I'm asking whether it annoys other designers or not? Especially when it is well designed. I mean, as a designer you spend time working things out to be just the right way for common sense to kick in and then you have this person just go, "Well I'm not going do what common sense tells me to do..." As a designer i gotta think that would be very annoying and even more so if someone complained about it to you... and just to add to that how can you even begin to handle someone like that?
Like what if you were in beta for a FPS and to pick up ammo all the player had to do is run over it, which is common place, and a tester made a bug report 'how do i pick up ammo' without even trying. I'm sure that guy would get fired, but what if you couldn't fire him? How would you even go about fixing this design flaw that really doesn't exist.
Am I the only one to find this disgusting?
I never design anything (games or other software) by thinking about common sense. I always design things so that the vast majority of testers gets it right. This is how Diablo 2 was designed, for instance: designers noticed players were trying to drag-and-drop objects from their inventory to the shopkeeper inventory to sell them, so they implemented the expected behavior because it made sense to some players.
The same happened to me while developing Darklaga. The pickups randomly changed every few seconds so that a weapon pickup could be used to pick any weapon up with good timing. But a lot of players thought the pickups cycled through values instead of being random, so they were surprised. We had to accept these players' interpretation of the game world instead of ours to keep them happy.
Besides, is it common sense to pick up things when you move over them?
So, how would a first-time FPS player react to ammo?
Back to the Half-Life 2 example: we trained the player to pick up objects with the E key. Then, we give the player a crowbar. He can walk over it (if he's an experienced FPS player) or he can point at them and press the E key. The Valve guys actually made sure that previous learning (use E to pick things up) also works on ammo and pickups, which naturally extends once the players get the gravity gun. In fact, the player training for that area is pretty clever:
Play HL2 and its episodes, and listen to the developer commentary, it's extremely interesting.
The same happened to me while developing Darklaga. The pickups randomly changed every few seconds so that a weapon pickup could be used to pick any weapon up with good timing. But a lot of players thought the pickups cycled through values instead of being random, so they were surprised. We had to accept these players' interpretation of the game world instead of ours to keep them happy.
Besides, is it common sense to pick up things when you move over them?
- In real life, I don't pick up objects simply by standing on them or touching them.
- In most role-playing games, I don't pick up objects simply by standing on them or touching them.
So, how would a first-time FPS player react to ammo?
Back to the Half-Life 2 example: we trained the player to pick up objects with the E key. Then, we give the player a crowbar. He can walk over it (if he's an experienced FPS player) or he can point at them and press the E key. The Valve guys actually made sure that previous learning (use E to pick things up) also works on ammo and pickups, which naturally extends once the players get the gravity gun. In fact, the player training for that area is pretty clever:
- You see a panorama view of the citadel with things flying out of it, and an NPC tells you that it's really on the move, and you get a message telling you "Z - Zoom in" which is exactly what you want to do. The designers actually tempt you into discovering features so that you use them immediately. Oh, and did I mention the area is gated (only lets you through after something happens)?
- You get your first weapon, the crowbar, one of several ways: you can stand in its way (it's dropped down on you), you can walk over it, or you can use the E key.
- You already knew that you can attack using Mouse 1 (from the small event with the can, trash can and Civil Protection officer in the station) but you are reminded of it. And you can't leave the area until you use the crowbar to smash wooden planks that block the exit (which is quite clearly labeled as such), which also teaches the player that wooden planks can be whacked away.
Play HL2 and its episodes, and listen to the developer commentary, it's extremely interesting.
Quote:Original post by Durakken
I'm asking whether it annoys other designers or not? Especially when it is well designed. I mean, as a designer you spend time working things out to be just the right way for common sense to kick in and then you have this person just go, "Well I'm not going do what common sense tells me to do..." As a designer i gotta think that would be very annoying and even more so if someone complained about it to you... and just to add to that how can you even begin to handle someone like that?
If someone is deliberately trying to be an ass, you ignore him. There's no reason to be upset it. People like that will be always be around, not just in game design. If I'm the producer of South Park and something tells me it's "teh suck" yet millions of viewers around the world enjoy every week, I couldn't care less about that kid.
Quote:Like what if you were in beta for a FPS and to pick up ammo all the player had to do is run over it, which is common place, and a tester made a bug report 'how do i pick up ammo' without even trying. I'm sure that guy would get fired, but what if you couldn't fire him?
Depends what is task is. If he's there to hunt bugs, he might not to be the best candidate for the job. If he's part of focus group to find out how 'random' people experience the game, he's invaluable. As one of the creators of the game you will know everything about it, inside out. It's very difficult to predict what people will like, where they will have problems etc. I see it first hand every day. You think something is obvious, but it turns it out it's quite the opposite. That why testing during design and development is extremely important. And not just for usability, but also to find out if players will actually find it fun to play.
