Sign in to follow this  
buntcake

Outside sources of in-game information

Recommended Posts

While playing through Bravely Default recently, I found myself looking on the internet for information on the game's robust class system, including information on some classes I hadn't unlocked yet, and strategies on how to best combine class abilities. I always feel a little bad doing this, because I feel like I'm subverting the developers' intentions and potentially ruining the experience for myself.

 

 

Do developers understand or even expect that players, especially experienced RPG players, are going to look ahead for this information? Do you personally try to avoid FAQs, guides, walkthroughs, or outside sources of information on games? Is the discovery and experimentation part of the fun for you?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

For me, it really depends on the game.

I have to assume that many games are simply designed with the expectation that players will share notes, so to speak. There is no logical world in which a player would be expected to figure out Dota 2 on their own, and indeed, much of the fun i've had playing that game comes from taking the knowledge other players make available and building my own stategies from it. Fighting games are definitely in the same boat, as are probably most other competitive multiplayer games.

Something like Dark Souls, on the other hand, is something where i find myself drawing a fairly neat line through the middle of it. Given the long-term investments of time and resources with regards to planning my character, i feel that information concerning the central mechanics in the game should be fair game, but with regards the the environments and the bosses, i want to have that experience of walking up to a corner and not knowing what lies just beyond. There are systems provided in the game to facilitate a player discovering those mysteries on their own, and i want to have that experience. That's probably my stance for most RPG's, i guess.

 

You know, but there's also games like TES where even the core mechanics are just so creaky that reading literally almost anything about them would threaten to break the game. I don't want to know how i can level a skill from 1-100 in 15 minutes, i don't want to have that weird, broken experience.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm going to brazenly state that any game's first playthrough should be designed to be played without the aid of any external source (manuals etc are perhaps exempt).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I'm going to brazenly state that any game's first playthrough should be designed to be played without the aid of any external source (manuals etc are perhaps exempt).

 

Including Kojima's P/T?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Wellll, I'll say it's a general rule that is made to be broken occasionally. But it's not like the whole of that game required it, right? It was just the final puzzle? Plus, that's half game, half advert, so it makes more sense for it to do that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

(the joke is that Persona 4 frequently tests players on their knowledge of Japanese cuisine, history, and literature; along with deliberately misleading or esoteric trivia questions. I still love them for it though)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The Secret World has quests that require out-of-game sources, and frequently that includes people who've worked out the puzzle beforehand. You could work it out yourself, but often it involves remembering that there's a shop in London with the name you're looking for and sometimes it involves a level of research that's not feasible to expect of a solitary player.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I remember reading somewhere that Miyamoto designed the original Legend of Zelda with the idea that kids would be talking about it with each other on the playground. He wanted to foster a sense of community and create real-world friendships among people playing his game. That's the reason why some of the puzzles and secret locations are so tough for one person to figure out. Personally, I think that he's a genius for that.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Oh jesus christ Miyamoto created the ARG

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

My answer is pretty lame. I don't search for outside information, until I have to. 

 

Although I do like reading about how combat or crafting mechanics work to the tiniest detail. I do that without needing to.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The Secret World has quests that require out-of-game sources, and frequently that includes people who've worked out the puzzle beforehand. You could work it out yourself, but often it involves remembering that there's a shop in London with the name you're looking for and sometimes it involves a level of research that's not feasible to expect of a solitary player.

Except Secret World offers an in-game browser that actually hits the internet along with mixing in some made-up sites with more information. Technically that all "in game."

I prefer when I don't have to look at external sources. Where that breaks down are 80 hour games like Persona where there's no respec and no way I'm going to play through a second time. I just can't risk ruining 60 hours of work by making a mistake like that.

Edit: I guess what I'm saying is that every game should have a respec if at all possible.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

which Persona? I recall that the gameplay of Persona is that you junk personas every couple of hours, so there's no real way to be locked into a combat-focused decision you regret. The story content, on the other hand, is all about spending your limited time as well as you can, and so letting people undo those choices doesn't work thematically. The 'optimal path' through Persona 4 is so fiddly that it's clearly only there for people who don't want to play the game properly. (And there are certain options that clearly are only available in New Game + anyway.)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

For some games? Sure I won't look up any sort of guide. Most times those games are rpg's or straight forward shooters. With rpg's the only time I'm really tempted is when I want a specific outcome to a situation while roleplaying more than I want to change my personal narrative of the game where X character makes a specific mistake. Games like ME or Divinity Original Sin tempt me heavily with this. I remember when I started with TWD Ep1 I began with a guide talking about conversation outcomes but by episode 5 I considered that to be heresy.

 

Some games lend themselves extremely well to out of game guides consciously or not. I mean for everyone who's played Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress we've all had those moments where we've wanted to do something cool but can't remember how to do it.

