if I don't care about the story or like the environments, it won't matter. I'm not going to travel back and forth through some dull locations trying a solve a puzzle in the midst of a story I'm not at all compelled by. I'm just going to head straight for walkthorough so I can progress. Secondly, the puzzle has to be logical. That doesn't just mean standard logic, it can also be abstract, but as long as I can look at the available information and the solution, and conclude that one could reasonably deduce this, that is okay.
I can handle some tough puzzles, but if I know the goal and I've still spent over an hour trying to accomplish something like I did with Still Life's lock-picking puzzle, I tend to get frustrated. That puzzle was doable, but only if you were willing to write down the results of pushing every prong. Sometimes I just don't have the time
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Old 07-13-2008, 02:02 PM   #10
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I'm a story-and-immersion guy myself. I know that folks who play these games are kind of conditioned to expect puzzles, but frankly, I could live without them. Now, don't misunderstand me; I'm all for problem solving. By 'puzzles', I mean that I could do without what I refer to as 'arbitrary problem abstractions', where the designers decide that the logical solution to an immediate problem is too mundane to feel like an accomplishment in the virtual world.

Part of the reason this happens is because games until recently couldn't hope to even vaguely convince you that you were actually 'doing' anything except (virtually) walking, (virtually) talking, and (virtually) opening drawers. A little more imagination is needed to make problem solving using conventional or even specialized thinking believable in a game context. We still can't do VR chambers with holographic projection and interface suits, so we need to approximate the concept of effort in a visual/aural environment and still accurately convey the difficulty of resolving a problem.

In that sense, the lockpicking puzzle in Still Life was half way there, except that it was a little unreasonably difficult. Throwing that extra trick in there was just the puzzle designer pitting his mind against the player's. Pure ego. Interestingly enough, while the plot point served no importance to the greater plot conflict, the cookies for Dad thing was a nice storytelling touch, so the puzzle was amusing. However, it shouldn't have been deal-breaking. There should have been a bag of cookies in the cupboard that Dad would have chided you for, but so what?

I don't mind logic puzzles entirely, but I think some developers (and a lot of gamers) are conditioned to make them the prime focus, and thus guarantee that only a very small niche market will ever take an interest. That might be alright if all you aspire to is amusing a few puzzle gamers, but storytellers can't help but want to treat this as a true storytelling medium with its own peculiar conditions, mainly, that the story has to be interactive. Focussing on puzzles to the detriment of story logic just means the story will never be taken seriously by anyone but fellow storytellers. Everyone else will continue to use the lazy excuse that games will never achieve the level of artistry of literature or cinema.

"If I want to just watch a story, I'll put on a movie, or better yet, read a book." They completely fail to see the potential of interactive storytelling as its own artistic medium of expression, because interactive storytelling is still in its infancy, and hasn't been explored well enough to have truly come into its own as a medium. Hardly anyone knows of the few games that have been made in the last twenty or so years that really test the boundaries, and there isn't enough acceptance yet for it to be granted its own sub-genre; it has to grow off the back of the genre that spawned puzzle games, and has for many people come to mean one and the same thing.

So while I enjoyed exploring through Myst and Riven, I prefer games where story is key, and the problem solving is of a kind that we can all sort of work out (with perhaps a few judicious hints) without being particularly gifted at tricky pattern recognition or spatial, mathematical, communications or textual reasoning. I do okay at these things myself, but people who are particularly gifted at puzzle logic of one school or another always feel cheated if a game has too much of a school of reasoning that isn't their forte. Well, the same goes for people who get more out of plot resolution for its own sake.

Personally, I think the reason Adventure Games are still in a sort of cultural ghetto is because the developers don't trust interactive storytelling. It's understandable that interactive storytelling has such a bad rap, because a lot of games in the last twenty or thirty years were written by programmers, and thus lacked finesse and narrative shape. It takes a lot of resources to create an interactive plot, and no two gamers can agree point for point on what makes good interactivity in a game. We all like and focus on different things, and 'good story' is still this foregone conclusion, but is often treated as an afterthought by game developers.

It doesn't help that at least a segment of the Adventure Gamer population could care less about story, so long as you pack in lots of hard puzzles, and are very vocal about this preference. To them, AGs are just another form of crossword or sudoku. The expectations are so diverse amongst AG aficionados that no developer ever seems to get this mythical balancing act just right.

