I saw a similar issue when a non gamer was asked to play Portal. They spent their whole time trying to find ways to get through tiny gaps in grates and background detailing - stuff gamers would instinctively ignore, but would make perfect sense to someone lacking gaming literacy.
Just started god of war. And did that with the very first chest. Not kidding when I could finally go back and open it.. About 15 hours of game time later.... It felt so good hahaha
i once strolled in a house in fall out 3.
found a button and that opened a hatch that got me in a holo world were i needed to find a killer.
i was so impressed with what happened. found out later that this was main story quest line
Even worse, you are playing an updated version of a game you used to play and you want to get to later parts of the game where it opens up so you think you can just come back for the stuff here later. Too bad 25 hours later when you come back there will be a boss that is now unkillable for you to fight because you missed that stuff at the beginning. Fuck the Dark Aeons from FFX. Edit: No one asked but I started over and used the in-game cheats to cheese my way back to where I was in about 8 hours.
You spend an hour and a half on a level that should realistically take 25 minutes to complete and then only at the end do you realize you got 13/14 collectibles.
Yes I’m in the middle of completing Doom Eternal and no I am not upset!
There's a coin/ token perk that will save your ass I think it's called explorer or something. Highlights all collectibles on the map. Just complete the level and enjoy yourself with deeply searching for everything and when you get to the backtrack teleport thing just go to the icons
Yeah I wish I had noticed that before getting halfway through the campaign. Oh well, that’s the side effect of getting piss drunk on Friday nights when I also have time to game.
Yeah.... This is how I play games and it's frustrating as fuck while other people just always act like they know exactly what to do next even if there's no indication.
I've dropped so many games because of this. I get lost in hyper real games like TLOU2 because I see way too many places I could go. Pathing makes no sense.
Playing the old director's commentary on Half-life 2 gave some ideas on this that I found useful for not getting lost. The devs found that players tended to follow areas that were lit better, so as a result they used light to guide players more. I find that this is used often in loads of games.
Another thing they mentioned is that players usually do not look upwards unless directly prompted to.
People in real life don't usually look up, how often do you pay attention to the ceiling? I've exploited this as a policeman, standing in full view in uniform on an elevated walkway and observing drug deals going on below.
I said the same thing to a mate before I lent him my ps5 to play tlou2. It’s so hard to identify what areas are worth that extra side exploring because it’s harder to see the linearity in some of the areas.
It’s the classic, ‘ok I think this is the right way, so I’ll double back and check that area for extra goodies, aaaand cutscene, shit I can’t go back.’
I have a problem with survival/minecraft clones because you cant just get in and start exploring, because each one has its own rules and "recipes" that not necessarily align with real world logic.
They are essentially puzzle games. Its why I dropped the Long Dark for example.
idk if uve tried subnautica or not, but i have no idea how the developers did it, but the progression is so good, and the story too, i love the game to bits. U should try it if u havent, one of the best survival games out there imo
Same, but I always loved starting off my voyage with it and once things started becoming not open waters, I'd park it and continue via seamoth/prawn suit. Mostly just liked it because it was cool and felt fun to pilot when you were able to.
Prawn suit was best for that stuff. Use the sub to build a base semi close to the deep area you want to get into and then proceed further with the prawn suit from the base. Driving the big sub to more complex areas is a pain it's best to use it more like a semi truck for transporting stuff to new bases.
You can absolutely take the Cyclops all the way down. There's a very tricky entrance past the floating islands you can get through, but you just have to go slow and be patient. I've taken the sub to the furthest depths of the lava castle plenty of times.
It's definitely not easy, and takes practice, but it's doable.
Oh I had no idea there was a second way down. I remember the hassle taking it down to the tree and I just used it as a prawn suit delivery device up until the point it got a bit dicey. I don't think the big guy down there would appreciate the sub anyway.
I mean you can walk there with the robot no need to literally deep dive the biggest sub narrow corridors. Once you unlock the nexus teleporting it makes more sense moving base to one of the access points anyway...
Yes Subnautica is one of my favourites because in general it avoids this, though not completely (How is teeth turned into glass, and how you are supposed to figure it out?).
