Should the new King's Quest game have unwinnable states?
I'm a big advocate of death and losing in adventure games. I think if a gamer is given enough warning that what they're about to embark on involves an element of genuine danger it makes for a much more intricate engagement with the game out of sheer glorious TERROR.
The puzzles in some King's Quest games border on the masochistic and I would feel disappointed if there wasn't some attempt to beef up the difficulty in order to genuinely reflect what this series was all about. You were adventuring in strange new worlds where fairy tale and horror had come to life - sometimes the best approach to make sense of this crazy world was to take a stab in the dark. You better grab that item right now or else you might never see it again! Maybe if I write this guy's name backwards i can pass this area. Things like that.
Dead ends are considered the worst possible thing you could do in an adventure game. It was part of the LucasArts manifesto to go against this design flaw, which brought about a flurry of genre defining adventure games that lasted up until Grim Fandango. However, that was never King's Quest's concern. In fact, when they removed unwinnable states in King's Quest VII the game was lambasted by fans for being TOO EASY!
So, why not bring back the dead end? Some of the most popular adventure games today have refined what it means to have an unwinnable state such as Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick. Surely there's a way to reconcile delicious punishment in a modern era of adventuring without throwing away the whole thing!
The puzzles in some King's Quest games border on the masochistic and I would feel disappointed if there wasn't some attempt to beef up the difficulty in order to genuinely reflect what this series was all about. You were adventuring in strange new worlds where fairy tale and horror had come to life - sometimes the best approach to make sense of this crazy world was to take a stab in the dark. You better grab that item right now or else you might never see it again! Maybe if I write this guy's name backwards i can pass this area. Things like that.
Dead ends are considered the worst possible thing you could do in an adventure game. It was part of the LucasArts manifesto to go against this design flaw, which brought about a flurry of genre defining adventure games that lasted up until Grim Fandango. However, that was never King's Quest's concern. In fact, when they removed unwinnable states in King's Quest VII the game was lambasted by fans for being TOO EASY!
So, why not bring back the dead end? Some of the most popular adventure games today have refined what it means to have an unwinnable state such as Ace Attorney and Ghost Trick. Surely there's a way to reconcile delicious punishment in a modern era of adventuring without throwing away the whole thing!
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Death is fine, and I'm sure Telltale will have plenty of it. Although, personally I'd go for a happy middle ground rather than go the Jurassic Park/The Walking Dead route of restarting the scene where you died or Sierra's route of game over where you have to load a saved game or restart: having options on death for retry and loading a saved game. That way the diehard Sierra fans can happily ignore the retry option and load a saved game, and the people who are new to the genre, never liked Sierra's design style, or those who prefer more leeway with their games, can just retry the scene The Walking Dead/Jurassic Park (or, going back, Full Throttle) style.
Though considering how much a lot of Sierra fans love the unwinnable states in their games, probably the best way to do this would be through options to customise the UI like Telltale did with The Walking Dead. That way, if you want classic Sierra style deaths, you can completely remove the retry button from the death sequences and just have the load game button instead. That should please everyone.
Personally, I think "it takes you out of the game" is just an excuse for "it makes you aware that you aren't the perfect gamer you think you are". From the beginning, games have always been about overcoming hurdles and challenges. That includes the ultimate challenge: complete and utter failure. When you die in an adventure game you're failing at a game that challenges you on an intellectual level (with failing to figure out the puzzle) as well as a mortal level (failing to overcome basic gaming obstacles that threaten the character's ability to progress in the game; death). Dead ends are something else entirely and I can live without it if everyone's a book-burning over it, but dying? Bring it on, please.
Retry? Yes, nobody has to click it if they don't have to. But everyone WILL just because it's there. It's possible to continue without any consequence whatsoever. Even those of us that hate it will use it because it's so available and easy. And that's PRECISELY why we hate it. At that point, the debate for us is that we've made save games precisely in perfect situations where we can continue if we die (even if we don't know death is coming). Now, technically, there's no difference between a save game and a retry button. But, again, that's exactly what we hate about it.