So yeah, to make a long story short (Too Late), puzzles have their place, but I don't believe that place should be at the front of the line. I think Adventure Game devs need to learn other ways to create conflict in their games, if the story/immersion factor is ever going to win folks over who didn't come just for the puzzles. I'm not calling an end to puzzle gaming as a whole. I just think it's a poor substitute for conventional problem solving, and it breaks the immersion for anyone who was actually interested in the story as opposed to just looking for the next puzzle. There has to be a better way to do this.
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Old 07-13-2008, 02:50 PM   #11
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A well-written post, with a clear and convincing position! Ah.
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Old 07-13-2008, 03:17 PM   #12
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Old 07-14-2008, 01:20 AM   #13
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So yeah, to make a long story short (Too Late), puzzles have their place, but I don't believe that place should be at the front of the line. I think Adventure Game devs need to learn other ways to create conflict in their games, if the story/immersion factor is ever going to win folks over who didn't come just for the puzzles. I'm not calling an end to puzzle gaming as a whole. I just think it's a poor substitute for conventional problem solving, and it breaks the immersion for anyone who was actually interested in the story as opposed to just looking for the next puzzle. There has to be a better way to do this.
There are lots of things I'd like to say in response to your very insightful post, but for the moment I'll just focus on defending puzzles a bit – or rather than defending, trying to explain why they are enjoyable to me. And by "puzzles" here, I don't mean logic puzzles, or Myst / Aura / Schizm style of puzzles. I mean "adventure" puzzles, the puzzles of Colossal Cave, of King's Quest, of Monkey Island.

What I really want to get across is that, to me, those games are indeed that – games. They're not real-life simulators: they rely on completely arbitrary and artificial rules, as all games do. I love games, all sorts of games, and I've always considered that games were not about competition, not about winning, but about fun, pleasure, shared between the players. And I especially like adventure games, because, despite their limiting and artificial rules, they leave a lot of room for creativity. If the rules of the game limit you to moving your pawn around and asking the other players if it could have been Colonel Mustard with the rope in the library, there's not much room left for creativity – though that doesn't prevent the game from being lots of fun. But adventure games, even with very simple rules (you can pick up items, use them, maybe combine them, etc.) are all about creativity, all about thinking outside the box. And it's precisely the artificial rules that make that fun. Of course in real life the king of Daventry would have money on him rather than have to through a series of trades to get what he wants – but where would the fun be in that?

Another part of the fun, which you've also seen, is that those games are duels – battles of wits between the designer and the player. If neither cheats (unfortunately, lots of designers tend to cheat from time to time, by withholding clues or hiding hotspots, which in turn prompts players to cheat by resorting to walkthroughs), this can be tremendously fun (much like a game of chess or go, I guess), especially since the duel relies on creativity.

Another very interesting thing that you've mentioned (and that I'd been thinking about for a while) is that most adventure designers used to be former programmers. That's no coincidence. I'm not a programmer, but I'm a physicist and I code a lot, and I can definitely say that the types of mind needed to code and to solve adventure puzzles are extremely similar, and that the fun in both activities is pretty much of the same nature. In both cases, it's about thinking up a way to reach a given goal, with given means and within given rules, and the fun comes not only from looking for the solution, but also from finding the most clever and elegant one – just like older adventure games used to have multiple solutions to puzzles, the more elegant ones being worth more points.

Now, I completely get that enjoying that type of game requires a certain type of mind. I can't play strategy games: my brain just shuts down when I try to make it think about different possibilities, and chains of possible reactions and consequences, to find the best strategy to adopt. So I understand that adventure games are not for everyone, and that the type of people who can like adventure puzzles are mainly the type of people who had a reason for having a home computer back in the early 90s – which is why the adventure genre was dominant then, and why it hasn't grown much since then, despite more and more people playing video games. Ultimately, adventure puzzles are in large part a coder's delight.

