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Comment by JohnFen | Hacker News Reader

> The reasoning for this is that the player experience is greatly hindered by searching up answers to problems found in a game.

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?

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On the other hand I think there are definitely situations and play styles where the player resorting to a wiki is a failure of game design. I mostly don't use wikis, but if I get into a situation where I don't feel like I'm making progress or have any idea what to do ("how do I even damage this boss at all?"; "I feel like I spent the last half hour wandering over the map and I have no clue where I need to go next"; that kind of thing), then I'm likely to look up the answer. And once I've found a walkthrough or wiki I'm probably going to keep using it even when the next part is less annoying. I think in that kind of case both the player and the designer are likely to feel it would have been a better game if that resort to the wiki was avoidable.

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.

> Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.

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.

> Players who want the "pure" game experience can simply not look things up on the wiki.

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.

"Given the choice, players will optimize all the fun out of their game." - this is a quote attributed to Sid Meier and it's very true.

And reading Wikis is pretty much one of things that really fits this.

At the same time he probably didn't think about wikis in that regard since he included an in-depth Civilopedia in the Civilization games before wikis were a thing.

Yeah this statement absolutely does not apply to me and I like that one of the answer point that the use of a wiki might be a failure from the game.

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 ...

>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

In Nier it's a lot less annoying because the game is specifically about that and makes it clear that it's about that.

It really depends on the player and the game.

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.

Though I could imagine huge/dynamic/roguelike/AI games that get bigger and bigger the more people play them. So all of that time could be exploring/creating new game areas or storylines that didn't exist until you started exploring, something that regularly occurs in tabletop RPGs. The idea of a dungeon, planet, or galaxy so vast that it would take millions of players years to explore it fully is interesting as well. In that case different instances of the game could be extremely different, depending on where the players decided to go.

Reminds me of No Man's Sky. Which has multiple huge galaxies mostly unexplored. It is just that procedural generation is not yet at point where these generated worlds are actually interesting or different enough. You end up seeing same elements and things over and over again.

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.

That is really exciting; I wonder if there is some really interesting world that just hasn't been generated/discovered yet? Or that will be in an upcoming/more advanced version of this sort of game?

> 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.)

Sure, but I doubt this straw man actually exists.

If you read the game reviews and message boards you will see a lot of people do just that and then complain very loudly.

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