We've earned the skill of saving games from experience in other games. It's a badge of honour to be able to overcome death when it comes, even if we didn't see it coming. Now any old Joe schmo can come along, completely fail, and be given infinite second chances without doing any work whatsoever. This reduces the skill we've refined of being wary of the gaming environment and saving to a redundancy. We might as well press retry because it's the same thing. But it's the principle of it that bugs me. Why do inexperienced players get to cheat? Yes, cheat, because half the skill of many adventure games -- minus 95% of the LucasArts catalogue -- is sensing when death might be near and saving at pivotal game moments. The retry button completely nullifies that. To me, it's like using God mode or skipping a level in an FPS game. Or using an infinite resources command in an RTS game. Or maxing out your stats and all power/level-ups in an RPG game. It's no different because it's totally subverting a main obstacle that's meant to be overcome by means that the game itself offers you. When the retry button came along, it took that challenge away, nullifying death (like Lamb said) by making it totally pointless and a mere nuisance compared to the immense foreboding shadow that hangs over your head throughout the game like it used to be.
Deaths are far more effective when there's a chance of losing everything without a way back, except the long journey you came from. Yes, it is punishment to the player. Rightful punishment. For failing. As it should be. Like anything else.
Does anyone on the other side of the fence see my point yet? How about this as a compromise? And I ask this to people on both sides of the fence.....limited retries? Without the option to save exactly where you want to. That's the only alternative I can come up with that makes any sense. Similar to the "continue?" countdown in arcade games. If you run out of quarters you have to start all over.
But if there was an option in the menu to turn retry off in the UI, that would solve the problem of temptation. Since Telltale games started having hints, they've always had the option to turn off hints in the UI. The Walking Dead has options to turn off the Back to the Future style mission messages as well (and there has almost always been the option to turn off text names of objects, and The Walking Dead lets you turn off highlighting of clickable spots). Having the options in the menu to transparently make the game as easy or hard as you want the game to be seems like a good solution for both newcomers, those more used to LucasArts-style adventures, and Sierra veterans.
You can make the same argument about in-game hints, and that's not something that's likely to change in Telltale's games. And I personally don't care. I don't mind that people use them. You can turn them off in the menu, so if you don't want to see the hints you never will. If you can do the same with retries, there's really no issue.
That would cut away a large chunk of the current adventure game market who likes a more casual adventure game. I don't think the game should actively turn away that market, when they can let you control the difficulty of your game transparently. It works well for The Walking Dead, and it worked well for the Sam & Max games, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures, Strong Bad, and Tales of Monkey Island in the past.
I do think that they should up the difficulty level of the puzzles though. The in game help is there for people who are more casual adventure gamers, so Telltale should take that into consideration. The highest level of help since Back to the Future has been hand-holding gamers on exactly how to solve puzzles, so there shouldn't be any problem getting casual gamers past hard puzzles that way if they want to use the highest level of hints.
On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if Telltale's King's Quest does include deaths, because they are one of the most distinguishing traits of the series, and they can be introduced without turning the design of the game into a cheap mess. The usefulness of a retry button (although I think they will include one anyway) depends on how they approach this: if the death scenes are introduced in a remotely reasonable way, there should be some ways of predicting and avoiding them if you play somewhat carefully, so a retry button is not really needed. If they are introduced in an unfair, completely unpredictable way, there is actually no ability involved, just pure trial and error. Therefore, the retry button could be useful, so the player doesn't have to compulsively save the game when entering every single screen, just in case a thunder falls randomly from the sky and kills Graham.
Regarding turning off the retry button, if that was to happen, it would have to be unavailable to re-enable once the game has started. You can always turn in-game hints on again whenever you want currently. I don't like the idea of customizing the game rules while the game is still playing. Ideally, I'd like hints to be grayed out once the game has started as well. It just feels like cheating. Customizing your game experience before starting and then being forced to stick to it is something I would prefer.
I look at it more as introducing these gamers to new experiences and challenges. I don't really agree with the idea that people get exactly what they want out of a game they've never played before. Where's the fun in that?
Many other Sierra games, however (especially the earlier ones, as I said), would be more like an FPS in which you are randomly shot dead by an invisible enemy. Most people wouldn't like that FPS.
