Discworld 1 - The puzzles

Authoring General Design Discussions
1

Since reading an article, a few thoughts have been bouncing in my head. I’d like to try and put them down, and hopefully it makes sense.

“John Cleese Told Us To F**k Off” - The Inside Story Of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld Games

Here’s the bit that’s stuck in my head,

Time Extension: One of the big things about the original game that kind of got criticized at the time of release was the puzzles. What are your thoughts on this?

Barnett: Obviously, some people have said Discworld 1 in particular is super hard, but the interesting thing is the way I designed it was if you just went step by step through any particular puzzle strand or any particular quest and just followed it step by step, it would lead you a little bit by the nose.

But because there was, at any given time, three or four or more strands open and the inventory did get quite large at times, experienced players who were taking shortcuts got tangled up more often than not.

And it was interesting because we even got mail from people in their 80s saying how easy they found it and that it was such a good experience. They just played it through the way the story led them by the nose. But then you had experts who had done King’s Quest and Simon the Sorcerer and so on saying, ‘Oh we can’t do this. These puzzles are so crazy.’ It was just interesting. So in Discworld 2, I made it so there were multiple ways of getting to the same answer.

I have suffered through Discworld 1’s puzzles many times, found them infuriating beyond measure, and so when he says “we even got mail from people in their 80s saying how easy they found it and that it was such a good experience” it makes me pause.

From what he talks about “being lead by the nose” and “taking shortcuts” and “having multiple strands”, my takeway from what he says is this:

There are two types of puzzles and/or players; one that leads the player step by step and one that contemplates the final goal and goes “now how do I achieve that?” I don’t much care for his tone when he talks about “shortcuts”. I get the feeling that the people he calls “experts” and “experienced” (so, the people who actually play a lot of these games and have a good feel for what is good design - it’s usually wise to at least not tune them off. To his credit he did rethink his design in Discworld 2) are the people who look at the various goals and see how to accomplish them. Or possibly they look at their inventory items and they go “now, what possible use can this item be?” None of these are “leading by the nose”, so I assume this is the method he didn’t design for.

However, unless you literally lead the player by the nose and tell them what to do at each point, the player will get stuck; and when the player gets stuck, this is a method of progressing forward. Probably the most common one, but I have no data to back me up on that. Consider the situations, consider the items, consider the hotspots - what do I need to do, how can I do it, how can I use these items; or at least, where can this item, yet unused, be useful in any way. And by this time, the player isn’t really likely to even remember the last “lead-by-the-nose clue”.

Also, honestly, I don’t quite see how the dragon’s breath puzzle is logical - and that is only the first one that comes to mind. I solved it by myself years and years ago - accidently, by trial and error. I would not say it’s easy or even sensible.

In this puzzle, you have to take with you a mirror, one that you can hang on a nail. You have to take it to a part of the game where you can only carry one thing. So out of your whole inventory, you have to make sure you have that on you. Then you have to hang it on the tip of a pole mast jutting out from a very very tall building, so that a shape in the distance - which is unidentified but you need to assume it’s a dragon - comes along, looks at itself vainly in the mirror, and then blows its reflection a fiery kiss; that’s the dragon’s breath captured in the mirror.

So trying to solve this by thinking “how do I get the dragon’s breath” is bonkers. Clearly that’s not the design they’re going for. Ok, totally fair. But in that case… I rather fail to see how we are “led by the nose” to do this action. It’s a bit along the lines of “try to hang the mirror on every surface that you see.” It’s only one fraction of a step removed from “use all with all”.

So the notion of wanting players to be led by the clues instead of trying to shoot for the end result (“shortcuts”, he calls them, and I can’t help but find that demeaning) is totally fine! But… what happens when the clues are unclear, or the player just misses them?

That comes around into what I think is the game’s biggest problem, which he doesn’t seem to go into. Player feedback is atrocious. Nil. “That doesn’t work” is the one line that you’ll hear over and over and over again. It’s clear “do stuff the way I want you to” design, with no leeway for nudging players onto the right track.

Look, it was another epoch in adventure gaming. I get that. So many other games had been doing that for a long time. For many reasons, it was not viewed as a bad thing to make the games artificially harder, and it could be a bad thing for games to be too easy. That’s established.

But, it bugs me a bit that that’s not what this guy is saying. This guy is saying basically that “experts found the game too hard because they tried to take shortcuts instead of following the clues the game dropped them”. Talk about not knowing or caring about your audience…

Discworld 1 is excellent in many ways, but notably not in gameplay because of the puzzle design, I feel. It is useful to know what the author was going for; but in that case, what the game needed, and I always had this notion before anyway, was much, much stronger player feedback. Give the player failure messages that nudge them back on track, or at least point them to where the track is, or at least tell them the track exists.

I hope this is a helpful reflection. I personally think that the biggest obstacle to a good puzzle, and a good game, is implementation. A hard thing to get right, because it feels that players demand to be able to do everything they can think of and then sulk when they can’t. Like the designer has to read the player’s mind and antecipate everything they can try.

