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> There are many players that don't want to be challenged or explore

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.

But is this because there is going to be a wiki explaining exactly what to do, something not done before?

Z:BotW and Z:TotK got the open world crafting balance right. Ingredients are plentiful, experimentation is low risk, and you exploring new places really seems like exploring.

>crafting an alchemy...that are pretty grind-heavy to puzzle out on your own

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!

> 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.

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.

Has that really changed recently? Different people have always enjoyed different things, and some don't like puzzles. That was as true a hundred years ago as now.

Yes and No, i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest.

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.

Don't forget the Yellow Paint Epidemic.

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.

That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun.

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.

But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive.

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".

Absolutely, I 100% agree. Ubisoft especially is terrible at this.

it's a very interesting divide when you have games that worry about this, and then genres/subgenres like the "soulslike" that take pride in its difficulty and precise maneuvering involved just to beat a boss.

I don't know about "recently", but things have certainly changed.

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.

Yes. But modern games also evolved to appeal to people who don't like to be challenged and look for a casual rewarding experience.

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.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but if you Game Over in SMB you can resume from the same world by pressing A and Start.

This is one of three things I would time travel to tell my childhood self.

No need to feel sorry. I never had a NES, I was actually thinking of Super Mario Land on GameBoy when I wrote this, but ultimately wrote it a bit more generic...

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...

> I like exploring and discovering and figuring things out.

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 me, this is mostly about what kind of information a player expects to find in a game.

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.

> 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.

The difficulty with experimenting is that most powerful attacks in games like this tend to have some sort of limit associated with it.

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.)

it's a bit of an issue experimenting in PvP early on. Because odds are that vets have already distilled out that discovery and know exactly what each attack does, who counters it, and when and how to maximize synergy. Someone already did that legwork and will use the knowledge against you.

Moon Logic Puzzles: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoonLogicPuzzle

I'm reminded of one of the developer commentaries on one of the Valve games, that designing games is as much about teaching as it is 'making fun'.

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.

I agree that the busy work in todays open world games are mostly boring and not providing any kind of experience. But that's also part of the problem of modern game design. Side content is mostly boring and useless.

People voted with their wallets for more hours per dollar instead o focusing on the quality of that hour, so that's the way the game design went.

Until people stop being sold on "over 200 quests!" not much will change in the AAA world.

Honestly I think every year that goes by in which the entire market is not consumed by F2P, battle royale, microtransaction-ridden shovelware, we're lucky for whatever we get left.

Though perhaps I'm just a bit cynical.

> 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.

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.

Perhaps your friends don't like video games and are just wanting to kill time out of boredom

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