Fnord
SasqWatch
I don't know bro. To me that 100 pages were quite good introduction into the setting on 19th centurey Saint Petersburg - which was in itself intriguing for me (though it couldn't have the same impact on Dostoyevskis' contemporaries). Raskolnikov was also the character that I could easily identify with. It was good enough reason to go on.
Similarly it's difficult to say yourself: "it will tun better once tutorial/chapter 1/2/10 is over". NWN ain't become any better throughout its gameplay. Same with Kotor. I feel no obligation to read a book/ watch a movie / play a game that bores me to tears. If I am not getting it 2 hours into game, why should I persist on? As Vii said, I don't have any obligation to get bored - it's the author/director/developer that's supposed to entertain me. Can I really trust you that it will become better? As a matter of fact, why should I at all?
Not to mention that 2 hours are enough to finish watching a full movie, read 100 pages book, so it should be enough to pass initial judgement of the game (No, I am not arguing here for shorter games).
Games are, as the name implies, based on the player actually doing something meaningful to surmount a challenge. Give me something to do, and it better be something creative, satisfying, and giving sense of accomplishement. Games are interactive by their nature, and taking away control from the player or restricting him in hamfisted fashion is simply betrayal of the medium. Ok, it may develop slowly, but at least let me do the developing bit - don't lock me in endless repetition and inanity with some vague promise of fun some time later.
For that reason, I also don't buy saying - "but you need to learn the rules". Learning rules is fine by mine, provided there's some reason to, some incentive for doing it - other then "you paid the moneyz, now suffer". There are the games of yesteryears that throw loads of stuff at you, then throw you into deep sea. That's all fine provided that there's something to pull you into the game - sometimes, theme, art direction and music are enough. As a wee kid I finished Betrayal at Krondor with an English dictionary on my lap - so good were the "hooks" in the game. I was learning everything about it, the rules, the use of spells, the combat, even goddamn English, because I had very good reasons to - from start to finish. This was the right, masterful approach.
Obviously it wouldn't work if the game didn't have a consistent theme, good music or art direction (for that times - I played it in 1997 for the first time though). If you do not to spark at least a flimsy flame of interest in entertainment you clearly are failing at it.
My initial impression of Crime & Punishment was that it was just too slow for its own good. The reason why I stayed with the book was a sense of almost guilt over not having read it. While the way Dostoyevsky explains the city life around the time was interesting, there were also long drawn out dialogue sections that, at the time when you read them (during the first 100 or so pages), don't feel necessary. They were of course needed for the reader to properly understand the characters and their motivations, but that only becomes apparent a while later. (I have sadly not read Heart of darkness, so I have nothing to add there, it is about 60-70 books down on my "to read" list. Nor have I played any final fantasy game past 9).
Many games relies on the expectation of "things getting better" for people to push past the initial period of pain. Games like the above mentioned Victoria: An empire under the sun, and also Dwarf fortress simply throws so much as you from the get go (by design), that unless you have the initial expectation of greatness, chances are that you won't find the time & energy to push yourself over the initial learning bump. But these are games that have such a level of complexity that it is very hard to design them any other way. Victoria 2 streamlined a lot of things, and also added options for automatisation for a lot of things in the game, but the fan reaction to this was less than favourable. While most people could agree on the fact that the game was easier to get into and more fun during the first few hours, they also found the game to be a bit patronizing. Some compared it to windows double warnings when trying to open a downloaded file ("Files downloaded from the internet can be dangerous, do you want to open it?" "Are you sure that you want to open this file?"). While a lot of it might be good for a person new to the game, the added streamline also became a hindrance in some part.
And as Patrick Bateman said, it would probably be better for a new player to the genre to play a game like Europa Universalis 3 rather than HoI3 or Victoria.
My point is that if you want to play a game that is as complex as a detailed grand strategy game (or a CRPG with a very complex rule system, for that matter), then you need to be prepared for the game to not be all that fun, before you get into it and understand what is going on.
(For the record, I find Victoria 1 to be better for smaller nations, up to around the size of Sweden, while Victoria 2 make larger nations like the UK or France more manageable). Victoria 1 could obviously have done a lot of things better, it could have had a better tutorial and a better manual, but even if those things were fixed, it would still be a rather time consuming game to get into.
And yes, Paradox are aware of the problems with their games, and have been working on trying to make their games more accessible, without dumbing them down (which has proven to be quite hard). The hearts of iron series is the easiest ones to follow, as they are the most transparent of the lot, you can see what most modifiers do, where they come in and get a rough idea about their impact on battles. HoI 1 had the most complex research system of the lot, it was hard to get into, and sometimes a bit messy, something that they changed for HoI 2. This in turn resulted in a fan backlash, where a lot of people complained about the research system in HoI 2. In HoI 3 they are trying to find a comfortable middle ground between the two, and I think that they getting close to finding the sweet spot (though they are not quite there yet).