Obviously, if adventure puzzles are what one plays adventure games for, it doesn't mean that the story gets neglected – the story provides the framework for the puzzles, it's what stimulates the player's creativity. A good story, a good world, good characters, are essential for good adventure puzzles – on top of being enjoyable for themselves, as good stories are, obviously. But that's completely different from "interactive storytelling". Interactive storytelling is something I'd love to see happen (independently of adventure puzzles; to me, those are two different kinds of pleasure, and could very well be two different types of games, two different genres). But I just don't see it happening. Seriously, what have the landmarks been in interactive storytelling? The Last Express? And then Fahrenheit a decade later? And then what? Once again, I'd love to see it happen, but for the moment we're not getting any closer.

What's mostly happening is adventure games without adventure puzzles. Adventure designers seem to have lost the pleasure of the duel, the pleasure of designing clever adventure puzzles – or maybe they just think that they should refrain themselves, because so few people enjoy such puzzles. And since exploration, the joy of scouring the garden hunting for Easter eggs, is getting removed as well for budget reasons (since it's much cheaper to just repeat "I can't do that" rather than write and execute lots of fun little things for every action the player can think of), what you're often left with is a half-decent story that could have been told just as well is a non-interactive way, with some half-baked puzzles here and there that feel like homework (and, just as importantly, seem to have felt like homework for the designer). Not my idea of fun.

There's a part of me that loves stories, and that would really like to see "interactive storytelling" happen. But there's also a part of me that loves adventure puzzles, those battles of creativity between a designer and a player, and I'm frustrated to see fewer and fewer of those these days, with designers who seem to be constantly apologising for putting puzzles into their games.

(Ugh. Sorry for the loooooong post.)
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Old 07-14-2008, 06:08 AM   #14
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Of course in real life the king of Daventry would have money on him rather than have to through a series of trades to get what he wants – but where would the fun be in that?
In getting to know first-hand how nice it is to not have to work for everything. To quote a sage, it's good to be the king. This is a dramatic truth which is lost by inserting generic puzzles. Thank you for bringing such a good example of how puzzles for the sake of puzzles hurt storytelling.

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Another part of the fun, which you've also seen, is that those games are duels – battles of wits between the designer and the player. If neither cheats (unfortunately, lots of designers tend to cheat from time to time, by withholding clues or hiding hotspots, which in turn prompts players to cheat by resorting to walkthroughs), this can be tremendously fun (much like a game of chess or go, I guess), especially since the duel relies on creativity.
Explain to me why such a duel needs a story. Imagine you took a strategy game like chess or go, and attached it to a story which has nothing to do with its gameplay. Does that make any sort of sense to you? The fun you are describing is precisely the reason God invented puzzle games and strategy games. If a developer really wants to make that sort of game, why on Earth is he making an adventure?

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Obviously, if adventure puzzles are what one plays adventure games for, it doesn't mean that the story gets neglected – the story provides the framework for the puzzles, it's what stimulates the player's creativity. A good story, a good world, good characters, are essential for good adventure puzzles – on top of being enjoyable for themselves, as good stories are, obviously.
Who ever said a puzzle game couldn't have stories? As a kid, I read all sorts of puzzle books with stories attached. You want to give a long series of puzzles with flimsy excuses attached, if you think that's more "stimulating" than purely abstract puzzles, that's fine. But then tell me: How do the cutscenes and dialogue and wandering around and rigid linearity help the game at all? It seems to me, that by putting your puzzles in an adventure structure you are quite simply wasting the player's time. If I want to think, then give me a puzzle. Don't give me twenty minutes of plot and characters and world design before you generously allow me to see a puzzle. Give me the puzzle, and whatever context is necessary for that puzzle, and then let me move straight on to the next one.


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Interactive storytelling is something I'd love to see happen (independently of adventure puzzles; to me, those are two different kinds of pleasure, and could very well be two different types of games, two different genres). But I just don't see it happening. Seriously, what have the landmarks been in interactive storytelling? The Last Express? And then Fahrenheit a decade later? And then what? Once again, I'd love to see it happen, but for the moment we're not getting any closer.
Excellent point. And your attitude certainly isn't helping us get closer. Puzzles are holding adventures back, man. The more fans hold on to puzzles and expect to get them, the less likely we'll get anywhere.

If a developer sticks a puzzle-for-its-own-sake into his long-form story, he should be apologizing for it! It does not belong there! It belongs in a puzzle game, where it can breathe!

