Adventure Gamers - Forums

I do enjoy Phoenix Wright, in principle. I love locked room mysteries and impossible crimes, and some of the cases are really inventive.

The problem is it’s just so damn boring!!!

A lot of the dialogue is amusing and well written; unlike a lot of companies they’ve spent the time getting the localisation right.

Instead, it falls into what seems to be a standard Japanese model of explaining everything to death. No logical leap is too small that it doesn’t need explaining and repeating several times. The Miles Edgeworth game was actually painful. I was actually disappointed that there was another case when I thought I’d finished!

I understand that, by basically playing them straight through, I’m not experiencing them in the normal way. Recapping is necessary if someone is playing for twenty minutes at a time, possibly over many months. But Professor Layton gets round this by having the recap whenever you load a save, which seems much better than going over everything again and again every time you learn a new fact.

We’ve touched on this elsewhere, but narratively, it’s also a bit awkward that you’re playing as Phoenix. For him to make some of the leaps he does, he must have solved the case. But then later down the chain of reasoning he’ll freeze as though he doesn’t know what’s going on.

And I find the gameplay rather frustrating. It’s great when it works, but sometimes I just don’t see why one item is any better evidence than some of the others. If there’s anything that would benefit from the “multiple routes to information” model that we’ve been discussing, I think it’s Phoenix Wright.

That all sounds very critical. I do enjoy the games. But it’s only because the plotting is so strong that I’m able to overlook the gameplay. I’d much rather just read the stories, to be honest. The end of the first game is wonderful. While it’s pretty obvious who the culprit is, the way they’re unmasked is very elegant.

TimovieMan - 05 March 2013 01:41 PM

And what does failure look like? If, at the end of Death of the Nile, Poirot had got it wrong, how would that play out? At the end of Cruise for a Corpse, selecting the wrong killer results in instant death (if I’m not misremembering), but in-story that makes no sense at all.

This is something David Cage likes. If you fail, the game continues to a bad, but more or less complete, ending.
Personally, I feel that’s taking things too far. You can go to a bad ending, but it should fit with the story, and it should be more or less immediate - otherwise I feel it would appear like the game is “wasting our time”...

I really like this solution actually. It’s not really on topic, but I think one of the major problems facing people trying to tell interactive stories is that the audience only thinks that good endings are true endings. I’d be much happier with a system where, for my money, I was getting one playthrough, unique to me, as long as I was getting a complete story.

Doesn’t this depend on the type of mystery? A Sherlock Holmes mystery shouldn’t be solvable by anyone other than Sherlock Holmes, so in this case, 99% should be completely surprised…

Sort of! But the game that Sherlock Holmes is playing and the game the reader is playing are different. If Holmes notices that the colonel’s cane is unusually worn at the top, there’s no way to replicate that, even if the reader is told. Holmes has picked that detail out of a million others in the room. The reader has picked it out of maybe three in a description given by Watson.

“Solved” for Holmes means that he’s worked out who the culprit is, what their motive is, and how they committed the crime. He’s also either gathered or knows where to find the necessary evidence.

“Solved” for most readers means “That guy did it!” Maybe “That guy did it: he’s not really wheelchair bound and he’s been dressing as the Countess to give himself an alibi!”

So I think my model still holds, because of the difference in what it means to be a real (albeit fictional) detective and an armchair detective solving over the narrator’s shoulder.

This isn’t quite as irrelevant as it might seem. The reason that mysteries don’t work as adventures is that they’re trying to model the first game, the one Holmes is playing, whereas it’s the second one that everyone loves.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree about Phoenix Wright, somanycrimes. I’m not going to argue that the games are flawless, but I found the fundamental mechanic delightful and the gameplay satisfying pretty much throughout. And I’m not sure the mysteries as written would work in a different, non-interactive medium.

It really didn’t bother me that a lot of the puzzles were pretty easy, or that they “gamified” minor plot points. Besides, even if I could spot the lie right away (or predict when something was going to be the clue that wins the next cross-interrogation), it was always interesting to see what the fallback story was going to be.

I think there are literally only a couple of times in all the games together where Phoenix/Apollo must have put it together before the actual moment when you direct him to show the key piece of evidence. Though in more general terms, the attorneys’ doofus personas become harder to believe in once they’ve won so many cases so brilliantly.

