Continuing the discussion from How far should we hack the original Infocom games?: @mewtamer, of course anyone can hack any Infocom game they want to, but your reply seems to veer off into the subject of whether some of your objections are actually flaws in the games, or just not your personal preference.
I would argue that most of the unwinnable states are there by design, and if they weren’t it wouldn’t be the same game. For example, let’s say you were given a gun with one bullet. If the game prevented you from shooting the wrong person, it wouldn’t be much of a puzzle, would it? The challenge here is to suss out who the person is, and shoot them. That may take an exhaustive search of all the possible branches, which isn’t so satisfying, or you may be able to reason it out, which is the hallmark of a well-designed game. But taking such a challenge out of the game changes the character of the game, and not necessarily for the better. For an example, see the ray gun in Starcross. My thinking was that every time I was presented with a possible place to use the gun, it seemed very brute force, so that probably wasn’t the correct place. Waiting turned out to be the correct solution.
I’ve been thinking that one of the reasons Infocom games have fallen (to some extent) out of favor is that modern audiences expect an uninterrupted narrative. Infocom games are played more effectively as a scientific investigation. “That didn’t work. Neither did that. Argh this is getting frustrating. Eureka!” So Infocom’s marketing term “Interactive Fiction” is a double-edged sword. One the one hand, it probably saved the text adventure from oblivion, but on the other hand, it raised a generation+ of players who expect something different from their IF.
Yeah - many older games were designed assuming an accretive protagonist, but “Hamlet gets 3/4 of the way through, realizes he needs to get Ophelia off his case, then restarts so he can call her names” isn’t a dramatically satisfying arc (“everyone stops what they’re doing for an hour while Hamlet flails around because he hasn’t realized he needs to stab the arras” also creates some challenges for mimesis, of course, but at least that approach strains rather than breaks causality).
This is one reason, I think, that many of the better-regarded games hearkening back to Infocom build diegetic contexts in which restarting with more info about what to do makes sense - it harmonizes the puzzle and narrative layers in a way the original games never really bothered to try. Hadean Lands is the ur-example but there are many others.
That might be really hitting the truth. But I’m not 100 percent sure. I think it true for me. Because I never was a big fan of Zork, to name an example. I enjoyed enough moments to carry on for while, but ultimately I quitted it. (But I love AMFV, and that’s definitely a fail-and-retry-game.)
The Zork trilogy is a bad example of this, because the puzzles make so little sense and the fail states seem so unmotivated and un-anticipate-able (the Flathead Ocean puzzle, for example.). This really can get to be just brute forcing your way down a series of dead ends.
Then I would say that the pragmatics of “I don’t want to replay the first chapter of this game, that’s boring” far far outweigh the aesthetic idea of displaying a single continuous narrative.
The point of HL isn’t that it gives a diegetic justification for resets. That’s cute but it’s not what people care about. What people care about is not having to retype a bunch of puzzle solutions by rote.
I think remakes seem fine, why not? Or even adaptations. Nobody gets too annoyed if someone makes a Beowulf movie in contemporary English (except my old professors, that is), but that seems different from jumping in and changing 100 lines because you know better. I think “fixing” them makes less sense. I don’t really know if “friendly Deadline” is Deadline, it’s just something else using Deadline’s name.
The games are very easy to beat with free, available resources, unless there are accessibility issues due to ASCII or copy protection challenges in feelies. I’m all for modifying those, or else making better feelies (I’ve made a few).
As I’ve said before, I’m not the IF police! Anybody can do whatever they want! But I’m for adaptation and allusion, less so for “correcting” classic works (except for accessibility).
Definitely, but there’s a reason IF nerds like that particular flavor of cuteness.
But the analogy to mainstream gaming is instructive because dying and respawning/reloading to try the current challenge again is totally normalized, whereas “restart or reload a save game that’s many hours back” is a design approach that’s quite rare these days outside of the roguelike context or other places where players are explicitly opting in, and it definitely sets off a lot of angry outbursts when it’s sprung on unsuspecting players. And that’s in genres where the mechanics of replaying are probably more inherently fun and interesting than puzzle-based parser IF!
As long as the game provides enough intellectual challenge, I’m in. Navigating life is nothing but playing a game with unwinnable states. Just like in those frustrating moments when you realize no move will save you, there are times in life when no decision leads to a win.
But, as any veteran gamer knows, the trick is to restart, learn from your mistakes, and never let the game think you’ll give up.
You can have permanent and weighty decisions without forcing players who choose poorly to flail about for hours in an unwinnable game. It’s not one or the other.
