Grinding for better stats/gear CAN be made fun though!! Perhaps it is more challenging to code in the “fun” part for the grind. In the Tales games ( my favorite still being tales of phantasia) it required you to actually use the skills and their skill combos to ‘level up’ those skills. And the combat was really fun for its time! A top down RPG would turn to a side scroller beat em up style fighter game and it was really neat to hear the characters battle cries and voices when performing the combos. Or even more recently in Breath of the Wild for an example fetch/grind quest, to get a certain gear to proceed to a certain place, it’s combined with a fetch quest, and some grinding for certain items to get another item (Don’t want to spoil the details.)I really enjoyed how they actually put some meaning as to “why” you have to get that gear item.
Grinding can be fun if there’s an equal amount of satisfaction from doing it. Path of Exile and the Diablo games come to mind, where you had to grind and grind for better gear and better exp, I really loved the skill tree in PoE and the combinations of unique traits you can have in a character.
Mostly these days it’s just lazy design or perhaps more emphasis on looks than material. And when I say material, I mean a plot that can create a meaningful world large enough for side quests/missions/grinding to be fun. That would require a much stronger/larger material. But I have to say, mobile gaming ruined it for me too. I can’t seem to look at a 2D platformer/rpg anymore without thinking “Just another mobile game looking game” unless they do something drastically different from the typical games.
Hollow knight and Salt & Sanctuary did something cool for me. They looked different, felt different, and paid attention to detail. And I think it’s the little things that can make a huge difference like lighting,movement,sounds,animations,and mystery.
A lot of the tutorials in games are implemented poorly. I think Dragon Age: Origins handled the tutorial fantastically - while going through your origin story, you are learning the basics of gameplay as well as getting an immersive sense of the world’s lore and your character’s background. In contrast, a game like Endless Legend had, what I consider to be, a horrible tutorial in which you have to go into a sequestered gamespace where you are hand-held, step by step, through a long list of mechanics, menus, etc. Creativity with respect to story and game mechanics doesn’t automatically translate into creative and effective ways to teach the player what they need to know. And then there’s the whole issue of how intuitive and informative the UI is… so many aspects in which design flaws can make it unnecessarily difficult to the learn the game.
The level of complexity of the game doesn’t have to determine the ease with which the player can get into it.
I was trying out a new indie game, and I won’t say the name because it’s an indie unity made game (and it looks awesome and has been received well), but it is absolutely necessary to play the tutorial in order to understand the game. Of course, the tutorial is a lengthy labrynth of rooms where you read a text box that explains all the annoying details of how spells work, how crafting works, how runes work, how combat works, how level trees work, etc etc etc.
There was a time where I’d just take it all in stride, but I got no patience for that anymore. If it isn’t immediately obvious and intuitive, I just don’t got the energy.
To make a tutorial that is effortless to play, I think you gotta do the same thing as when you are teaching somebody a new skill. Don’t showcase all the tools that exist and then theorize about what they can do. Show a problem, explain in non-technical terms how we aim to solve the problem, and then before we ever see the tools we can imagine what they might be. That way learning is effortless and engaging, because we aren’t starting from abstraction. We are seeing real problems in front of our face, and if there is abstraction of thought we (the learner) are guiding it. So you can’t get confused trying to figure out what somebody else is describing.
I’m currently playing a part of God of War where there’s one world which is just a mountain with a bunch of arenas. Defeat the waves in each arena and it unlocks a chest with some unique stuff in it which you can use to craft unique armor. On one hand that’s “grind” by definition: kill bad guys to get loot, repeat until you have what you wanted. And I typically detest “grind”.
But in this case I’m loving it. Why? For the same reason I played hours of Geometry Wars. The fights use the same enemies as the rest of the game but are designed to each be challenging in unique ways and require different strategies to win. It’s a side quest, so the developers could use it as an opportunity to push the combat mechanics in a way that (I suspect) the main quest line will continue to avoid.
Persoanlly I like my games to have some complexity and depth. Unless there’s some other hook I get bored very quickly once I feel like I’ve “solved” something. But I also don’t like having to study before I can play, or remember more than a couple of new things at a time.
A well designed game should introduce its complexity in layers, and ensure that players are reasonably comfortable with one thing before introducing the next. To me that keeps things interesting by constantly keeping the intellectual side of things fresh without ever making me stop to do some deliberate learning.
I think the Portal games are great examples of this. The individual mechanics are simple, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff you can do with them, and some of the puzzles towards the end are somewhat complex, but you’re eased into it so well that there’s a consistent but relatively low challenge.
Yeah you are making a good point. A lot of times, it’s not necessarily that the game is too complicated, just that it is being presented poorly.
