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| This message seems eager to convey the word TIANOWT. |
Again, I think I've hit a wall with Ard. This game is just merciless. It's too bad it has to be this hard because some of the puzzles are rather fun.
Between LanHawk and an anonymous commenter, we cleared up most of the issues I was having last time. To wit:
- Finding the magic shop in the town's central square was just a matter of typing SEARCH at the right location. The magic shop sells a few physical items that you need for spells, including "Teleport," which returns you to the magic shop from any location.
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| If only casting the spell a second time took you back to the last place you cast it. |
- Opening the chest in the thieves' guild requires you to use the special command to type SCREW PEG (the game calls your attention to a peg on the wall above the chest). The chest has a green potion that you need for a later encounter.
- Entering the dungeon beneath the ruins is about feeding the right number of coins into three slots. Based on a message that "key opens the dungeon door," you have to feed the number of coins corresponding to the positional number of each letter in KEY, which is 11-5-25.
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| I'm so annoyed this worked. |
The solution to the thieves' guild chest offers an example of how this game can be simply unfair. There is no hint, message, or instruction that helps you solve this puzzle. How could the average player possibly arrive at SCREW as the verb he or she wanted? Even worse, the game disincentives you from fiddling with the peg at all by having it spring a deadly trap when you P)ush or Y)ank on it. If the game was going to use a special command, TWIST or TURN would be hard enough, but SCREW? If LanHawk hadn't inspected the code, I'm sure I never would have gotten that.
The dungeon consists of (I think) five levels. It's hard to map, although the game tries to help by overlaying a grid of square cells on each screen when you hit the F2 key. I still frequently had rooms running into each other. Multiple up and down staircases don't help, and the game gives you no indication of what level you're on to help you keep track. There are secret doors everywhere. You have to bump into every blank wall to test for them, which causes the character to take damage when it really is just a wall. This is one amusing thing this game has in common with Dungeon Master II.
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| A grid supposedly helps you map by indicating how many squares each room takes. |
Some of the rooms have nothing in them except perhaps a random encounter, but others have an object, message, or puzzle. These are some of the ones I recorded, solved and unsolved:
- Two rooms on the first level offer two messages: TEDFEETSZ OMHSASCE OR and H IFRN IERO A ERTDO. I couldn't make anything of them as cryptograms or anagrams. But Might and Magic has also trained me to look out for interleaves, and that's what we have here. Alternate characters from the two messages, including spaces, and you get THE DIFFERENT SIZE ROOM HAS A SECRET DOOR. This is a clue to test the walls of a thin room in the northeast corner. A stairway beyond leads to Level 2.
- A message in another room reads: SEVEN HEADS OF STONE. But if you examine the message closely, the game tells you it's been altered from the original: SEVER HEAD OF STONE. Later, you find a stone statue, and severing its head opens a secret door. If that's not enough, a message in another room is addressed to someone named Grimly: "I know you changed the message to throw me off, but I figured out the statue anyway." For all its hard puzzles, the game sometimes gives you plenty of hints.
- A room with an altar. Examining the altar shows a relief carving of a winged woman. I never figured out what to do here, although ALTER [sic] is a keyword that the player has to use at some point. I tried pushing on it, pulling it, opening it, and just about everything else. SACRIFICE is a keyword, but I'm not sure how to employ it.
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| I would think the wings rule her out as a "woman." |
- A red scroll offers the message seen in the image here. This one is a cryptogram: IT SURELY WOULD BE A SHAME TO HAVE A HOT DRAGON FLAME BURN ALL YOUR FLESH, SO FOR YOU TO STAY FRESH, FOR A BONE RING YOU CAN AIM. I have not yet found a bone ring nor a dragon.
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| I confess I only figured out this was a cryptogram after trying Polish translation first. |
- A room with three boxes on the north wall. A previous message alerted that A SINGLE BOX IS DANGEROUS; ALL THREE GIVE INFORMATION. Sure enough, opening any of the boxes individually produces a random encounter. To use "all three," you have to STACK BOXES. Again, I don't think I would have figured this out if not for LanHawk's text dump. The boxes provide a riddle as seen in the screenshot below. If it seems like nonsense, it is: you have to just focus on the first letter of each word to spell out JUST SAY OPEN WIDE. Using the T)alk command to say OPEN WIDE opens a door to the north.
