- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- greentext@lemmy.ml
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Design like this is how games optimise the fun out of playing.
Forcing players to meticulously search every last nook and cranny through fear of “missing out” is cruel, and I appreciate games that telegraph to players they don’t need to do it.
(Exceptions apply of course for games where the entire point is searching, like finite-resource survival games.)
It’s nice to have some reward for looking in the nooks and crannies, without feeling like you have to search in every nook and cranny. What is the best way to achieve this? One way could be if you had interesting items each of which could be found in several places, and when you’ve found it in one place you won’t find it in another.
Metroid games have things like the missile and health expansions where you don’t need even close to all of them but they’re a nice reward when you do find them
Do you have any examples of games that do that kind of telegraphing well? I also love the kind of game that just lets me enjoy the ride.
Difficult question.
There are obviously thousands of games which don’t suffer this problem because they just aren’t of a genre which even has any concept of items or searching.
Where it gets interesting is examples where games could suffer it but don’t.
I looked through my steam list for an example and one which jumped out is Prey, a first-person RPG shooter.
Prey does have lots of secrets and things to find, but the game also makes it very clear early on that you can always travel back and forth between any area on Talos 1, the space station where the game takes place.
By virtue of this design choice, you don’t feel compelled to be absolutely meticulous in your searching because you know you can always return to look again, and cannot permanently miss anything.
I swear to fucking god I got the same ending twice in Elden Ring because of this. Because at the end the game is like “you could go to the end, or have a quick chat with someone else first” but that quick chat is actually a alternative ending. and because my dumbass is like “gotta see what this gal has to say first” I fell for it the second go around again…
Jokes on your for not ruining your experience with a completion checklist like I did!
Seriously though, I usually don’t get FOMO, but Dark Souls games suck for making you miss all the side plots if you miss a hint early on, and Bloodborne completely traumatized my inner completionist.
Don’t know if you’ll jive with it but usually with RPGs I’ll do a blind first playthrough then in a month or two I’ll go back and do a playthrough with a simple flowchart checklist to get all the content. Unless it’s classic Fallout, I don’t need the checklist anymore, now give me a minute so I can forget the Khan’s and Klamath exist.
I do play with a wiki on the side most of the time (not rn as I’m doing SOTE for the first time) but even then taking a quick 3-7 month break mid-playthru shit like this happens easily :D
I need to save the Soulslike storytelling greentexts.
The ones about how you need the random item to make sense of the plot for a specific boss “Lord Brambles : Noo, not my gwimblies”
this shit makes me check everything twice and waste a lot of time instead of playing the game. and i will still miss some secret. i fucking hate this
I’m convinced they started doing this to sell more strategy guides or get people to call into the pay-per-minute tip lines. And now they keep doing it because it increases online engagement and gives people reasons to write wiki articles.
I never had fomo in games. Either i found it right away or i don’t really care. It’s the searching that turns me off.
BG3 has some warnings that you can not return if you progress after some points. That has saved me multiple times.
Elden Ring doesn’t really lock you out of items but I did spend so many fucking hours looking behind every single rock on that huge map for the fear of missing out. My second playthrough was honestly much more chill and fun because I could happily skip most of that
It does lock you out of a few when the capital changes, but if you look up missables before finishing Faram Azula you’ll be fine.
makes me think of Vitis and Gesheft, the steel and silver sword set from Witcher 3 that are the best available for a sign build. they’re only accessible in one of the two branching paths in the final mission of the main quest of the second dlc. so if you want them, you have to choose that path, and then once you have them, the game’s over, and you don’t get to use them. only way for them to actually be useful is to make sure you get them both in a previous playthrough, and then start a ng+
They’ll finally be useful in the new DLC!
For me this is a welcome challenge. I developed a 3rd sense to know which way is a side path and which way is the main path. Sometimes you have to probe both paths for a little while and then back track.
Same. And it is the opposite of fun.
And sometimes you probe the path “for a bit” and the cutsceme starts locking you in
I would even argue that this practice of spreading items in lesser important places is often bad design. It motivates a player to do things that are not fun. Why should this be in the game?
As a bonus it is easier to balance a game when the amount of items does not vary that much.
I don’t get it, it sounds to me you are advocating dropping side content in games.
I dont think they are advocating dropping side content, but instead saying that having side content that is hidden or has no direction can take fun out of a game. For example, in OG pokemon games there are “hidden” items that have no hints or clues that they exist. If you walk to certain spots and press the action button you can find hidden items, but since there are no clues or indicators that they are there, it encourages just walking around and mashing buttons for the entire game in case there is another hidden item, which is the opposite of fun.
Pokémon is a good example. There is no item in the trash cans throughout the whole game (the originals). I and many others do check every trash can ever. And the reason is managing motivation. The game teaches you that there might be something of value and that is a heavy hitter on your dopamine. Directing the motivation towards disappointment is the essence of bad game design.
I think it depends on the game, for example Fallout 2 kinda does this. The earliest 10mm pistol is found in a cave under Klamath just on the ground with which it blends in, but you can highlight it with a button press. Similarly some good shit is hidden in weird corners of KOTOR 1 & 2 but those games are linear enough that a random path teaches you that there’s probably something to do.
I don’t get it
Yeah that’s what happens when you go past the point of return first
See: every Final Fantasy game ever (or at least up to 12, which is the last one I played).
FF12 be like: Oh you opened the treasure chest sitting right in front of the NPC you have to talk to at the very beginning of the game? Guess you don’t get the most powerful weapon in the game then.
