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TheCool69 posted:Oid but gold. Which Wolfenstein 1? I assume you mean New Order which isn't a remake and is just the (almost) newest game in the series. It's all canon
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Oct 21, 2018 19:24
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Replaying the Portal games and it's too bad the dev commentary modes never caught on outside of Valve releases because some of this stuff is really interesting.
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Oct 22, 2018 20:33
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yook posted:Replaying the Portal games and it's too bad the dev commentary modes never caught on outside of Valve releases because some of this stuff is really interesting. They also did a lot to tell us just how dumb Valve's testers were, like the one guy who was stuck in a maze in HL2:Ep. 2 for like an hour because it never occurred to him to turn right. They simplified that maze. A lot of Half-Life 2 and Portal ended up how they did because of those testers, including Portal's aesthetic
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Oct 22, 2018 20:47
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RBA Starblade posted:They also did a lot to tell us just how dumb Valve's testers were, like the one guy who was stuck in a maze in HL2:Ep. 2 for like an hour because it never occurred to him to turn right. They simplified that maze. A lot of Half-Life 2 and Portal ended up how they did because of those testers, including Portal's aesthetic My takeaway from that wasn't so much "wow our testers are idiots" as it was "we're selling an experience, not a puzzle". The purpose of the Portal games was to make the player feel smart by presenting puzzles that looked complicated but were actually fairly straightforward to solve. There was a tremendous amount of skill demonstrated by the level designers to guide the player in how they needed to "solve the puzzle", without making it obvious to the player that they were being guided. Which isn't to say they always succeeded (Portal 2 is pretty notable in only placing portal-able surfaces where they'd be useful in solving a room), but there's a pretty clear disparity between playing Portal and playing an actual puzzle game. In the latter you spend a lot more time staring at the problem space, experimenting, and in particular getting stuck.
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Oct 22, 2018 20:52
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:My takeaway from that wasn't so much "wow our testers are idiots" as it was "we're selling an experience, not a puzzle". The purpose of the Portal games was to make the player feel smart by presenting puzzles that looked complicated but were actually fairly straightforward to solve. There was a tremendous amount of skill demonstrated by the level designers to guide the player in how they needed to "solve the puzzle", without making it obvious to the player that they were being guided. Which isn't to say they always succeeded (Portal 2 is pretty notable in only placing portal-able surfaces where they'd be useful in solving a room), but there's a pretty clear disparity between playing Portal and playing an actual puzzle game. In the latter you spend a lot more time staring at the problem space, experimenting, and in particular getting stuck. The entirety of Portal 2 is a set up for that last portal shot, which is a great little thing in a game full of little things.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:51
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The upshot is that there's very few puzzles or levels in HL2 or Portal where you'll get outright stonewalled, even if you're totally new to video games and haven't learned their vernacular.RBA Starblade posted:They also did a lot to tell us just how dumb Valve's testers were, like the one guy who was stuck in a maze in HL2:Ep. 2 for like an hour because it never occurred to him to turn right. They simplified that maze. A lot of Half-Life 2 and Portal ended up how they did because of those testers, including Portal's aesthetic This may be part of the reason commentary features never caught on. The perceived dumbness of Valve's playtesters seems to be much better remembered than the rest of HL2's commentary. Who wants to include a feature that'll make your players think that what they have in front of them is worse than a theoretical different version of the game that never left the dev studio? I mean, we don't really know what the level that the player got stuck on for an hour actually looked like. Could've been trash! If it's the section I'm thinking of, the player is also being pursued from behind, and that added layer of pressure might make it a lot harder to solve a maze at the same time.
