Design like this is how games optimise the fun out of playing.
Forcing players to meticulously search every last nook and cranny through fear of “missing out” is cruel, and I appreciate games that telegraph to players they don’t need to do it.
(Exceptions apply of course for games where the entire point is searching, like finite-resource survival games.)
It’s nice to have some reward for looking in the nooks and crannies, without feeling like you have to search in every nook and cranny. What is the best way to achieve this? One way could be if you had interesting items each of which could be found in several places, and when you’ve found it in one place you won’t find it in another.
Metroid games have things like the missile and health expansions where you don’t need even close to all of them but they’re a nice reward when you do find them
Do you have any examples of games that do that kind of telegraphing well? I also love the kind of game that just lets me enjoy the ride.
Difficult question.
There are obviously thousands of games which don’t suffer this problem because they just aren’t of a genre which even has any concept of items or searching.
Where it gets interesting is examples where games could suffer it but don’t.
I looked through my steam list for an example and one which jumped out is Prey, a first-person RPG shooter.
Prey does have lots of secrets and things to find, but the game also makes it very clear early on that you can always travel back and forth between any area on Talos 1, the space station where the game takes place.
By virtue of this design choice, you don’t feel compelled to be absolutely meticulous in your searching because you know you can always return to look again, and cannot permanently miss anything.
this shit makes me check everything twice and waste a lot of time instead of playing the game. and i will still miss some secret. i fucking hate this
I never had fomo in games. Either i found it right away or i don’t really care. It’s the searching that turns me off.
I’m convinced they started doing this to sell more strategy guides or get people to call into the pay-per-minute tip lines. And now they keep doing it because it increases online engagement and gives people reasons to write wiki articles.
I swear to fucking god I got the same ending twice in Elden Ring because of this. Because at the end the game is like “you could go to the end, or have a quick chat with someone else first” but that quick chat is actually a alternative ending. and because my dumbass is like “gotta see what this gal has to say first” I fell for it the second go around again…
If you know anything about From software, that fuck you was very much intentional. Go through Sen’s Fortress for the first time and you’ll understand that their entire design ethos is fuck you. It’s what makes them special.
Yep, FromSoft makes a lot of intentionally bad and player-hostile design choices (especially when it comes to bonus/hidden/secret content) and their fans love them for it.
Used to have a friend, complete FromSoft fanboy, who argued incessantly that this wasn’t the case.
Dude just would not admit that Miyazaki, known to be a gigantic troll IRL, designs parts of his games to troll people.
Goes under Sen’s Fortress instead
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Jokes on your for not ruining your experience with a completion checklist like I did!
Seriously though, I usually don’t get FOMO, but Dark Souls games suck for making you miss all the side plots if you miss a hint early on, and Bloodborne completely traumatized my inner completionist.
I do play with a wiki on the side most of the time (not rn as I’m doing SOTE for the first time) but even then taking a quick 3-7 month break mid-playthru shit like this happens easily :D
Don’t know if you’ll jive with it but usually with RPGs I’ll do a blind first playthrough then in a month or two I’ll go back and do a playthrough with a simple flowchart checklist to get all the content. Unless it’s classic Fallout, I don’t need the checklist anymore, now give me a minute so I can forget the Khan’s and Klamath exist.
I need to save the Soulslike storytelling greentexts.
The ones about how you need the random item to make sense of the plot for a specific boss “Lord Brambles : Noo, not my gwimblies”
BG3 has some warnings that you can not return if you progress after some points. That has saved me multiple times.
Elden Ring doesn’t really lock you out of items but I did spend so many fucking hours looking behind every single rock on that huge map for the fear of missing out. My second playthrough was honestly much more chill and fun because I could happily skip most of that
It does lock you out of a few when the capital changes, but if you look up missables before finishing Faram Azula you’ll be fine.
For me this is a welcome challenge. I developed a 3rd sense to know which way is a side path and which way is the main path. Sometimes you have to probe both paths for a little while and then back track.
Same. And it is the opposite of fun.
