Witcher 3 - What Bethesda Can Learn

Hexprone

Hexprone

Thou hast lost an eighth!
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It's not news, but I think Alistair Pinsof at TechRaptor makes some good points in this editorial about what CD Projekt Red got right in Wild Hunt that Bethesda often gets wrong. This is all feedback Bethesda has heard before, but as they're gearing up for FO4 I hope they're hearing it loud and clear.

Recognize player choice in small moments, not just big ones

Open world games tempt us to see where we can go and what we can we get away with, but for all our silly crimes and antics it seems these virtual worlds rarely recognize our curiosity. [...] Yet, Witcher 3 — a title by a relatively small Polish studio and featuring state-of-the-art graphics — brings this back to the open world game.

We see major story moments recognized by characters in Mass Effect and Skyrim. It’s expected at this point. What’s unexpected is a character sending me on a mission to an area and my character commenting I previously went there — even though I did this out of my own curiosity with no attached mission.

Give enemies a variety of strengths and tactics

Bethesda has come a long way from the stiff combat of Arena, but the developer still struggles to provide combat that remains engaging from a game’s beginning to end. [...] After 20 hours in Skyrim, I was on autopilot. [...] In Witcher 3, you’ll be forced to face enemies that will demand you use of spells you might not regularly use or play in a defensive style that doesn’t suit the aggressive one you used on ghouls early on.

Pace the journey; don’t frontload the most exciting moments

Bethesda has a habit of providing the most memorable moment of its games within the first 3 hours and never having an equal moment again. Whether its blowing up Megaton or escaping/battling a dragon, Bethesda seems more interested in bringing in players via a press-conference-friendly opening than giving a narrative with an ebb-and-flow.

In contrast, Witcher 3’s opening is quiet, subtle and true to the focus of the game: letting the player explore the countryside at a leisurely place and make discoveries off the beaten path.

Give romance sub-plots nuance and depth

The Witcher series has come a long way from the controversial collectible sex cards in the original that limited romance to a crude novelty.

Gating world exploration by difficulty

As the market for open-world RPGs grew, Bethesda decided to make games more accessible by easing the difficulty and letting players explore its game worlds freely without higher level enemies getting in the way, with few exceptions.

It’s humiliating charging into a small group of bandits in Witcher 3 and dying without even getting a hit in [...] but I came to appreciate this aspect ofWitcher 3 in time. CD Projekt Red tells its player to respect the world and its obstacles, while Bethesda prefer to provide a sandbox where the world must respect the player’s incompetence and naivete. Maybe with Bethesda’s upcoming title we can have both.
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More information.
 
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"Pace the journey; don’t frontload the most exciting moments

Bethesda has a habit of providing the most memorable moment of its games within the first 3 hours and never having an equal moment again."

It's simple statistics. The vast majority of people never finish games— especially long RPGs. Every hour that passes more and more people quit playing, so it makes sense to have most of the 'fun stuff' very early. Just the way it is.
 
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ChaosTheory said:
"Bethesda has a habit of providing the most memorable moment of its games within the first 3 hours and never having an equal moment again."

It's simple statistics. The vast majority of people never finish games— especially long RPGs.
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Maybe. But look at what happened to poor Casey Hudson when he applied those simple statistics to ME3 — a public relations nightmare and major damage to the reputation of the IP he helped create.

RPGs are narratives as well as games. The story arc has to have its own logic and shape beyond simply giving someone who plays for 20 minutes a thrill. When that arc is weak at one end, it distorts the game in ways that will be felt even by those who never persist through to the neglected later content.
 
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Hexprone said:
Maybe. But look at what happened to poor Casey Hudson when he applied those simple statistics to ME3 — a public relations nightmare and major damage to the reputation of the IP he helped create.

RPGs are narratives as well as games. The story arc has to have its own logic and shape beyond simply giving someone who plays for 20 minutes a thrill. When that arc is weak at one end, it distorts the game in ways that will be felt even by those who never persist through to the neglected later content.
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I dunno if that's a good example, though. ME3's ending wasn't of lesser quality— it just didn't make sense, and it rendered everything your PC did through 3 games completely moot. People also expected a huge, long cut scene to wrap up the trilogy and say goodbye to characters. But when you look at ME3 as a standalone story, the ending was actually pretty substantial.

