Enhancing replayability?
I was wondering about something. What do you guys think would enhance the replay value of the series? Dialogue options in the MI2 vein - shedding choices once you've picked something - seems obvious, but what about other things like people telling you stories (like in CMI), or little easter eggs that hatch out of attention to detail (10000 grubs)?
What else? I mean, essentially, you cram these in, you improve on your puzzle design, you...you shed the three trial structure? The best games always have their stories feeding gameplay feeding stories, like the LucasArts classics. I'm thinking that the shed SCUMM interface killed a kind of puzzle, which is the "obvious solution" puzzle. In Secret, you pick up an idol to escape being trapped underwater, or picking up a shovel that's stuck on a sign like in MI2. Telltale's current interface will allow Guybrush to either pick up or examine either of those objects, but not both. Do you think Telltale needs to change their interface, or adapt their puzzles to what they're doing now? Do the "Mouth" (talk to, lick, kiss), "Eye" (examine) and "Hand" (pick up, push, slap around) buttons add anything a one-click system can't deliver on?
Maybe add more locations? Scabb had 14 (Woodtick outside, the carpentry, Wally's workplace [cartography?], the ship with the pirates and Maaad Marty, the Inn reception, Largo's room, the kitchen, the bar, the cemetery, the swamp, the Intl House Of Mojo, the beach, the plateau, and Captain Dread's ship). Flotsam, by comparison, had maybe 11, with the jungles all looking the same (beach, Flotsam outside, the five jungles, DeSinge's labs, the prison the court/Voodoo Lady's shack, Club 41/the Narwhal); variation and number help. You shouldn't tempt and not deliver, though, which was a mistake in Spinner Cay.
What would you do to add replay value? I'm trying to imagine ways to make things better. A true classic is only elevated to that status when there's a second or third try that elevates an entire colony of life undiscovered - whether jokes, easter eggs or otherwise.
Edit: I bring up Scabb Island because it feels very much like an "episode". I doubt any Part II-size episodic games existing anytime soon.
What else? I mean, essentially, you cram these in, you improve on your puzzle design, you...you shed the three trial structure? The best games always have their stories feeding gameplay feeding stories, like the LucasArts classics. I'm thinking that the shed SCUMM interface killed a kind of puzzle, which is the "obvious solution" puzzle. In Secret, you pick up an idol to escape being trapped underwater, or picking up a shovel that's stuck on a sign like in MI2. Telltale's current interface will allow Guybrush to either pick up or examine either of those objects, but not both. Do you think Telltale needs to change their interface, or adapt their puzzles to what they're doing now? Do the "Mouth" (talk to, lick, kiss), "Eye" (examine) and "Hand" (pick up, push, slap around) buttons add anything a one-click system can't deliver on?
Maybe add more locations? Scabb had 14 (Woodtick outside, the carpentry, Wally's workplace [cartography?], the ship with the pirates and Maaad Marty, the Inn reception, Largo's room, the kitchen, the bar, the cemetery, the swamp, the Intl House Of Mojo, the beach, the plateau, and Captain Dread's ship). Flotsam, by comparison, had maybe 11, with the jungles all looking the same (beach, Flotsam outside, the five jungles, DeSinge's labs, the prison the court/Voodoo Lady's shack, Club 41/the Narwhal); variation and number help. You shouldn't tempt and not deliver, though, which was a mistake in Spinner Cay.
What would you do to add replay value? I'm trying to imagine ways to make things better. A true classic is only elevated to that status when there's a second or third try that elevates an entire colony of life undiscovered - whether jokes, easter eggs or otherwise.
Edit: I bring up Scabb Island because it feels very much like an "episode". I doubt any Part II-size episodic games existing anytime soon.
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I'm not sure about changing the interface, I don't know how well a CMI-style interface would mesh with the mouse controls. I would really like the option to look at/use/push/pull things though. Guybrush just better hope I never get a 'kiss' option or I'd be using it with everything. (and I do mean EVERYTHING...)
Did I say the dialogue affects the path of the game? What I meant was that different dialogue choices gave you different jokes, but selecting one makes the others inaccessible. In Monkey 2, for example, the Voodoo Lady tells Guybrush that LeChuck is about to return to stick his worm-infested boot so far up Guybrush's fundament he'll be coughing fine leather jackets by Christmas. You get to pick one - and only one - of these responses:
>> "What can I do?"
>> "Where can I hide?"
>> "Can you just give me something to protect me?"
>> "Can you just kill me now and get it over with?"
All of these lend slightly different responses from the Voodoo Lady (the bottom three all feature a small joke about the Voodoo Lady telling Guybrush he's already doing everything he can, prompting Guybrush to ask - maybe sarcastically - "Fiddling with the change in my pocket?"), but they all lead into another exchange that gives you necessary information and even more dialogue choices. I've been playing the old games to understand what made them work so well. (I used to know, but a persistently lazy mind is a forgetful one.)
As for the interface: the CMI gave you the choice of using hand, ears or mouth, but with a pre-determined action. It made for good jokes, like, say, "lick cannon" (I don't think it was actually lick cannon, but you get the idea). You could only talk to other people. I don't mean to have a list of a dozen verbs.
You didn't, I was just saying that I thought game-altering dialogue choices would be hard to implement. I agree that similar dialogues like the one you cited with the Voodoo Lady in MI2 would be a good thing, that's the kind of thing I'd keep going back to until I'd gotten all the responses.
