The quest for a Wiki-less game
gamedev.stackexchange.com
gamedev.stackexchange.com
There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore, they want to complete tasks and get rewards. Some of them don't really care that much about the actual gameplay, as long as there is a quick way to complete sets of tasks and get their rewards.
Some of my friends are like this, they blast through games without looking at anything but the tasks and rewards and they hate having to figure things out, explore, discover and other road blocks to their "task list". They move at break neck speed too, like their lives depend on it. It's really hard to keep up, becasue they never stop at look at anything, but just rush to the next marker to finish the next task.
I had to actually stop playing certain types of games with them, because it would completely ruin the game for me.
I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out. If everything has an easy hint, marker, or otherwise shortcut that takes that away or discourages it, i would enjoy games a lot less.
An external wiki/youtube etc. gives you that choice when you need it, but it's far enough away that you can still enjoy those parts without using it.
That might be true in some cases, sure.
But in recent years I've noticed a lot of games adding things like crafting and alchemy mechanics that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own.
If I've got to brute-force recipes? Or if there are hard-won ingredients and they might get wasted or produce something useless? Or if the developers, not wanting to risk breaking the game balance, made the craftable items weak or highly situational? Can easily be Not Fun.
Or it could be you have a minor goal (eg, 'what would X + Y be') but first you need to GET x and y. You're not spoiling what you're doing. The other day I was playing Infinite Craft and wanted to test something (what WOULD freedom + fries be; for those wondering, freedom + french fries is America), but first I needed french fries. I'm not too interested in figuring out how to get them on my own, so I looked that up.
In open ended games, wikis can be used to help accomplish goals you set for yourself, since they tend to have minimal direction. They take the place of, eg, hints on where to go next. Some games have official wikis (like Little Alchemy/Little Alchemy 2), even!
Exactly.
This was noticeable in Subnautica, in which most of the game is figuring out what you do next.
The PS4 shows you how rare it is to achieve each progress trophy for a game, among people who started the game, and... the completion level looked suspiciously high. (Especially for a game that was given away free at one point, so you don't have only people who paid money for the game, starting it.)
I did have to "Zoomer" the game once, when I was stuck over the course of calendar weeks, knowing which specific linking piece I was missing, but unable to figure it out. So eventually I cheated, by Web searching how you get this one missing link.
But otherwise, I figured it out with the in-game hints, and some not-too-hard exploring, mapping, note-taking, deducing, planning, survival resource tactics-ing, and grinding.
If this were a real-world business problem, not a game, I would've gotten help sooner. But I also would've been able to apply skills to solving the problem more effectively, than if I'd only ever learned how to copy&paste Stack Overflow or LLM robo-plagiarism.
It becomes quite obvious when you play a game of the early 90s and compare it to gameplay of today.
If you couldn't identify(!) and solve the puzzle in a LucasArts Adventure Game, you were stuck, if you repeatedly died in Super Mario / Sonic the Hedgehog you had to restart from Level 1.
This is one of three things I would time travel to tell my childhood self.
I do however have a vivid memory of LucasArts' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where I got stuck in a cave under a Venice Cafe for days, because I didn't know that I need to talk a guest out of his Wine-bottle using specific sentences, and use the wine to soften the mud of a lever in a wall...
But I guess that's too specific for anyone to relate to...
Even when there was information available in the past, it wasn't always easy to access or understand, and more critically, the willingness and pace of shared knowledge has increased tremendously.
If we look back, admittedly through the lens of nostalgia, at games like WoW:BC, then strategies took weeks or even months to bed in and disseminate from the top guilds to the wider public. RPGs, even in the gamefaqs era, took weeks or months to feel "solved".
Whereas now games are released and are often "solved" in beta before their official release. Game knowledge is spread so much faster now.
Even when we had early youtube back then, and we had IRC and gamefaqs, the knowledge just wasn't spread as fast. It's hard to know if that's just the sheer numbers of people involved now, or a greater willingness to share that knowledge.
