Game becoming easier and easier. Can the game never narrow down?

Well, he says that adventure games for him are about “quiet contemplation and having fun thinking”. What else could they be about? :slight_smile:

and he says the best part is when you are not playing but doing something else, and suddenly you find a solution. Maybe you jump off bed with the solution. I agree. Being stuck is the best part.

He says and implies an awful lot more than that, and it’s exceptionally clear. He pushes further on it earlier in the interview at around 4:15. At 8:20 he very quickly once again moves to the topic of puzzles and not story. It’s all blatant.

at 4:15 he says that he likes the design phase, “figuring out the puzzles that go together and weaving those around the story”.

elsewhere he explained it’s an iterative process, where sometimes you make change to the story, sometimes to puzzles. There is no recipe of course, it’s an art.

What? Amy Briggs of Plundered Hearts fame was Ron Gilbert’s babysitter?? This is an awesome interview!! I don’t know how I missed it earlier.

Right. So he offers a lot of insight about himself and his approach and also the wider approach of game design – all very relevant and interesting when getting involved in the tangent that the thread took:

It’s a real gem – extremely insightful.

just to clarify, I did not say that Ron Gilbert starts from the puzzles and then tries to fit a story in them. We know he does not do that, and if he tried the result would be horrible. He clearly starts from a story, then writes down the key puzzles that are induced by the story. Then an iterative refinement phase starts, where story and puzzles are changed to fit each other. What I mean is that, at the end of all this process, what you get is a product that is primarily about puzzles, not primarily about a story. I mean: if you take MI, or even TWP, and remove the puzzles, what remains is not something that you would want to read as a novel, or that would stand up on its own. That’s all I meant.

Hehe… That’s what I’ve been saying all along and you were trying to argue against. Which part of “puzzles are the most important thing, puzzles are the game” does not contradict the above?

Welcome to game design 101. :stuck_out_tongue:

-dZ.

not again, please…

To do X, you need to start from a story, but the end result is not primarily about story.

Ron didn’t even know how the story was going to end when he finished the (major) puzzles…

Oh gaaawd… puhleeze. Stop with the mincing of words. It’s OK to admit you didn’t see the full picture and jumped to conclusions. It’s OK to widen your horizons and learn new perspectives. :slight_smile:

It’s not OK to constantly twist words around until they can mean whatever you feel at any time.

I think some of you tend to see these things as a science: there must be one way to define it, one way to approach it, one perfect single way in which it can be described. There is a formula or an algorithm to designing games. Perhaps you are a programmer and see it all thusly; when you have a hammer at hand, the world looks full of nails.

However, the reality is that people are not machines, approaches differ like the colours, and game design is part mad science, part art, mostly sweat and tears, and a dash of black magic. There is no algorithm and there are no magic bullets. To reduce anything to absolute positions of black or white is silly and just invites argument. :slight_smile:

Peace,
-dZ.

We should ask David Lynch to make a game, it would be almost impossible to complete! :slight_smile:
Oh btw the Twin Peaks premiere episodes were amazing!

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it started already? :frowning:

I guess I lean more towards an emphasis on story, though for me the best puzzles are always those that have an impact on the story. One very recent example was from Deponia 4, where one specific puzzle that started innocently enough (you need to satisfy the needs of some NPCs to get the game to move on) turns into the catalyst of the cataclysmic events that are at the heart of the underlying plot. Personally, I did not see that coming at all, and was absolutely flabbergasted (but also widely amazed) at what I just had caused, unwillingly.

It’s situations like these, when story and puzzles become indistinguishable from each other, that I like most.

I think a book has the one great advantage that it can concentrate entirely on the story. In an adventure game, the very gameplay mechanic that is the game’s heart and soul is actively hindering the story from progressing, by throwing those pesky puzzles into the path of the player :wink:. So the stalwart game designer needs to reconcile two things that are at odds with each other. In a way, I can understand how this inevitably leads to the modern Telltale-style games, where story is first and foremost, with barely enough interactivity left to call the beast a game. At the other end of the spectrum are games like The Witness; nearly all puzzle, not much of a story. Classic P&C adventures are somewhat of a middle-ground, sometimes leaning a bit more towards puzzles, sometimes more towards story, but never one without the other. And that’s how it should be, if you ask me :slight_smile:

It’s a sandbox, which TWP isn’t. It’s also much larger and more content-rich to begin with.

