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Roderick

Crappy design pervading quality titles

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,,That'll teach you to play our game!"

Bah. I had just conquered one of the many challenging bosses from Metroid Prime. In the iclevel, this was a boss that took me over fifteen minutes to beat. I was very happy when I finally saw him fall down to the floor and I could claim my reward -a new upgrade.

Now Metroid Prime is a game that practices the dubious art of putting savegames a bit in front of the bosses, so that you have to negotiate a few hardships before you get to it; making it more exciting, but also more frustrating if you die.

So, I had finally defeated the icelevel behemoth. Still on my wits, but with the rush of victory in my body, I began to make my way back to the savepoint. I went through a door, and what do I see? COLD HARD DEATH. The game had placed two flying machinelike enemies (which weren't there before) just on the other end of the door. I couldn't get IN to the room, nor LOCK on to them to destroy them. But they were able to blast me to smithereens. And as leveldesign would have it; I had no place to hide or go back. I was a sitting fucking duck and it didn't take long before those otherwise harmless machines had destroyed me.

This has NOTHING to do with providing the player with a challenge, but everything with punishing him by taking away his victory and kicking him in the face. You killed the boss we had so carefully put there? Good for you! Here's DEATH. Try again. That'll teach you to play our game.

Now I know I'll be able to pummel that boss into submission again. I've learned the necessary skills. I know the moves. But it will take yet again some fifteen minutes. And there's nothing more frustrating than having to do something twice, through no fault of your own. This is just bad gamedesign, and although Metroid Prime is wonderful in a lot of respects, this is just :tdown:

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Funny you should mention that situation... have you beat Metroid Zero Mission?

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Those robots are meant to be push-over enemies, you shouldn't be taking more than like 40 damage, not dying especially. You know, you can move your gun without locking on, thats probably what you need to do.

Although I don't agree with the example I absolutely agree with the general sentiment....even worse are the 10 billion bosses in a row in some Final Fantasy games. If you die at the end you'll be playing for hours just to get back to the one that gives you problems. Not fun.

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I feel your pain. I put down Metroid Prime for months because of that boss, and when I finally picked it up again - and beat him - I got hammered before I could reach a save point. Twice. I feel sorry for my neighbors that may have been home that day.

Chris, care to elucidate concerning Zero Mission? I've played & completed it, and off-hand can only think of one part that gave me similar troubles.

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I'm pretty sure you can go back the way you came into that area with the Thardus boss. I'm sure I did that in one of my failed attempts at that boss and got toasted but it wasn't as annoying as the robot things.

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I'm totaly there on the Final Fantasy thing. I stoped playing FFTA after a particularly large jump in difficulity about halfway through, and outhers have complained about 'the wall', where all FF games suddenly jump in difficulaty and force you to go back and bore yourself to tears leveling up. I don't, I just stop playing.

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I'm almost positive it's Zero Mission, if not it's Fusion. Near the end of the game (it might be the final boss, I don't remember) when you're escaping the Space Pirate place and you run all the way through this damn space station to get to your ship, in the last room there are these two black Space Pirates who are a total surprise unless you know they're there. They just jump all over the place and take way more shots to kill than usual and you can't leave the room until you kill them. Argh, that was ultimate frustration for me when I was trying to beat the game under various conditions to unlock endings.

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I'm totaly there on the Final Fantasy thing. I stoped playing FFTA after a particularly large jump in difficulity about halfway through, and outhers have complained about 'the wall', where all FF games suddenly jump in difficulaty and force you to go back and bore yourself to tears leveling up. I don't, I just stop playing.

Ah, yes. I didn't know this was widespread...I figured people were just leveling up all the time or something. Its funny because although I own FF 7,8,9, and 10, I have never beaten a single one of them. Granted I got about 50 hours of enjoyable gameplay out of each, but I just can't seem to finish one because of the descrepency in difficulties. I hear that Chrono Cross doesn't have this problem, plus gamespot gave it a 10, so I'm probably gonna go looking for a copy ,throw it on my pocket pc, and maybe, finally, beat a Square game.

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I'm almost positive it's Zero Mission, if not it's Fusion. Near the end of the game (it might be the final boss, I don't remember) when you're escaping the Space Pirate place and you run all the way through this damn space station to get to your ship, in the last room there are these two black Space Pirates who are a total surprise unless you know they're there.