Often the way games can be unwinnable is by not picking up an easily missable object early in the game that you’ll need hours later, forcing a complete restart even if you have saves. Often when that happened I’d just give up on the game. I don’t play them for tediousness.
Strikes me that this kind of design is just unpleasant and doesn’t encourage any particular “challenge”. You’re either lucky and don’t get in the bind, or you get in the bind and go through the whole game from the top. That’s perhaps okay for short works but many of these games were massive.
I think unwinnable states are bad design. They are littered throughout Infocom’s games and are the most unpleasant feature in them. People aren’t as adverse to character death as they are to losing lots of progress and having to do a lot of repetitive replays. Arcadey type games can often get away with it because even though recovering your progress can be repetitive, it typically requires some skill where you could fail at any point. Not to mention action sequences are often slightly different each time, either due to variability in the game itself or slight timing and input differences by the player which add up. In games like Zork, unless you get some unlucky random number generator rolls leading to death by troll or thief (which is a whole other can of unpleasantness), getting back to the point of failure is an exercise in pure repetition. It is boring and unsatisfying. Needing previous playthrough knowledge to successfully complete a game is also something I really don’t enjoy.
A better way is if a player makes a game losing decision, let them know immediately and then undo back to before the decision was made, or work the reset into the story to make it clear the decision was wrong, but keep going. The game ‘Day of the Tentacle’ is an awesome example of this, having no unwinnable states and comical results for all “wrong” actions, making exploration and experimentation fun and rewarding. In your hypothetical ‘one bullet’ puzzle, shooting the wrong person (or the right one in the wrong circumstances) could lead to the character’s arrest, death, or whatever and that’s ok. Just don’t make them start the game over or restore from a (hopefully recent) save.
Yeah, if a game is just one elaborate puzzle and much of the game is uncovering clues to the correct solution that you can skip uncovering in subsequent playthroughs, ending up in an unwinnable state without the game telling you isn’t too bad.
What I take issue with is critical mistakes that seem innocuous when committed, spending hours seemingly making progress before you’ve even realized a mistake was made, and by the time you realize, it’s been so long you’re not sure where you went wrong. Feeling like I need to be paranoid, saving every few steps, and keeping dozens of saves along with a journal to keep all those saves straight(a strategy I assume wouldn’t have been viable with the storage limits of the 80s) in order to avoid having to start a new game sucks a lot of the fun out of the game… If nothing else, it would be nice to be able to be certain that, in a game like Zork I, placing a treasure in the display case guaranteed you could save at that point and never have to rewind to an earlier save.
I don’t mind challenge, and I don’t mind having to experiment, but what I’ve played of Infocom’s library doesn’t feel like they give the player much room to experiment and that beating these games at all takes a level of proficiency comparable to speed running a Platformer or RPG or competing in major Tournaments for a fighting game. Granted, it’s also possible the ones I’ve played are particularly unforgiving and there are better entry points from an escalating difficulty standpoint.
As for Super Mario Bros. As much as I bet beating the whole game on a single life makes the player feel like a total badass(I wouldn’t know, furthest I ever got in SMB1 was 8-3, SMB2US was the battle with Wart(only to die almost immediately), SMB3 was World 8, and Lost Levels was 1-4, and that was with abusing warps and All-Stars letting you start at the beginning of worlds you skipped with Warps to accessWarps in SMB2US that are skipped over by other warps), probably the biggest improvement Super Mario All-Stars made to the NES Trilogy was adding saves(though shame the save feature for SMB1/2US was limited to selecting a world to start at instead of matching Lost Levels and that SMB3 wasn’t more like World(though it was also annoying how often I had to travel miles to beat an easy Ghost House out of fear of a game over forcing me to replay very hard stages)… ON a related note, only Genesis Sonic game I’ve ever actually beaten without level selecting to the final boss is Sonic 3 and Knuckles, likely thanks in no small part to it having a save function… Needless to say, I was very happy when platformers saving after every completed level instead of after only certain levels or when visiting a designated save point started becoming standard… Also didn’t miss lives when console games started making infinite respawns a common thing.
Limited lives were just a design holdover from arcades, where there was financial incentive to make the player lose quickly. They make no sense in other contexts and eventually most game designers realized this.
It doesn’t help that the supposedly Beginner-level games (as self-rated) are also among the weakest, such as Seastalker or Moonmist. Wishbringer appears to be an exception, but I don’t consider it beginner-level, personally. Witness is actually quite easy to complete, at least conceptually, but it has other serious flaws.