I admit that you could sometimes have a perfectly logical courtroom argument in mind that the game just wouldn’t let you input, either because you’d jumped ahead of Phoenix in your deductions, or because the judge would only accept one particular piece of evidence, when another ought to have served equally well. But again, in my experience that was a very occasional problem. When I got stuck for more than a minute or two (a rare occurrence), at least two thirds of the time it was because I had genuinely missed something, not because of a flaw in the game logic. And these problem instances aren’t inherent in the design, either, just imperfections in the execution.

TimovieMan - 05 March 2013 01:52 PM

Isn’t that the best proof that they implemented something like that correctly? If the underlying mechanism is barely detectable for the player, then the devs did it right, imo.

Oh, sure. I’m not at all opposed to this kind of puzzle. I see it as a pretty standard puzzle form, which probably adds some amount of extra work to the overall design, but I really like it, when it’s well executed.

The detective thing sounds like a whole other beast to me; I don’t really see the connection at all.

Iznogood - 05 March 2013 02:12 PM

Let me first say welcome to the forum somanycrimes.

You have some valid points and it is always good to get some input from professional.

Thanks! It’s always weird to think of myself as a professional. I just really, really like writing and thinking about writing (and criticizing - being an editor is often like being a critic, but hopefully more helpful!). Luckily people are happy to pay me for it!

As for the Sherlock Holmes and Poirot are geniuses, and we mortal players can’t possible compete with that - Fine, that is a valid point, but not all detectives are geniuses and not all protagonists are the sharpest knife in the drawer. Solving the crimes ourselves might not work for a Sherlock game, but i could work in many other games.

This is a good point, and I totally agree. I think, generally, this is where a lot of developers go wrong. There’s this assumption that basically any story can be an adventure game, or that the gameplay and story are very separate. But the traits of your main character can directly affect what sort of puzzles mechanics will be plausible and fun. What would work for an everyman detective wouldn’t work at all for a genius detective.

After a brisk nap - 05 March 2013 03:02 PM

We’ll just have to agree to disagree about Phoenix Wright, somanycrimes. I’m not going to argue that the games are flawless, but I found the fundamental mechanic delightful and the gameplay satisfying pretty much throughout. And I’m not sure the mysteries as written would work in a different, non-interactive medium.

Oh I don’t think we disagree all that much. I think the central mechanic is a clever one, and the goofy tone fits it perfectly. I just think the execution could be tightened up.

And I think it’s the adventure sections where the logic is most lacking. Often the triggers to get things to move on are quite inscrutable. I agree with you that there were only a few times in court where it seemed like there were possible alternatives that hadn’t been considered.

Once you’re bored, other perceived problems tend to seem heightened. If I was allowed to cut most of the dialogue by about 25% - 50% they’d probably be perfect!

Anyway, I totally diverted the thread, sorry. With regards resources for opening up the puzzles, I wonder if that’s really that much of a problem. Sure, you don’t want to be adding whole new locations and objects that some players will never see or use, and you don’t want to have to animate a million new possibilities for existing assets.

But dialogue and information puzzles don’t have the same limitations, I assume? My assumption is always that writing is the cheapest part of any adventure game, which is why I can legitimately gripe that it seems to get the least investment.

TimovieMan - 05 March 2013 03:31 PM

Then you’re going to love Heavy Rain.

Actually I HATE Heavy Rain. Because it’s exactly the sort of game I desperately want to play and enjoy, but David Cage has such a cack-handed understanding of storytelling and language that it’s bitterly disappointing at almost every stage after the first half hour or so.

A lot of things people don’t like about it I’m fine with. I love the fact that it starts with you just pottering around your house. I even quite like the QTEs. I love the audacity of the twist (even if I did guess it from the first gameplay video I saw, in a sort of “if this was my game, I know what I’d do” sort of way.) I just need my mysteries to make sense. Some plots don’t need to make sense anywhere except in the moment, but mysteries and thrillers necessarily require you to think back over everything you’ve learned to cast it in a new light. And basically nothing in Heavy Rain hangs together, no matter which route you take through the game.