Ah yes, I became intimately familiar with the final boss because of those two damn pirates. I thought you might have been referring to several types of areas that caused similar furstration though.

Somewhat similar, I remember getting severely ticked off with Ninja Gaiden because of the amount of area I had to cover in order to get from the save point in Chapter Seven to the boss. Then again, I found that game more tedious than enthralling. :blink:

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It is, by the way, indeed amusing that my little rant should fall alongside the article about quicksaves. Different sides of the medal, don't you agree? A quicksave would have prevented this.

It's amusing also because in the article it's stated amongst others that quicksaving spoils a gameplay because you're constantly reminded of the saving. But in these cases, it's the absence of savepoints that spoils the gameplay and makes your mind wonder constantly to the fact where the savepoint is; making you see the experience even more strongly in terms of mechanics, instead of as a game.

Also, I read some Grumpy Gamer back catalog yesterday night, and one of the articles ("Why Adventuregames Suck") posed the theory that savegames are bad in general. That it detracts from any experience whatsoever, making for a bad game. Ron Gilbert then presented the challenge to create a game that doesn't need savepoints (only if you want to quit playing to save progress), but is still interesting and challenging.

Really, it will take some time before there's a solution that makes everyone happy, if that'll come at all. But neither of the extremes is going to work out in 99% of the cases. Until then, we'll just have to comfort ourselves with what we have.

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Also, I read some Grumpy Gamer back catalog yesterday night, and one of the articles ("Why Adventuregames Suck") posed the theory that savegames are bad in general. That it detracts from any experience whatsoever, making for a bad game. Ron Gilbert then presented the challenge to create a game that doesn't need savepoints (only if you want to quit playing to save progress), but is still interesting and challenging.

All the LucasArts adventures (except the 2 Indiana Jones ones) would seem to fit under that category. And somewhat coincidentally Ron was involved in a number of them. :shifty:

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The Last Express had by all accounts an amazing save system. The whole rewind jibba-jabba that was deemed revolutionary -- a generation after its original incarnation -- when it later found its way into the new POP game. It may be a programming and testing nightmare to account for and memorize all the ragdoll and Physics trajectories and things, but a rewind option should become the norm.

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Ultimately it should be up the players themselves. No one is forcing you to save every five seconds, and conversely no one should force you to have to look for save points 20 minutes into a level because wife/mum/kids just came home and it's time for dinner, etc. A combination of autosaves and optional in-game saves would be good. But like I stated, it would be your own damn fault if you kept saving every five seconds, thus ruining your immersion in the game. Discipline your own damn arse, it's not the devs' responsibility to babysit you.

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:grin: I disagree. It's still ultimately my responsibility, as long as I have the option of choosing. I am not gonna blame the designer just because I felt the obligation to save every five seconds, not matter how 'rational' that may be in the face of ruining my immersion. That's the deal with having choices, you weigh the pros and cons. Especially with the sophistication of today's games.

This is what I love about Hitman 2. On the easiest setting you have unlimited saves, on medium you have 2 saves, on hardest absolutely no saves. You decide how suspenseful you want it to be, and how masterful you want to be.

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I haven't felt that I've lost immersion due to over-saving. Saving is as natural in a game as steering is. I loose more immersion by having to replay a long bit just because I didn't save. Plus, I like doing what Walter said, saving ammunition and other stuff that I might need later on. Or trying to make sure to not be detected in stealth games (like Thief).

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Right. This is when saving options truly become part of the gameplay, like it or not. But also it could easily expose the shortcomings of a game, like A.I. for example. In No One Lives Forever you automatically fail certain missions if you are merely spotted by NPCs, so I found myself saving every five seconds. However, this was fixed in NOLF2, so I didn't need to save as often, and I felt more 'into' the game that way. But in a game like Hitman: Codename 47, absolutely no in-game saves can fook with you. It may infuse the gameplay with heart pounding suspense, but if you screw up (or the telephone rings and disrupts you), you'd have to play the whole thing again from the start, and the momentum is ruined the second time around.

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It also depends on the goal you have with the game. If you set up personal "unnecessary" goals, like I did when I played NOLF2 just now (I had the goal that I shouldn't be hit at all, to make the gameplay somwhat more interesting. In most missions I succeded, but some missions it simply wasn't feasible) you can need to be able to save more often. When I played Thief 3 I had the goal to not use physical violence at all, etc. It all depends on what you want to get out of the games you play and all playing styles should be promoted imho.