I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are.
You just get used to these things, but i also think they are a bit immersion breaking and shift the focus a lot on the destination and not the journey.
Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.
The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing"
It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On the other hand, having a convention that climbable surfaces will be blazed yellow, and teaching it early in the game is comparatively easy.
There's also aspects of pacing and focus to consider. A game that ebbs and flows in it's intensity often feels better to play than one that's high intensity all the time. So if your game is mostly about combat, you'll want to break up big fights with lower energy experiences. But those lower energy experiences really aren't "the game" in a sense, they're a kind of filler that makes the high energy experiences feel more fun. It can't be completely boring, but it should be easier than the primary gameplay experience and also have lower stakes. That's a big reason why do many actiony games have blatantly obvious climbing and puzzles. It keeps the player lightly engaged while letting them catch their breath before the next set piece.
It's not the only way to build games by any means, but it is a generally effective, and consistently reliable, template.
I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in.
Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place?
I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".
I understand this is very common, but for me: "discovering and figuring things out" in games often becomes: "guess what the game devs want me to do."
Oh, is there something on the other side of that hill? Meh, not really. What about at the top of that cliff? Oh I can only sort of climb it? Should I keep trying or am I just going to hit an invisible wall? Is this enemy way too tough for me with my current equipment, or do I just need to get better? Am I doing things in the wrong order and just making things way tougher?
Some games are better about it than others, but I already know I'm playing a game. I don't get much enjoyment from "finding" something that was put there for me to find. I like stories, characters, and world-building. I don't need a giant yellow HUD arrow, but there's nothing fun about wandering aimlessly in hopes of finding something mildly interesting. I already know there are N mildly interesting things on the map, each within a focus-tested ~30 second distance from each other. So for me at least, I'll take the map markers.
For example in Overwatch 2, there are no numbers on abilities. It's just something like "fires a rocket at the enemy" - how much damage does the rocket do? How long is the cooldown? Can it crit if it hits an enemy in the head?
In other games there might be items or talents with tooltips like "increases your damage" - how much? Is it additive or multiplicative with other modifiers?
I like games where this kind of information is easily available. I won't look up how to complete a quest or something unless I'm completely stuck on it, but I will look up numbers so I can make informed decisions instead of just guessing what might be good.
Isn't that even more immersion- and game-breaking? Figuring out what kind of attacks have what kind of effect on what kind of enemy is generally part of the game.
Players won't for example feel the need to use this super powerful item they found and see how well it works because they only have one copy of that item.
The best way to avoid this is to give players access to low/zero opportunity cost versions of strong items so they can get a good "feel" of when to use stronger things in their arsenal. Players need to be able to safely experiment with their kit but that experimentation also has to happen in an environment where it can be meaningfully tested.
(You can see this with the dark souls formula on both ends; because death and healing are both low cost resources to manage, players are more incentivized to experiment, since the cost for a "dud" attempt at a tough boss fight/figuring out a weapon is much lower. Meanwhile rarer items like summoning allies have a much greater cost attached to them, meaning players don't feel driven to use them since if they die, they now lost a rare and valuable resource they could've used elsewhere.)
Until people stop being sold on "over 200 quests!" not much will change in the AAA world.
Though perhaps I'm just a bit cynical.
It's not just about setting up start and end points, a challenge between them, and informing the player of the mechanics involved at least once beforehand. For any teaching on a topic with a broad audience there will be different attitudes from the students and how much prompting is needed, they may be returning to it after a long break, you might be drawing from lessons a long time ago. Then most games try to put that in an immersive world without breaking the 4th wall more than they can help it and have the challenge fit and be plausible within it. Graphics and detail levels are constantly increasing, and may be variable depending on the user's system which can obscure/reveal any hints/prompts or deliberately hidden elements they needs to see to progress (and similar with other senses).
And after all that, the range of players need to hit a Goldilocks "just right" amount of resistance so it feels like a fair challenge to conquer, not be drawn out of the experience, and whatever extra goals are laid on top such as slowing pacing so story/lore/character conversations can play out.
