In my case, both. I hated the “Sherrif-a-reno” almost as soon as he opened his mouth. I’m just glad he didn’t become a central part of the plot, as I feared, given the fact that we are two feds investigating a local crime and therefore would probably have to interact with local law enforcement extensively.
Maybe it was a combination of him being so annoying, and this long dialogue happening very early in the game when I just reached the first area of consequence (the town) and was still trying to get a lay of the land. I experienced the conversation as a jarring interruption, and this could perhaps have been avoided if I were the one who initiated the conversation.
I agree with you, but only for the elements that are “integrated in the game” - like a tutorial that happens subtle in the first room(s) and is part of the story.
All other things could be annoying. The instruction cards of TWP are a good example: I know several “hard core gamer” who disliked even these three(?) cards. They said: “I know this, I’ve played adventure games all my life. So why do I have to read these cards?”
Hadn’t we a discussion about the tutorial in the blog? And about “moving” the sentence line to the cursor? And …?
Oh, yes, you can certainly annoy someone with just about anything. My point is that there may be solutions that may not.
So, rather than dividing the players into camps and trying to satisfy one or the other, I think it’s more productive to understand the range of needs players may have and how to integrate them into a cohesive and intuitive solution.
After all, as much as some of you may like to deny it, some hardcore gamers do use walk-throughs (they are very, very popular online for all retro- and vintage-games, which has a very narrow niche of dedicated players); and there is always the case of a casual player who may not like reading instructions cards.
I am horrified by the scenario “guy skips the dialogs, gets stuck as a result, reads the walkthrough (or uses “everything with everything”), does not understand how he could have guessed the solution, and writes a bad review saying the puzzles are illogical”. (And often he did not even pay for the game.)
Edit: this could be avoided by the character spelling out the logic of the puzzle each time a puzzle is solved.
LOL. Right, not “each time” Only for those puzzles where the player who skipped dialogs and used “everything on everything” might believe they were illogical.
I think this is mitigated somewhat by the in-game Hint-Line, which instead of giving you the solution without any context, aids you in reasoning through it one step at a time.
If you are really interested in figuring out a puzzle, but you truly do not know how or are not equipped with the discipline to solve an adventure game, then this at least provides some context to the solution.
If you still plow through the hint-system to get directly to the answer without reading, then I will posit that you never intended to learn or play fair, and that any bad review you leave afterwards was actually inevitable and that there was nothing the designer could have done to prevent it.
There are befuddled and ignorant players, and then there are *beep*holes. We can try to help the former, but attempting to address the latter is a fool’s errand.
I was meaning to say that, we´re getting to the point of trying to aid people who call the hintline and then skip through that…I mean how to help those people?!
There will always be people who write movie reviews after having walked out off the theater halfway through. That is really the part you just have to forget about.
Legitimate reviewers skipping dialog is not a problem, they don’t tend to do that, or if they do, they are very well aware of what is happening. The concern is players who post Steam reviews and the like, but even they are not the real issue.
I think this thread has blown up into something much much bigger than the actual problem. To me, the biggest issue is players who have never played an adventure game powering through the dialog, and not having a good time and never playing another adventure game because they are stupid and the puzzles don’t follow logic and you have to try everything with everything.
I don’t think there is a solution to that problem without significant redesign. I’m sure I would enjoy FPS games a lot more if I didn’t run around shooting and everything, never learning the controls.
This is a very real thing. There is actually people who say “I always wanted to play Maniac Mansion but I couldn´t even figure out how to enter the house”.
This is very sad to look at actually, because those are the same people who exactly know what bush to burn or what wall to bomb in the Legend Of Zelda but can´t remember anymore how they knew that in the first place.
Yes, and you can’t do anything about that. Even if you write in the description of the game: “Warning! This game is for hard core player only!” there will be at least one person complaining that the game is too difficult …
(Maybe we live in a world where the Alien Mindbenders have won …)
I think you’ve done what you can without changing the core mechanics of the game. Perhaps there may be more that could be done, but at this point we’ve exhausted the low hanging fruit so what’s left is not obvious nor trivial to achieve.
I am not interested in solving every case; my goal with this thread was to improve the experience and ease the training of those like my nephew, who are obviously potential fans, but require a bit of handholding.
To that end, the ONE THING that would make the most difference is not telling him to skip dialogue. Your game already does this by not emphasizing nor advertising the feature.
The SECOND THING that I think would help is disabling speech bubbles by default, which encourages an experience wherein the player actively listens to the dialogue.
However, this last one brings up the other problem of users playing without sound, so it becomes a matter of which one has the greatest impact on the experience.
I believe you have stated your views on this already.
Speech text is disabled by default. They have been since day one. Unless, you’re not in English.
I can’t disable speech text by default on mobile, due to a vast number of players playing with audio off. I just watched someone play the other day on iOS and I had the volume muted and no text and they played for several minutes and didn’t know anything was wrong, expect they were really confused and not having a good time. Let me say that again… they didn’t know anything was wrong.
Putting up pre-game pop-ups about turning up audio doesn’t work (massive stats have shown this). Given them an option to show text at the beginning will be mean most people will turn it on, negating the solution (might as well have left it on).
The only solution is to not tell them, and make it a discoverable thing. The downside is some people will discover it, and not know what they did. All they know if they missed some dialog when they touched the screen. If you’ve ever sat in on a playtest session, you will know all this crap happens.
I don’t think there is a solution to this problem, except remove skipping. But if I do that, I’ll have to add a way for power users to turn it on.
Personally, I don’t consider improving the experience of a large number of potential customers making the game “stupid.” It’s only “stupid” if your solution is to dumb the game down, which nobody wants.
Just because the obvious solutions are bad does not necessarily mean that no solution is good.
I thought we could explore options to do things better, with the hope that there would be a solution, not an assumption that there was one.
I think we’ve exhausted all options that are practical to implement, unless someone comes up with something else completely out of the box…
I thank Mr. Gilbert especially for being so open and candid on this topic.
I’m not an expert in mobile gaming, but I doubt this is true. Do you have any links to those stats? I would like to see some of them.
So you first muted the device and gave the phone to the person? (In this case it would be natural that these person(s) were irritated as the didn’t know that there has to be sound.)
How does other mobile adventure games handle these cases? For example the Broken Sword series?