Like I read the reviews about some game and it sounds right up my alley, but if it’s going to be a chore to learn how to play I just don’t have the patience.
But I’m tired at the end of the day everyday and generally don’t want to look at screen any longer :). Still, I think that is not a bad metric for if a game is approachable – if I can get into when I’m tired of sitting behind screen, it’s got to be pretty well streamlined.
I like some of this stuff. However, one thing I don’t like is “false choices”. That is, when you’re given a choice that turns out to make no practical difference or, indeed, no actual difference. It takes the same cognitive load as any other choice, but gives zero value aside from maybe an illusion of agency.
God of War seems to have some of this. I have so many XP right now it’s ridiculous, yet I’m presented with menus of stuff to “unlock”. At the start of the game I thought my choices here might be important, so I put thought into them. Further into the game it’s as if the desighers changed their mind and said “screw it, let the player have everything”. I haven’t added up the costs, maybe I couldn’t actually unlock it all, but I can sure as heck unlock far more than I actually need. Also, when I unlock stuff, I often fully upgrade it straight away because of the afforementioned glut of XP. So… why have all of those options in there? It’s basically glorified character customsiation.
My guess is that if you play the game on harder settings then you get less resources and the choices do matter, but they don’t want to disappoint casual players by not letting us have everything the first time around. I just happen to find that somewhat condescending at times.
Hmm… to disagree with myself… I’ve been doing all of the side quests, because exploring the world and finding all the stuff is right up my alley. Perhaps they’ve deliberately balanced it so that if you do everything you can also have everything, and players who beeline for the main quest do indeed have to stick with their choices unless they leave the beaten path?
In any case, these “gripes” are purely academic. I’m enjoying the game quite a lot.
Yeah I think really what I want is AAA streamlining, but not AAA themes. Really, the only games I’ve thoroughly enjoyed in like the last ten years was the Souls series, because they did this perfectly. AAA streamlined gameplay, but not silly AAA theme.
That and The Long Dark. They did such a good job with that one.
I think that’s the thread in a nutshell. Obviously, people learn differently, so there’s no single perfect method, but you’re absolutely right about designers needing to approach tutorials with serious thought to utilizing teaching methods. The “captive audience” style tutorial is a huge turnoff for a lot of us.
Yeah that’s the part, especially for us tiny developers with limited resources, that I think we make a mistake in not taking seriously enough. It’s easy to get focused in on technical workings of the game but it comes down to end-user experience. If it’s hard to start playing the game, that’s no good.
I am sure I am way more intolerant than average gamer but still, this is something that I think too many indies don’t take serious enough.
I think the concept of “tutorialisation” might even be going down the wrong path. Tutorials are a form of explicit teaching, and that stuff is boring. I want to feel like I’m on an adventure, not in a classroom. I certainly don’t want to be reminded that that I’m playing a contrived experience crafted for my entertainment.
Using Portal as an example again, I remember almost no explicit teaching in that game despite the theme being “testing”. All I remember being explicitly told was the move, jump and portal buttons. Everything else is taught to you experentially. To clarify what I mean by that, you are never told “this is how you solve a puzzle with a portal” or whatever. You’re given simple scenarios which force you to figure out one thing for yourself, then increasingly complex scenarios which get you to apply it in different ways. Then you have to figure out something else, or you get given a new thing to learn about, and that’s how complexity is built over time, without any “stop and learn” moments and without the player ever feeling overwhelmed with all this new stuff they have to think about.
I think The Witness is another great example. Controls wise you can move around and you can drag things on panels you find around the place. That’s it, dead simple. From there the game’s mechanics are all about figuring out, for yourself, what the different things on the panels mean and how they work.
Compare that to when I played The Division a few years ago, when the game literally pauses itself on multiple occasions to show you panels of instructions. You’re running around shooting stuff with your mates and suddenly “STOP AND READ!” It’s not integrated into the experience, it’s not fun, it’s distracting, and it’s stressful ('cause you’re balancing absorbing info that you need vs. keeping your friends waiting while you read it).
I call the start of our game a “tutorial”, but what I really mean is “the part where players get familiar with the controls”. Once players understand the controls I want them to figure everything else out on their own, with the game giving them just the right nudges to do that comfortably.
I will always follow what Nintendo does - look at this video what shigeru miyamoto explained Nintendo’s approach was when they designed the very first Mario level, and that how the first stage is always a sandbox like environment for players to learn the controls and experiment what can be done and can’t be done.
“Once the player realizes what they need to do, it becomes their game.”