I can see your initial point, though, about the desolation that sets in as you exhaust any possible interaction. I guess one way to deal with that is to actually close off depleted areas to the player. That’s what a lot of adventures actually do, by moving the player from area to area, always forward, never back. If that’s not what you want (and it also does not appear to be Ron’s style), the only other way is adding more interaction. But that does not come cheap, and I guess that’s often the issue: everything not strictly required for the core game is not feasible to implement. Games chock-full of stuff like U7 therefore are rare these days, sadly.

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You are refusing to listen what is a simple concept. Even Gobliins started with a story. This has nothing to do with whether the story is central in a game. It may or may not be.

It seems to me that this thread addresses two main topics:

  1. Adventure games “narrowing down” when the player approaches the end and the world has less things to do/take/interact with.
  2. If point-and-click adventure games are mainly defined by the story or by the puzzles.

About the point 1, I think that it’s true that the world can feel more empty when the player has done most of the things that were required to proceed. I don’t think that this phenomenon is necessarily a bad thing, though, because in my opinion it was never a goal of adventure games to make the players believe that they were in an open world.

In point-and-click adventure games, there is a static tree of paths that has been designed by the authors and the player has to traverse this tree to reach its end. This structure can usually be traversed in more than one way and, from this perspective, this is the feature that makes adventure games non-linear, but when the tree is traversed the story and the puzzles are consumed by the player and towards the end the quantity of things to do has been reduced. I think that this “consumption” is an intrinsic property of adventure games.

Is this bad? It depends. For me, the emptiness of the locations that I’ve already explored and “used” helps me to understand that I’m approaching the end; it’s a way to feel the progress that I’ve made. Personally, I wouldn’t like to go back to already explored locations just to do “random more stuff” if this stuff doesn’t help me to reach the final goal.

For example, in Thimbleweed Park, Chet appears at the intersection of Main Street with B Street after a while and the presence of a character who wasn’t there at the beginning makes the place more lively and believable, but this happening has a purpose and it’s necessary to advance the story. Adding red herrings or useless objects to already explored locations to “renew” them just for the sake of renewing them, would be in my opinion a misleading change for a player who has a goal in mind and who wants to proceed.


About the point 2, I agree with @N_N when he says “It’s difficult to be reductionistic about works of art that are greater than the sum of their parts.”.

I don’t feel that dissecting an adventure game into its parts and trying to establish which one of them is the main feature of this kind of game makes much sense. Even if it was possible to reach a definitive conclusion, I have the feeling that we would do a disservice to this game genre, that has become famous for flawlessly mixing story and puzzles so that they are inter-dependent.

This opinion of mine is related to another topic that I’ve addressed in other threads: there is not a strong and shared definition of what an “adventure game” is. Some of us think that puzzles define this genre more than the storytelling, while other people think differently. The point is that… definitions (and strict recipes) are not so important, in my opinion. (unless you need them to understand what other people are talking about)

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Ad 1.: I think you are right, that’s probably just how adventure games work.

  • You either have a quite open world like TWP or Rubacava which then noticeable narrows down
  • or you progress from confined spaces with several rooms to the next ones, never opening up a lot, but therefore also never feeling it narrowing down much.

Having still an open world feeling at the end of such game (e.g. many objects and NPC/monsters to interact with) would probably make it more of an RPG-like game.

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You can avoid the “narrowing” (a little bit) if you

  • open up more rooms to the end and
  • introduce more puzzles and
  • make the puzzles more difficult towards the end.

In TWP you have access to most of the locations relatively fast. And near the end there are only a few (easy) puzzles. If you place more puzzles in the factory, the game “narrows” not that fast.

But the “narrowing down” isn’t bad at all. Because the story comes to an end or it’s climax.

Wouldn’t this result in another openworld-ish scenario, taking you some time to solve all the puzzles and than at the end of these puzzle chains it feels like a narrowed down, empty world again?

I think the complaints about this narrowing down is that the previously rich world becomes feeling empty.

But maybe you can’t and also shouldn’t avoid it, it’s just how it works with adventure games?

Unless you abstain from opening up in the first place, keeping it at about the same pace throughout the game. I think Indiana Jones 3&4 would be an example for this while TWP and Zak are examples for “open world” adventures.

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Yes. You have to come to an end. :slight_smile: And with it the amount of puzzles decreases.

Yes, but you can keep this part as short as possible. For example in the TWP factory you haven’t much to do. With some more puzzles the factory won’t feel that empty.

That’s what I meant: At the end of TWP you walk alone in the wireframe world. This is part of the story: The player feels alone. And he keeps this feeling when Delores had pushed the last tube. So here the empty world is useful and needed.

It’s not easy to chose and time the puzzles in the right way.