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Renoistic posted:Other than that I think people are too hard on the game. Yeah. It's flawed for sure and not at all Tim's best work but I wouldn't hesitate to call it a good game despite the flaws. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one here who overall enjoyed the puzzles in act 2, in any case. Sway Grunt fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 09:54
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I didn't hate the game, but I definitely felt like Act 2 was a let-down after Act 1. I wish Lee Petty had been the lead on this project because Stacking was cute, funny and full of anti-frustration features so your progress wasn't totally blocked because you couldn't figure out the one combination of dolls you needed for a given puzzle. In fact most puzzles had multiple solutions and I never felt like the game was dumbed down.ColdPie posted:And yeah, when you're stuck on a puzzle, you move on to a different one and hope to stumble upon some hints. When you're totally out of ideas, you look it up. Adventure gaming 101. If you have to know how to be an Adventure gamer to play an Adventure game, then how is a first time player supposed to be able to complete one? You can't resurrect a genre by catering only to it's existing fans. You need to make it accessible to new players too. After all, what you're describing is the player frustrating themselves into giving up, then hoping the game will tell them the answer in an unrelated scene in order to progress. That's really unintuitive for people who aren't familiar with the genre, and also not usually much fun. More so considering how many other puzzle games make a point of having all the tools you need easily visible in the same area as the puzzle itself. Games like Portal manage to be both clever, and accessible because the answer to each puzzle is a logical extrapolation of mechanics you already understand. They don't need to hide behind obfuscation and poor communication because they put the effort into teaching the player what to expect ahead of time.
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Jun 29, 2015 11:43
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Yeah but in BA's case, streamlining it and making it more approachable, to be precise its one click interface, cut out half of any point and click's fun, that is, funny one liner description of stuff. Not a tradeoff I as an adventure game lover would endorse. It's been a throwback genre for years now, and I believe it'll stay that way, with very little innovation in the future. And that's a-ok with me.
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Jun 29, 2015 12:05
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You can still have funny dialogue like all the breakfast cereals in Act 1. Adventure games have always had to modernize. Imagine if developers listened to the "text adventures" crowd, the genre would be dead as a doornail. The only reason adventure games even require using a guide when a player is stuck is because Sierra was making a mint off their 900 line, Infocom sold hint books, etc. so they intentionally made their puzzles obtuse. Even though guides are free now, the old-timers got used to it and complain if they can solve a game without having to look something up. Literally nobody else thinks a guide should be required unless you are going for 100% completion for something. Developers can still make Sierra-style games but don't expect the masses to show up and don't expect Broken Age production values for a niche product.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:36
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I don't think the old-timers are the ones who would be using guides, though, and I doubt anyone is advocating for the return of the Sierra style or for guides to be required. I think the difference is more in how long people are okay with being stuck. Some are fine for hours, others will get frustrated after 20 minutes. The kind of stuff Sierra was pulling on us back in the 90s, like unknowable dead-ends, would rightly be unacceptable to 99% of players nowadays. But if the puzzles are not complete nonsense and the player knows that they cannot screw themselves permanently, then being stuck for a time while exploring the game world for hints is fine. And if it's not then you go for the guide. I haven't played any recent adventure games that I would consider unfairly hard, I think developers are getting it mostly right nowadays. Maybe slightly on the easy side for my taste (mostly because so many like to restrict you to 3-5 screens at a time; I kind of like large, sprawling locations where you can explore and have multiple interdependent puzzle chains open at once, e.g. Rubacava, chapter 2 in MI2, etc.). I suppose that might well mean that the genre could remain niche and not particularly friendly to newcomers as you and Pyradox say. That question - are classic adventure games destined to be niche - was probably one of the biggest issues with Broken Age specifically. The project was being pulled in many different directions by many different forces. The unexpected success of the Kickstarter was kind of a double-edged sword in that sense, since it led to much higher expectations from the backers, DF itself and even the the gaming community as a whole (in terms of what failure would mean for Kickstarter projects as a whole), even though the project conceptually had a deliberate uncertainty about it. Add to that Tim's own uncertainty about why people liked adventure games in the first place and the whole thing turned into an exercise in walking a tightrope.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:19
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