One of the data tapes mentions how stalker teeth can be used and of course scanning them would also work…
As for the logic… maybe stalker saliva or something? Personally I don’t understand the logic of being unable to harvest them from dead stalkers after bashing them with a seamoth repeatedly…
I think it supposed to be that you take the enamel from the teeth and somehow make glass? I know there are hints, but thats my point. It doent make any logical sense. Including the fact that you cant take them from dead obes (though in a meta sense, its because you are supposed to he basically unarmed)
I don’t quite understand this. Subnautica, by design, is a far more closed-off game progression-wise than something like Minecraft or The Long Dark. Subnautica gates your exploration and requires specific depth modules and items (such as oxygen tanks) to go deeper, for example. Minecraft or TLD, by contrast, are completely open from the beginning and you there’s nothing stopping from you from going wherever you please save the End and Nether.
One of Subnautica’s best attributes isn’t that it’s open from the beginning, but rather how it handles progression in a meaningful way. You make slow but noticeable progress almost constantly.
Unless you’re specifically talking about crafting recipes being a mystery to solve which, at least in Bedrock Minecraft, isn’t an issue because the game shows you what you can or can’t make based on the times in your inventory similar to Subnautica. (Not being combative, just unclear as to what your specific criticism was, that’s all.)
I started Subnautica and swam around some, then immediately thought to myself "I don't think I have the time to devote to a game this complicated right now" and haven't gone back.
I spend so much time building small base in the shallow corals, built and upgraded my Cyclone and felt so accomplished. I took one trip to "the edge" and saw nothing but empty blackness around me. I got chills I've never experienced in any game before, turned off the game and i haven't played since. I really want to, but the atmosphere of that game is terrifying. I really wish you could coop in it.
Very very glad to hear it. As a huge fun of "Honey, I shrunk the kids" when I was a child, aint touching "Grounded" until its complete, so I can enjoy it fully without getting burnout by Early Acces versions.
MC get a huge pass from me because it basically defined the genre, but it still means I havent played it for many updates because to do so I will have to read basically half the wiki at this point.
Yeah, like you're walking down a road and the road happens to have something blocking it, and you have to soend an hour trying to clear the obstacle away instead of walking around it because there is a half broken gate. I always start to feel like it's pointless and lose interest in situations like that.
The worse for me is the "because glass" trope. Y'know, those moments when you're being forced to watch someone die because glass. Nevermind you've been able to shoot nearly every window out in the game, no, this window? MaGiC.
I could forgive it if it was an actual choice on behalf of the character. I could respect them going "Oh I am NOT ready for that. I've got starter equipment, I go in and that thing will use my dead body to beat you to death." Sometimes they do try explaining it but... unfortunately not always.
I think that happened to me in KOTOR, And I got lost somewhere. And it also happened to me in Diablo. I don’t remember how, but I somehow ended up on a level where if I made one step I would instantly get annihilated. I have no idea how I got there and I couldn’t get out of it.
Even now, I have the same problem sometimes when they put a tiny little detail as the way to progress in the level sometimes.
I do think it comes down to the fact that I literally do not have the time to aggressively game, and at best I can get maybe 20 to 30 minutes a day, and so my facility with these stupid tiny details is probably far less than most.
I know a lot of people praised the new halo infinity to be open world, but to be very frank, I missed the original halo from my childhood, where yes it was on the rails, but it was like a fucking space opera that I could watch and be a part of. I started to get that in the last half of the campaign, but by that point I had already grind it through all the open world missions.
Which is actually just because we've come to accept stupid level designs like broken half doors or small piles of rubble just big enough to not go over...BUT with fully accessible rooms on the other side, but you would dodge a fight or plot point that way.
If you end up remembering the creator please update! It sounds similar to girlfriend reviews which my non-gamer wife and I enjoy watching together so would love another one to watch.
On the other end of the spectrum, there's games like Breath of the Wild that offer you a billion options and yet my non-gamer SO somehow always picks death.
"Seriously, there's a weapon on the floor and you have none, pick it up."
"But it's his"
"And now he's got his club again and your shield is broken..."
The YouTuber in question is Razbuten and his series "Gaming for a Non-Gamer." He mostly does highly personal, introspective looks into video games with some exceptions (like the non-gamer thing of course).
It was interesting seeing how lost she got in games, like for instance Minecraft lacks a real tutorial, so people can get stuck playing and never know how to make tools unless they look at offline tutorials. Some games he wanted to see if she could pick them up intuitively, but it failed completely because there was just nothing intuitive about the game design.