Trophy/achievment-oriented gamers. Focused more on their profile than the particular game. Not to be confused with Trophy hunters, who tend to target harder or popular games for achievements.
Expecting that all games should become like this because that's how "you" like them is selfish and dangerous
There is room for all kind of games
Games that do that well, such as Zelda (which does this very well) introduce new mechanics and scenarios in an very iterative way. By having a linear structure. Other games use AI to control the gameplay flow.
A linear level structure could look like this: A & B are different types of enemies
| A (new enemy) | A,A (more complex situation) | B (new enemy) | B,B (more complex situation) | A,B (new combination) | A,A,B,B (complex new combination) | ...
This method works with lots of systems, such as level design elements, enemies or construction of ingame elements. The problem is that procedural content generation and open worlds make it hard for the game designer to introduce the content to the player in this order.
interesting videos on this topic:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMggqenxuZc (Half-Life 2's Invisible Tutorial)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mnt5zxb8W0Y (Director AI for Balancing In-Game Experiences)
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GV814cWiAw (Can we Improve Tutorials for Complex Games?)
A lot of games are also ruined by this handhelding style of design where 20 hours in you are still seeing tutorials
Also games might target new players, while you might have encountered similar game mechanics before. But even then a good tutorial will make it fun, although it may be easy to solve. It's also helps to make it solvable fast if you already know the mechanics.
But still, if you add a new game mechanics 20 into a game, it is good practice to add a situation where you can learn to handle it. A good example is the gravity gun in half life, or specific features of it that only get available in the endgame.
that's just bad game/level design - the player should never be aware that they're being lead on by a tutorial.
Obscure NPC comments work if there's only like 20 secrets to push for. You'll need some tracker once you go above that number. Crafting recipes stop having any interesting thumbing through for cool new things when to find them you need to talk to an NPC who just gives you a list of all things you can craft with an item you're holding (especially common early game since a lot of minable materials end up in late game recipes). Item effect descriptions are too limited to explain all relevant effects, which pushes people further to a wiki.
Wiki syndrome tends to occur if the game has a bad UI to explain itself. Weirdly, having no UI for it can sometimes be better for this sort of thing; players are pretty willing to accept "behind the scenes magic" as long as the info they do have is giving them the idea that it's working. (Classic horror games like Resident Evil are a good example where a "no UI is better than some UI" works.)
It's the same thing with open world quest markers. Nowadays, a lot of open world games give the player the option to remove quest markers outright. It's great to have that choice. But compared to, for example Morrowind, it often turns out to be an exercise in frustration, because the quests and the world haven't been designed with that in mind ("Go south from Vivec and turn left at the third tree", followed by an internal dialogue about if you should count a stump as a tree and a four hour detour is one of my best memories).
There's also this middle ground: in Ghost of Tsushima you can summon the wind as a compass to guide you to your next quest marker. Mechanically it's the exact same thing as an arrow, or line to guide you. But the fact that it's so well integrated, and thematically fitting into the game, makes my brain experience it totally differently. Not needing it would be even better, but the way they implemented it is at least pleasant.
I wish more games had a journal to keep track of things :). Why do I need notepad open, or a wiki open when playing satisfactory? If I make the effort to calculate the exact amount of iron ore I need to perfectly match my iron rod production, it'd be great if I could keep track of that in game.
PS - if you aren’t playing BG3 - this game is fantastic and a worthy heir to the BG 1/2 standard
I'm about 3 personal projects and 2 side jobs and 1 computer generation too far behind to play BG3 --- positive reports such as yours make me regret that, but I also worry about disturbing my pleasant memories of resolving a crisis and ensuring the best endings for my various companions....
The absolute worst offender is "Don't give choices with unexpected or unclear outcomes". Almost every decision has unclear outcomes, some with devastating consequences on later phases of the game.
It's an impressive game with a great story and great combat, but only the most hardcore players are exempt from the mandatory save-scumming and wiki-reading IMO.
