Quote:Original post by TechnoGoth
Survial Horror game:
A player arrives at a tough boss, and doesn't have enough ammo and health packs to win. Does this mean the designer didn't give them enough? Made the boss to hard? or is the player fault for waisting their resources?

Design flaw.

Firstly, there should be more than one way to kill the boss.

If there is not, you should give the player the ammo he needs. You don't have to do this in an obvious way: ammo crates dotted around the boss's chamber are an obvious SOD-killer. An easy option is make like Doom or Quake and suppose there are other people fighting the same enemies as you. If you enter an area where the player must have a certain weapon or a certain amount of ammo to succeed, put a dead guy with the required equipment near the entrance, but only if the player doesn't have enough ammo.

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RTS game:
Your opponent has destroyed all your resource gathering units, and your ability to make more.

Depends upon player experience.

At early levels, it should be assumed that the player isn't yet quite skilled enough to manage his units, and in particular won't automatically recognise when he becomes unable to win the game.

There are a number of possible resolutions to this. You could cripple the enemy AI so that it won't destroy all your resource gathering units. You could airlift in new units if you get into a no-win situation. You could make the resource gathering unit constructors invincible.

Of course, later on in the game, it would be expected that the player has come to understand how to manage his resources, by gradually disabling features like those listed above. Then, if the player gets into an unwinnable situation, it is almost certainly the player's fault.

In an RTS game, yet another option is to allow the player to get into an unwinnable situation, but allow the player to lose a battle but win the war. Perhaps you'd suffer a hit to your prestige, which would effect the units you could have and the missions you could take on. If you have a string of failures, which should only be possible if the player is totally useless, then you'll be demoted out of the army/navy/starfleet/whatever.

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Adventure/RPG

You need to get aboard the alien mothership, but you blew up the transporter bad, don't have the brains or charm to talk your way past the guards at the shuttle pad, you decided to use your favor with the trade guild for 30% discount at all their stores instead of taking the personal shuttle, and you decided to turn in your friend the smuggler captain earlier on for the juice bounty on his head. Is that the desingers fault for allowing you eliminate all possible roads to the shuttle? Or the players fault for closing them all with out realizing it at the time.

If getting aboard the ship is the only way to progress the game, and you can't possibly get aboard the ship, it's a design flaw.

But, suppose you go away and work on some side-quests for a while. When you get back, the transporter pad has been fixed. That would happen, right? Or you could go to your local Intellectician and get smartfaced on intelligence-enhancing drugs, so you could get past the guards. Or you get some sleeping gas to get past the guards. Or you stroll down to the smuggler's bar and recruit another captain. Or you do another favor for the trade guild (or some other guild) and get the shuttle this time.

The keynote here is realism. You don't have to make the Finger Of God reach down and rub out the guards, but there's no reason you can't make it possible to acquire the things you need to best any puzzle.

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Failure case.

There player chooses a team to go on a mission and during the mission loose a critcal team member that they needed to complete the mission. They have failed the mission and lost part of their team. The game isn't over but they've still failed at something.

If they can still complete the game as a whole, that's fine.

I think something that people forget is that, in the real world, for every hero who defeats an army with brawn, wit and intelligence, there are many thousands who get shot in the head at the first checkpoint.

In a computer game, you want to be playing that hero. And the only reason that hero actually wins is that he has extraordinary luck. No amount of skill, no amount of strength, no amount of wisdom will grant a single man victory over an entire race of brutal killing machines (c.f. Doom or Quake). It's 99.99% luck.

Lots of people complain about games being unrealistic. The chances of there being guns, ammo and medkits in every crate, cabinet and dark corner. But if you're a hero that is realistic. The reason the player finds a rocket launcher just before fighting an enemy that can only be killed with a rocket launcher is that the player is incredibly lucky. After all, I've played through Doom, Quake, Half Life, Max Payne, Soldier of Fortune -- and I was lucky enough never to receive a headshot. In fact, in all but a few games, I was lucky enough that even when I did get shot it wasn't usually in a way that impaired my physical abilities.