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| A lost verse from "A Whiter Shade of Pale." |
- A tor beast attacks! Nothing seems to harm him. If you previously tried drinking the potion from the thieves' guild, you found that it was poison (and had to reload). You have to defeat the beast by throwing the potion at him. Killing him doubled my experience points, but that's not really the boon it sounds like, for a couple reasons covered below.
- You enter a room with a skeleton. All exits close behind you. From a previous conversation in town, you know this is Nephron. You also know that you're supposed to find an amulet here. The game doesn't call your attention to it, but if you type GET AMULET, you'll get it. Nephron finished his warning by saying, "I died for the lack of a way out. I know now a silver coin could have changed my fate." Fortunately, you've found a silver coin. How do you use it to get out? You SPIN it, of course. Another riddle I wouldn't have solved without that text dump.
- Opening a door got me a face full of poison and I died. On a reload, examining the door revealed a hole with a plug in it. I could Y)ank the plug to cause a stream of poison gas to come out. I can tell from the text dump that I'm supposed to fill a flask with this gas, but I can't find any combination of commands that accomplishes this.
- Another room has a hole in a wall and a button. Pressing the button causes the ceiling to cave in and kill me. I know from the text dump that I have to SEAL HOLE. I don't know what with, so I try holding various items in my hand until a candle works. For some reason, sealing the hole causes the button to work normally, and a secret door becomes available.
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| I still don't see why I couldn't have stuffed that cloth into the opening. |
That last puzzle is a point of no return, as I learned the hard way. I got the candle in the general store, and it's the only one available. Dungeon rooms have no memory; everything resets when you leave and return. If you solve this puzzle, then use "Teleport" to return to town, there's no way to get back through the door again.
There are a couple of other things that make dungeon exploration difficult. One is the sheer number of random encounters, any one of which can deal a serious blow to your hit points. Because I spent so much time wandering around town trying to solve the puzzles recounted last time, I've been over-leveled for most of the game. You'd think this was a good thing, but the game scales enemy encounters to your level, so instead of orcs and trolls, I've been fighting demons and blood beasts the entire time. If you can't leave the dungeon to heal, you're limited to the hit point pool you have when you enter the dungeon, plus what you can restore with at least two blue scrolls.
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| My map of Level 1. I made it before I understood how the grid thing worked, but I think it's reasonably accurate. |
Constitution is also a concern. It depletes as you move around, and eventually you need to eat to restore it. You can bring one meal from the tavern, but that's it. You can't do a lot of dallying and backtracking.
Constitution is particularly imperiled because your encumbrance goes up as you find things in the dungeon rooms. Most of them are solutions to puzzles, but some are theoretically helpful armor items, including a breastplate, bracers, and boots. I discovered by accident that K)icking with the boots stuns foes, which sounds great, but every kick depletes a point of strength. You can only regain strength by sleeping, and the dungeon is a dangerous place to sleep.
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| Couldn't I have magic gauntlets that stun enemies when I punch them? Kicking just seems silly. |
Success, I think, involves burning a few characters on simple exploration, and then sending the "real" character on a beeline path through the most important encounters, thus minimizing your expenditures of health and constitution. I was able to accomplish that to some degree with save states.
But then I hit the problem that led me to ragequit this session. The dungeon is full of dark rooms for which you need the "Light" spell and locked doors for which you need the "Knock" spell. These spells require the flint and lockpick, respectively, and there is only one of each in the game. [Ed. This is not true of the lockpick. If it disappears, you can get another one from the thief outside the guild. He just doesn't drop it every time. However, there doesn't appear to be any way to get another flint, candle, or other item sold by the general store.] Apparently, they don't last forever. Somewhere on Level 4, I cast "Knock," and my lockpick disappeared. With no way to get another one, I have no way to open the rest of the dungeon's locked doors. There's at least one, right in my path.
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| Samuel L. Jackson would be proud of my response to this. |
To remedy this, I'm going to have to reload from before I even started exploring the dungeon, and trace a careful path that minimizes the number of times I have to use the pick. The thing is, I don't think that in my current game, I used it much more than necessary. Maybe one or two times.
Between being punished for exploring and having to guess unintuitive keywords, I don't understand how anyone has ever won this game legitimately--or at all. It's beginning to feel a bit like Infocom's Journey, where you have the illusion of choice, but you really have to enter an exact set of commands with no mistakes from beginning to end to have any hope of winning.
