A Dangerous path

Suggestions
21

I wouldn’t say his message is "Learn from trial and error"
I would say it’s "Don’t sacrifice depth for accessibility. "
I agree with that entirely.
I would say the two polar opposites would be Dwarf Fortress on one end, where I watched tutorial videos and read the wiki and still have no idea how to play that game. It’s a deep, deep game, but it is horribly uninviting.
And Spore, which has already been pointed out. The game welcomes you to play it. It is so easy to get into and learn. But there is no depth.
Dwarf Fortress is a bottomless well with a downdraft that sucks you in and drowns you, and Spore is a little puddle on the side of the road. The ideal would be to have a lake to swim in, because that is fun, inviting, won’t kill you, and never gets boring.

I haven’t slept in awhile. I apologize if I am repeating things that have already been said or just not make sense word yo.

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22

I think it’s interesting how everyone is bringing up Dwarf Fortress as a super hard game - while I don’t disagree that DF is horribly complex and a perfect example of how you don’t want to design an accessible game, I actually tried it the other day and found it simultaneously confusing and too easy. Basically, I was following along with a quick start guide, and it told me things like “build an 11x11 room, then build a 5x5 room” without telling me why. As a result, I wasn’t really learning anything. At the same time, it didn’t seem like I needed to do anything. As far as I could tell, nothing was going wrong. The dwarves were happy and autonomous. (I think… the interface of that game is atrocious) There was nothing for me to fix, nothing to inspire me as to what I should do next.

Minecraft, by contrast, forces you to learn the basics of the game in a very stressful situation: within 10 minutes, if you haven’t learned how to perform the basic functions of the game (mining blocks, crafting tools, building shelter), you will be punished (sun goes down… sssssBOOM). Like Dwarf Fortress, it’s virtually impossible to learn these things without consulting a wiki, but as you hear the zombies pounding on your door at night, it’s easy to understand why the early game is played the way it is.

Unfortunately, a few in-game days later, you’ve seen all the game has to offer in terms of gameplay and you’re just left in a tedious cycle of trying to find more diamonds and Ender Pearls before you explore the new features they added in the last update. The gameplay simply doesn’t scale with the player’s skill - all the unique mechanics are overshadowed by the tedious core mechanic of just scouring the world looking for some rare resource. In addition, the main challenge of the early game (monsters at night, hunger) virtually cease to be an issue in the mid game, but they’re never replaced by more intense challenges unless you go looking for a fight.

I think the best way to make a game fun to learn is to force players to learn one thing at a time by forcing very targeted but quick challenges in the early game. Skilled players can pass these challenges quickly and get to the meat of the game, and new players will find them difficult but not insurmountable.

So in the first few minutes of Stonehearth, maybe it becomes clear that your citizens are getting tired and need somewhere to sleep. So you build a house and learn how to do that. And in order to craft a bed, you need a carpenter - which means building a workshop and learning about another core mechanic. Now all of your citizens have a place to sleep and they’re happy - except now they’re getting hungry! So you have to learn how to farm. Then the goblins attack, and you have to learn how to train and control soldiers - all the while having to manage the hunger and rest mechanics that you’ve already been taught. The game can get very deep very easily in this way, as long as there’s always a challenge forcing the player towards the next mechanic.

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23

@MrKrazy, You bring up some very good points. I’ve steered away from using Minecraft as a negative example in my arguments due to it’s incredible popularity. To me the game has lots of problems, and yet I can’t understand why it has become such a phenomenon. Yet, I have found myself playing it for hours, the whole time, telling myself, this game is really stupid. My desires in playing it have always been to build some amazing fortress, or some kind of super monster harvesting machine. But the effort required to do such grandiose things boils down to clicking on thousands of blocks of stone, which required many diamond pickaxes, which required clicking on blocks of stone. And in the end it’s just a very clumsy voxel editor. There is no question that Minecraft has changed the gaming industry forever. It’s practically infinite world (enough to fit over 75 full scale earth’s in); it’s use of simple (retro) style graphics to create enormous landscapes; and it’s complete freedom, with no pre-set goals, or story. I think for these reasons Minecraft has done great things for gaming, but projects like Stonehearth, and Cube World that take some of those basic concepts and mold them into a quality game with some depth are the biggest reason Minecraft was a good thing, not for the game itself.

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24

I like Minecraft, but I totally agree with you, because the only reason I like Minecraft is mods. The vanilla game never really intrigued me, because there really was no end goal, and even with mods and friends, we can’t play for longer than a week because we just fall into the same pattern and setups and lose interest. It was fun at one point, and it was interesting, at one point, but it just failed to hold up because there were no goals or challenges, or even enough room for variation caused by the game itself.