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Oct 22, 2018 21:52
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The Stanley Parable had some commentary that made me think about a mechanic I never had considered but notice all the time now: How long the corridors in the game should be to give you enough time to hear the entire dialogue before another begins. It reminded me of all those open-world segments where you are driving and the characters are talking but you can't reach your objective too fast or the mission will begin and you won't hear the end of it.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:05
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Deus Ex Human Revolution also threw one in for the Director's Cut. TBH I think the biggest problem with those modes is that integrating them well is hard to do and outside of the occasional instance of them manipulating the game state directly you could get the same effect from Youtube videos narrated by the devs.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:07
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I too listened to the commentary and thought "boy, were some of these Valve testers dumb as heck". I then played old games which had unintuitive stuff and longed for those kind of testers. For example, shortly after The Orange Box I played the original Sin. Sin is a FPS with a level in a construction site. At one point you end up in a sandpit with a giant sewer pipe. You can't jump high enough and/or climb inside the sewer pipe. Embedded within the sand pit is a small pipe with a valve, however there is no way to interact with or directly destroy it. The solution is to look up 90 degrees where a crane is carrying a big pallet. You shoot at the pallet, its load drops down and breaks the small pipe which then floods the sandpit with water. You can now climb into the giant sewer pipe. THERE WAS NO INDICATION I HAD TO LOOK ALL THE WAY UP. No noticeable sound effect, no neon arrow sign. I had to look it up in a walkthrough.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:20
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L4D play testers couldn't figure out crouching iirc
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Oct 22, 2018 22:25
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Samuringa posted:The Stanley Parable had some commentary that made me think about a mechanic I never had considered but notice all the time now: How long the corridors in the game should be to give you enough time to hear the entire dialogue before another begins. It reminded me of all those open-world segments where you are driving and the characters are talking but you can't reach your objective too fast or the mission will begin and you won't hear the end of it. I remember playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Aloy commented on something that I couldn't see - I had the camera pointed a different direction than she was facing. It confused the hell out of me for a moment - I would have loved it if it was set to the player's view instead.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:32
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Len posted:L4D play testers couldn't figure out crouching iirc yep. there's a bit in the final map of No Mercy where survivors crouch through a grate to enter an elevator shaft and climb up to the hospital roof. playtesters being unable to figure that out led to the invention of the trigger_auto_crouch function.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:46
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The original Half-Life has one area that you can only reach by crouch-jumping, which gives you marginally more height on your jump. I did not know this and probably spent 15-30 minutes trying to figure out how to get there. The kicker? There's nothing important there, I could've just ignored it and moved on.  (Then Black Mesa comes along and requires crouch-jumping for drat near every jump you make, but that's a post for a different thread) In general, playtesting is one of the most demoralizing things you can do as a game designer. Your shining gem is getting played for the first time! Finally someone other than yourself gets to experience its majesty! ...and they can't figure out how to get out of the first room. They don't understand your expertly-crafted mechanics. They notice things that are supposed to be irrelevant and fail to notice things that are supposed to be important. They fail basic tasks over and over again. And worst of all? They're right. Your "shining gem" is a piece of crap, and it only makes sense in your head.
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Oct 22, 2018 22:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:The original Half-Life has one area that you can only reach by crouch-jumping, which gives you marginally more height on your jump. I did not know this and probably spent 15-30 minutes trying to figure out how to get there. The kicker? There's nothing important there, I could've just ignored it and moved on. Did you play the tutorial for Half Life? Because it has an entire section about crouch jumping making you jump higher
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Oct 22, 2018 22:59
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I kinda feel for them. I forgot how to run during my first Dark Souls playthrough and I only figured out I could make bullets out of my HP in Bloodborne if I had none left when I decided to make a second character. People are dumm
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Oct 22, 2018 23:00
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Mierenneuker posted:I too listened to the commentary and thought "boy, were some of these Valve testers dumb as heck". I then played old games which had unintuitive stuff and longed for those kind of testers. For example, shortly after The Orange Box I played the original Sin. Sin is a FPS with a level in a construction site. At one point you end up in a sandpit with a giant sewer pipe. You can't jump high enough and/or climb inside the sewer pipe. Embedded within the sand pit is a small pipe with a valve, however there is no way to interact with or directly destroy it. The solution is to look up 90 degrees where a crane is carrying a big pallet. You shoot at the pallet, its load drops down and breaks the small pipe which then floods the sandpit with water. You can now climb into the giant sewer pipe. One of the very weird quirks about humanity is that we just kind of don't look up unless there's a reason to. Like...we just don't. Which is one reason the developer commentary is interesting as is talking about playtesting. Like the ladder that falls apart in Portal? That was put there to make you look up. That's literally its entire purpose. That puzzle originally didn't have the ladder and apparently testers would just kind of be baffled at that little square room and poke around for some sort of secret or whatever. The secret was not a secret at all; you just had to look up. So the devs put a ladder in that immediately broke to say "go this way you dumb poo poo." Like what do you do with ladders? You climb them! Why is there a ladder here? Because people had to go up! But oh no, the ladder just broke! What ever will you do?!?
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Oct 22, 2018 23:16
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the very weird quirks about humanity is that we just kind of don't look up unless there's a reason to. Like...we just don't. The actual quest chain is just bad due to control issues but there's a chain in Secret World/Secret World Legends where you have to follow the trail of an occultist who went missing. At one point I just could not find the drat hint. Tearing the location apart and looking everywhere for something to interact with and reveal the thing. It was above me. Not covered by anything. Gamers don't look up.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:19
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Len posted:Did you play the tutorial for Half Life? Because it has an entire section about crouch jumping making you jump higher I honestly can't remember if I played the tutorial or not. It doesn't change the fact that I found that particular section frustrating. One of the lessons we've learned in the last ~15 years of game design is that people don't read the manual, they don't play the tutorial, and they don't remember poo poo unless they're forced to use it practically at gunpoint.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:20
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One of my buddies has the superpower of "look up". We were playing Twilight Princess together back when it was new and I kept getting stumped by the stupidest things and he just kept saying the dumbass catchphrase "gazing skyward will reveal many problems" and he was right every. single. time.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:22
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I honestly can't remember if I played the tutorial or not. It doesn't change the fact that I found that particular section frustrating. One of the lessons we've learned in the last ~15 years of game design is that people don't read the manual, they don't play the tutorial, and they don't remember poo poo unless they're forced to use it practically at gunpoint. It's also possible that the tutorials didn't actually teach you what they were supposed to. I totally stumbled my way through the rope-climbing tutorial in Opposing Force without really getting how to climb ropes, and then of course had immense problems with the rope-climbing bits in the actual game (it definitely didn't help that that mechanic was kind of a mess anyhow.)