Time so far: 14 hours
"There are secret doors everywhere. You have to bump into every blank wall to test for them, which causes the character to take damage when it really is just a wall. This is one amusing thing this game has in common with Dungeon Master II."
ReplyDeleteDo you really have to test for secret door by bumping into walls in DM2? Can't you just click on the walls instead?
It seems to me a much less efficient way.
DeleteYou have to:
- turn to face the wall
- move the cursor on the wall
- click on the wall
- pay attention to the sound (if any)
OR you can just bump on the wall from any direction having instant visual and audio feedback with a single keypress.
Great list. Also:
Delete-Losing a single-digit number of hit points in DM isn't a big deal since they regenerate quickly.
That's one possible method, but DM2 also gives the player another option. The magic maps have one button that highlights illusory walls. If the player explores with this detector turned on, it becomes (too) easy to find secret doors.
DeleteI´ve been playing video games for many years and it´s shocking how much this issue comes up of games either being too hard or too easy. Analyzing it, gaming has always had this problem of how do you set the difficulty just right for human users. Make a game too hard, nobody wants or recommends it. The biggest frustration is when no cheats or walkthru´s are available in the least. Good programming should provide a choice of easy or difficult play, or be intuitive and "help" the player when progress isn´t being made. If I hired programmers, I would find it fundamental that they understand that ease of use is important not just in writing a business app,, but also true of gaming. Why do people play games? To enjoy, not to tear their hair out wondering how to go forward.
ReplyDeleteOverall, this plays like a poorly-written text adventure. All the famous games with text parsers try hard to avoid guess-the-verb scenarios (notably Infocom, Sierra, and The Hobbit; and even these famous games sometimes slip up).
DeleteWhile what you're saying is true...
Delete...it's also a bit of a harsh judgement for a game from '87 made by a single person, especially when we just read about famously difficult game 'Wiz IV' and many posterior graphic-adventures having similarly uintuitive puzzles.
In the early days, there were perverse incentives to make a game "hard" by any means necessary - you were asking for the inflation-adjusted equivalent of a week's salary for a game with roughly the same total amount of content as a comic book. But even today, it's a complicated problem because a large part of the joy in games is the pattern of alternation between the joy of accomplishment and the joy of mastery - you should at regular intervals be faced with sufficient adversity that you really feel like you achieved something when you succeed, but you should ALSO have regular intervals where you're just cruising because you have reached a level of mastery where what was previously challenging is now trivial, and the game should switch between those at the exact right pace. In CRPG terms, this usually means something like "boss battles should be followed by a section that is much easier before slowly ramping the difficulty up again" but the exact and scale length of those intervals and the following ramp is hard to calibrate
DeleteThe issue of difficulty is rearing its head in DM2, too. I've thrown myself at what I assume is the final battle about 12 times, and I can't seem to win it. Nothing else in the game has prepared me for this level of combat difficulty.
Delete@Bestie: the key here is the difference between "real difficulty" and "fake difficulty". Note how Chet was able to complete Wiz IV *without* a text dump.
Deletethere should be tactics tips for the last battle in dm2 if you feel stuck and want to look them up... but as I recall other people and reviews have complained about the difficulty spike right at the end
DeleteAlso note that everyone considers different things harder or easier. I, for example, consider most "dodge when the monster indicates an attack" games mostly impossible because they never give ME enough time to react. Yet others breeze through them.
DeleteNot to mention different ways of thinking.
"Make a game too hard, nobody wants or recommends it."
DeleteMake it too easy, and its the same thing. And in both cases the people who actually enjoy games being that easy or that hard tend to spend more time talking about why games should be that way instead of playing them.
Although that said a lot of the puzzles in this game feel like the kind of thing the person actually playing doesn't have a shot at, while someone reading does. Like the key puzzle, where you had to guess that it was numbers. No player is going guess that unless they go away from the game for a long time. But a friend looking over your shoulder or someone reading about it might guess it was numbers. They might even say it was a stupid answer, but they'd acknowledge that as they were telling it to you.
Playing "guess the magical verb that makes sense to the designer but to nobody else" has long cursed adventure games. It was the death of the media, honestly. And nobody cried at the funeral. Seriously, fashioning a false moustache from cat hair in order to impersonate someone who does not have a moustache.