My argument was just that a game does not have to suck you right in to be a good game. Both chess & go are, if you start to analyze their finer points, immensely complex games (Go in particular), and both are examples of excellent game design. They have simple rules, but in order to get really good at those games you need to spend some time with them. But they are also games that you can get a good feel for very quickly, a person can understand Go after having played it once.Indeed. However, doesn't that in itself brings down the arguments we were trying to bring down?
1. Good strategy games START to get fun after much time has been invested.
Go and Chess are the very definition of great strategy games, yet they are easy to learn and, thus, can be fun from the very first game as long as you aren't playing against someone far above or below your own level of skill.
2. People make the investment to learn chess not because it is fun but because it will be fun once you have mastered it.
Go and Chess are fun from the very first game if you know the rules and your opponent is about the same skill level you are.
3. This is somehow related to a new trend towards instant gratification.
Considering how old Go and Chess are…
4. Games whose rules you can learn in an hour are shallow.
I.E: Go and Chess are shallow. If I have to forward an actual argument against this one I'll go on a rampage.
WiF is also a great game, but in a different way. It takes time and effort to understand how the game works, and you are forced to spend quite a lot of time with the game in order to properly play it, or even see the strategic nuances that the game has to offer. They are just two different ways of creating strategy games, neither is better than the other in my opinion. WiF is a game for the people who love details, but with the plethora of details also comes a far more unforgiving learning curve. The game basically forces you to have high expectations of it before you start for you to actually get past the rough bits.
And board game design is something that I've spent some time studying during the last year. In the off topic forum thread about good 2 person board games I mention that I'm currently working on my own game. Abstract games do have a rather easy way out, it does not need to "really" represent something. So while the black & white stones in Go are supposed to represent armies, that is unimportant. In my game the core idea is based around commanders giving orders to their soldiers, so right there you remove one level of abstraction. Now you need rules that in some way simulate order giving, and suddenly you also have to get a good feel for what the different soldiers actually represent. You can't just have soldiers appearing out of thin air (like in Go), their movement need to make sense to the players, even if it is not an accurate simulation. And suddenly you are faced with the problem of trying to make the game as easy as possible to get into, within the base framework of the core game idea versus the issue of making the rules for the game to make some form of logical sense when compared to the real world. And then you need to make sure that the rules in turn also offer a good amount of tactical depth. My first draft was cluttered and cumbersome, and many rules had to be cut because they either did not work as expected, because players had a hard time grasping their meaning or because they interacted poorly with other rules. And this is for a relatively rules light game. Even now, when it has reached a state where the core rules are set, and I'm mainly working on scenario design, there are some concepts that I feel that brand new players do have a problem grasping, but if I were to remove them, the game would not make as much logical sense (thus it would be a lot harder to visualize what is actually going on). If I were to try and make my game into more of an accurate simulation, then the threshold of entry would become far greater. So in the end, and what I'm clumsily trying to get at here is that you always need to look at the game as a whole when designing it. Compromises will have to be made somewhere. Sometimes the compromise will be made at accessibility (and as an extension fun for a new player), and sometimes it will have to be made at the level of rule complexity. It all depends on what the goal of the game actually is.
And as I know that I enjoy playing complex (or rules heavy would probably be a better word to use, Go is as we both agree on not a simplistic game, it just has simple rules), I am willing to put myself through this period of pain, because I know that the payoff will be worth it, in most cases (this is often more apparent when it comes to board games, where you have all the rules from the get go, than in computer games, where most rules are, at least partially, obscured by the game itself).
I tend to obsess over things, in particular when I have important exams coming up (should I study differential equations or play challenging computer games? Hm, computer games seem more fun). That is usually the time when I sit down and beat these super challenging games…And you are my hero. I have gotten to the point where I can clear Embodiment of Scarlet Devil with little effort yet I can't reach Yuyuko with more than a single life in Perfect Cherry Blossom, every single time. Words can't describe how much I hate Youmu, once I got to her without lossing a single life in the entire game, yet when I finally got to Yuyuko I still did with naught but a single one!
*edit* I think I should clarify where I stand a little better:
-I am not opposed to games being accessible. I think that the people who make the games should try to make games as accessible as they can as long as they don't compromise anything important.
-A game should try to draw you in early on. But I also find that the most rewarding games (books & movies) are the ones that requires some effort from the players part. The reason why both Planescape and Crime & Punishment were so good was because they forced the player to think, draw conclusions and work through some of the tougher parts in his/her own. In the same vein Go is absolutely a game that requires a lot of effort from the players side in order to get good at it. The reason why I compared shmups to go and grand strategy to WiF has nothing to do with their skill level, but rather the initial threshold of entry and how early in the process of learning the games you can draw any serious conclusions about them. This person has obviously spent a lot of time & effort on getting to where he is, and even though the core gameplay is simple, it is still a game that requires a lot of dedication from its player in order to become that good.
-Certain games are, at their very core, harder to get into for a new player.
-Requiring effort from the player is not the same as making a game inaccessible to new players, though it can be a determining factor.
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