But does it add anything to replayability? It 1. increases play time, since you don't just click on something and have Guybrush do the right thing. 2. Adds a few jokes ("I don't want to pick that cow up" or something), 3. Creates different puzzle styles (the "obvious solution" I mentioned in the original post, the "examine" option revealing lice on a coat, etc). Are those reasons enough to add it?
Some of these things mentioned in this one I posted on a different thread would also enhance replayability.
So yeah, a) More locations
b) more detailed backgrounds
c) more things to examine = more chances to mislead you = more playing time
d) more items to pick up
e) if there is more items in your inventory, theres lot more choices to try them on, and some of them you might have to combine with other items.
f) controls design should take a few steps back, so that you can try more things, (more wrong things) its stupid if the game always points you automatically the right thing to do.
The inventory was kind of crappy I thought, and especially the item combining. I think they were at their best in CMI.
Woah there, soldier. Listen. Larger gameplay time is not necessarily a good thing. I'd say that, within certain limits, it's a bad thing. I think Telltale are aiming at 4 hours per session. Having you struggle for ten hours per chapter is a very bad idea...
This is probably going to be more frustrating than fun. You need to be able to progress logically through a game. Having you randomly combine a plate with a bunch of forks to make a dartboard is the kind of thing that killed adventure games.
Sure, it can be frustrating at times, but that makes solving the sollution just that more satisfying (or use a walkthrough if you can't bother).
Replayability to me would be several different paths to the same destination. So the journey is the same, but the way you can get there is different. Thus; you have a reason to replay it and do it differently. Obviously this is pretty hard to implement...
Carrying around a few dozen items in your pants is fine, so long as you have a clear goal of what you need to do. If the game has you resorting to randomly clicking on things to find solutions, then it's messed up. If it actually makes you look at a walkthrough, it's messed up. If it frustrates you, then it has really messed-up. But becoming frustrating for the sake of being a "real" adventure game is a wrong, wrong, wrong ideology. You might as well call it a sequel to King's Quest.
Day of the Tentacle did, Full Throttle did, Sam&Max Hit the Road did.
What can I say? I suck at adventure games... still find them fun. But I can pretty much breeze through ToMI, that should say something of it's difficulty.
All the previous MI games had puzzles from hell anyways.
If by "breezed" you mean "finished each chunk in 3 or so hours", then good: that's what a long adventure game takes you, and that's the goal Telltale are aiming at.
I think larger gameplay would be welcomed and could be achieved with those aforementioned suggestions I made. Im personally wanting to see a full game like the majority, not a new episodic release so im not that concerned about each episode`s/chapter`s playing time. But even if the release is going to be episodic, I definitely wouldnt mind up to 10 hours of gameplay per episode ( I think everyone else would love that also). It doesnt have to be struggling all the time, but great gameplay.
(Maybe they are aiming to 4 hours per ep. but for me ep. 1 and 3 were about 2 hours of gameplay.)
Frustration has always been a big part of the attraction of MI games for me. The more frustrated I am, the better it feels to find the solution. I didnt have those feelings almost at all in ToMI and thats what made it a bit dull for me at times.
Of course when you have to record 4x the dialogue and draw more and more environments this isn't so easy. (just look at how packed and complex some of Steve Purcell's work is).
More stuff to play around with, and dialogue options that have an effect is always good. Randomizing selected bits of dialogue, e.g in the bar fight in ep.1, might be another good option. Unlocking extra scenes can also work really well. Breath of Fire IV did this really well, though it was almost impossible to unlock everything, which is a bit frustrating. A quick example might be that the next time round you get to see events that happened off screen - such as morgan and Le Chucks encounter. The type of stuff that would spoil the plot if you saw it the first time round, but enhances it afterwards.
Either that or you take the resident evil approach and drop a new costume and a bazooka into the inventory on the 2nd time round.
For those who like harder/different puzzles
This actually could be quite effective, instead of overhauling the approach Telltale are already accustomed, Mega monkey provides a viable solution especially of Telltale wanted to avoid a pathways type of game that result in the same conclusion.
Apart from this;
- up the locations
- revise/reintroduce an old Island, not Monkey though, perhaps Melee?
- in the way of design - make it really dark, there was just something about Tales that felt like, "oh I'm Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate. Now there's a pox, oh no! But let's go visit another surreal beach paradise" maybe the air of gloom and doom was a little flippant in my opinion, though Chapter 5 really honed in on this, and was executed perfectly.
- MORE SOUNDTRACK, I don't just want to hear it in the cutsscenes, nor do I want to hear just the surrounding ambience.
MORE MORE MORE!
There could even be alternative interfaces. In hard mode, you have the 3-verb interface from CMI, and in simple mode you just click and Guybrush automatically does the right thing out of the 3.
Put in some bonus for the people who play hard mode (extra jokes, some mysterious plot explained, ...) and there we go.
Newcomers first play the easy mode, and then when they're familiar with the story replay the game in hard mode.
Oh and I also agree with the FateOfAtlantis (and Last Crusade) approach, but that won't work with episodic games, as said.
Splitting paths like in Fate of Atlantis would be hard for episodic games because they'd need to start and end at the same place/with the same characters, but maybe there could be an option to solve puzzles in different ways/with the help of different characters within episodes, like getting out of the cages at the end of Lair of the Leviathan without Morgan's help.