You lose the kind of puzzle that relies on unusual verb combinations, but you can have more specific verbs. If you have enough appropriate verbs, the exploration stays there.
So, for example, suppose you have a reclining armchair. You can’t have a puzzle where you “open” it to reveal something is under the cushion (otherwise, a “lift cushion” would give the puzzle away), but you can sit on it and recline more/less, while “use” would be ambiguous and “push/pull” would be kind of a stretch.
All in all, it depends on what kind of puzzles you want to design. The good thing is, you spare the player (and the programmer) from all the “that didn’t do anything” or “I can’t pick it up” or “I can’t push it”. And having dubbed and cut audio for the TWP Italian voiceover, I have enough of all those sentences
Unless, by the time you see that armchair, you have already seen a dozen other armchairs, and you’ve seen the “lift cushion” verb on them, and that verb achieved nothing. So, if you design the game in this way, you can still have a “lift cushion” puzzle. The puzzle becomes to understand that that one is the right armchair to search. Of course it becomes a burden on the developer to have this much quantity of armchairs… but i wonder if there’s any real alternative…
Isn’t that basically the Cruise for a Corpse interface? Then I’m proud to have suggested that to Ron 3 years ago on this very forum . It’s all written down…
But then you give either the player the solution or you have the “I can’t” problem again: If you can sit only on the armchair, the player knows that he has to sit on it. Otherwise you have to introduce “sit” on every chair and sofa (and more objects) which leads to more work (you need more animations, more voice recordings, etc.).
It’s the predecessor, yes. AFAIR in Future Worlds and Operations Stealth you were able to choose between every possible verb.
Yes, we talked about that modified coin interface already and Ron implemented our suggestion more or less.
Although I’ll add that a really annoying thing they did for that in DotT remastered iirc is that they killed the reliability of positioning in removing rather than graying out the verbs.
More than the positioning, I was more annoyed by the fact they don’t have text… having to understand icons has never been a strengh of mine… they all look the same to me.
True. But at least it’s better - for the player, at least - to see an action that brings to nothing but at least is done (so, sitting everywhere) instead of a generic failure.
In fact, I think this is the reason why Boris has so many elaborate lines in TWP. He has a single, explicit reaction for all possible combinations. You push the rock, he says you can’t push a rock because it’s a rock, not “I can’t push it”. You use the rock on your notes, he makes a joke about rock-paper-scissors. And I think this is because the devs tried to give a good first impression to new players, give them an illusion of freedom - even if it doesn’t work, the game reacts to that specific command - instead of bombarding them with generic "no can do"s.
So, you’d probably have to do more sitting animations or lines where the player explains why he doesn’t want to sit there, but I feel like it’s an improvement from the usual “use chair” that results in “I can’t use that”.
But that’s the thing, as long as you’ve got a limited number of standard verbs your problem is only a problem because the positioning isn’t reliable. That forces you to keep parsing the icons instead of allowing it to become an automatism that left is talk and up is look (or whatever).
I think people might be reading too much into a prototype. If they run with this UI I’d imagine a ‘dropdown’ of 4-6 verbs that are either hardcoded on an object basis or a category basis, or both. You could even put the full classic 9 verbs in the dropdown but most of those verbs make no sense for most objects in a given circumstance (you’d rarely consider opening or closing Wally the cartographer).
I love the interface. There’s no reason to waste all the screen real estate on these verbs (except nostalgia, maybe) when you are still spending two clicks. So with this UI you’re allowing more room for awesome artwork and you are saving countless dumb hands from constantly delving to the bottom of the screen to click one of the verbs, then back up to the object.
. It’s all written down… 
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