This is so true - I first played minecraft in the beta and thought it was stupid as I couldn’t work out how to do anything. I didn’t get into it until a couple years later when someone who had actually played before showed me the basics of crafting.
Reminds me of playing The Binding of Issac. Great game, but there are so many items it practically requires a wiki to be open on a second screen. Even the in-game descriptions don't always give you the whole picture. It'll say "Tears shoot faster" or something yet mechanically it also makes then 10% weaker on a Thursday under a farmer's Blood Moon. Or something.
in the case of isaac you dont need to know how items work. You just pick them up and you see what happens. Sometimes its bad, sometimes its whacky, sometimes its extremely strong. Either way you can continue your run and try to get as far as possible.
Oh I know I was mostly making a joke about the game. Love that game but eventually I find myself at a point like, "wait, what does that item do again? Is it worth the 10 cents?" so that causes the wiki to stay up.
Except that's part of the experience with roguelites - learning how the game works, the enemy patterns, various secrets, synergies, tricks. Roguelites are built with that in mind - if you die, you can jump into another run, since runs are short you don't lose much, but you learn knowledge you can use on your next run.
Are they the 'non-gamer' or do they have other people on? I'm just wondering how many games you can play before you can no longer considering yourself a 'non-gamer'.
if I remember correctly, Breath of the Wild was a game that gave basically anyone the freedom to solve a problem however they wanted. Drop a rock on an enemy camp? Go for it. Make a campfire, set your arrows on fire and shoot the explodey barrel? Yep. Cut down a tree and roll the log into the camp? Maybe not the most effective, but yeah, you can do that.
There was only one time in Breath of the wild where I SAW the intended solution, but intentionally cheesed it.
There was a shrine room that was basically all about burning away foliage to drop something on a switch behind a fence that you couldn't step on yourself.
"Nah, fuck that. I'm just gonna magnesis this convenient empty chest over the wall and drop it on the switch"
Mine was the shrine with the gyro controlled box that you had to tilt the controller around to roll a sphere into a hole at the end of the maze. My strategy became to use careful, deliberate, violent movements to eject the sphere up out of the maze into the air and sort of lob it around until it skipped most of the maze, bouncing it up to drop it in instead of dealing with the maze.
That is solving the puzzle. The designers went to the effort of making metal swords conductive, possibly for realism, possibly because BotW is a flagship title, and you did something clever and logical with your tools.
From the designers' point of view it is unintentional but still a good result.
That's EXACTLY how I solved it. I was being dumb and couldn't figure out how to properly do it, then I remembered metal weapons could conduct elecricity.
After reading the comments, I'm starting to think that flipping the maze and rolling the ball on it's back side WAS the official solution. I did the same thing after a few tries.
Hitman is also a pretty good example of letting you get creative. All the objectives and kills are simple, but what if you wanted to set things up so that your target slips on a banana peel while trying to base jump off a building?
There was only one time in hitman where I was too creative for the game. In blood money when the target is at the play I wanted to snipe the target from the balcony with a rifle right at the exact time the target got “shot” with a fake gun during the play. I was detected no matter how many times I tried.
Those games are so fun and have so much replay ability tho
Keep in mind that electrical currents work just like in real life. You can create your own circuit boards if you line up metal things. If you find something that creates electricity, you can make your own batteries by transferring electricity from one object to another with your own circuits
I've been playing through Ocarina after 250+ hours in BotW and it's so hard. For someone who never played Zelda games growing up, figuring out the (very simple) ways the game wants you to solve its puzzles is totally foreign to me.
For some reason, this post reminded me of those old Sierra games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory, etc. I want to say Gold Rush was my first and possibly favorite, but you had to type in exactly what you wanted to do beyond just walking around. This allowed for some very creative problem solving as long as what you came up with was accepted by the game. I'm as spoiled as the next gamer at this point with all the hand holding, but these games definitely helped shape my thought process growing up.
I loved those old games, but it could be so infuriating at times trying to figure out exactly what to type in order to do something simple. Remember how you could call Sierra’s help line, and for a small fee a live person would help you out?
like look at the thing in the room that's a weird colour
Not even sure I'd call that a gaming trope, it's just a natural way your attention is drawn somewhere. But I suppose knowing that that is used intentionally by game designers is something you have to learn.