 

Then there's competitive games that offer insights into more experienced player's techniques that when integrated into your own playstyle do make a noticeable difference but don't feel like a key to the universe. CS:GO comes to mind.

 

I think the game that most lends itself to going to the community for help (besides Dota 2) is Natural Selection 2.

 

A lot of the time we see rookie players jumping right into commander rts roles without a firm grasp of the mechanics or the social responsibility of communicating with your team while commanding. The commander is such a crucial role (a match does not start until there is one on both sides) and a match's enjoyability & length and the commander's skill are so closely related that unless newcommers are willing to engage with the server's community they have to be thrown out of the commander chair. It sounds harsh but even a game with a new commander can still last a painfully long time where you just end up in a meat grinder contained in one room. A game could be over by 12 minutes and still last to 30 minutes if the winning players don't know how to consolidate to end the the game.

So most commanders in the game start of by being coached by someone from the server before everyone recommends that they go practice in offline mode and watch guides on youtube.

It's a weird game where a player is still considered to be pretty much a total noob even with 100 hours and there are so many different play styles to learn or lessons on positioning and tactics to take in that even with 890 hours in game I still look at guides to refresh myself on alien lifeform play styles and map zone control.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I use a lot of outside guides when Pokémon breeding to look up things like compatible breeding partners and potential move pools. I also use an IV calculator to find the exact value of an IV that I don't know.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I like looking at guides/wikis when im through the game, or close to it, to see what i missed.

Also, sometimes like in games like FO3, to see what happens if I had chosen the other path in a quest. These games are so long that I probably will never play through them more than once. 

 

But some games, like the binding of isaac for example, I don't know how I could play them without resorting to the wiki sometimes to see what some items do. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think that there's a lot of like, video game coolness pressure to make people who use guides and FAQs and the internet feel bad for seeking outside information, usually under the guise of: "it's cheapening the experience," or "it's making it easier than it would otherwise be," or "it's not how the game was designed." I'm ok with how anyone wants to play a game.

 

I tend to be on the side of the New Criticism view of video games, where developer or authorial intent takes a backseat to my own reading/playing of a game. I seek out guides all the time, because I don't have an infinite amount of time to play and re-play an area and slowly tease out its secrets, and I get what I want out of the experience. Sure, discover and experimentation are very fun, but I'm not at an age where I can do that forever in a video game.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think that there's a lot of like, video game coolness pressure to make people who use guides and FAQs and the internet feel bad for seeking outside information, usually under the guise of: "it's cheapening the experience," or "it's making it easier than it would otherwise be," or "it's not how the game was designed." I'm ok with how anyone wants to play a game.

 

I tend to be on the side of the New Criticism view of video games, where developer or authorial intent takes a backseat to my own reading/playing of a game. I seek out guides all the time, because I don't have an infinite amount of time to play and re-play an area and slowly tease out its secrets, and I get what I want out of the experience. Sure, discover and experimentation are very fun, but I'm not at an age where I can do that forever in a video game.

 

I agree. It's all well and good to play the game "the way the designer intended" but I've never forced myself to play a game that way when I did not want to. I don't see it as the "right" way to play a game. It assumes that the author is infallible and that the way they intend for me to play their game is what is most rewarding. To me the whole point of games as a medium is that they can exist as a conversation between the player and the text, not a one-way didactic lecture with only a single correct interpretation. The social link stuff in Persona is a good example. The dating-sim aspect of agonizing over which decisions will compromise me for the rest of the game when it comes to friend and school commitments is not the fun part of the game for me. The whole gamification of social choices actually really pisses me off in games. It cheapens the actual role-playing experience by changing the motivation of the player from wanting to express themselves through choice to just trying to power-game the systems.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I don't see the point of playing what is arguably the most interactive medium we have today and then getting hung up on not making choices the designer didn't intend.

 

Also since I just realised I never responded apart from a cheeky devil's advocate question...

 

I think it's a reasonably design choice for outside searching to be necessary, but it can make me engage less with the game if I'm doing it instead of discovering/solving a problem I just get someone else to tell me, especially if what I find seems like a ridiculous thing I would never have gotten through by myself without a lot of effort. I have caused some games to wane a little in my mental estimation due to deciding that I'd rather just find out what I'm missing and move on, but equally I've saved myself grief and frustration in other games I probably would've abandoned had I not checked a guide.


It seems to repeatedly come up in anything adventure game-y where I don't even know if I have all the necessary items and have no interest in searching through all the screens again for the thing I missed, if there even IS one. It may be a bit of an influence that I almost never played adventure games as a child and also really don't like indirect control systems but I'm just not that patient with most games because most don't deserve it. And if I'm going to go on at all, it's a lot easier to do that after a minute or two of consulting a guide.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
Sign in to follow this