Some games are like learning a new language. Paradox titles and Endless Space 2 feel that way to me. Are you excited to learn a new interface and strange new things that make no sense, or do you look at it and feel your brain hop out of your head to run in the opposite direction?
Lately sadly more the latter. I do not want to spend a lot of time learning a new game. I enjoy new mechanics but please implement them in a way that is clear and easy to use. I have very little patience with obtuse UI and bad Tutorials in games.
I’m a lot more forgiving of obtuse or strange interfaces and ideas/concepts when the tutorial is in game and guides me to it. If they direct me to YouTube videos and Wikis at the get go, probably going to run the opposite direction.
Now if I can start the game, get into it to the point of enjoying and being intrigued by the game, then I’ll actually go find the Wiki and videos myself to get a better understanding.
Usually I move on to another game and feel guilty.
It makes me sad. I definitely think that front-loading a few hours’ effort can have huge payoffs in certain games. I hope I’ll be better about it in the future.
As much as people deride consoles, I think the input restraints actually tighten the design of interfaces and systems.
For me it’s a function of age. Given infinite time I love to puzzle out game systems and map out complexity. The problem is now that I am 43 I recognize that I’m mortal, I have a family and a job - multiple competing interests for my finite pool of time - and so these days I find I tend to gravitate to games that are simpler to pick up and run with after an exhausting days work.
It does mean I buy a lot of games I like the sound of but don’t spend a lot of time playing. This year I am cracking back on that and going to discipline myself to play more EUIV and HOI4 and really grok those systems. It’s my New Years resolution!
In extreme cases, I feel anger. If I’m going to spend my time, let alone money, on a game, I deserve an accessible user interface. To add insult to injury, I know that a lot of these developers are telling themselves that people like me are just too dumb or lazy and don’t deserve to play their games. No. You’ve got it backwards. It’s up to you to earn my attention.
This. As soon as I alt-tab out of the game, it’s going to be much harder for me to learn and remember anything about it. That’s just how the human brain works.
What I always say about Paradox games is that there’s no excuse for their UI to be so much worse than what Romance of the Three Kingdoms can do with a controller. Even in games from the early '90s designed around the keyboard it can be much easier to give commands and get information than clicking around different windows and tabs with a mouse.
I feel this is the place to say that Cinco Paus is a really addictive game.
Anyway, if there is not a properly written manual that doesn’t merely list systems with no regards to the design mentality underscoring them, I will probably not learn an obtuse game — unless Tom goes into full tomsplaining modes, like he loves to do with braingoodgames games (sic). I am waiting for his Sacrifice video, as the manual is way too disjointed for me.
I hate guesswork, and by extension games that don’t show properly what their mechanics actually do. I’m fine with experimenting with different systems but if I can’t tell what causes a specific outcome or what I have to do to get one then I’ll likely give the game a pass.
Learning new systems is great, as long as they follow some internal logic instead of some asinine arbitrary rules.
I am never excited to learn a new interface. Never. I don’t mind the idea of it, though.
My issue is I feel like it’s just a big investment of time. A game like Endless Legends requires a couple of hours at start and then I feel I need to keep playing every night for the next 4-5 nights so I get the interface down. And then after that I can take a day or two off, but I can’t take a two weeks off because if I do I will have to relearn the interface again.
Another annoyance is if you play a game for a few step away and then find coming back you have no idea how to play it or relearn it. It’s not too bad if you can start another new game and run through the tutorial.
I think the older you are the harder it is to deal with youtube and watching stuff. I prefer a printable guide or faq so I can refer to it as I play.
Ah, that’s one of a few Michael Brough games I want to check out. I’ve only played his local multiplayer compendium, Kompendium, as part of our Side by Side series and it was very good!
I tried getting into Sacrifice twice (6-10 hours total) but it was like herding cats. A real shame because I loved almost everything about it apart from the actual playing it part.
Yep, same here. I hate game help being outside the game. One of my major criticisms of Sacrifice was that the tutorial neglects to tell you what types of units counter what.
Sacrifice’s creatures adhere to the rules of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ when on the battlefield. Flying creatures counter melee troops, which have no air attack. Ranged troops counter flyers. Melee troops counter ranged troops.
