Consider, though: a player who really wants to know which items are essential, and is willing to try breaking everything in the game to find out, can also just look at a walkthrough and see which objects are needed for every puzzle.
And honestly that’s probably what I’d do if I got a vague message fifty turns later—I’d pull up a walkthrough to see which action caused it, in order to make sure I didn’t waste another 50 moves because I changed the wrong thing, or didn’t restore an old enough save, etc.
I’m sure you’re right about the player looking for a hint sooner than trying to throw objects into oblivion… I haven’t actually played an overwhelming amount of text adventures myself, and when I did, I approached it as I would another kind of puzzle, where if I looked at “the answer” then I was defeated. However, I would have used any leeway that the game itself allowed me to figure things out. So this whole post has probably developed just because I had/have a quirky way of looking at things.
Pretty sure at this point I’m not going to use any variation of my hypothetical mechanic…
If you know a place where players will fail and get stuck, I think it’s much more fun as an author to write a way to get them out - Deus Ex Machina/Finger of the Implementor/Random Time Machine. The author and the player should be on the same team.
HanonO, I agree, I’m already heading down that course. I wasn’t trying to get players stuck, I just started out with the mentality of not wanting players to be able to brute-force determine which objects were critical. I’ve started trying to devise ways for getting a “copy” of a critical object if it gets lost…
Well, fixed in the sense of stopping players from wandering hopelessly when the game is unwinnable, but one of the revolutions (so to speak?) of Lucasarts games were that you couldn’t get the game into an unwinnable state. To the point that Guybrush Threepwood diegetically states he can hold his breath for ten minutes (the player has to solve an underwater puzzle) and if he dies the game rewinds and starts the clock with no load. The player can also not drop or use objects randomly and lose them, and there’s always a replacement available if they need one.
This requires the author to think about in-world reasons to prevent the player from getting hopelessly stuck which takes some work and is preferred by most players.
Mike, the reason we’re trying to dissuade Johnny from this isn’t because we like making the player wander around indefinitely in the hope that there’s a solution for them somewhere - it’s the opposite. Rather than a generic message an arbitrary number of turns after the game is made unwinnable, we are suggesting that, if unwinnability is desired, the player learn that the game is unwinnable at the point where they need the thing that they have thrown away.
Sorry, I didn’t know we were only talking about dropping items. I was thinking more about “failing to help people”, people who would have done something for you in return. If you fail to help someone, you don’t know which item they would have given you (or that they would have come to your rescue later). So you never realize you have to go back and help that character.
I feel like the same principle would apply. You learn that you missed talking to that NPC at the point at which you need their help, or you learn it when you cross that one-way gate out of their city or when the time runs out for you to do things there. But getting a “btw, you can’t win the game at this point and we won’t tell you why” 20 turns later doesn’t seem to solve any problem.
But this could be much later. Maybe the point where you need their help is 6 hours later.
Suppose you let someone starve in the beginning of the game, and then in the end he won’t come to your rescue, and the game is unfinishable.
It’s better to be warned, say, 20 minutes after he starves, that you’ve overlooked something. (not immediately after, because it would be like telling you what you missed)
There’s also another problem: when you need their help, you don’t know you need their help. How could you have foreseen that guy would have helped you? You were supposed to help him out of generosity, not because you could foresee he was useful…
If I’ve already saved the game in a state where it’s unwinnable, it doesn’t matter whether I learn 20 minutes later or 6 hours later.
It sounds (maybe?) like you’re approaching the idea that failure messages need to make sense in-universe, and sometimes that’s more possible than other times. I don’t see how “You’re alone in your dark, dank cell, and your last thought before you starve is that you wish you’d thought about other people more and made some friends who could have helped you” is more immersion-breaking than “You overlooked something…but what? ”
Alternately, you’re thinking about this in much more of an RPG mode than I am (altruism is not something I’m thinking about when I write or play text adventures; I will do the mini-quest because I assume that the dev included it for a reason), in which case allowing the player to choose to play altruistically or selfishly as a story choice, but then punishing them for playing selfishly without anything to balance it out, seems odd to me? (Using Dishonored as an example because it’s easy to explain even if it’s not really an RPG: you can murder everyone instead of sneaking around and knocking them out, which saves you time in the short run but creates a worse worldstate with some obstacles down the line. You can still complete the game either way.)