And to make matters worse, many of the outcomes are identical. It's disheartening to save scum through an exchange only to find that the exact same thing happens no matter which option you choose.
And then you'll see that you get some bonus effect for one choice for a d20 roll, which makes it seem more likely to succeed than the others, but then the number to beat is also higher, making it actually a worse option.
> Item and spell descriptions are good at least
I don't agree with this. Most item descriptions make no distinction between items you should definitely hold onto and ones that are just garbage to sell for gold, which you don't even need because there just isn't that much to buy relative to the amount of incense flooding the world. And finding out what it means for something to add e.g. "momentum" can be non-obvious. And dyes don't describe their use. And a potion/elixir might say that you can get the same effect from throw/splash vs drinking but not say that if you do then the effect goes from "until next long rest" to "for three turns".
But the absolute worst here is the character selection and leveling. You have zero guidance whatsoever on what it means to pick a bard vs a druid etc, both short term and long term. It just assumes that have a D&D character guide. Turns out that bards are actually really good at combat magic after a few levels. Who knew.
Overall though I love the game. Nothing is perfect but this game is a blast and kudos to the developers more making something so deep, interesting, and fun.
In all of those examples I'm figuring things out myself and using a wiki and sometimes other community tools such as calculators etc.
I would be really amazed if this person makes a good game when their focus is make players do A rather than B instead of "how do I make this game as much fun to play as possible". It's also likely that the gameplay systems are really shallow if they feel they would be harmed by people searching for information in a wiki.
I firmly believe that the internet normalized metagaming as a side-effect (guides, talk to friends online, etc.) and that in turn affected the way games designed, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on.
The vast majority of games should never, ever be designed under the assumption that the player has access to Google, and by extend ease of access to stuff like "the most OP Gundam parts", "most OP weapon for Elden Ring", etc.
Yet in the 90s/2000s we had games coming with full manual books with all the info printed, an offline wiki.
Like HOMM2 my all time favorite http://homm2.free.fr/dl/pdf/Heroes%20of%20Might%20and%20Magi...
In this context, I am very much mystified by "I played through game Y in 2.5 hours!". Uh, what?! I just paid for this game, and my goal isn't to run directly to some arbitrary finish line. I want to see things. Explore things. Learn the story that is presented around me.
And I'm not referring to side-quests, although those are fun too. I mean, I've been in some games where there is just "stuff" in the world around me, and you can explore and find random info.
I'm referencing games such as "The Last of Us" re: PS3/2013 version, where you could look at newspaper boxes and make out headlines, something that didn't make it with the same legibility into the PS4 remake. (Newspapers were still to be found in the PS4 remake, but a lot of places where there were papers in newsboxes had legible headlines in the PS3 version, and just blurred stuff in the PS4 version).
To run a max speed through a game with all sorts of side-info, is like watching a plot laden movie at 5x on mute. What a waste of money, and joy.
Another example is Horizon Zero Dawn, where there were all sorts of interesting recordings to be found, and just random info to be gleamed about "what happened", regardless of other main/sub plot info. Again, to fast forward "yay I did this in 2 hours!" is madness in the extreme to me.
My point in the above is, that any sort of wiki requirement for these games is a solid ruin. What a way to reduce fun, if everything about the game, and things such as "how this world came about" is just laid out in a wiki.
Yet at the same time, I don't want all puzzles to be so easily solvable. I don't want my hand held. Imagine playing God of War, with all puzzles solvable in 1 second. Why even bother?
I wonder, there is often talk of great 'apathy' today in youth. Games are a part of youth. An example is 'hide and go seek', which in the real world teaches one how to be sneaky, how to think as another trying to hunt you, how to be clever, and just how to play with others. This game is teaching you to hunt, and to escape when being hunted!
Video games of my youth taught me puzzles, were difficult, required fast reflexes, and by no means did I think better gear was the answer to issues I was having.