And sometimes you probe the path “for a bit” and the cutsceme starts locking you in
makes me think of Vitis and Gesheft, the steel and silver sword set from Witcher 3 that are the best available for a sign build. they’re only accessible in one of the two branching paths in the final mission of the main quest of the second dlc. so if you want them, you have to choose that path, and then once you have them, the game’s over, and you don’t get to use them. only way for them to actually be useful is to make sure you get them both in a previous playthrough, and then start a ng+
They’ll finally be useful in the new DLC!
I don’t get it
Yeah that’s what happens when you go past the point of return first
The black line represents a branching path you can take in a game.
There are points in a game that are impossible to return to after leaving the area or like killing a certain boss enemy. (Red X in the image)
When there are cool/special items only accessible in those areas (yellow star), if you leave and can’t come back, you might miss the item and be unable to get it ever without restarting and playing the game all over again just to get the chance to pick it up this time around.
Things get much worse when there are multiple items or even boss fights like this in the same game, where doing things ouf of order can lock you out of full questlines (like in Elden Ring where reaching Altus Plateau before getting as far as possible through everyone’s questlines will make half of them unable to be completed for no reason whatsoever)
And then you have the witch quest line that needs you to go to the Plateau before doing some other progress (I no longer remember what is what well enough)
Which is fun for a player aimed at multiple ng+ runs in a row, but a disaster for a player who would have loved to play through some story and may never even know it was there (yes, the girl with eyes of Shabriri, I am looking at you)
See: every Final Fantasy game ever (or at least up to 12, which is the last one I played).
FF12 be like: Oh you opened the treasure chest sitting right in front of the NPC you have to talk to at the very beginning of the game? Guess you don’t get the most powerful weapon in the game then.
I would even argue that this practice of spreading items in lesser important places is often bad design. It motivates a player to do things that are not fun. Why should this be in the game?
As a bonus it is easier to balance a game when the amount of items does not vary that much.
Encouraging exploration through rewards is not inherently bad design just because you don’t like it.
There is “exploration”, and then there is “obsessively grinding sidequests”. If you tie endings to the latter, that is … questionable design, especially when it’s not clear if you’re merely pursuing a sidequest or doing something that will lead to a completely different ending.
Yeah, I accidentally found a secret ending in one game because I kept grinding the arena fights for XP and turns out the secret final boss is the last fight
Chrono Trigger? There’s like 12 endings and I think one can be initiated like that.
No, but it was some JRPG, I think it might be a common trope
It probably is. I haven’t played a lot of JRPGs because they’re so long.
It is good design only if it’s good. The prevalence of Indy games in modern gaming culture has taught me that games should stick to what they do well. If exploration is a meaningful and engaging element it can be excellent. Most of the time in RPGs it’s a drag. And even if you don’t like it, the influence on the parts of the game that are good means you can’t skip it. In an RPG, collectables is something I never interact with because it’s boring. I am however getting every usable item there is even though I don’t enjoy doing so.
We’ve taken the largest map in video game history and hidden 1000 needles around it
My kinda game.
I don’t get it, it sounds to me you are advocating dropping side content in games.
I dont think they are advocating dropping side content, but instead saying that having side content that is hidden or has no direction can take fun out of a game. For example, in OG pokemon games there are “hidden” items that have no hints or clues that they exist. If you walk to certain spots and press the action button you can find hidden items, but since there are no clues or indicators that they are there, it encourages just walking around and mashing buttons for the entire game in case there is another hidden item, which is the opposite of fun.
Pokémon is a good example. There is no item in the trash cans throughout the whole game (the originals). I and many others do check every trash can ever. And the reason is managing motivation. The game teaches you that there might be something of value and that is a heavy hitter on your dopamine. Directing the motivation towards disappointment is the essence of bad game design.
I think it depends on the game, for example Fallout 2 kinda does this. The earliest 10mm pistol is found in a cave under Klamath just on the ground with which it blends in, but you can highlight it with a button press. Similarly some good shit is hidden in weird corners of KOTOR 1 & 2 but those games are linear enough that a random path teaches you that there’s probably something to do.