DeleteIt dates back to the beginning of the genre and Roberta Williams' infamous puzzle solution "Nikstlitselpmur". The cause of the curse is the Dunning-Krueger Effect. The designers are incompetent but are so incompetent that they do not realize this. So they make puzzles with SEAL HOLE as the solution, while nobody can figure out how you would possibly make the leap to understand to phrase the solution, much less how one would seal a hole with a candle.
There's a difference between "difficult game" and "game that nobody would ever figure out in a million years." Difficulty does not mean being actively hostile to the player. Ard is a great example of the genre that nobody ever won.
There is a big following of really hard games, prominent examples being La Mulana, Touhou, the whole genre of precision platformers, and basically any Roguelike.
DeleteSo "make a game too hard" and people will HIGHLY recommend it as long as it's FAIR. But bring in "fake difficulty" and players run away.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty
Unsolvable adventure game puzzles have nothing to do with the Dunning-Krueger effect, and are not a sign of incompetence. It is just extremely difficult to objectively look at your chain of logic and see if somebody else is going to be able to follow it.
DeleteThat's particularly true in a game like this one, which is an amateur effort that by nature would have received minimal playtesting, and any playtesting done would have likely been done by people in the same general reference pool.
When developers release a commercial game with puzzles that are not solvable with logic and apparently were not playtested by anyone, is it not justified to call them incompetent designers? Yes, it's hard for them to assess their puzzles by themselves. Thats why it's at least very negligent to completely skip the essential step of playtesting. A very harsh judgement, maybe, and it was certainly not uncommon for the time, but already then there were other developers who have taken great care in the design of their puzzles. It's still possible to respect the developers' achievements in other areas.
DeleteIt's possible that this game was playtested, but the other people came from "the same general reference pool" and were able to solve the puzzles. Can't say without very detailed knowledge of the game, but going by Chet's descriptions it doesn't seem likely. But yes, in that case, "incompetent" would be too harsh.
Generally, letting your work be scrutinized by a third party before inflicting the potential consequences on lots of people should be part of the job.
Another thing about difficulty in adventure games in particular (And therefore on the other genres influenced by them) is that the history of adventure games traces back to late 70s collegiate nerd culture, and as a result many of the early examples reveled in a sort of fratboy showboating: to some extent, it didn't really matter if some of the puzzles were unfair; the point was to stump your friends by hook or by crook to prove you were the cleverest lad in the department. It may have felt fun and friendly and even enhanced sense of being part of the community in its original context - no outsider could reasonably solve the Infamous Foobar Puzzle; it is penetrable only to someone who paid their dues and had the logic of the puzzle explained to him by an upperclassman. But a generation or two after those games made it out "into the wild", that link back to the original community was lost, and "insane moon logic puzzles" was just part of the genre because it "always had been"
DeleteIt is not so much that "insane moon logic" is an expectation of the adventure game genre; but rather, there are a handful of infamous instances that everyone keeps talking about (particularly people who don't actually play adventure games).
DeleteFor instance, Infocom games are largely devoid of moon logic, except intentionally in the HHGTG game. Even Sierra games rarely require moon logic outside of the King's Quest series.
The downside of the internet age is that everybody keeps talking about the one instance where a game designer did it wrong, instead of the 99 instances where they did it right.
Is no one going to point out that the page Harland linked to contains ableist slurs?
DeleteDunno about the slurs, but I do want to point out that incompetence and lack of self-awareness aren't mutually inclusive with being "actively hostile" (as a game designer) towards the player. Bad puzzle design due to lack of either competence or awareness is still bad, but it might as well be passively innocent.
DeleteEven in Hitchhiker's, the cruelty isn't much about moon-logic. The infamous bablefish puzzle is cruel, but not illogical: every failure spells out what some part of what else you need to accomplish; the cruelty is that the process of working through it takes more attempts than you are allotted - there's several puzzles in HHGG that use the same "The text telling you that you have failed and the game is now unwinnable gives enough detail to lead you to the correct path" mechanism; the cruelty is that the failure generally comes LONG after you've passed the point of no return. The only Infocom game that I can think of as relying on the infamous sort of impressionistic "moon logic" you do, in fact, see a lot of in early games from lesser producers -the "Well, Spaghetti is sort of like a rope, so you can use pasta to climb out of a pit" sort of thing, is Nord and Bert, which, of course, is deliberately set in a moon-logic wordplay-based Far Side sort of world.