Now games are often one dimensional. People look for the solve online before even playing. People have issues and 1 minute later are looking for a work around. When I was a kid, maybe I could find help by phoning a friend, but talk about embarrassing!
Yet with puzzles comes satisfaction when there is a solve.
And with easy answers, comes an empty feeling.
So back to the wiki or not, I really think there should be no wikis, because the potential for lost joy is massive.
The game will still provide quite a challenge even if you know where you need to go and get weapons/items/etc. The bosses won't defeat themselves even if you know the overall strategy to use.
I think of it as kind of a self-regulated difficulty system, if you want to go in blind you are still free to do so.
There are probably far simpler ones as well. People still talk about chess strategies and things like that all across the detail spectrum.
There is also the reality that most games produced just aren't worth that much of people's time. They may still be fun, but in a more limited capacity.
For example, for a point & click adventure, external knowledge can destroy the immersion and overall spell of the game very quickly. I just get yanked out of the atmosphere and the puzzle solving mode and then the spell tends to be gone. One of the reason why one of my barely moving side projects would be a minimal spoiler hint system for games like these.
On the other hand, games like DF, Technical Minecraft, more complex modded minecraft and such live and honestly thrive with the community, tooling and the wiki around. And it is no drawback - it makes it more fun and interesting. There are just so many mechanics in DF or in Gregtech to keep up with.
And then there are more middle-ground-ish games, like Terraria, Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon. Entirely playable and winnable without external information, but in a second run or after a certain amount of time, adding in external information can open your eyes to new levels of hilarity you never knew existed, or guide you towards the obscure niches of completion.
But - you can easily mess up things for good in the story, sometimes its not clear in dialogs how big consequences may be, sometimes decisions from far past affect matters and story will go in directions you don't want. Its absolutely massive game in terms of decision trees and consequences. And without any prior knowledge one will miss many if not most not-in-your-sight mechanics and connections. The creativity with ie various fighting approaches you can find in reddit is mind-boggling. Seeing some characters die because you missed something is pretty common too and it pisses me off.
Some people love playing it 3x through, or even more, getting better, playing with 1 character only. I have family, work, tons of passions so this is just a small time effort for me, I will never spend enough time to get really good at 3rd playthrough, I just grew up from such gaming and found more interesting stuff in our very short lives, to not end up later with deep regrets.
Larian studios were smart enough to offer very generous saving system (heck you can save even mid fights, generally unheard of) and overall there is a lot of confidence their gameplay is very robust regardless how casual / hardcore gamer are you. And it works, dammit it works so well, no matter the approach.
This is mechanics I can totally respect. In contrary, when authors force me to play only how they want and punish or block you for everything else, it shows me how shallow and unbalanced gameplay is, how little they trust it. Not everybody can do games like Larian, but sure as hell I wish they could.
The wiki-friendly community was a big plus to me, it let me adjust my gaming experience to what I felt comfortable. Without that it's likely that I would consider the game too difficult and I'd stop playing. As it is now, I completed the game and I recommend it to others (available on other platforms and Apple Arcade too).
Some people really like to go in depth on mechanics, look up every little mechanic on the wiki and optimize their build. Other people just copy what someone else did and mostly just play the actual game. Both are totally valid ways to play as long as you're having fun.
If I think about how the devs could've designed their game so these tools aren't needed I feel like that'd be nearly impossible without a massive time investment to bring basically those exact tools ingame. The easier path would be to reduce complexity which would make the game appeal less to players who play precisely because they like the complexity. So an external wiki and external tools seems like the right solution here to me.
Would you consider Terraria a good game? I think at one point it was the highest rated game on Steam. And yet that game is exactly this way - it makes players do A rather than B: it is pretty much impossible to play it WITHOUT the wiki, because of the design: there is no list of all craftable items in-game.
And because of this I could never really get into it, because I had to tediosly collect all my resources and then go to each crafting station one by one, simply to see what I am able to craft.
If you don't have an expectation of Terraria, you don't know the depth and therefore play the game as it is.
