I absolutly agree, that´s why I said that it´s a fine line because at least to me there seems to be the danger of alienating the core audience.
And I don´t think you did that with adding the hintline in spite of some of those strange complaints that said it shouldn´t be there because they wouldn´t be able to resist. Had it been implemented to a simple press of the “h” key I would have understood that but going out of your way to not call a number seems to be really hard.
But in the end I think it was a good decision.
I think the difference is that a movie is a passive experience and everybody knows how to act and what to expect: you sit there and you watch it.
With a game, the experience is interactive, and this interaction is defined and circumscribed by various factors, which include the genre, its traditional game mechanics, and the particular interfaces afforded by the game.
Since the mechanics of interacting with a game vary from genre to genre – and sometimes from game to game – the player essentially has to re-train himself each time. While that happens, he will rely on his past experiences of similar genre games and behave as he thinks may be natural.
Now, in light of the above, if you consider that a modern player may have had absolutely no experience with classic- (or retro-) style adventure games, what can he fall back on to understand the game world?
Back in our youth when video games themselves were new, we were most likely more receptive to start with an open mind and an empty skills canvas, and train with the game. Nowadays, kids have been conditioned by myriad shoot-em-up, and rapid-paced game mechanics, filling in that void.
In my opinion, this conditioning makes kids expect a certain behavior from games, rather than being receptive to learn a new way of playing. Thus, they plow through dialogue (because in modern games it is inconsequential to the action and the goal), and they ignore clues and plot points (because they are unnecessary or anathema to their gaming experience), etc.
It’s not that they are stupid, and it’s not that they don’t like to read or listen to dialog – obviously they do watch movies and TV and revel in their rich dramatic stories, as attested by the large volume of fan fiction and so-called “nerd-cultural” events. It’s that, in their experience, too many games have demonstrated that reading the dialogue or paying attention to the story is unnecessary to complete the end goal and get the eventual spoils (trophy, achievments, high scores, cash prize, etc.). So, why should they pay attention this time, with this game?
However, this game is different, so ignoring plot, clues, dialogue, and scenery has actual consequences that impact on the playing experience.
Now, to the big question, @RonGilbert: How do you convince them from the beginning that this game is different, will require different skills, and a different kind of attention? And how do you train them to play your game while simultaneously convincing them that it is really worth it, and that they will really enjoy it, if they just give it a chance?
I have no answer. I would hope that the niche grows enough to serve as an attractive invitation to others.
I don’t think there is a way I can do that. They will discover that for themselves, and maybe tell their friends. You can display messages on title cards telling them stuff, and they will just ignore it. It’s kind of like when mobile games tell me to put on headphones. I ignore that and even find it pretentious.
if our goal was to make an adventure game for the masses, I’d go about it very differently, but that wasn’t the goal of TWP.
But you are making a game for the masses. The people who are skipping the dialogue and missing the plot (the very problem we are discussing) are not your hardcore fans or classic adventure game players. Those know how the game works and are probably conditioned already to read everything, pick up everything that’s not bolted down, and save often.
When I said train I didn’t mean give them a class. I meant that our goal should perhaps be to figure out a way to lead the player to as close to the best experience possible, so that they “get” the whole point of adventure games, enjoy it, and spread the word.
The problem is not people skipping dialogue – that’s a symptom. The problem, in my opinion, is that they are not aware that they must not do it – and more to the point, they are not aware that spending the little extra time and effort in listening and paying attention will pay back in spades with a much richer and fun experience.
This is what I saw with my nephew, Dante: he loooooooved the game, he couldn’t put it down. However, that happened after me pushing a bit for him to play through, guiding him in reasoning his way out of a puzzle, egging him on when he got frustrated, and essentially forcing him not to skip dialogue.
Once he broke through that invisible barrier in his brain, he “got” it, and mostly played on his own. And as attested by his short review at the top of this thread, he understood some (if not all) of the plot and the character connections.
Breaking through that initial barrier, overcoming the initial resistance… that’s the real problem. That’s what I meant by “training”: to teach them a different way of playing games that involves a bit more effort and thinking that some other genres.
Anyway, I agree with you, it is a hard problem to solve, and it is very frustraing to a game designer.
“Put on headphones, switch the lights off and turn the volume way up!” I read that so often these days! I miss the times when horror games didn´t feel the need to tell you that. Feels desperate.
By the way, regardless of all that, I still think you, @RonGilbert, have made an exceptional job at addressing most of these issues in some capacity. Honestly, I don’t know what else you could do: your game is fun, intuitive, easy to understand, and appealing – even to children used to playing casual and shooting games.
The end is a bit, shall we say, controversial, and there will always be something that someone is not going to like; but the whole experience is great. I can’t wait for the iOS version to come out, and I am absolutely sure it will do great in that platform.