I agree that the first one is more immersive, but when you are in the cell it’s too late: you need to replay the whole game. (And if you give the message before you are in the cell, say after 20 minutes from the mistake, it becomes too much of a spoiler.)
Right… maybe it can be complemented by an autosave system, in order to work.
I was just wondering if it’s possible to fix King’s quest V with minimal effort, without redesigning the story or the puzzles…
I might be the minority here but I have to say I generally do not touch IF that somehow can be made unwinnable (I know that is a large chunk of them). The thing is not even in the context of their hayday was this ever a state to be desired, it was only a necessity to pad the game length and in my book always considered bad game design.
I would strongly suggest to prevent any potential state where the game is unwinnable. Respect your players time. Since there is no more commercial interest in IF these days anymore we should soley do away with that kind of outdated game design.
Not true. It was normal, not padding or a design flaw. You don’t have to play those games, but you should understand what kind of player experience they were designed for.
I do play them, and I have played them. Saying this was a desired state is just not true. It was always an artifact of development and an artifact of the commercial interest rather then intended game design in my opinion, and I stand by that.
You having played those games doesn’t give you transcendental access to what the intended goals of the authors were in a way that would legitimize saying that the comment you’re replying to “is just not true.” (There is in any case no “just” about it.)
There’s a good amount of documentation about what some commercial IF producers, and Infocom especially, wanted from their works, and there’s no indication that either the tools or the markets entered into their calculations in this regard. There were Infocom games that were more or less impossible to put into an unwinnable state (Wishbringer), and there were games where it was relatively easy to do so (better get everything you’ll need before leaving the ship in Planetfall). If you look back at Infocom’s advertising and the manuals they distributed with their games, it’s perfectly clear that they intentionally created a spectrum of options for players in this very regard. It’s not that Hitchhiker’s Guide was supposed to be impossible to put into an unwinnable state, but that their tools weren’t good enough to achieve the goal; nor is it that they wrung their hands over how the market demanded it. It’s that they recognized that some people were offended by the very thought that a game could become unwinnable, and some were not, and they consciously wrote games for both groups of people.
The early days of post-commercial hobbyist IF kept that up despite the lack of market interests driving development: even when the people producing the lion’s share of parser IF expected to make no money from it, there was not an immediate shift to games that avoid unwinnability. When the community at the time started thinking about unwinnability as a problem to be avoided in the mid- to late '90s, it was not because the tools had improved or market forces had changed; it was one result of a long process of debate and discussion about good design in IF and a lot of soul-searching on the parts of players and designers.
It was not the tools available or market forces that motivated this change. It was that player and author taste evolved in response to a whole lot of thinking out loud about what makes for a good game.
Agreed with all of the above – I’d just add that one additional part of the mid-to-late-90’s shift was the analogous conversations happening about graphic adventures. There was a whole debate about unwinnability, roughly polarized as Sierra vs. Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts: the former’s games tended to feature lots of opportunities to put yourself in an unwinnable state, while the latter’s didn’t, and as far as I remember sometimes used that as part of their marketing. Ron Gilbert’s Why Adventure Games Suck manifesto from 1989 also harped on the point. So if anything, in the world of commercial adventure games, my sense is that making games forgiving was seen as the market-friendly thing to do by the 90’s, with those that could be made unwinnable seeming like more purist experiences (of course, the trad-vs.-Mystalike polarization that soon Balkanized the genre wound up being a much bigger deal…)
I was thinking about this, and looked at the Wishbringer source yesterday. Is this really true? Wishbringer’s innovation was providing alternate “easy” solutions using wishes. I didn’t think it tried to avoid the traditional unwinnable traps like “oh, well, you drank that potion and now it’s gone.”
However, it’s been a long time since I played it and I could be wrong!
EDIT: The plot depends quite a lot on turn limits. (Starting with “Deliver the envelope by 5:00.”) These are generously sized, but they still lead to unwinnable situations. Infocom doesn’t seem to have considered the idea of simply dropping them.
”