A better example, I feel, would be The Witcher 2 or even Pillars of Eternity. There was a clear story and content decline as it progressed, but guess what? According to Steam achievements, only 20% of players of PoE completed Act 2, and 10% Act 3. If I were a game company trying to impress gamers, I'd probably front load my content budget too.

One of the few recent examples of a company keeping solid experience throughout, despite knowing most wouldn't see it, was BioWare's DA:I. The game was great start-to-finish, and I would argue it actually got better as it went on. I'm hoping TW3 is the same way, though I'm beginning to think the game is eternal.
 
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ChaosTheory said:
I dunno if that's a good example, though. ME3's ending wasn't of lesser quality— it just didn't make sense, and it rendered everything your PC did through 3 games completely moot.

A better example, I feel, would be The Witcher 2 or even Pillars of Eternity. There was a clear story and content decline as it progressed, but guess what? According to Steam achievement, only 20% of players of PoE completed Act 2, and 10% Act 3. If I were a game company trying to impress gamers, I'd probably front load my content too.

One of the few recent examples of a company keeping solid experience throughout, despite knowing most wouldn't see it, was BioWare's DA:I. The game was great start-to-finish, and I would argue it actually got better as it went on.
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Good luck finding a RPG with more than 50% completion rate. BioWare games outside of ME2 are not exception. I suspect DAI is lower though. Then you have stuff like Skyrim, I never completed the game story, but I put over 200 hours in it…

As for POE low numbers, Steam achievements were broken at release…
 
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Well here we go again with the how Bethesda can do better debate.:cool:

Let me grab my popcorn since the last thread was about nine pages already.
 
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Bethesda is making "sandbox grinders for dummies" not epic story RPGs. So that part Bethesda doesn't have to learn from Witcher or from, someone posted above, DA3. It's simply another type of games.

There is another part however, but that's something Bethesda should have learned from Square Enix ages ago. Patch polish bloody games! IF SqE can release almost bugfree games, hell Bethesda can do too.
 
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ChaosTheory said:
"Pace the journey; don’t frontload the most exciting moments

Bethesda has a habit of providing the most memorable moment of its games within the first 3 hours and never having an equal moment again."

It's simple statistics. The vast majority of people never finish games— especially long RPGs. Every hour that passes more and more people quit playing, so it makes sense to have most of the 'fun stuff' very early. Just the way it is.
Click to expand...

Perhaps that line of thought and following through on it is part of the cause, the problem. Making games that get steadily more boring, less eventful, less attention to detail as they progress hardly seems like a recipe to keep people playing throughout.

I think using statistics in such a manner is myopic, sadly it can happens just as you said. Instead of them asking questions such as "why are people not playing through the games and how can we improve them to address this" they go "well most probably aren't going to play the second half anyway so we'll just throw some grind and crap in there with a cutscene at the end and we still get to say xxxx hours of gameplay". Which not only discourages people from completing something but also conditions them to it, expecting less and less as they progress and being less inclined to finish a game before they've even started it.

You set the tone for something, obviously at the start, setting a tone that is not even remotely representative of the rest is a mistake, it's a flaw. If one was inclined they might even be able to argue it's a bait and switch or a copout in that they couldn't maintain the pace or quality they had set.

With the kind of refund policy something like Steam is taking we can also expect this to become even more of a problem. No refunds after X hours of playing, well then we'll just make those first X hours good and screw the rest.
 
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Not sure all realize that people may stop playing games because all the best stuff is frontloaded. Case of mistaking cause and effect could be happening here… If the material gets better as a game progresses, more people would finish them. Remove trash combat and MMO gameplay, replace with something meaningful. Not too hard to understand, but perhaps expensive to do.

EDIT: Oops, Watchtower beat me to it.
 
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ChaosTheory said:
"Pace the journey; don’t frontload the most exciting moments

Bethesda has a habit of providing the most memorable moment of its games within the first 3 hours and never having an equal moment again."

It's simple statistics. The vast majority of people never finish games— especially long RPGs. Every hour that passes more and more people quit playing, so it makes sense to have most of the 'fun stuff' very early. Just the way it is.
Click to expand...