And yeah, the current adventures are pretty pathetic. I'm with you on that one. But moving backward, toward something which never made much sense to begin with, is not the answer. We need to move forward!
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Old 07-14-2008, 07:13 AM   #15
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I'm in the 'only like very difficult pizzles if the payoff is worth it' camp. The Myst games are my favorite because although difficult at times the puzzles are always fair, germaine to the story and pay off in a pretty spectacular way. There are a few other games close to Myst quality but most fall in the middle somewhere and are not worth the brain busters that are just thrown in to slow down the gameplay or are so wildly illogical as to only rate a peek at a walkthrough. Those games can be enjoyable to me if the puzzles are of medium to easy difficulty and advance a good story.
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Old 07-14-2008, 08:52 AM   #16
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Explain to me why such a duel needs a story. Imagine you took a strategy game like chess or go, and attached it to a story which has nothing to do with its gameplay. Does that make any sort of sense to you? The fun you are describing is precisely the reason God invented puzzle games and strategy games. If a developer really wants to make that sort of game, why on Earth is he making an adventure?

Who ever said a puzzle game couldn't have stories? As a kid, I read all sorts of puzzle books with stories attached. You want to give a long series of puzzles with flimsy excuses attached, if you think that's more "stimulating" than purely abstract puzzles, that's fine. But then tell me: How do the cutscenes and dialogue and wandering around and rigid linearity help the game at all? It seems to me, that by putting your puzzles in an adventure structure you are quite simply wasting the player's time. If I want to think, then give me a puzzle. Don't give me twenty minutes of plot and characters and world design before you generously allow me to see a puzzle. Give me the puzzle, and whatever context is necessary for that puzzle, and then let me move straight on to the next one.
Once again, I'm not talking about logic puzzles, but Colossal Cave / King's Quest / Monkey Island style puzzles. Those absolutely need a story and settings to work, because those define the rules of the particular puzzles, they define what you can or can't do, the sort of problems you'll have to solve. Take GK3, for instance: the sections you play as Gabriel are very different from those you play as Grace, in terms of gameplay, even though it's still the same game, the same interface. Because they're different people, with different talents, different personalities, and different relationships with the other characters. And obviously, if, instead of Gabriel or Grace, you're Guybrush Threepwood or April Ryan, living different stories in different worlds, with different motivations, then the rules will once again be different. I'm not saying that you should only play GK3 (or TLJ, or...) for the puzzles, but even so, the puzzles couldn't exist without a believable context – precisely because adventure puzzles are all about figuring out how to reach your goal within the current context.

Another part of what makes adventure games enjoyable to several people (and which I only briefly touched upon in my previous post) is exploration. By exploration, I don't (just) mean visiting new locations, but trying out stuff to discover things. For instance, compare Sam & Max ep. 201 with its non-interactive version. The latter is great, because the humour is brilliant, but I enjoyed the game more. That's partly due to the pleasure of solving the puzzles, but also to the enjoyment of exploring the settings, looking at every little thing, talking to everyone, trying weird item combinations and getting funny answers. A similar example is the Banang gag in a later episode: you click on a background item and get a hilarious reaction from your character; but what makes it even funnier is that, unexpectedly, the more you click on the item, the more over-the-top his reaction gets. And obviously that's something you wouldn't have without interactivity. And that's also something you wouldn't have without a story, without good characters, without interesting settings. (If you had the same gag with Grace instead of Sam, it would just be disturbing: it's because you have those wacky characters in that wacky world that the game works.) Exploration can only be enjoyable if there's something worth exploring; it has no point with a bland character living his bland life in a bland world (case in point: Touch Detective — lots of little things to explore, but no reason whatsoever to want to do it). Obviously, exploration is different from puzzles, so I'm getting somewhat off-topic, but since it's been a component of adventure games ever since they've existed, it's also a reason why adventure games need a good story.