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Oct 22, 2018 23:27
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StandardVC10 posted:It's also possible that the tutorials didn't actually teach you what they were supposed to. I totally stumbled my way through the rope-climbing tutorial in Opposing Force without really getting how to climb ropes, and then of course had immense problems with the rope-climbing bits in the actual game (it definitely didn't help that that mechanic was kind of a mess anyhow.) https://youtu.be/D4kDHX9e_Ao 3:48 where it has you crouch jump to enter three different pipes. I remember very little about half life but I do remember the tutorial, barnacles, and shooting a fetus in the head.
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Oct 22, 2018 23:33
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Stuff that seems obvious to you will just happen to be really opaque and unclear to someone else and vice versa. I think the kind of playtesting valve did is really good, if not always their response to it. Someone is always gonna get stuck on something which is simple but non-obvious, and it screws up the experience/pacing when you're that person who never looks up but the game doesn't have any kind of subtle aid to encourage you to do it. From time to time I play random low-budget first person indie games for some reason, and you definitely feel it when that kind of in-depth testing didn't happen. Like I played a few hours of NaissancE and got stuck more than once for a few minutes at a time when the answer was actually right in front of me. Getting stuck didn't make the game better. I definitely think the response to these sticking points shouldn't always be to rip them out entirely though. Like mario galaxy and mario odyssey just pop up a control picture in the corner if you linger for a few seconds near an obstacle you have to spin or ground pound or whatever and don't do anything, which I think is better than just removing the obstacle entirely. I originally wrote "the kind of playtesting valve does" and then had to change it to "valve did" because ha ha ha
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Oct 23, 2018 00:50
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Samuringa posted:The Stanley Parable had some commentary that made me think about a mechanic I never had considered but notice all the time now: How long the corridors in the game should be to give you enough time to hear the entire dialogue before another begins. It reminded me of all those open-world segments where you are driving and the characters are talking but you can't reach your objective too fast or the mission will begin and you won't hear the end of it. I thought of this just yesterday with Spider-Man. There's a part where Spider-Man is talking aloud to himself as you travel to the main objective marker and you can tell the audio is broken up into chunks because sometimes there are conspicuous enough pauses in between. Made me wonder what they use to trigger his next line. Since you don't have to travel in any kind of straight line towards the marker or follow anyone/thing maybe they use proximity to the marker rather than distance down a particular corridor that might exist in another game.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:08
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ToxicSlurpee posted:One of the very weird quirks about humanity is that we just kind of don't look up unless there's a reason to. Like...we just don't. Anachronox has a great bit about this. You're dealing with an information broker who knows all sort of secrets most people don't even dream about. When you finish his quest line you get to ask him what his secret is and he tells you, as he spreads his wings and soars above everyone, "When was the last time you looked up?" Kinda hosed me up when I was younger.