It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me in terms of value to the player, but I really feel that a lot of games these days are designed to sort of maximize the extraction of activity from the player rather than focusing on offering the player something meaningful. And somehow, in squeezing activity from the player like a worker on a production line, the player gets satisfaction - at least it seems so or these incredibly grindy games we have these days wouldn’t work.
I think @Antypodish has a point, or at least there’s some overlap between grindy games and complex games. It’s like these games are generators of systems to maximize cognitive and activity investment. And I have to say, as someone who is critical of the value of games in general (I think they can have value, but are not valuable in themselves) this seems like a depressing waste of human labor to me. Imagine all the people who spend incredible amounts of time learning about and mastering the systems in some game, and what they could accomplish for themselves if they turned that output to something more productive?
My point of view on the value of games is that they are vehicles of meaning, in the same sense that stories are - although they operate in a fundamentally different way. I’m aware that this could be my own bias toward the games I like, but I cannot objectively for the life of me find any value simply in a player investing work toward some virtual ‘production’ or ‘levelling’ in a game, because the value of the result of that work is quite literally zero.
So I think the value of games is in providing an experience of the imagination, an interactive story, a fantasy. They provide a way to look at ourselves a bit differently. Of course, games are enhanced by a certain level of obstacle → learning → investment → overcoming/winning, because that’s a fundamental part of how we experience things that are meaningful - but that part of the game does not have a value in itself whatsoever. What is valuable is how the experience of a game changes the way we see ourselves and the world around us, not in some politically correct way but in terms of exercising our imagination.
You could say the same thing about building a snowman. The value of this is only zero if you don’t enjoy the activity itself to the slightest, it doesn’t leave you with any pleasant memories and it doesn’t lead to any positive interactions with other people. The same things could even be said about life itself. Some people enjoy grinding gameplay more than others, but it does not mean that these types of games inherently don’t have any value to offer to anyone. Having something useful/interesting to say about the real world is just one way for a piece of entertainment to offer value.
I highly agree with everything that has been said here about good/bad tutorials. Portal, Super Mario and Celeste are all great examples of doing it really well. To summarize what others have said and offer my own thoughts, here are some good rules of thumb about teaching the player:
- Do teach the player through practical challenges.
- Do integrate teaching naturally with the story and level design.
- Do introduce new mechanics / dynamics to the player gradually.
- Do use choke points to ensure the player cannot miss essential learning moments.
- Don’t tell the player exactly what to do.
- Don’t interrupt the flow of the game by pausing it to display a static wall of text.
- Don’t patronize the player by blatantly teaching them something they’ve already demonstrated to know.
- Don’t break the fourth wall by talking directly to the player.
The worst tutorial I’ve ever experienced? Black & White. Not due to its complexity, but due to how excruciatingly slow and hand-holding it was. This goes to show that while too much complexity can be a turn off, too little complexity can also ruin an experience.
I get what @Billy4184 is saying, though I agree with @SisusCo too. There is plenty of games that I put alot of time into only to feel pretty depressed about having it all been a waste later. There is only a select few I look back on and think, “wow I am really glad I played that one” because it left me with something positive.
I think the games that leave you feeling empty and mad about wasted times are the ones that are specifically designed to be addicting. The ones that leave a lasting impression are the ones that were developed by people who had a passion and acted on it. It’s like, art or something.
In my own designs, I try to think of some positive thing I can teach or share with people. I’m particularly keen on motivating people to be confident and take on risk, so I think that shapes my design a lot.
I would say that there is almost no story-driven, linear, singleplayer game that ever left me with a feeling like I wasted my time. Simply because it was so clear whether or not the content was valuable to me.
Similarly, games that are designed to be simply fun and exciting without too much complexity, are easy to put down once they have served as the distraction you wanted them to be.
The games that wasted my time were the ones which gave me what I wanted in small bites, but forced me to work for it*.* Games I wanted to like enough that I put up with too much from them. I don’t have many examples because a game has to really get my attention for me to play it. Probably many survival games and open world games fall into this category, though I very rarely play either. I suppose it makes sense that non-linear gameplay is correlated with grinding, because it’s very hard (though not impossible) to generate a meaningful experience that is not fully designed.
I agree, and for me, one of the best indicators of the worth of a game (like any other kind of art) is the author’s intent. There are many games that have the excuse “you can do whatever you want in this game” or something like that, but you look at the game and it is simply a retention system wrapped inside a flimsy premise. I mean, I can do whatever I want in reality (within reason) so when I am playing a game I am looking for something specific, something substantial, something meaningful, something exciting, something designed. Something that makes the game worth spending time on over all the other possible things I could be doing.
I think the issue comes down to deep mechanics vs wide mechanics, both are complex, but in different ways.