The only thing that is harming your fun is knowing how it could be by watching videos, streams whatever.
Saying "it is impossible to play without a wiki" is entirely self inflicted by wrong expectation management. Of course people want shortcuts but a person without internet access wouldn't call Terraria unplayable without a wiki.
A person who lived under the rock and found Terraria one day, probably wouldn't call it unplayable, having nothing to compare it against. I remember back in old days, where you'd have to figure out many cryptic mechanisms on your own in the old games. But yet here we are - decades later, and yes I do expect modern games would fully learn from mistakes of the past and provide such basic functionality as crafting lists in the game itself.
>I enjoy partly because of the active community
I wouldn't conflate community with guides. Community are people sharing expriments, tricks, and optimizations within each other. guides is some lurker googling a speciic issue, finding that info, and going their merry way.
I interpret the author aiming to address B. Because you can't control A no matter how good your game is. Sometimes the community of this cult classic RPG community is mostly 2-3 people digging deep and 10 other people clapping in awe.
The only rule in a single player game is you should do whatever seems like it would be fun for you[1]. For some people the fun comes in working things out, for others the fun comes from "making progress" (whatever that means in the game). For me personally it depends very much on the situation. It's not generally fun if you're just stuck banging your head against a wall so I totally get people looking up answers to things to get unstuck. From my perspective that's really fine.
There have certainly been games (Subnautica is the most obvious example for me personally) where the sense of wonder and exploration was really a huge part of the experience for me so I didn't want to search external sources and spoiler it - I wanted to experience it all for myself, but even there if someone just wanted to have a map and know everything that was going to happen I would say that's fine let them do whatever they want to do.
The dev should be focussing 100% on making the game fun. That's it. Focussing on preventing your players from doing something they want to do seems like a step back to the days where games had a single way to move forward and you had to do things exactly that way. That's definitely not a good way to design a fun game.
[1] Multiplayer games are more complex of course because your actions affect other people so there is for sure cheating and other types of behaviour that I would personally consider unethical.
But I’ve also used a wiki to find crafting recipes for Minecraft back when I started playing. Looking up crafting recipes helped me find out what things I could craft. And it didn’t remove any of the joy I got out of playing Minecraft at all.
And then there are other cases where I’ve looked at walkthroughs again but learning from my mistake I make a point of only looking when I’m really really stuck, and to only read as little as possible to get unstuck.
So my opinion is yes it’s perfectly possible to ruin a good game for yourself by looking up info online. But if you learn from doing that to yourself you’ll probably learn to only use it when you really need it. And then the game remains fun to play.
* Give good in-game info. Players resort to wikis because they don't feel like they know what they're doing and there's nothing more awful than making a choice you aren't ready for. Roguelikes tend to be varying levels of this; Risk of Rain for example will absolutely give you the exact percentages for its items in the collection menu, but during a run you don't need those percentages to know what you should pick. The bad side of this is The Binding of Isaac, which just has items that do not work at all, for any player whatsoever. Isaac is a game where you open a wiki/cheatsheet just to make sure you aren't picking up a run-ending item. CRPGs are universally terrible at this, something only amplified by their dice roll system. Disco Elysium is the only CRPG I've played that made choices work without pulling up a wiki because it makes it very clear early on that most consequences are yours and it will not lie to you about how far your choices will reach.
* The Wiki Will Not Save You. This is for games like Nethack. Nethack has a wiki. Nethack also has so much depth that a single human will struggle to not just learn it, but might screw up even when they have all knowledge they need. Very difficult to design without alienating your players, but if it works, it's probably the best way to avoid wiki syndrome since there's so much info that most players will just end up mentally arranging the information they themselves need. (Noita I'd consider to be a partial success at this, where the wiki contains all valuable info for achievements without learning Swedish, but the actual spellcrafting and core loop is something with so much depth that every player I've seen try it ends up with their own preferred combos.)