Page 54 of the manual. That would have been handy in the tutorial, Zyzyx. A couple of years later Age of Mythology (no idea about Age of Empires I’m afraid) had everything you could possibly want to know in-game and I loved that so much. (I played AoM around launch, and Sacrifice fairly recently.)
4X is something I only tried getting into a few years ago. Civ V was the first and I really struggled with it, specifically expansion and population/resource management, then I dabbled with Age of Wonders 3 but that was more combat oriented (and I loved the GUI and in-game documentation). It was Endless Legend where everything just clicked into place and I suddenly felt the ‘one more turn’ phenomenon. I attribute this almost entirely to the GUI and the quest bread crumb trail that encouraged you to poke around early on and discover weird and wonderful races and resources. I felt like everything I wanted to know was always there, easy to read and understand. Even though Civ V was grounded in reality, I still found it confusing as a 4X fresher.
One of my favourite Klingon screenshots is from the AI War tutorial:
I sunk a good 26 hours into understanding AI War and I appreciated a lot of what it was trying to do (particularly the automation and macro-management) but the shear breadth of (tiny) idiosyncratic units overwhelmed me. It was well documented but there was just too much to document, too much sprawl.
I think I did leave my Endless Legend campaign for a few weeks, for whatever reason, and while it did take me a while to get my bearings again, I was surprised how quickly I was able to get back into it. I expected the worst!
I meant to say, too, that I started playing Factorio with friends recently and that’s been hard work. I was doing okay until I looked at the research tree which is incredibly intimidating before you consider the time and effort involved in mining and processing all the materials to start producing everything. Oof. Refining crude oil felt like its own game. The interface is alright and there are some neat quality of life controls but on the whole it’s a lot to digest.
Since you won’t link to it yourself:
(I am hoping you guys keep that tight formula by the way. Love those produced videos)
Chang Chang looks like a blast. I love the latest 3 games of the Brought Rogue Quarilogy. It’s tough to talk about them, as figuring them out is actually part of the gameplay, and some of the (obvious, retrospectively) realizations are the rewards of those games. That, and chasing hiscores.
While I could mostly make my way around a custom, tightly built AI War experience (nothing like that apocalyptic snapshot), I confess having been vanquished by their Last Federation’s UI. The game wasn’t really hard, but I was “interacting” so randomly with a lot of its aspects, I ended up in a place that @Bateau would have hated. In some regards, it felt like the Koei game of Arcen Games, i.e a game so stupid and focused on one single aspect that even a monkey had its chance at it, but with lots of numbers floating around, which gave any truly sentient being the feeling (and only the feeling, as far as I can tell) of being overwhelmed.
Haha, thank you. Do you mean the current format (fewer games, longer episodes) or the format from season one and two (more games, tighter episodes)? I think we’ll be going with the latter for season four. In that Kompendium video there’s a bit where you see our reactions to the rules screen being utterly garbled so neither of us know what we’re doing and we want to recapture more of that surprise and excitement as we discover things together. Season three lost some of that!
I want to know what @dsmart thinks on this topic.
Also, not a game, but this program is bizarre compared to its predecessors:
I am glad that someone started this discussion. Now I know its just not me. I do not have the patience anymore to figure out complex games / UIs. Ill give it a try for a little while, but if I feel confused or lost, I will give up.
I wonder how many good / great games I have not played because of this.
I bought Distance worlds Universe when it was on super-sale a few years back. Once in a long while I look at some you-tube tutorials, and then think that Ill never play this game.
I used to put time into figuring things out, but now, I do not know. I just do not have that drive anymore. I just want to have fun. I do not want to invest a bunch of hours in just trying how to learn to play some game.
I was going to say the tighter episodes, but now that you make me thing about it, I notice I enjoyed the longer episodes more, and wished there were more lengthy gameplay bits in some of the earlier ones!
All in all: just don’t listen to me.
I definitely take the path of least resistance. If your game has a sword, shield or assault rifle that’s what I use. You might have a great radio-tuning sub-game, but if I don’t have to do it you might as well not bother :/