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Oct 23, 2018 01:38
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Lobok posted:I thought of this just yesterday with Spider-Man. There's a part where Spider-Man is talking aloud to himself as you travel to the main objective marker and you can tell the audio is broken up into chunks because sometimes there are conspicuous enough pauses in between. Made me wonder what they use to trigger his next line. Since you don't have to travel in any kind of straight line towards the marker or follow anyone/thing maybe they use proximity to the marker rather than distance down a particular corridor that might exist in another game. Also if the dialogue gets interrupted by a menu or something, itll start back up shortly with Peter saying something like "sorry, as I was saying -"  Semirelated, in The Saboteur whenever you skip the intro to a mission, Sean says a line like "yeah yeah, get to the point" or "just give me the short version", followed by the mission giver giving a quick "go here kill nazi" rundown of what you're doing  it's perfectly in character since Sean's a crass shithead
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Oct 23, 2018 02:22
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I feel like this is why some games have those introductory levels which are disguised tutorials. It's unfortunate when they're unskippable by default.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:26
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the problem with having skippable tutorials is then people skip them and then don't ever learn the lesson that they were supposed to teach
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Oct 23, 2018 02:30
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Danaru posted:Also if the dialogue gets interrupted by a menu or something, itll start back up shortly with Peter saying something like "sorry, as I was saying -" In the Dragon Age Inquisition postgame DLC you have a showdown with a character you talked with in the main game. During your conversations in the main game you could generally tell him to shut up or that you don't want to talk to him. If you did that a lot, then in the DLC instead of having a long question and answer session about what's going on he gives you a terse one-sentence explanation and then peaces out
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Oct 23, 2018 02:38
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TheMostFrench posted:I feel like this is why some games have those introductory levels which are disguised tutorials. It's unfortunate when they're unskippable by default. It's really a no win situation. If they give an unskippable tutorial it gets people bitching about being forced to do a tutorial. If the tutorial is optional people bitch about not knowing what to do.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:43
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Len posted:It's really a no win situation. If they give an unskippable tutorial it gets people bitching about being forced to do a tutorial. If the tutorial is optional people bitch about not knowing what to do. The best way to do that is the way MegaMan X did. The first level is basically a tutorial but you just plain don't notice. If you've already played it then you just blast through the first level quickly and easily.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:46
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The best way to do that is the way MegaMan X did. The first level is basically a tutorial but you just plain don't notice. If you've already played it then you just blast through the first level quickly and easily. Does it count as a tutorial when at that point the game is nearly the same as every other megaman game? The only thing new is the wall slide and the game doesn't tell you that exists
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Oct 23, 2018 02:49
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The best way to do that is the way MegaMan X did. The first level is basically a tutorial but you just plain don't notice. If you've already played it then you just blast through the first level quickly and easily. It works in 2D platformers but modern games often have way more controls to remember and sub systems that can be very esoteric even if conveyed in a clear way.
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Oct 23, 2018 02:50
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Len posted:Does it count as a tutorial when at that point the game is nearly the same as every other megaman game? The only thing new is the wall slide and the game doesn't tell you that exists There's a segment in that level where you are forced to use the wall kicks to progress
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Oct 23, 2018 02:50
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Len posted:Does it count as a tutorial when at that point the game is nearly the same as every other megaman game? The only thing new is the wall slide and the game doesn't tell you that exists This video gets into the nitty-gritty details about how X1's first level makes a great hidden tutorial. It gets kind of whiny at points, but the actual bits it has to say are pretty accurate. The wallkick tutorial is really well-hidden, in particular: the game basically taunts you into jumping into a one-tile-wide pit, at which point in order to pull off a walljump all you have to do is hold a horizontal direction and press jump. You can organically figure it out before you get to that point, but if you don't, then you're put into a situation where you have to figure it out to proceed and it's really easy to figure out, without any dialog boxes or other explicit tutorializing. Zero also shows off that you can charge your shot, which is old news if you've played prior Mega Man games, but especially for the first game on a new console, you can't assume that's the case. And yeah, hidden tutorials are where it's at. It's just really hard to actually hide them well. In particular, it's really hard to have a "real" level (where things of consequence are happening) that still has safe spaces to force the player to come to grips with the game's mechanics. Like, you're gonna have to have an empty room somewhere where the player can figure out how their psychic powers work, and that's kind of hard to pull off if you want the first level to be on a disintegrating spaceship.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:12
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RagnarokAngel posted:It works in 2D platformers but modern games often have way more controls to remember and sub systems that can be very esoteric even if conveyed in a clear way. Games should just through you in the middle of it, first fight, 8 end game enemies, sink or swim bitch. And if you keep losing oh, would you like to play the tutorial?
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Oct 23, 2018 03:13
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If you go the tutorial route, just make the tutorial unskippable the first time, then once you finish it once make it skippable.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:25
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RareAcumen posted:Games should just through you in the middle of it, first fight, 8 end game enemies, sink or swim bitch. Aquaria almost does this -- tosses you into a gauntlet of enemies before explaining how any of the mechanics beyond basic swimming work, and win or die you pop out at the next plot point.
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Oct 23, 2018 03:47
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jivjov posted:There's a segment in that level where you are forced to use the wall kicks to progress Looks like someone skipped the tutorial!
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Oct 23, 2018 04:35
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Actually, just thought of an idea. The tutorial level is unskippable technically, but you can use the less obvious techniques it's supposed to teach you to reach a shortcut from the start that brings you to the end almost immediately. I bet that's been done somewhere.
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Oct 23, 2018 04:39
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Len posted:The actual quest chain is just bad due to control issues but there's a chain in Secret World/Secret World Legends where you have to follow the trail of an occultist who went missing. At one point I just could not find the drat hint. Tearing the location apart and looking everywhere for something to interact with and reveal the thing. (If you could figure out how to obtain the sign, you could also use it as a weapon of sorts against other NPCs, which was pretty cool. The game had a lot of fun little things going for it, especially considering it came out in 1985.)
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Oct 23, 2018 04:57
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