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@MrKrazy and @2_Zons I think Minecraft is some kind of good example on … how not to do it… throwing the player into it without the chance to explain anything at the beginning if you not dig through some source like the wiki or get to watch some videos on youtube. I remember my very first time with MC quite clearly.

I spawned at a cliff… in a quite hilly region… with some animals and understanding nothing. I somehow managed to make planks and filling the whole grid I managed to make a workbench… but that was all. I even managed to dig dirt and place them as well as logs and … you can guess what happened. Night and monsters and Boom’s and frustration. Some months later Paul’s video was linked on the page and I learned some basics thanks to it and the wiki. Between that time when I first tried it and then it was not present on my HDD for quite some time, since it was not accessible enough. Some kind of Tutorial for the important steps simply were not available with ease. Right now I am frustrated only thanks to mods which spawn dungeons which are just to hard for me right now, hardly any useful enchantments or highlevel-gear.

Really, this kind of game screams for some kind of tutorial or some popups or whatever to explain the first steps but should be skipable or have an option to be deactivated but not make them far to easy. I loved the idea about spore as well but… it DOES get kinda boring… and skips a lot of possible fun like it is. Be it the far to short phases which sometimes scream for a certain approach or the endgame all together. You have some obstacles, mostly selfmade ones but in general, what was envisioned sadly never really made it :frowning: And I doubt anyone of us wants something like that happening.

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Oddly enough, I don’t consider Minecraft’s lack of a tutorial a flaw. At its heart, it’s a game meant to be played with the wiki open in another window. While I sincerely hope that future games don’t take this approach, the merciless beginning of the game introduces you to the fact that you’re not going to get anywhere without help and instructions. Fortunately, later versions of Minecraft (i.e. Pocket Edition, Xbox) have strayed away from the “secret recipe” system (Minecraft’s primary flaw in the learning curve) and the Xbox Edition even has a tutorial.

That said, maybe it would be better to have instructional popups on the first ingame day to tell you what to do next instead of telling you what you just did :P.

What I’m most excited about with Stonehearth as opposed to Minecrat is the fact that it’s a strategy game rather than a first-person game - which means, if they do it right, there will be no tedious chores and micromanagement. You’ll set a villager to go do something, and wait until he’s done. While you’re waiting, you can set up something else to be done. The more villagers you have, the more things you can do at once, where as in a first-person sandbox, you can only ever do one thing at once.

On the topic of Spore - I just had an interesting thought. I don’t think that the mind-numbing shallowness of Spore’s gameplay was due to an attempt to be more accessible. Remember: Maxis has always made casual, accessible games; although they’re usually a bit better about depth. Rather, it was the result of trying to build five games in one. An action/arcade game, an RPG, two RTSs, and a 4X space sim, all with the central theme of procedural content - really, each of those could be a full project. Something had to give to get the game done in this century, and so they chose to strip every sub-game down to its basic mechanics.

I’m getting way off-topic now, but I think the right way to do Spore would have been to split it into four distinct games, with the ability to import save games into the next, Mass Effect-style: Cell (call it Spore: Origins, like the mobile game, and have it as a free download; a free companion game is a great publicity tool. Remember the free Creature Creator?), Creature (just call it Spore), Civ/Tribal (call it Spore 2, have a seamless transition between managing a village and multiple cities), and Space (Spore 3). That way, each individual mode could have the depth it deserved.
But I digress! STONEHEARTH YA

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@MrKrazy, unfortunately I think you have your information wrong about Spore. The amount of content that they actually developed for the game was massive. They had one of the largest development teams a game has ever seen, and they worked on it for like 4 years. They removed more features and content then they left in. I followed the development of Spore very closely. If you look at some of the alpha information from years before the release there were a pile more features. Fact is they simply dumbed the game down in order to make it more marketable.

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Yeah… I’m starting to think accessible is the wrong word. All games should be accessible. A game should be able to heav plenty of depth while at the same time be relatively easy to learn (the basics at least). The same way all good swimming pools have a deep end. Don’t know what the word I’m looking for is. Like, when they took The Elder Scrolls and made it so dumbed down and easy to appeal to the masses that Skyrim ended up nothing more than a fancy first person hack’n’slash.

Spore and Fable, two of the biggest heartbreaks of my life :’( I was promised so much and got so little.

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My mistake - I’ve only seen one pre-alpha presentation of Spore and if I remember right, it didn’t show much more than what made it into the final game, although it was implied that there would be more. But again, you seem more observant of and sensitive to these types of things, so you probably know better than I.