This is an interesting statement to me, and I think the truth of it is debatable. It's certainly true if you're only looking at a specific sort of player experience, but there are other sorts of experiences some people want which is greatly enhanced by the use of reference material.
Why would a game designer want to reduce the appeal of their game to those sorts of players? Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.
Surely, in the end, game designers want to make games that are fun and engaging, so if the use of a wiki makes a game more fun and engaging to some, why would a game designer object to that?
There are also situations where I will happily look up a walkthrough because I've had enough "puzzle solving" fun and just want the "see the last bits of content" fun before I put the game down. I did the tail end of Tunic and Fez that way. This kind of thing I don't think is a game design failure -- it's just different players having different preferences for how much and how complicated they like riddle solving and secret finding gameplay.
Unfortunately it's not so simple, if you need wiki to search for the most basic information, because they game doesn't provide it. It's what the author actually describes as "terraria problem" and I fully agree with that sentiment: in Terraria you can craft things, but the game doesn't show you what you can craft, unless you are near the correct crafting station AND have sufficient resources on yourself to craft it. So in order to play without wiki you'd need to:
1. stuff your inventory with all possible resources you'd otherwise store in various chests
2. go to each of your crafting stations
Needless to say, it is extremely tedious and still you might not see that some item can be crafted at a given station, because for example you only have 99 pieces of some resource and that item needs 100 pieces of that resource.
So I'd say it's fine for some cryptic or more advanced mechanisms to be covered on wiki. But when I need to go to wiki simply to get a list of craftable items, then there's something seriously wrong with the UI design in the game.
Because people don't have the self control not to do that and want to get spoonfed the answer, even if not cheating would be more satisfying for them.
And reading Wikis is pretty much one of things that really fits this.
Good example for this is the Witcher 3 ending. One of the ending which I would consider the most favorable is almost an easter egg and rely on specific answer in barely related dialogs. Easter egg are nice but don’t put the ending I’m most interested in behind some "choice" I made ...
Never play a Nier game lol
I could imagine being disappointed by a player who uses a game guide to speed through the shortest path in a game and then complains that the game is too short (or that the puzzles are too easy.)
Or by MMO players who spend 200 hours completing quests in a new expansion and then complain that there wasn't enough new content.
I think big challenge now is how to get AI or system to generate good and novel feeling content. Not just rehashing same elements placed slightly different with some sliders moved around.
Sure, but I doubt this straw man actually exists.
People look up recipes all the time on wiki and yet Minecraft is the #1 best selling game, so obviously it isn't an issue in the real world.
So of course everyone used a wiki from the very start. I wonder if Notch ever spoke about this and what were his thoughts. Did he design the game already with a wiki in mind? It made it problematic for new players to play offline, so there are some downsides.
The UI can loose the "self-learn" mode, as soon, as the user has invested and is invested in the game behind it. Before that - you are fishing without bait and got no leverage.
An example of things done right would be Deus Ex (2000): While a given character build or approach may restrict you to certain paths forward, you almost always have the opportunity to backtrack, explore, and loot to the other routes later.
In contrast, if the routes became totally inaccessible or a scripted event cleared them of useful items, then I would be more likely to consult a guide about pros and cons of the different options.
Games with multiple levels of puzzles and meta gameplay wouldn't exist without an active community and wikis, and they are great partly because of that. Think Noita, Animal Well or even Binding of Isaac.
On the other hand, you don't need a wiki to play and enjoy Ori and the Blind Forest
For example, markets statistics to see live market information in game for trading, you have to use a user created website.
Want to see what components will get your ship in the configuration you want ? Third party tool.
Want to plan a nice scenic route somewhere with some interesting/valuable finds on the way ? Third party tool.
Want to go mining and be in anyway profitable, maybe looking for a particular resource, you guessed it, only through a third party tool.
On one hand this has brought the community much closer together as the tools for that in game don't exists. But it's ridiculous that core gameplay loops depend on user created tools.
The same applied to so many different mechanics. Sure, Road to Riches was cheating, but it only existed because there was no mechanic in the game to make exploration more profitable than random chance.