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I completely agree with Jean-Paul Homoludens. :D

Why should it be most "rational" that we save frequently? It's only rational if we're convinced that the game won't play fair with us, and will somehow punish any faith we show in it. Sadly, that IS the case all too often. That's the problem we should be dissecting, not our reaction to it. I think a good game not only keeps us immersed in the onscreen activity, but it also dangles the carrot that we can make it a little farther without getting burned. If the game isn't doing that, screw it. I'm not making sacrifices for design inadequacy. :hmph:

Besides, almost all developers offer difficulty options, so we're drawing imaginary lines in the sand if we say that one level of player choice is good and another is bad.

BTW, I think the whole point of the quicksave is to make it so easy and intuitive that it barely even registers as a conscious decision. That's as close to maintaining immersion as possible.

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I think I agree on this one. I barely register quicksaving, how would that affect the immersion more than say, scratching your nose during play? But I'm not at all opposed to games with a save-strategy, because then it becomes an ingame playmechanic. The thing is, if not well exectued, both can blow up in your face. So hell yeah, it's for a part the responsibility of the designers. How could it not be? They're the ones that are making the game. They obviously cannot decide how we choose to use their game, but we gamers don't carry around a 900 page designdocument, they do. What they put in their games affects us, not the other way around*

*Note that this is not an excuse for total apathy towards shaping your own gaming experience

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I think designing games with a specific save game policy is silly. Why shouldn't people be allowed to quicksave every 5 seconds if they want to? The game designers should worry about making a good game, not worry about if someone will make it easy for themselves by saving every 5 seconds. It's not their problem to worry about............abusive saving, as you put it, is just a way to cheat in the game. It's not any different than using a cheat code, and since most games have cheat codes there's really no reason to limit game saves. Otherwise you can just go and grab an invlunerability code or some such thing. Games should be designed to allow the players MORE freedom, not to limit it. How infuriating would it be to have to replay one section of a game over and over again because you couldn't save? I think most people would consider that poor game design.......but if you're allowed to save whenever you want, it's just not an issue. Anything that can be left to the player's choice is usually a good thing, and save games certainly falls in that category.

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I completely disagree with that. I think it's the duty of any gamedesigner to carefully construct every tiny aspect of his game. To neglect something of such impact as savegames would be to create a hole in your design. It's both sloppy and bad designing ethic to simply say: let the gamer think of how he's gonna play my game*

*this has nothing to do with offering the player freedom of course, as portrayed for instance in Morrowind. Freedom comes from offering the player ingame choices on a multitude of levels, saving is not one of those levels. However, saving can of course impair or augment the freedom of a game in the way you play it, but that is all the more reason for the designer to think extra carefully about where he wants to go with it.

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While immersion may not be directly at stake, tension definitely is, and to the extent that a lack of tension fails to immerse you even more, it's a problem. Either way, whether it's tension or immersion, you're getting a deficient version of the intended experience.

I agree about the tension point, but I disagree about it being an acceptable tradeoff. If a game doesn't offer enough tension in its design, then it should simply be designed better, not rely on some gimmicky save restriction to add artificial (ie non narrative-driven) tension. To me the latter screams of "game", and not "experience". Which is fine for some games, but is actually counter-productive in the more ambitious titles. We don't get to moan about Spielberg's "level 17" comments if this is our approach.

To be honest, I think that when we start insisting that players have to approach their games with some sort of 'philosophy' or stern discipline about saving, we've already gone too far. Not all of you may have problems with abusing quicksaves and whatnot, but it's clearly a problem for a great many players...

Well, that insistence is what developers have been doing by imposing restrictions. We're just saying that as an interactive medium, then should enable the player to tailor that aspect to their own preferences. Then if they can't live with their own choices, they're just hopeless whiners. :fart:

And who exactly is this clearly a problem for? I honestly don't hear gamers complaining. Frankly, to me it sounds like something developers want to believe is a problem, but isn't.

Anyway, my example to this argument is always the same - Soldier of Fortune II. It's not perfect, but it's better than virtually anything else out there. By default, the game has limited saves per level. The number of saves is dependent on the difficulty level chosen. But you can still go in to the options and customize these numbers, or even eliminate the restriction altogether. So... developer gives their "ideal" input, but player gets the choice, and once chosen, plays accordingly. Simple, elegant.

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