Mario games are largely running and jumping. Yeah there are other powerups, but that’s the main mechanic. So the width of the mechanics set is very narrow, but mario’s jump is one of the most complicated mechanics in all of video games. It’s got so many subtleties that you could spend hours and hours mastering it, and once you do you can fly around stages in really crazy ways.
Halo has annoyed me more and more as the version number ticks up. Halo CE is my favorite because it’s dead simple. Here is a gun and some grenades, go. If you pick up a powerup, it just does it’s thing without you having to do anything. Halo 3 added a whole fuckton of items: power drains, jumpers, trip mines… Most of the time I forget I even have them on me. Then they kept adding more and more crap with Spartan abilities and it just made it too complicated to be fun at any kind of casual level. Halo CE’s mechanics are simple, but deep: how long you hold jump affects how high you jump, crouching at the top of your jump brings your feet up a little extra, you can use explosions to increase your jump. Melee combat is simple: one button causes you to melee with your weapon, but again, the mechanic is deep: each weapon has it’s own time to melee and its own damage value, hitting someone from behind is an insta-kill, your motion affects the strength of the attack, and you can even double melee for in instant kill, but it pops out a grenade. Simple. Even the guns were simpler: mid range? Use the pistol. Close range, use the shotgun, long range, sniper. In later Halos, wtf. In Reach, wtf am I supposed to use for mid range? The BR, needle rifle, and DMR all fit this function and have only minor differences, why do I need three midrange weapons?
Perhaps for an equivalent reason to needing variable power jumping with the ability to tuck your knees and use explosions for momentum. 
It could well be that to a casual player they’re all equivalent, and to an expert player there are significant differences towards the top of the skill pyramid.
This pyramid is from Starcraft, but many games would have something similar:
Assuming (for the sake of discussion) that the game is designed well, to me it sounds like the difference between the guns you mentioned are probably up in the orange or red areas. You understand that they’re all “mid range” weapons, but there could well be further nuance that sets them apart in different scenarios. I know that there are people who play Halo competitively, and to them just breaking weapons down into short/mid/long range might not provide enough nuance after years of play. So it makes sense to me that the developers have sub-categorised stuff within that, even though to me it’s basically just different skins on the gun.
From a design perspective I think the challenge there is accomodating people throughout that whole skills pyramid. Designing a game so that it’s accessible and fun to people who don’t even have the blue level stuff, and isn’t boring to people who are already orange or red level in similar games and want to transfer some of that existing skill.
Note that this is indepentent of the breadth vs. depth concept raised, which is also important to think about.
Honestly ever since that whole call of duty non-sense, the shooting genre has become a money grubbing scene with barely any innovation on weaponry or gameplay but are now moving more towards cut-scene gameplay, more cinematic stuff. I’ve been playing the metro games recently, but something about it is turning me off. Might be the intensity?? The annoying mechanic of having to put on gas masks that run out of charges in toxic environments? Or the linear element of “levels” in an FPS shooter?
Anyway, I really miss shooters like half-life, unreal tournament, serious sam 1, duke nukem 3D, the Quake games etc. these games brought something so different and new to their games and it was through sheer gameplay. Half-life had the puzzles/gunfire/aliens; unreal tournament had the most epic weapon of all time (redeemer);Duke Nukem’s dialogues and flirty commentary when fighting aliens; Quake’s quad damage where everything you shot just blew into pieces… I miss those times. They were simple but finding the redeemer in Unreal tournament always felt satisfying and those zero gravity levels…man. We need to go back to game mechanics more than story and graphics in these kinds of games.
Not sure how you are associating ‘money grubbing’ with story and graphics? Game mechanics are entirely the foundation on which these games bleed your wallet. They aren’t selling chunks of story or a graphics overhaul in their virtual stores. They are selling improved game mechanics.
Incidentally, the singleplayer CoD games are for me an example of games where you know exactly what you are getting. A big cinematic distraction for a few hours, with set pieces other games only dream about. I’ve played several CoD games over the years and thoroughly enjoyed them. I don’t care for the multiplayer though.
I think the graphics versus gameplay debate is kind of surface level. Whether you got big money or no money, what you are doing is selling some fantasy that people want to believe in. Call of Duty can sell the fantasy of being a badass soldier to the biggest audience, because they can afford the best graphics and the whizbang that gets the LCD excited.
The shooting and general gameplay in those games is really tight and polished. The animatiosn and “juice” makes for extremely satisfying gameplay. But, the games are stupid easy for those of us who’ve been playing games for a long time, or otherwise identify as “hardcore” or non-casual for w/e reason. But that doesn’t mean COD lacks good gameplay. It’s just not the fantasy we want to dive into.