Tom Chick's crazyman ranting about difficulty levels and game designers not doing their jobs

[nijimeijer]

If you meant “niji”, then it’s tough for me to point it out, because a really well done tutorial can be such an intrinsic part of the game that it’s nearly impossible to separate out.

For me, some of the gold standards are Valve games (if we’re talking action; I rarely play strategy games, so I can’t really point to any there). The entire first Act of Portal is the tutorial, but it’s a game in and of itself. That game is the definition of a title with a very special USP, but the learning is so contextualized that you hardly realize it’s teaching you.

Half Life and HL2 are similar in a lot of ways, with 2 being head and shoulders better. You start out on the train, stuck in place so you learn camera control. Light movement and exploration so you learn to walk around. Then, boom, you’re being chased, so you really learn traversal, but it’s exciting. They introduce weapons slowly, usually after they’re used against you so you get an idea as to function. And when you get the Gravity Gun, a highly unique weapon, they basically say “Here’s a playground. Have fun. We’ll tell you some things to try, but fuck around for while.” It’s all presented in context, so it never feels like they’re breaking immersion to teach you anything, and you don’t have big ugly pop up boxes that are like “HOW TO MOVE YOUR CAMERA”.

Multiplayer games are often harder to do this with, unless they have a robust single player tutorial. But L4D sidesteps this in a genius way. Sure, there’s the SP campaign that ramps things up, but the fucking intro movie is a fantastic tutorial in and of itself. Check it out - https://youtu.be/avdxtLleADM

In that movie, they introduce weapons, show how sound attracts zombies, teach how some of the special zombies work (and give you the inkling that there may be strategies to use against them), display grenades, show that there are hordes that you can just flee from, introduce team work and DBNO states - more than that even. You don’t know it when watching it - it’s just a nicely done narrative piece that sets the stage, completely presented “in fiction” - but you’re learning the basics of the game, so even if you jump in cold, you’re gonna be all “hmmm, I saw this in the video” maybe even subconsciously when you start playing.

Those are a few tutorials that I think hold up as the most interesting, creative, planned, and thoughtful ways to teach gamers.

[KristiGaines]

Sry Niji and also I can recall as few tutorials that were not bad.

I recall Rome 1: being a decent tutorial.

It has to be an afterthought for most designers.

[Nesrie]

Most of the Nintendo games seem to do well in this area, and not all of them are simple. I do think if you went through the bulk of games though, most fail with the tutorial, and that’s even if you remove some of the intentionally learn as you go pieces.

[tomchick]

@WarpRattler

If the aesthetic doesn’t turn you off, and assuming they haven’t neutered all the gameplay systems since the DS original, you’ll love the custom difficulty stuff in The World Ends With You when that comes out on Switch on Friday, Tom.

Ooh, that’s Friday? Yeah, I loved what they did with the badges in the original DS version. I look forward to seeing if that’s still part of the design.

Great post, @nijimeijer.

@nijimeijer

Players don’t read text boxes unless the box pop up pauses the game. But if the box pauses the game, players get angry and spam the button that closes it, meaning they still don’t read it

And this is why we can’t have nice things!

@KristiGaines

Niki out of just simple curiosity can we name a few games where the tutorial doesn’t suck? I am at a loss.

Hmm, I bet that would make a cool thread… :)

-Tom

[YakAttack]

@malkav11

I would argue that offering tweaks - be that to difficulty, controls, visuals, or whatever - allows a wider range of players to experience and enjoy the game and that most games and certainly most designers’ bottom lines would benefit from this expansion.

Leonardo da Vinci should have painted more cat pictures because it would have benefited his bottom line. /s

Sometimes genius isn’t accessible.

[malkav11]

Yeah, that’s not responsive to what I am saying. Read it again. I am not arguing that creators should or must create different works so as to reach a wider audience, I am arguing that offering the audience options on how to experience the work they want to make would reach a wider audience and that’s generally a good thing and doesn’t compromise the piece any more than having tour guides and books of art criticism to help understand art hurts those works.

[Nesrie]

@YakAttack

Leonardo da Vinci should have painted more cat pictures because it would have benefited his bottom line. /s

I don’t think anyone is telling them to make a completely different game. This example just doesn’t work.

[Juan_Raigada]

He should have written an explanation of the Giocconda below the painting, then.

[KWhit]

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

[sillhouette]

@KWhit

I’d rather be nine people’s favorite thing than a hundred people’s ninth favorite thing.