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Excellent point. And your attitude certainly isn't helping us get closer. Puzzles are holding adventures back, man.
No. Puzzles may be holding back interactive stories, but they're not holding back adventure games (sc. games following the same principles as the original Adventure), since puzzles (and exploration) lie at the heart of those (and therefore story too, as explained above). Now, I understand that you don't enjoy (or possibly even "get") adventure games, the same way I don't enjoy strategy games, or shooters. And I completely respect that. And I also understand and respect that you want interactive storytelling to make leaps forward. And so do I. But I also want adventure games to go on existing, probably as a separate entity; I want them to evolve, to improve, yes, but not to change their fundamental nature, which is to focus on puzzles and exploration, which are enjoyable in their own right (and which, once again, can only exist within the framework of a good story). Interactive storytelling is not the natural evolution of adventure games: it's something that can also be enjoyed by adventure gamers, but it's something fundamentally different, which, indeed, might possibly exist without puzzles or gameplay as we generally understand it.
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Old 07-14-2008, 12:21 PM   #17
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Read my virtual lips: A puzzle game can have short-term stories!

Where do you get this idea that a context-dependent puzzle can only exist within the larger framework of an adventure? Why can't I have a game with two hundred different puzzles, each one starring a different character whose mind I've gotta get into to solve the puzzle? Why do I have to play it with one character, in one plot, and not be able to switch to a different one when I get stuck? Puzzles are holding back story, and story is holding back puzzles!

A single stand-alone puzzle could have a setting so detailed, so rich that you can imagine an entire world around it with fascinating characters and stories. But I don't want to have to slog through that entire world, and go through lengthy forced exchanges with every one of those characters, and see an entire movie's-worth of plot, just to play that one puzzle! Let me at the puzzle, give me whatever characterization and style and interaction and whatever else you think will amuse me in the context of that puzzle, and then let me move on to another puzzle!

And please don't remind me about how exploration is never on its own and there's never any good exploration because of that and it's used as a stage for the story and puzzles without any interesting landmarks but where it takes me ten minutes to cross the screen and I can't just go where I want without that stupid monkey wrench and every few steps I lose control for a cutscene and Myst and Metroid are dead having committed suicide in the name of gameplay but they never reached their potential even while they had it because they thought it was all about the puzzles and the action and the story and the waste of time that never ends when all I really want is a pretty waterfall and some architecture but I can never get anything nice. Just don't.
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Old 07-14-2008, 12:59 PM   #18
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I love hard puzzles, because one gets a great sense of achievement upon solving them.
If I want a sense of achievement, the last place I would go is in front of a computer game. I like my games fun and laid back. Kind of like what Blizzard did to MMOs.
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Old 07-17-2008, 03:09 PM   #19
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I don't much care if puzzles are "relevant to the story" as long as they're fun. After all, I enjoy Professor Layton and other puzzle games. But I think with some games it matters if the puzzles are "relevant to the story" and with other games it doesn't. Maybe instead of "relevant to the story" we should think "relevant to the game."

I'd rather a game be good at what it aims to be than try to satisfy everyone in all respects and not really succeed at any of them. In other words I'd rather play a game with fun puzzles than a game with mediocre puzzles, mediocre story, mediocre characters, mediocre everything. And I'd rather play a game with an engaging story, interesting characters, and very few puzzles than a game with mediocre puzzles, mediocre story, mediocre characters, mediocre everything. Unfortunately very few recent games have a story and/or characters that really stand out, so my favorite games tend to be the ones that are puzzle-centric.
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Old 07-17-2008, 08:52 PM   #20
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Interactive storytelling is something I'd love to see happen (independently of adventure puzzles; to me, those are two different kinds of pleasure, and could very well be two different types of games, two different genres). But I just don't see it happening. Seriously, what have the landmarks been in interactive storytelling? The Last Express? And then Fahrenheit a decade later? And then what? Once again, I'd love to see it happen, but for the moment we're not getting any closer.
Interactive storytelling isn’t a new game genre that developers have failed to successfully create. It’s simply a bi-product of games trying to tell worthy stories. A perfect example is Bioshock; a game that has it all: great gameplay, convincing world and atmosphere, intriguing characters and story. Obviously adventure games are completely different to action games so developers have to approach storytelling in alternative ways, but the principles are the same. You don’t need flashy graphics in a game to tell a good story, but you do need interactivity or you might as well make a film.

The reason games are exciting as a medium for storytelling is because they’re interactive. Simply walking from one conversation and/or cut-scene to the next is a poor excuse for a game and will never be very successful.
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