Hi there - “the masses” speaking. I actually liked Skyrim a lot more than Oblivion (haven’t played Morrowind) - though oddly, that’s not because Skyrim was more accessible; I just liked the pacing better. Oblivion was a rather slow game. I also loved the readability of the interface, though the actual usability was a disaster. (i.e. it’s pretty to look at, but scrolling around is not fun)

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They removed a lot of the skills from previous games, and then took out all of the stats. And then took out a lot of the magic options. Personally I would prefer another buggy run through of Daggerfall than Oblivion. The setting was just boring some how.

But I would still take the complexities and the horrible combat of Morrowind over the stripped down streamlined Skyrim.

(P.S. I really enjoyed Skyrim) (P.P.S. They really need to stop putting console based UI’s on PC versions of games)

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I would venture a guess that you’re saying this primarily because you had already played Morrowind, which was created when the standards for games’ accessibility were much lower. The popular attitude of that day was “RTFM”, and the responsibility of learning a game was placed on the player, not the developer. As a result, you put a lot of time into learning the game’s complexities because you had no other choice if you wanted to get your money’s worth. Now you feel cheated that new players can enter the series without putting in the same amount of work.

I could be wrong. I’m a programmer, not a psychiatrist! But it seems plausible to me that the problem is more due to violated expectations than a lesser game.

While I don’t deny that Skyrim lacks some of the depth and attention to detail of its predessors, I actually don’t agree that it’s worse for removing the things you mentioned. RPG stats in particular are a thing I’m happy to see go away. Skyrim’s perk-based system of “You leveled up! Now, do you want to ability to do a combat roll, or a chance to behead people?” has a much tighter feedback loop than a classic RPG’s “You leveled up! Now you can do 5% more damage!”

But you illustrate a very interesting point that’s actually unique to sequels: the community expects bigger, better, and more complex; because they’ve already mastered the core mechanics of the previous installment. As a result, if game companies were to actually listen to community feedback when developing sequels, their games would only appeal to an increasingly niche market. See Stronghold 2 for an example of a sequel gone bad with feature bloat (disclaimer: I haven’t actually played Stronghold 2).

Which leaves developers with a very tough decision: they could give into the community’s demands and simply add features and complexity, which would have the effect of alienating potential new players coming into the series (with some exceptions; Left 4 Dead 2 did nothing but add features and yet remained accessible and well designed; Portal 2 primarily added features and replaced a few others. Really, Valve just knows how to do sequels right :P); or they could appeal to a broader audience by streamlining the game and removing unnecessary features that don’t add value to the core mechanics (remember the expression: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”.), but alienating the fans of the previous installments who will complain that the new game is “dumbed down”.

No game can ever go through a sequel-streamlining process unscathed by its fans. Mass Effect 2 has its haters, Skyrim has its haters, Battlefield 3 has its haters (myself included; though not because it’s simplified compared to 2; I have other reasons which don’t deserve to be crammed into a sidenote). Supreme Commander 2 was a unique situation in that it actually turned out as a better-designed game than its predecessor by throwing out virtually everything that made Supreme Commander 1 unique - which had the predictable result of also incurring the wrath of SupCom1 fans and the game failed commercially.

In summary: many games considered to be “dumbed down” are actually the result of developers fixing mistakes in the original design and disappointing previous fans who had grown to love those mistakes - perhaps through a bit of Stockholm Syndrome! The philosophical question is this: should developers continue to streamline their games and make them technically better, despite the objections of their fans?

Wow. That was a long rant that was mostly off-topic (Stonehearth isn’t even a sequel!). Sorry. I also apologize if my post comes across as inflammatory - these are just my unsupported opinions, and I know that some people feel very strongly about their favorite games losing complexity.

33

I agree, DF’s difficulty (IMO) was based on the unnecessarily complex UI (not the graphics but the menus and particularly the military menus; I think this is the wrong way to go for making a game difficult. This is what gives me such hope for SH, the UI seems much more straightforward and I hope its the content itself that brings the difficulty not the interface.
tl;dr: I love the idea that DF had, but not the execution (UI). SH seems to be everything I wanted in DF and more.

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34

One more post before I leave this topic (it’s been fun but I think we’ve exhausted all possible conversation as it relates to Stonehearth):

I’m not sure how I never saw this video before, but it’s exactly right.

Edit: And this one, which actually explains my initial points better than I did:


Players think they want hard and not easy, and publishers think players want easy and not hard, but really everyone wants deep and not complex or shallow.

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