Well, the designer doesn’t have to read the player’s mind, but… a) it helps to try to do that a bit, and b) beta testers will tell you what’s on their mind, and c) the designer doesn’t have to account for everything the player tries to do, but the more that the designer does antecipate, the more impressed a player will be.

The more impressed a player will be: the more trust they will have.

The more trust a player has: the deeper a player is willing to go to solve a puzzle, and the longer they will mull it over.

This section that I quoted feels like a massive cop-out and like they massively misunderstood the problem.

But then they go and make Discworld 2, which is so far on the other end it’s almost too easy (but SO FRICKING’ MUCH MORE enjoyable and fun). Therefore, clearly they must have understood more about it that I’m gleaning from this interview.

Like I said, I hope this is useful.

(personally, i think discworld is the goldilocks of game series. you try discworld 1, then you try discworld 2 which is so unlike it it feels like the opposite approach, and then discworld 3: just right. pity that it’s rather buggy)

4 Likes
2

A follow-up thought: naturally, part of the trick is often setting things up to give the illusion of having antecipated what the player is trying, when in fact it’s a more general thing that catches a number of interactions.

Another thought: it’s possible for a game to be hard for the wrong reasons, and that’s what I feel Discworld 1 is. When I think about how difficult a game is, whether or not I stick with it will depend on whether it’s hard for the wrong reasons.

1 Like
3

I played this back in the 90s when I was at university, with a couple of housemates. We didn’t get very far. I thought it was pretty hard. I had played and completed a lot of the lucasarts games so I was fairly au fait with the genre. (We did play it on a PlayStation which was far from ideal as well.)

I remember one part where you have to use a flamingo as a club to swing at something, like using a golf club. (Sorry, my memory is hazy.) I remember just thinking, from the shape of the flamingo, ‘hmmm, let’s try hitting it with this, Discworld is sort of zany after all.’

It worked, but I remember my friend thinking it was completely bizarre - both that I tried it and that it worked.

I thought at the time that I struggled with it because I’d never read any Pratchett and couldn’t get on the wavelength.

But I’ve seen some of that quote about the design of the game before, probably in Retro Gamer.

3 Likes
4

I think that’s Discworld 2. That’s zany cartoon logic indeed. :slight_smile: There’s also a bit where you make a weight heavier by slapping on it a piece of paper that says 10t.

I don’t remember why it is that I found these puzzles easier in Discworld 2. I suspect it’s possibly because I had better feedback. I don’t know what possessed me to use the weight and that other item together, for instance. But I did. It’s a zany logic, but it is a working type of logic.

Discworld 1’s logic is more bonkers, I think.

5

I would probably get that puzzle myself, but because of Lewis Carroll, not Terry Pratchett. There’s a famous scene in Alice in Wonderland where they play croquet using flamingos as mallets and rolled-up hedgehogs as balls.

3 Likes
6

Actually, I think I just remembered how the puzzle goes.

There are three croquet players, playing, using croquet mallets. You need those mallets. So you substitute them for stuff like a flamingo and hammerheaded shark, so they can keep playing, and you can have the mallets.

Seems reasonably reasonable, in cartoon logic. And Lewis Carroll logic.

7

As someone who has always found adventure puzzles interesting, but purely in a mechanical or design way, seeing as I (A) can’t play pointnclicks, (B) suck at solving IF puzzles, and (C) couldn’t come up with a good puzzle unless I really try, something strikes me about this whole “swing a flamingo like a croquet mallet” puzzle. It reeks, personally, of the same sort of general knowledge trivia style puzzles that Infocom caught flack for back in the day. In particular, the baseball diamond maze in Zork 2 comes to mind. Personally, as someone who has never read neither Carroll nor Pratchet, my mind wonders how I’d ever come up with the idea to swing a flamingo, like a golf club or croquet mallet. Like, it’s cartoony, yes, and maybe I just don’t understand what the game’s going fore, but it boggles the mind. I wonder how that particular meeting went down, either with Pratchet or Psygnosis.

1 Like
8

An excellent point. I think the biggest clues were, as you say, cultural - possibly, between Carroll’s books and Disney’s adaptation (possibly others?), the whole idea is not as alien to a sighted person for whom it’s part of their cultural makeup…

…and, probably, the visual clues. Something about the sprites does lend itself to replacing the mallets.

It’s worth mentioning that you are actively looking for something to replace the mallets, as I recall. It’s not an unclued interaction; you are looking for something to use there so you can get the mallets. Something they can still use for croquet. This is where I think the game did it right, and us talking about the puzzle like this may not quite get into its mindset; as I recall, the puzzle does successfully put you in the mindset of “I’ve got a nail, so what looks like a hammer, even remotely?” As a result, it’s not all that unlikely that you’ll start looking at those inventory items and go “hang on… possibly…”

9

You must be right, and I remember solving the puzzle with the weight as well (or my friends did). But we still got stuck. I think part of the problem for me was I wasn’t in charge of the controller :sweat_smile: and I also missed the start of the game.

I did read Alice’s Adventures at some point around then, but I don’t remember explicitly making the connection. And yes, I recall it was croquet now!

1 Like