I'm sure I would be more efficient, if I'd use 3rd party tools, but it still didn't prevent me from actually playing and enjoying the game. I'd say it's much different to the "terraria problem" mentioned in the post.
Online gaming discourse favors instant gratification, min/maxing, low thought, and low complexity. Reddit, forums, and youtube create feedback/echo chambers that give the impression that there is only one correct way to play a game. Tribal thinking reinforces those bad viewpoints and drowns out, or even punishes, anyone who questions it. People participate in these patterns to feed their own ego more than explore the game. And a lot of people don't know any better; they're told that this is the best way to play, and they believe it and spread that misinformation, getting tribal approval and warm fuzzies for "helping" newbies.
In most cases, Elite now has enough in-game information to let you become broadly knowledgeable and competent, but you have to pay attention, think, experiment, record, persist, and be patient. The high skill ceiling does not just apply to flying, but to understanding the world itself, and it can take a long time to approach it. Most things will take days to get comfortable with, and some things weeks or months! Its philosophy is at odds with reddit and youtube thinking, where the loudest signals you'll receive by far are how to min/max, how to obtain as much as possible as fast as possible, and what the "correct" ways of thinking about the game are.
And certain aspects of the game were meant to be discoverable by the playerbase as a whole, rather than every individual player. Finding barnacles, Thargoids, and Guardian artifacts originally happened because someone in the large number of players searching for them just got lucky. It's frustrating that any given player has an infinitesimal chance of finding that kind of stuff, but that's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.
> That's the price of making something so rare that the news of its discovery can excite the whole playerbase.
This is completely true, but its also extremely annoying to me, because when I send the game to friends who I know would love it if they get over the learning curve just seem to bounce off it because they think "is this all there is". And it's a very hard game to explain.
With this in mind, its very easy to see Frontier not getting the playerbase that they deserve and so it being an online only game, will be eventually shut down sooner than it should be. Its really unfortunate.
I have had success with 1 friend and we've sinked well over 300 hours together which co-op play in itself changes the game up so much.
For me it's the exploration side, I love spending a week or so going out to colonia and having that true 'lost in space' feeling.
1) I have no idea what I'm supposed to do or where I'm supposed to go next. There have been lots of times when I've not know where to go next or seem trapped in an area with no enemies and had to go look up how to get out.
2) I want to make sure what I'm trying is even possible. I remember one game where a boss would come out of a room and attack. I tried a dozen times to shut the door to trap the boss before I looked it up and found out I was supposed to run away and you couldn't close the door.
E.g to beat a youtube video that shows you how to complete a quest, you can have a ghost of your character frontrunning the player and doing exactly what needs to be done.
Most gamedesigners abhore even the thought of adding such a thing as they want players to explore and discover. And some will, but the majority that pay your bills will just use youtube or wikis or addons to just tell them what to do.
This cannot be true. It can't. If it is, I hope for us all.
What's the point of it then?! Why do they even play? What joy is derived?
I think I'll create an immersive headset where people have an overlay of someone vacuuming. Maybe then at least the world will be clean, while people just follow along on youtube demos.
I guess to complete it, I'll give a reward sound at each room, with bonus points for completeness and catching every crumb in the couch cushions. A little casino like 'ding', and a drop of 'reward bucks', which go onto a card you can use to buy real world things, like food.
My god, what have we all come to.
I guess this is where Idiocracy lands in our lap. Put on helmet, follow a GPT walk through on how to perform brain surgery, get reward points to buy food and housing.
Been enjoying Zelda randomizers lately, it needs a bit of a wiki to understand mechanics etc. But a game designed for randomization could include difficulty curve & then have higher difficulty levels where that hand holding backs off like how many modern roguelites have difficulty level mechanics
I think Papers Please did a great job with their checkpoint system.
Basically each important decision creates a checkpoint you can start the game from right before that decision so you can check various scenarios yourself without extensive replaying of the same parts in the same way.