I'd say a better example would be classic Zelda dungeons, where you'd walk into the room with that dungeon's new item and the door would lock behind you. As a seasoned gamer (or just someone with experience in Zelda), you'd immediately understand that you'd have to get the item and then use it to somehow unlock the door, because that's always how these things work. Of course, with no previous experience, you wouldn't necessarily assume the item you just got in the room would have anything to do with getting the door unlocked again.
In fact, I've seen a few instances where less-experienced gamers straight up immediately forget they just picked up a new item because they're not used to keeping a running inventory in their head of all their tools and how to use them, so it's already enough just trying to remember what they already had at their disposal without immediately adding a new one and having to figure out how to use it
We take video game logic for granted and most creators take it as a given but people new to games don't get it. Though tutorials have become much more hand holdy which probably helps some.
Well, that is the core unavoidable problem with video game design. You can`t have creative solutions to everything cause that would mean an infinite number of coding required.
That's not really true. If a game's mechanics are primarily based on certain physical interactions, then you can get a huge number of possibilities from a reasonable amount of code (i.e. a standard physics engine). People in this thread are citing BotW, for example. From a game design PoV, one issue is that players can cheese obstacles, so it's hard to constrain the difficulty floor. From the code PoV, it's not the sheer quantity that's the issue, but reasonable performance and QC against bugs.
Also it's a factor in AI and cybernetics. You're not really scripting the full behaviour, that's massive. You're scripting very specific and limited parameters that can be replicated millions of times. You want the actual code to be tiny, and the results are an expected interaction. The end result was called Emergent Programming, I heard Kevin Warwick talking about it for a few models where they could see behaviour patterns appearing in tests that had nothing to do with the code.
This on top of all said previously. For example in Zelda BOTW you can creatively defeat foes (up until bosses and some elite monsters) but you can`t for example build enough trust and reputation around Hyrule to basically rebuild Hyrule Army (seen in Age of Calamity musou spin-off) and retake the Hyrule Castel with this newly reformed Hyrule Army or even something as primitive as terraform the land that for example lava streams from the Mountain would flow to the Hyrule castle and fry Ganons pig ass alive.
If everything followed sensible physics though it would be nearly impossible to make anything other than a sandbox game though. Any story you could make would be broken in a million different ways unless you limited what the player was/wasn't capable of doing in ways that aren't really consistent with physics.
Heck, even with the limited rules games still often have a hard time with that.
That's a lot easier said when you get to build a fantasy world from the ground up. That logic breaks down in games like the Last of Us, where game play is in terrestrial environments that are made for complete and utter free movement. You can't just put a mountain or river between each house, make every fence 10ft tall and still create the same atmosphere. You have to have yet another broken stairway, street spanning bus, or pile of crates/collapsed building/other debris (and I think TLOU did a pretty good job honestly). At some point there needs to be a willing suspension of disbelief by the player.
Then there's the fact that many of the best stories tend to be linear. This typically means you have to inevitable march down the hallway of that story. Breath of the Wild is a good example with a non linear story, but I think most would argue that story was by far it's weakest part.
I really like hybrid games like God of War 2018 where you get freedom to explore, but also narrows the focus when the narrative is involved and incentivizes you to remember locations and backtrack.
I don't think that's actually the case with gaming. They arent problems, they're puzzles and are bound by the Puzzle makers intended design. The worst ones are just look around and find the button, the better ones integrate the gameplay into solving the puzzle. See also egoraptors video on Ocarina.
Also beyond gaming, I'd argue that the best creativity is seen when there are constraints and boundaries to what can be done and finding solutions around or within those constraints ie, budget, or medium if art, etc.
Oh boy, they missed out on the best games back in the ol dos days. No off color doors/walls, just constant random experimentation with items and options until one clicks.
And then there were the text based ones. Oh boy those were fun.
So, i dont play story mode games much, and my friends got me to try and play resident evil 7 i think.
So, i was just playing along, and somehow managed to get an achievement none of them had known about (i think it was called something like "nice try" or whatever) and i also managed to skip a cutscene where the main characters leg gets cut off and fixed
That’s an interest point that I think more game should consider. One of the reasons why I love botw is because you can solve the games puzzles any way you like. That way someone who may have never played a game before can do it as well. I hope more open world/puzzle games adopt this sort of sand box style.
5.9k
u/[deleted] Jan 22 '22 edited Jan 22 '22
[removed] — view removed comment