We don’t have the depth of analytics to do proper A/B testing. I don’t know if I’m going to do this yet, I’m going to code it up and I may reject it one I see it working. Like lot of people on this topic have said, it could have downsides. I want to see how those play out. If it’s not done right, delaying the skipping of dialog will just feel like a punishment. But also keep in mind that most of the people on this forum are power-users and don’t always represent the majority of players. The balance is to satisfy one group without pissing off the other. It’s what we tried to do with the Hint Line.
I have a hunch that it should be important to investigate if delaying the skipping in any way will actually make people pay more attention to the text. Will they read more? If their goal is to avoid reading, they might not read it anyway, regardless of the quantity of time the text will stay on screen.
Maybe a way to focus their attention on the text and help them reading might be to show the sentence being written (word by word, for example) and accept the skip command only after the entire sentence has appeared on screen.
The difference is that it is a game. When I replay a game it´s not always for the same reason I rewatch a movie. There is other little things to discover or go for a different approach. And then I skip cutscenes and dialogue as well. Not having that option would be annoying and probably stop me from playing a game more often.
Horses for courses. You would still play it once, at least, I imagine. If one is trying to expand the reach and audience of a game, I think offering the ability to enjoy the game at least once by the largest audience, would be more important than focusing on having a smaller audience’s replayability.
That’s just my opinion, and it also depends on one’s goals and motivations. You can’t make a game for hardcore gamers and fans and then lament when others don’t appreciate or misuse some of those features.
Of course, ideally one would do both, but that is extremely hard as we’ve seen.
Of course I would play it once. But it would make replayabilty less fun. But if we have to trade that in for a bigger audience so be it. Also means I have to buy more games because I play each game only once. So more games get sold and less played I suppose.
When I press skip, I also want to skip and not wait. Usually it’s also a sequence of skips. Don’t interfere when there is no need to and allow people to make mistakes and learn something. It would be nice if you could skip cutscenes (like, once Arcade is available) too.
I wasn’t advocating to add a delay. I think the fact that the skip function is hidden and unemphasized, in my opinion, helps greatly.
I agree that skip with delay sounds like a bad idea. However, perhaps Mr. Gilbert has an idea of how to make it less terrible. I’d be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Why is the person playing it a second time if they found that stuff so burdensome the first time around? And it it truly is important to track this stuff over the lifetime of the player, then it seems that the only solution is to make the game always-online, which I personally consider to be a bad idea.
Maybe the player should be forced to read the lines again. Lots of other games force players to do something they don’t want to do, but have to anyway if they expect to make progress, such as fighting a difficult boss, navigating a series of tricky platforms, or escaping from a large horde of determined pursuers. We’re not just talking about “boring” exposition here. A LARGE amount of the dialogue is critical for properly figuring out the solutions to puzzles.
Maybe this isn’t a good idea, but what about an in-game tutorial section. Here’s an example from Morrowind:
When you first start Morrowind, you’re being released from prison. Character creation comes in the form of administrators filing your release paperwork. Prior to your release, you have the opportunity to pick up various items, none of which belong to you. This of course is natural behavior for anyone who plays computer games, especially point-and-click adventure games and RPGs. But in Morrowind, this sort of behavior can result in fines, arrest, or even death if you resist and fail to overcome or evade the guards. But if you try to steal items within the presence of the officials processing your release, they’ll take the items you stole and let you off with a warning, so that you learn that theft has consequences in the game without having to learn the HARD way.
So what if there were a tutorial section in the game, where if a player skips dialogue (that of course would have some important clue), the NPC gets mad and challenges the player to answer a question or complete a task based on information they tried to tell the player. Of course, this angry part would be unskippable so that the player can’t miss the in-game warning that ignoring people comes with consequences. If it is a task to be completed, it could even require listening to what other NPCs say, so that the player learns that listening to dialogue is something that’s consistently going to be useful.
Valve is incredible at tutorials like this. Rather than telling people what to do, they basically set up situations that prevent a player from proceeding until they’ve understood a concept. For instance, picking up and moving objects is an important part of the game at many points. So they set up multiple isolated sections where the only way to proceed is to pick up an object and place it somewhere sensibly. They also put those in areas of narrative significance, so there are important NPCs available who can help the player figure out how to proceed, along with making those early tutorial bits more memorable.
If this approach is to be used, I’d recommend puzzles with random solutions that can’t be easily brute-forced. That way it’s very unlikely that the player can proceed without using the proper method, and even a walkthrough is going to tell the player to talk to such-and-such to find the answer to their problem.
This reminds me of a side quest in Borderlands 2 where you have to listen to an old woman ramble on and on for a really long time. Then suddenly she asks you a question of what she was talking about. If you can’t answer you fail the mission.
Of course you can just force the player to read all lines again. But we are trying to find a better solution.