That’s a very 20th century view. Nowadays you need that huge audience to monetize your twitch streams and instagram promotions. #AD

[FinnegansFather]

It’s my sense that this indecision is what has led to Pathfinder: Kingmaker’s problems. They want intense love from the RPG grognards, but they also want wider love from a broad audience. And in their efforts to have it both ways, they messed things up with both groups.

I’ve seen this a lot when books are made into movies. The movie is almost impossible to understand if you never read the book. But the movie loses the essence of what made the book special, so the book audience is also dissatisfied. And in trying to square this circle, they throw in some gimmicks that make it even worse.

[porousnapkin]

@FinnegansFather

It’s my sense that this indecision is what has led to Pathfinder: Kingmaker’s problems. They want intense love from the RPG grognards, but they also want wider love from a broad audience. And in their efforts to have it both ways, they messed things up with both groups.

I’ve seen this a lot when books are made into movies. The movie is almost impossible to understand if you never read the book. But the movie loses the essence of what made the book special, so the book audience is also dissatisfied. And in trying to square this circle, they throw in some gimmicks that make it even worse.

Oof, that’s a fantastic analogy!

[Nesrie]

@FinnegansFather

The movie is almost impossible to understand if you never read the book. But the movie loses the essence of what made the book special, so the book audience is also dissatisfied.

True but we have several examples of books with movie adaptions that primarily pleased the book reader and appealed to a larger audience, so it can be done. It’s not an either or.

[FinnegansFather]

Oh, I’m not for a moment claiming that it can’t be done. But it’s tough, and there are a lot of failures. And I think that success requires a lot of insight and focus on this exact problem.

If instead you try to fix it by putting a bunch of tertiary book characters back in to placate one, and add extraneous violence and special effects to placate the other, you end up with, well, Pathfinder Kingmaker.

[Nesrie]

@FinnegansFather

If instead you try to fix it by putting a bunch of tertiary book characters back in to placate one, and add extraneous violence and special effects to placate the other, you end up with, well, Pathfinder Kingmaker.

So you might be the first person that I’ve seen and engaged with that doesn’t like that game. I know it’s a little off-topic, but is the way they handle the mechanics the primary reason at all or is it other things?

[Rod_Humble]

Its interesting because from a mainstream commercial game design perspective, “difficulty” is there primarily to ration out a games content. At the game designers whim or for monetization reasons.

I used to be in that camp “the game needs challenge so you get your 100 hours worth of gameplay for your money.”

now I am in the camp of “you paid for this game so if you want to see all the content in a shorter or longer amount of time then that’s your choice.”

I dont know how much this adds to the discussion but in mobile game balancing is often just about monetization. So your games difficulty is tuned based on a lot of data. Not for you to have fun, no no, but to craft certain levels and the content so you JUST lose at specific pinch points when you are hit up for “shame you just lost this level and all the work you put into it, how about buying a booster?”

Its the same principle as machine learning in some ways, just using people instead of neural nets to get the desired outcome.

I dont like it at all and has contributed to my evolving “always let the player avoid challenge if they want” philosophy.

[FinnegansFather]

@Nesrie

So you might be the first person that I’ve seen who doesn’t, and engaged, that doesn’t like that game. I know it’s a little off-topic, but is the way they handle the mechanics the primary reason at all or is it other things?

Not sure what you meant to type in that first part – but I have the impression that dissatisfaction is pretty widespread with the game.

But my answer will not be off topic, because it goes back to Tom’s original rant. When I first read his comments, I thought he was way off base. But that was when I was in Chapter 1, which, in my mind is a quite good despite some very aggravating flaws that I believe they can and will fix. The truth of Tom’s comments comes through in the Kingdom section of the game, and it is there that their true colors (the colors identified promptly by Tom) came clear to me. They even tell you in the tutorial, it’s okay, you can not only make this easier, you can turn it off completely. What does this mean, this kind offer on their part to allow you to turn off the kingdom part of Pathfinder KINGMAKER? So… “Buy our game, you can always turn it off?” Very nice.

The first warning sign is that the underlying rules are not laid out. Which at first struck me as bizarre in a game intended for the DnD/Pathfinder crowd. It’s one thing to neglect to explain BAB in chapter 1, but in chapter 2, they neglect to tell you that your town’s economic points do not improve your economy. Shops and piers are fun to build and all, but they do not bring in money. (Just as a wall does not help your defense.) These are only ratings. And a rating only means something if you reach 20 (sort of) and rank up. Which requires advisor time. (More on that in a moment.) And even then, that hardly affects income, anyway. Although income is extremely important (Better go out and take treasure from baddies if by income you mean money coming your way), the truth is that you are playing to raise an economic rating that is mostly divorced from having an ecomomy.