I think a lot of the criticism levelled at David Cage is unfair - a lot of his ideas are good, and it’s often unfairly extrapolated that he’s trying to change every game in the world to be like his. But the man cannot write. At this point I doubt he could even learn how to write well, and I don’t say that about many people.

I did love The Nomad Soul though. A nutty disregard for the rhythms of language and narrative sort of worked there… Maybe Cage should just stay away from trying to replicate anything even approximating humanity!

Iznogood - 05 March 2013 02:51 PM

I think you may have misunderstood me.
When i said that it requires less work from the developers, then i was speaking specifically about the Password puzzle, and other similar stand-alone puzzles.

You still wouldn’t have access to the room where the computer is, until you had some reason to go there, or at least that is not the point of the password example. And as for not talking to the person that provides you with the clue to the password, before you try to hack the computer, well that is already the case in many games, there is plenty of examples, where you get to a door or computer etc, and realize that you can’t get further before you do something else somewhere else.

Also a dialog like “Hi i am Sarah, the ambassador is my mother”, which in my example would be the crucial clue, doesn’t require different dialog depending on whether or not you have already hacked the computer, it makes perfect sense in both cases. 

As for the overall idea of “opening” the games up more, then you are probably right, this would require extra work and different dialogs depending on what you have already discovered, compared to a more sequential approach.

No, I don’t think I’ve misunderstood.

The point of the password puzzle example was that the game doesn’t know / doesn’t care how you solved it, right? What that means in terms of game logic is that having passed this point in the game guarantees less about what has happened in the game so far. You can’t automatically assume that the player has picked up that inventory item, looked at that hotspot, had that particular conversation with that character, or whatever the precondition for solving the puzzle would have been in a more linear design. That means that from there on, you have to consider more possible game states, and make sure the game remains consistent, plausible, fair and winnable (and doesn’t, in the worst case, crash) whatever the player did to get there. The more unknown parameters you have, the more work that is. That’s why nonlinearity is so expensive.

Sure, you can write generic dialog, but then you’re restricting the dramatic potential and the storytelling opportunities. And you can put in choke points before or after that puzzle, to make sure players have jumped through all the necessary hoops, but then what are you really adding in terms of player freedom?

Again, I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, or not worth doing. I’m just saying that it actually adds more complexity to the puzzle and story logic.

To take another example from Resonance, there’s a bit where [spoiler]you have to guess the code to a combination lock, in order to read a diary, which is furthermore written in a cypher you have to decrypt. You can brute-force both the code lock and the cypher (trying different options until you get it right), but there are also clues spread around in various places. You get the diary early in the game, and there’s no particular time you have to read it. I’m not 100% sure whether you even need to read the diary in order to complete the game; but if you do, it only becomes necessary pretty late in the game. That means that from very early on in the game, and for most of the length, you may or may not have read the diary that provides very central information to the story. This means that every conversation about these topics either had to be written very generically, or in two different versions. And it means that there’s no guarantee that the player has picked up some of the clues that were meant to help you to read it. For example, there’s a graveyard you really only have to visit in order to pick up one of these clues. If you crack the code without going (it’s a bit hard to figure out how to get there), later on you’ll reach a point where you can’t proceed without going to the graveyard, doing nothing, and then coming back. If the puzzle had been made so you needed the hint to crack the code, and you needed to have cracked the code to proceed, it would have made sense, but now it’s left as a completely arbitrary trigger.[/spoiler]

Resonance has a lot of nonlinearity like this, but Vince has often talked about how that also meant a ton of extra work in order to handle most possible game states fairly elegantly.

I think the problem you’d have is that a wild goose chase in an RPG will at least have some fringe benefits: you’ll be gaining experience and items and such.

Also, how do you know that it’s a wild goose chase? Will the game tell you “Sorry, Detective Mario, the guy who killed the hooker is in another castle”? Because that IS annoying. The game might as well say “Ha ha! You guessed wrong!” or “Ha ha! I wasted your time!”

But if there ISN’T something like that, how do you know you aren’t just stuck? Being stuck is the default position in adventure games, and it’s essential that the player trust that they’re missing something, instead of there simply being nothing else to do. Because once the player loses that trust, every moment is going to feel like it could potentially be a waste of time.