DeleteIt is just extremely difficult to objectively look at your chain of logic and see if somebody else is going to be able to follow it.
DeleteYes, and if you design a puzzle that's so difficult that nobody can solve it, you're incompetent at designing puzzles. And you should be smart enough to realize that. But you don't. Why? Because of the Dunning-Krueger Effect. It explains the situation perfectly.
I guess its okay if Harland implies everyone who disagrees with him is an autist and mentally disabled. At least he didn't outright say it like on the RPGCodex, and just linked to it. Funny, I always thought that autists couldn't let things go, like people whining about some random puzzle in a 40-year-old video game on an unrelated website.
DeleteRPG Codex is an inclusive site that does not discriminate against people with Tourette's Syndrom.
DeleteOld Man Murray was an “edgy” gaming site that was almost always in bad taste yet somehow very influential. There’s literally direct references to it in some games e.g. Quake III has the site’s logo hidden in a map. I am surprised that it is still up despite essentially shutting down 20 years ago. Take it as a time capsule of what people could get away with in back them. The two main writers ended up going to Valve afterward for quite a long time with one of them going to Double Fine first to co-write Psychonauts.
DeleteI love adventure games, but they have always been full of obtuse puzzles. Many of them can get away with it because they’re comedies so the logic has more room to stretch. The mustache puzzle isn’t bad per se, but it has a cartoony quality in a game that’s supposed to be serious. Sierra didn’t do any external playtesting until Leisure Suit Larry in 1987, and it certainly feels very erratic afterward. They’ve always felt like they were much more up to the individual whims of the main designer compared to LucasArts for example which playtested games heavily.
Infocom games do have their fair share of obnoxious puzzles, but it’s worst in Zork I and II which were originally a single mainframe game at MIT. One of the puzzles was even an inadvertent suggestion by someone complaining about them! (tvivat gur rtt gb gur guvrs) They get better starting with Zork III, but Zork I and HGtG were the highest selling Infocom games by a wide margin so people mainly think of the BS in those instead of the fairer but less remembered games.
It's so tiring when people bang on about adventure games being "dead". I see articles about it year after year... while playing newly-released adventure games. They're no more dead than turn-based RPGs.
DeleteOne thing that might affect the design of these early games is that computer/video games were still pretty new, and many of them had no concept of winning or finishing the game. So I think many players would not have been as bothered by being unable to finish a game as we are now.
Delete1984's Tower of Druaga is another example of this phenomenon; the game is virtually impossible to finish without help. You have to do very specific things on quite a few of the levels to get items you need to win, but there are no clues at all in the game and some of the things you have to do seem next to impossible to do even by chance. And yet the game was a smash hit that had enormous influence on Japanese RPGs. I do not know why this was, or how the players at the time learned the secrets they needed.
Jeremy Parish has a good video on Tower of Druaga, but the short version is that it was played collectively with people trading secrets they found. Some arcades had notebooks next to cabinets where people would write down what they found.
DeleteAnd then From Soft incorporated the notebook into the game.
DeleteI chuckled when reading the title, because I imagined the writer intending to write another thing and becoming exasperated mid-sentence ("The Power Stones of... THIS GAME IS GODDAMNED IMPOSSIBLE!!!").
ReplyDelete"The Power Stones of Aaargh!" ;)
Delete(To be honest, that's how I've been reading the game title every time I've seen it in Chet's blog entry headings. Apparently it's more fitting than I supposed!)
That would have been a better title.
DeleteThe Power Stones of Too ‘Ard.
Delete@Tristan: That sounds like a perfect title.
DeleteYou don't mention the Apple problem (I presume you solved it, but just in case), looking at the code you can "Fyvpr nccyr". I think this refers to the "star" hint. I think you will also need to do this at a specific time or place, but not sure what
ReplyDeleteI never found the right time or place.
DeleteApparently there is a room with a star on the floor
DeleteIt is possible that the lockpick doesn't have a set amount of uses, but instead has a small percentage chance of breaking each time you use it; this is how it works both in D&D and in the Ultima series. That would make your reloading issue easier.
ReplyDeleteGreat minds think alike. Alas, that doesn't seem to be the case. I've tried reloading, fighting a few combats, wandering around, and then using the pick again. It always vanishes.