So did no one on their development team point out that this was kind of a bad idea?

The tutorial does tell you that your advisors are extremely important. But they neglect to tell you that you have almost no choice of advisors, and, to the extent you do have choice, “choice” is based on a one sentence little blurb. They touch on truth in referring to the importance of advisors, but you have no control over the most important thing, and that is advisor time. Apparently, the mission critical save-our-barony jobs can only be done by a tiny group of people, and those people can only work on one thing at a time. For some reason, they can still go empty dungeons with you, but they certainly cannot talk to two different troubled groups in the same obscenely long period of time. And you as baron cannot do the job yourself in a pinch, nor ask another local notable to handle it, even at a diminished effectiveness. And there is a strict time limit to accomplishing the tasks, or else your realm is going over the cliff.

Is this really the development team’s idea of the essence of a barony and the problems it entails? No one on the team said, “Hey, I don’t think that time was really the true and only god of noble struggles”?

Actually, I think they did notice this problem, and that is why the rules are laid out so vaguely, and why we are told we can turn this off if we wish. Because it is a desperate, Hail Mary effort to create a game tension where they did not know how to turn a barony simulation into a game. As Tom said, they did not do their job, and they are using difficulty settings as cover for that fact.

It gets worse. Routine actions require series of loading times. It is often ambiguous whether you are supposed to address a problem through a party quest or through an advisor (and solving it through a quest does not free up the advisor, even after the Hotfix). You have two maps of the same area, and they do not match up very well, and you can never see both of them. A map of the surrounding nations and factions would clarify the politics immensely, but no. The date is crucial but often inaccessible. And, a small point, but somehow this encapsulates the game at this point: In your newly acquired territory, you have a choice of some 20+ locations for your town… and zero basis for choosing among them. A charade of an interesting strategic decision, where it does not really exist.

Bottom line is this, I think I know why the developers settled on time as the central resource of a kingdom – I imagine that time was looming heavily over them as they tried vainly to make the kingdom game into a game.

Chapter one was very enjoyable, but I am skeptical that they will ever fix the Kingdom part of the game – or that they have any idea how to do it.

[Nesrie]

@FinnegansFather

Not sure what you meant to type in that first part

My apologies, I fixed that.

@FinnegansFather

but I have the impression that dissatisfaction is pretty widespread with the game.

I am under the impression this is pretty well received, with critics and playors. I mean it is a little niche by going back to some older types of play and systems so I would consider like a 70 to be a good score, so to speak.

@FinnegansFather

But my answer will not be off topic, because it goes back to Tom’s original rant.

I was curious about Tom’s rant, about Pathfinder because it sounds like stuff I could deal with. If it’s true they’re dealing with imperfection in Pathfinder by using difficulty sliders or toggles or whatever… okay.

I mostly disagree with him on difficult for other games though. I mean hardcore imperfect RPG systems are one thing… whether or not someone wants an easier go with say 10% or more critters having fewer hit points or maybe less immunity is another.

So the bulk of your concern is in the kingdom building part of the game then?

[FinnegansFather]

@Nesrie

So the bulk of your concern is in the kingdom building part of the game then?

Absolutely.

Reading between the lines, I think they devoted too much of their total resources toward fine tuning chapter one to please diverse audiences, and then lacked time and ideas for the kingdom portion.

fwiw, I have no problem at all with difficulty settings, nor with fine tuning those difficulty settings for people who want to adjust one aspect of difficulty. Aggressors: Ancient Rome does that extremely well.

And Tom put me off when he talked to the effect that his beef had to do with the fact that someone else could cheese their way to achievements, while he go no reward for playing the game at a legit difficulty. I cannot relate to caring about such a thing.

But I now think he was dead right about this particular game. They are using these settings to allow them to ship something that doesn’t really work, and just put it on the player to make it work. Kind of like shipping a shoddily made car and putting it out there that since the customer can put the parts together any way they like, it’s all okay. The more I looked at and analyzed the Kingdom part of this game, the more outraged I became.

My advice to any potential buyer: Wait til you can find some Let’s Plays that get an hour or so into the Kingdom part, and sound as though they are okay with it. I tried two, and both were making the same wtf comments I made, so this time at least, I am pretty sure it was not just my failure to understand the UI.

(And just to be clear, I am fine with the way the game handles the regular DnD/Pathfinder portion, even beyond chapter 1. Quibbles, sure, but I would recommend that as good quality stuff.)

[tomchick]

Welp, there goes any desire I had to play the Pathfinder game. I was interested in it specifically for the kingdom building stuff, but if that’s how they’ve implemented it… Ugh.

-Tom