Does it? Either way the game gets sold. Why reward those who quit early? There's no financial incentive. Better to create an enjoyable experience for the diehard fans, and have that feedback rub off on other potential customers.

Besides, I'd expect that the diehard fans are also the ones more likely to buy DLC add-ons. Why not encourage them to stay hooked by a rewarding experience throughout?
 
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Those theories fall apart because… even good games with solid content from start to end have very low completion rates. It's not that modern games suck, because the trend has always been there, and it's not a 'which happened first' thing— it's a human thing. You can make the best game ever and while the completion percentage may be higher, a startling few will finish it regardless.

It takes a lot to hold someone's attention for several hours. Game producers know this, but no matter how long you play their product, they want you to buy the next one, so they throw as much at you early as they can so that the high you get while playing is as high as possible.

Then it's simple numbers. How much effort, as a producer, do you really put into the rest, when you're just catering to a fraction of the people who will continue beyond the majority attention span?

There's a reason most movies are under 2 hours. Years and years of research has shown that no matter how good the movie is, people really start to lose interest after about 2 hours— whether you're in a theater, at home, etc. I suppose games could be 2 hours long, and I'm sure they could attain at least 75% completion, but it would be lame. Kind of justifies the chapter release games we're seeing now, actually.
 
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Why do people stop playing? Because it becomes boring. Simple as that. Make it MORE interesting as you go on, and people might actually finish it. Get rid of dreadful end bosses battles while you're at it.
 
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Thrasher said:
Why do people stop playing? Because it becomes boring.
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Or it gets too frustrating (clunky mechanics, bugs, difficulty, etc) or it's not your type of game (probably happens a lots with Summer Sales purchases).
 
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Couchpotato said:
Well here we go again with the how Bethesda can do better debate.:cool:

Let me grab my popcorn since the last thread was about nine pages already.
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Lol, what have you got against long threads? It seems every time people start conversing as opposed to simply providing one-off soundbites you get grumpy? If people enjoy debating the merits of the most popular games isn't that a good thing? As opposed to a dead forum?

Just shooting some thoughts out there, not conversing with you (*runs for cover* :raincloud: :slap:)
 
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I thought we were discussing the scenario why few people finish games, even if they liked them to begin with. Increased frustration leads to boredom, at least it does for me.
 
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I always finish games that I enjoy. If I don't then it's going to be something 'odd' with the game - such as the sudden teleportation to crap-land in Divine Divinity after a genius middle.

I don't even know who these people are who buy games by the billion and only finish 20% of each. I lived with a guy once with a buy everything mentality and some general distraction issues, but even then he passed the controller over to me for some fight in Mass Effect 3 and it turned out to be basically the end-game boss (I confounded him by just standing in one position and shooting occasionally at the monster and he was like "oh, never knew you could do that" - I guess that's how lazy popamoles get buyers, they have no idea most of the 'action' is just horsetwaddle for effect and actually start jumping about because everyone else is shouting and ducking and diving).

Some games aren't supposed to be 'finished', such as open world and sandbox games. How many people have ever 'finished' minecraft? LOL.

I don't even know why it's a debate from my point of view, either make a game or don't. If you only want to make a 10 hour game, make a 10 hour game…
 
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While movies may still rarely exceed 2 hours, it's become common for people to 'bingewatch' TV shows. So long as it's interesting people will consume the content.

I suppose there's no single factor determining why the majority of people don't finish games. For me, if it's not holding my attention then why waste time on it? I have a vast library of ready-to-go replacements at my finger tips. The beginning of the game is more like an audition.

Even games I love to death burn me out after 70 hours. And god forbid if a game that's touting a 100 plus hour gameplay pads itself with grind content. Yeah, that's not gonna happen.

These days my favorite games hold a tight creative focus all the way through, and aren't afraid if that means they'll be "short."
 
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Give enemies a variety of strengths and tactics

No offence but you seem to be glorifying console combat a bit much there. Perhaps not everyone is interested in mindless arcade slashers with controls that feel like your steering a steamboat instead of a person. I could kill everyone and everything so far with the roll, separate, kill, repeat tactic.

I'm pretty much done with it already and I'm looking forward to the real game of the year. Please please please release fallout 4 for Christmas! :)
 
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