DeleteThat would be even worse from a game design perspective, because it'd essentially mean that the game had a random chance of being unwinnable even if played perfectly.
DeleteBut could it be that it reappears somewhere once you've used it up? Seems like a super strange mechanic to have.
Delete@VK This might just be possible as I believe the thief dropped the lockpick after combat defeat. So maybe there will be another thief to fight and collect another.
DeleteIt's not impossible that one turns up again somewhere, but not as easy as that. Killing further thieves outside the guild does not produce any more lockpicks.
DeleteI was wrong. You can get another lockpick from the thieves outside the guild. It just takes a few tries.
DeleteHowever, there's still a problem that with only one candle in the game, there's no way to get back into the depths of the dungeon once you've left it to get a new lockpick.
DeleteCut to lengthy montage of Chester roaming outside the Chandlers' Guild surrounded by bodies.
DeleteLevel scaling in 1987? Wow.
ReplyDeleteAnd working as badly as 2022!
DeleteUltima III did it in 1983.
DeleteWhere's Kenny when you really need him? SCREW PEG indeed!
ReplyDeleteAlso, as indicated by Anonymous in the first comment, I seem to remember that in Dungeon Master you could click on the wall and get a thump for a real one and nothing for an illusionary one.
Vince offered a good list of reasons why I don't do that. Also, losing a couple of hit points in DM isn't a big deal. They continually regenerate.
DeleteWhen I saw the phrase, I instantly thought of alternate meanings and Kenny as well.
DeleteRight, I'd say the author had some issue with Peg and just had to work that into the game.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteMy initial thought was that Al Bundy would never be able to finish this game
DeleteKenny would probably suggest to try the same solution with the Winged Woman.
DeleteWhen you described the lockpick disappearing my first thought was "this sounds exactly like that Infocom game". Seems like it might be a natural failure mode of trying to combine text adventures and RPGs.
ReplyDeleteNah, Infocom has a much better parser than this one.
DeleteWinged woman is no woman ? Why not ?
ReplyDeleteAs an example, in "Magic, the Gathering" almost all the angels are represented as winged women, although... they are not humans. Then, there is this human-bird hybrid: https://scryfall.com/card/arn/37/bird-maiden
"Winged women is no woman? Why not? Here are two examples of things that also are not women."
DeleteI think the commenter is defining a woman as a female humanoid, and I think the game is using it in the same sense, or in the even more generic sense of "female sapient lifeform". Both definitions optionally have adulthood as a delineating line from "girl", as well. You've probably seen the phrases "elven woman" or "dwarven woman" before, which are generally meant to describe an adult female member of said species.
DeleteFor example, if I saw a harpy in real life and wanted to tell someone else about that, but I didn't know that there was a specific word for what it was, I would say "I saw a woman with eagle-like wings and talons".
I think the game is trying to be evocative here, saying that you see what appears to be a humanoid female with the startling addition of wings on the altar. You don't know quite WHAT it is supposed to represent, but like when you see an image from an ancient culture whose language you cannot read in real life, you can glean from the context of it being on an altar that it is probably supposed to represent an angel or goddess.
Even if you don't know who Nirgul is (or any of the ancient Mesopotamian civilizations that worshipped him, for that matter), if you saw the "Nirgul Tablet" portraying him adorned with a fire-red mane of hair and beard, with horns and a crown on his head and a scowl on his face, wielding a hatchet and sheathed sword, alongside a ceremonial brazier and staff, several venomous snakes and scorpions, and holding the leash of a three-headed dog with a snake for a tail, not to mention the fact that someone him important enough to carve a beautiful, partly-coloured relief of in the first place, you can probably guess that this guy is (A) very important and (B) very dangerous.
This is an amazing set of comments! Some contain good advice for game designers. Others are cogent social commentary
ReplyDeleteMy take on the puzzles is that many of them are challenging and interesting, but the consequences make them unfair. I would triple-plus the anonymous comment, "The downside of the internet age is that everybody keeps talking about the one instance where a game designer did it wrong, instead of the 99 instances where they did it right."
Having the lockpick vanish would be fine if players had a reliable way to get another one, or an alternative way to open locked doors that doesn't require a lockpick. Having that turn the game into "dead man walking" is not ok.
Having an obvious action kill or seriously harm the player is also bad design... except in cases such as "seven heads of stone," where there are substantial clues to take, or not take, an action.