In sports, board games, card games, etc. you're either playing against friends or in some sort of professional arrangement (e.g. high school/college sports). In either case, the game is balanced from years of refinement, which few computer games have had. You also already know generally how good your opponent is. I know which of my friends are better/worse than me at cards, better/worse than me at sports, etc. Computer games generally don't have this. When you're playing someone over the internet, you have, at best, a vague notion of their abilities. Are you going to wipe the floor with them, or will it be the other way around? Or will it be a fair fight? You don't know. There's also a long tradition of cheating in online games. If it got to the point where cheats/lag weren't an issue, you'd see better sportsmanship after some time. When you're playing a single player game, you assume it's balanced, but that's hardly a good assumption. There's also the "I only play on hard" mentality. If you can't beat it on hard, that's why there's a "normal" or even "easy" setting. I usually play on normal because that's the level of difficulty I can reach with the time and skills I have.

Quote:Original post by AgentC
To the survival horror problem: IMO, there should always be some low-powered "last resort" weapon with no ammo requirements (fists, screwdriver, whatever) and every situation (at least, when talking of action games) should be theoretically possible to clear without health loss.

Hopefully you wouldn't want to limit this to survival horror! One of the things I particularly like about Halo or Republic Commando is that you always have a melee weapon. The chainsaw is also a popular last-resort weapon, but of course it's odd that it never runs out of fuel. [wink]

I'd advocate that every action game should have at least one melee weapon, which must be available at the start of the game. Worst case scenario: it's your elbow. You should also be able to pick up other ammo-less weapons: knifes, crowbars, baseball bats, rocks.

Another point I'd make is that almost any trained soldier can sneak up behind someone and break their neck. It's not a skill that's limited to secret agents.

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You could also do like Riddick or Max Payne: regenerate some health if the player manages to stay alive long enough after a near-fatal hit. Should be more thrilling to keep fighting on the edge rather than to realize you've accumulated too much damage and are doomed no matter what.

On the one hand, it's obviously unrealistic.

On the other hand, if you're living in a universe where bandages can completely heal wounds that leave you one light finger-poke away from death, it seems obvious that, given a few minutes of peace, you should be able to rip some bandages out of your shirt, or a fallen comrade's shirt. So, in that kind of universe, I think that makes sense.

There might be a limit as to how much self-healing you can get. Perhaps it can only heal up to the nearest 10% of hit points. Then you'd have a design rule that, in general, you shouldn't need more than 10% of your total hit points to get to a healing kit.

If this is used, it might be reasonable to place limits upon saving. Perhaps, at least in the beginning, you would only have one save slot. You could save whenever, but wouldn't be able to have a chain of saves all the way back to the beginning of the game.

I would however relate this to difficulty, in the style of Alien vs. Predator. At "Easiest" you'd have unlimited save slots. At "Hardest" you'd have one save slot and could only save at specified checkpoints.

Try to play dungeon crawl, and then say something. Is it design flaw that they'd kill you, and often quickly (no reload of course)?
In many current games, the player is rushing to the enemy headlessly. In dungeon crawl player would move AWAY from the enemy and rather quickly.

Alas it looks like some players, and reviewers becomed a lazy bums. They expect to get the game on a silver plate, but it don't happen. Thus they might try to find some "design failures". I listened words "That RTS from warhammer world Dawn of war? is too difficult." I'm probably spoiled by dungeon crawl, and DROD, because I finished it under 3 days with only one mission restart (because I wanted to finish that mission with my alies, and noticed that they are really crappy too late to prevent theirs destruction.) Of course in one mission I missed one enemy base and lost all build capabilities, but I won anyway. No manual, no hint book, and last RTS played a lot ago.

Quote:Original post by Raghar
Alas it looks like some players, and reviewers becomed a lazy bums. They expect to get the game on a silver plate, but it don't happen.

Well, yes. If I pay money for a game, I expect to get a game I'm going to enjoy.

I don't particularly care if a developer thinks computer games shouldn't be easy. If a game is too difficult for me to play, or is challenging in a way that I don't find enjoyable, then I just won't play it.

Quote:Original post by Nathan Baum

Quote:Original post by Raghar
Alas it looks like some players, and reviewers becomed a lazy bums. They expect to get the game on a silver plate, but it don't happen.

Well, yes. If I pay money for a game, I expect to get a game I'm going to enjoy.

I don't particularly care if a developer thinks computer games shouldn't be easy. If a game is too difficult for me to play, or is challenging in a way that I don't find enjoyable, then I just won't play it.

Thing is, I still enjoy Contra (Remember Contra? NES?) and that's still a game I can't beat (without cheating, that is). I'm pretty bad at FPS's and RTS's on the whole and can't beat those games, yet they're still enjoyable. Never did see the end of CnC:RA. WCIII kicked my ass. I died horrible deaths in Tribes I&II. HL? Unreal? Same. Still fun though. Still fun.