For a FPS, you can make certain assumptions of course. Many of the players will have played that type of game before, and you can probably don't have to tell them that they'll have to left click to shoot. In fact, clicking the mouse as a means to fire your weapon is pretty intuitive, even for someone who has never played a FPS, so who ever game up with that idea was a good designer. ;)
Quote:Original post by Durakken
I can't agree with that with what I said previously. Yes it's the job of the designer to put everything where it should be easy for the person to find it all like that, but I'm not talking about bad design. I'm talking about players that blatantly disregard those things.
If they do that, it is bad design. They're not doing it to spite you, but because you haven't made it convenient/obvious enough.
You're not the judge of whether your game is well-designed. The idiot players who blunder around and have no clue what they're supposed to be doing are.
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Are you all saying that you should play to the lowest common denominator? If it is I can't understand that on any level what so ever. I assume everyone should have a basic level of intelligence about things and when things go far beyond that it boggles my mind how it is that people have problems with it...
To go further would certainly get this thread modded so I'll just stop there ^.^
To go further would certainly get this thread modded so I'll just stop there ^.^
People have a hard time adjusting to "time-sink" game design, which is prevalent in MMOs. The amount of just plain walking you have to do in WoW is abhorrent to me as a player, made worse by a plugin I got that estimates travel time. If I want to kill these eight harpies, I have to walk for 16 minutes? Are you kidding me? No, of course they aren't. So you chain your quests together and you try to keep busy, but you still wind up spending fully half of your time just watching your guy auto-run.
It's easy for a gamer to think they've done something wrong in that situation, and the penalty for going to the wrong place is substantial. My girlfriend recently started playing WoW, with a Shaman character, and she canceled one of the quests on the Fire Totem tree. We decided to get caught up on that, and it took over an hour to wander the world (even with Thottbot pinpointing every possible step) and figure out where in the process she'd left off, then pick it up and do it over again to completion. That's infuriating. If there had been a button to push where I could have asked someone which NPC to talk to, I'd have pushed it.
It's easy for a gamer to think they've done something wrong in that situation, and the penalty for going to the wrong place is substantial. My girlfriend recently started playing WoW, with a Shaman character, and she canceled one of the quests on the Fire Totem tree. We decided to get caught up on that, and it took over an hour to wander the world (even with Thottbot pinpointing every possible step) and figure out where in the process she'd left off, then pick it up and do it over again to completion. That's infuriating. If there had been a button to push where I could have asked someone which NPC to talk to, I'd have pushed it.
Quote:Original post by DurakkenThey aren't stupid, they're probably just not very good at video games. Things like "minimaps" and "compass headings" and "waypoints" might be intuitively accessible to people who grew up playing Wing Commander and Defender and Metroid games, but if you're 15 years old and have never dealt with a HUD like that, you might not be immediately able to reconcile the little box full of icons and the 3D world with your avatar in it. They start out ignorant, for sure. That doesn't make them stupid.
Are you all saying that you should play to the lowest common denominator? If it is I can't understand that on any level what so ever. I assume everyone should have a basic level of intelligence about things and when things go far beyond that it boggles my mind how it is that people have problems with it...
Quote:Original post by Durakken
I'm asking whether it annoys other designers or not? Especially when it is well designed. I mean, as a designer you spend time working things out to be just the right way for common sense to kick in and then you have this person just go, "Well I'm not going do what common sense tells me to do..."
But in a game there is no common sense, just whatever contrived rules the designers felt like adding. The player won't know what to expect until you tell them.
for a amusing example see:
avgn(mildly NSFW)
We (25-30 year olds an up) are in an extremely unique position in that we played games as they developed; went from one button controllers (Atari) to the 3 joystick 12 button things we have today. We played game that absolutely required manuals...now we have downloadable games with hardly a read-me included. (I have fond memories of the paragraph book from wasteland, and the ultima manuals.)We played games as they went from no HUD at all to what we have today. We also played games with no internet, no community..now even single player games need a community with a forum to even be taken seriously. Ever element of game design we have seen added piece by piece as games advanced- like one giant tutorial for the complexity of today's games.
It is very hard sometimes to see games as others do. What is intuitive to us may be cryptic to some one else, and designers need to take all players into account.
I do find it sad that people will no longer explore a game (not the game world), but ask for help first, and it is sad that "Quest helper" is the most popular WoW ad-on, that some one will just drop a game if they don't get it in 5 min. But this is just how it is.