Combat difficulty is one of the toughest problems for a game designer. For Hero's Quest, I came up with a guideline - Player characters should be able to win any single combat in an appropriate area of the game, but should be expected to lose about one-third of their health points. Two consecutive combats are doable, but scary. The player should need to heal or rest before fighting a third.
We also created sort-of-concentric rings around the safe area of the town. The farther out the player travels, the more dangerous. Also, night-time encounters are more dangerous than daytime ones.
With all that consideration, we had some players who found combat almost impossible. Others considered it trivial.
In Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, on a test playthrough, I found myself in the first category on certain fights. Nerfing them angered one of our major backers, who thought those fights were already too easy for ones that had been telegraphed as extremely dangerous.
Part of it is also playstyle and game developer tendencies. A bit too late to change it, I discovered that I had made the Fitness stat in Hero-U too important. Players who max out fitness, such as that backer, have an easy time with the battles. Unfortunately, players who work to mini-max important stats and skills also tend to be the ones who want serious challenge and a sense of danger.
We can balance the game for those players, but casual players will then find it impossible. If we balance the game so that casual players can win, hardcore players may find that the game lacks challenge for them. Read any MMO forum to find players who find the toughest content easy, and others who struggle with much lower levels. (e.g. WoW Mythic raids and M+ dungeons vs. Normal versions of the same).
My approach has always been to err on the easy and more approachable side. I have to mentally take a step back on hearing from players that they consider my games extremely difficult and challenging. Of course, others race through them.
@Corey re combat difficulty: I'm no game designer, but can understand the problem. It seems some games try to solve this by having at least two different settings for the overall difficulty or parts of it like fights e.g. through a story mode vs a challenge mode.
DeleteFor puzzles, an optional gradual hint system (like e.g. https://www.uhs-hints.com/) might help.
Though in both cases I don't know how much extra work that adds in development.
They didn't get it right 99 times out of 100. More like 33 times out of 100. Text adventure (and graphical text adventure, like this one) games are notorious for impossible solutions. Eventually this habit killed the whole genre. I follow this other blog where they play these oldschool adventure games, and it's rare that they don't get stuck and are forced check a walkthrough. And this is with modern tools like Trizbort, lists of commonly used verbs, inspecting the machine code for text strings, etc. And when you see the solution you're like "how the heck was anyone supposed to ever think of that‽" It's not often that the conclusion is "this was a really well-done game that wasn't completely baffling."
DeleteIt's rather silly to suggest that after decades of popularity, the adventure genre was "killed" by difficult puzzles. Rather, its decline is usually attributed to rising popularity of other genres, such as FPS.
DeleteIt is true that certain specific adventure games are notorious for impossible solutions, for instance Curse of Enchantia or King's Quest V. But these are notorious precisely because MOST adventure games do not have impossible solutions. You can check out the Adventurer's Guild blog for that, they usually manage just fine without walkthroughs.
On the topic of difficulty balance, in addition to a robust set of accessibility options, I think an interesting approach would be to design challenges so there's always a reliable way to advance, but there are more difficult and enticing approaches available for higher skilled players.
DeleteOne way is making the most challenging stuff optional, and counting on the completionist impulse to motivate players to give it a try. Another is to just make the reliable path a little more tedious, and lure the more skilled players to attempt higher difficult short cuts to avoid the grind.
Ideally you end up with a way for all types of players to find their level of challenge, but never get completely stuck or frustrated.
Your words remind of "four kinds of MMO players" theory: some play to experience a power-fantasy, to dominate and win; some play to exercise their intelligence and reach mastery, the very real possibility to lose is important for them; some play to immerse themselves in a new world, to explore its wonders, akin to reading a book; some play to socialize and communicate...
DeleteThe needs of different kinds of players are, actually, implicitly exclusive to an extent, so balancing to accomodate, more or less, everyone, must be a delicate act by its nature.
(I'd like, if I may, to thank you for the great games you made. They brought so much joy in my life in their time, I consider them to be in the top tier of ALL games EVER actually).
internet walkthroughs and gamefaqs killed adventures.
DeletePeople also were not as eager to finish the games as they once were, I think. Nowadays you can spend a few minutes on google and have thousands of games to play, for free. Even if you just want text adventures you can have them all at the click of a button. This is a very different experience from someone who might buy only a few games a year. If you get a new Infocom game you probably wouldn't have wanted it to be over in 5 days. Whereas if you are doing a blog where you play all adventure games, you don't want to spend a week running around in circles making no progress.