It is very hard sometimes to see games as others do. What is intuitive to us may be cryptic to some one else, and designers need to take all players into account.
I do find it sad that people will no longer explore a game (not the game world), but ask for help first, and it is sad that "Quest helper" is the most popular WoW ad-on, that some one will just drop a game if they don't get it in 5 min. But this is just how it is.
If things like this bother you, you're definitely not ready to work as one in the game industry. I hear those kinds of complaints from players all the time. "I can't find this, where is it?" or "This is stupid, I quit.".
Well, another you need to fully understand and respect is the fact that you will never please all of the people who play your game. Ever. There are people who are going to be ignorant and just plain lazy playing videogames because they can be. Videogames are, for a'lot of people, a release from whatever else they've got going on so they just want something mindless to do for a few hours. I've been wanting to work in Game Development since I was 7, and I won't let anything stop me from attaining this goal. Even stupid people. You need let it roll off your back and move on.
On a side note to this, I admit to even being in this category every now and again. I am by no means an idiot (but that's not saying much, this is the internet afterall) and yet I still find myself getting lazy now and again. I recall that specific situation in Star Ocean: The Last Hope and I even was asking myself "where the hell am I supposed to go now?". Eventually I persisted and found he open path (I think with a little help from a FAQ)...but I hadn't played an RPG like that in almost 2 years.
So while something like this might grate at your nerves, I think you're standing on shaky ground. Sometimes it could be laziness or inexperience, sometimes it could be like my situation.
To be a truly good designer you have to look past this sort of thing or you'll never make it anywhere.
Well, another you need to fully understand and respect is the fact that you will never please all of the people who play your game. Ever. There are people who are going to be ignorant and just plain lazy playing videogames because they can be. Videogames are, for a'lot of people, a release from whatever else they've got going on so they just want something mindless to do for a few hours. I've been wanting to work in Game Development since I was 7, and I won't let anything stop me from attaining this goal. Even stupid people. You need let it roll off your back and move on.
On a side note to this, I admit to even being in this category every now and again. I am by no means an idiot (but that's not saying much, this is the internet afterall) and yet I still find myself getting lazy now and again. I recall that specific situation in Star Ocean: The Last Hope and I even was asking myself "where the hell am I supposed to go now?". Eventually I persisted and found he open path (I think with a little help from a FAQ)...but I hadn't played an RPG like that in almost 2 years.
So while something like this might grate at your nerves, I think you're standing on shaky ground. Sometimes it could be laziness or inexperience, sometimes it could be like my situation.
To be a truly good designer you have to look past this sort of thing or you'll never make it anywhere.
There are very few games I tried that forced me to refer to the manual before grasping some concept or feature that I couldn't figure out ingame. I can't remember all of them, but I vividly remember the first - I spent nearly an year playing Heroes of Might & Magic 2 before learning how to split my troops, which was a huge handicap. Right until I, by chance, ran into a forum thread where somebody mentioned it was done via the SHIFT key (apparently that was mentioned in the manual, the one I never bothered to read). I'm still certain that information wasn't available anywhere in the game, at any point. Moreover, I think they made the same mistake in the sequel. Things like that you can blame on the designers.
However, I have to partly agree with the OP. Such degree of catering to the consumers, to the point where everything they use must become ever more convenient, simple and require little thought or effort to comprehend and use is not an attitude I particularly approve of. In fact, I could go on to say it is wrong on many different levels, but such debate is beyond the scope or topic of this thread. In games, complexity of the interface depends greatly on the complexity of the game and degree of control and overview the player has over the game. There is only so much a designer can do to make the interface comprehensible and practical while still allowing the player to see, do and understand as much as originally intended.
Ultimately, everything comes down to the target audience, or the people you make the game for. In theory, for every five players who are lazy, don't want to read, think, or bother learning and understanding the game there is one who will appreciate the game much more if it provides the complete experience.
However, I have to partly agree with the OP. Such degree of catering to the consumers, to the point where everything they use must become ever more convenient, simple and require little thought or effort to comprehend and use is not an attitude I particularly approve of. In fact, I could go on to say it is wrong on many different levels, but such debate is beyond the scope or topic of this thread. In games, complexity of the interface depends greatly on the complexity of the game and degree of control and overview the player has over the game. There is only so much a designer can do to make the interface comprehensible and practical while still allowing the player to see, do and understand as much as originally intended.
Ultimately, everything comes down to the target audience, or the people you make the game for. In theory, for every five players who are lazy, don't want to read, think, or bother learning and understanding the game there is one who will appreciate the game much more if it provides the complete experience.
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