DeleteIt is telling that adventure games went into a decline at roughly the same time that adventure game tropes started appearing in other genres as a matter of course. John Carmack famously said that plot in a video game was like plot in porn: you expect it to exist, but it's not what you're there for and you don't really care about it. But eventually we had enough technological leeway that a game didn't have to choose between one or the other, and one way of looking at it is less "adventure died in favor of other genres" as "Other genres became different structures for presenting adventure game tropes"
DeleteWell-said, Ross! I believe that Jimmy Maher of The Digital Antiquarian put it like this first, but a game like DOOM can be seen as almost a more logical evolution of the adventure-game genre. You are only presented with the verbs that will accomplish results in the game, a trend that games like Maniac Mansion/Day of the Tentacle and Simon the Sorceror were already veering towards, and one that Myst would exemplify to about the largest degree possible (and the realMyst remake would, of course, add full-motion, embodied gameplay just like DOOM). As graphics and sound began to become as evocative as the textual descriptions of interactive fiction, it gave way - first to illustrated adventures, then fully-graphical adventures, and finally the aforementioned fully-embodied gameplay of DOOM.
DeleteDungeon Master is also worth pointing out as the "DOOM before DOOM", having a blend of real-time and tile/turn-based gameplay, and of action and puzzles. I believe it to be a lack of the latter that cause many people to be vengeful of the dearth of commercial interactive fiction and graphic adventures; I cannot begrudge them good, hand-crafted puzzles, despite how popular emergent problem solving has become in games ranging from Tetris to Minecraft to roguelikes. Games like Ad Verbum and Counterfeit Monkey are some of my favourite interactive fiction games solely due to them using the textual format to deliver clever puzzles that no other format of game could possibly present. "Voices" is another one of my favourites - the "puzzles" are naff, though luckily the game comes with a built-in walkthrough. The true genius is how you, the person behind the parser, play a role in the commands you give and the choices that you make in the course of the story, a role that most interactive fiction does not acknowledge. I won't spoil it any further - it's a short play.
I posted an edit in the entry. You CAN get a new lockpick from one of the thieves outside the guild. It just doesn't happen every combat. You have to try a few times. So that isn't a barrier to progress.
ReplyDeleteGenerally speaking, when you lose or drop an item sold by a shop , another one appears in the shop. So if you use one of your fire rubies on a "Fireball" spell, you can purchase another one from the jeweller. This is NOT true of the items sold by the general store, however: there's only one flint, white cloth, candle, and flask in the game. I suspect this is an unintentional error given the way the rest of the stores work.
This may be a dumb remark, but did you check if the candle disappears after you've sealed the hole with wax? Could be that you only need very little wax, and so the candle remains in your inventory. (I'm probably trying to be far too generous for this game now...)
Deleteis there a way to edit your inventory and get another candle that way
DeleteI was able to win, as you'll see tomorrow, so this is a bit moot, but good suggestions. The candle definitely does disappear from your inventory. As for editing, I did explore that later in regards to a different issue, but I wasn't able to figure out how to add items. Editing Color Computer 3 files is a skill that I haven't had time to develop.
DeleteConsidering the era of this game, I'm wondering how much of this punishing difficulty is connected to the standards of D&D and tabletop RPGs around this time. We're not that far away from Gygax designing punishingly unfair dungeons. These were designed under Gygax's more wargame-y view that the DM is on one side, the players are on the other, and the whole point of the game is to pit ingenuity against each other. What can the DM dream up? How can the players respond?
ReplyDeleteAnd because they're not sitting around a table, there might be an expectation that the player will just sit for as long as it takes to figure it out.
(When I run D&D now, I love to include puzzles but I always try to make sure that they have lots of clues and mechanisms for me to make sure it doesn't take more than an hour to figure out.)
A lot of the other commenters have noted adventure games and some of the failings/challenges of that medium, but I'm not sure that the adventure game form being taken here is meant to be connected to that genre; it might be that they simply found an adventure game style easier to program.
(I'm not saying that adventure games are inherently easier to program, but when you're trying to give a wide variety of puzzles and challenges, you might choose a form that allows you to take lots of different actions in that form than trying to incorporate them in the more simulationist style of an RPG.)