However I generally don't like dead ends. I can live with those if I know in advance that dead ends are possible and I know to save my game before doing something with an item which might have limited uses etc. In early King's Quest games dead ends didn't bother that much, because replaying the whole game didn't take much time if you knew what you were doing, but I doubt I would enjoy if in TTG's King's Quest I couldn't finish the Episode 5, because of a wrong dialogue choice in Episode 1 or something like that.
As for Space Quest, oddly enough there is a fan game that as far as I know has no ingame deaths. Shocking as it may be
Like I said it's difficult to imagine King's Quest game where you can't die, but dying isn't as integral part of the game experience as it was in Space Quest series. In Space Quest games deaths were one of the most enjoyable part and I often killed Roger on purpose just to see what happens to him.
But I agree that dying was important part of the challenge in every early Sierra adventures, in later games deaths were less frequent and for example in Gabriel Knight games, despite the horror themes, there was only few places where Gabriel could die. And also in the later King's Quest games dying became less important. In King's Quest VII there was a retry button which allowed you to retry from the start of the scene and in Mask of Eternity dying happened only when you lost all your hit points, but that happened only rarely because battles were easy and there was always plenty of healing items available.
If you were smart and/or experienced enough to use them.....ahhhh, see? I don't see this as any different. It's not THAT hard to avoid deaths in the older KQ games either.
Except that sometimes it is relatively hard to avoid deaths and it requires plenty of saving. I would assume that almost everyone died few times because of the cave troll in KQIV. Climbing the beanstalk in KQ1 is also a pain in the bottom, because it's not obvious which is the safe route to climb and if you don't know the danger zones in the forest wolf or ogre can come out of nowhere and kill Graham. Only by learning those places of danger with plenty of trial and error you can avoid deaths.
I mean, come on now. It's obviously dangerous to climb a beanstalk. Anyone can realize this. This allows you to realize that you'll need to probably save here just in case. There's two screens of beanstalk before reaching the top. Once you reach one screen, you save again just in case (I'd bet money that a retry in this area would start you at the beginning of the beanstalk and not exactly where you were, if retries were in this game). Once you continue doing it you get a feel for how the game works. In both the AGI and SCI remake of KQ1 you have to position your hands (not feet) on the beanstalk. Once you realize this it's incredibly easy. I get it first try every time. It's not hard to understand. And it's not trial and error. At least not to the point you're exaggerating it to. It takes experimenting and there's nothing wrong with that. I consider that a puzzle.
And even if people were having trouble, once they finally reach the top there's that incredible sense of accomplishment at defeating that game hurdle. Of course it's annoying to see Graham fall to his death time after time, but that just makes the reward even better. Much better than if it was impossible to die or if there was a retry on each beanstalk screen. It'd just be another annoying sequence without any reward whatsoever.
Hate on deaths all you want, but they make the game more exciting and more rewarding. You're missing out if you only play games without deaths. This is why I prefer Sierra games to LucasArts games. They're just more exciting and more rewarding. The makeup for it in LA games is that the dialogue is funny and entertaining.
I didn't say that I hate deaths. I said that dying had more important role as part of the challenge in the early Sierra games than in later ones. And I also said that I think that dying is part of the King's Quest games. And while I said that in early King's Quest games you have to die sometimes before you can figure out the right solution, it doesn't mean that I don't accept it as part of the challenge (although I'm not good in climbing scenes and have tendency to walk over the edge especially if DOSBox cycles are accidentally set to bit too fast). None of those statements means that I hate deaths.
My personal favourite is KQIV where deaths are still quite frequent (cave troll, shark etc.) and it has dead ends too and it even has a time limit. But none of those bother me at all, because it's a good and challenging game.
Amen.
That said.. most dead ends where not put in their on purpose... and I really do not want to see dead ends return now.
Besides, as it's been pointed out, it's not like most of the dead ends in Sierra's older games were a deliberate and pondered choice (death scenes, on the other hand, were definitely a design choice). Many if not most of them were just there as a result of poor, lazy design.
OK. I thought that you were still answering to my post.
If game allows only one save, then I usually make backup copy of my saved game after every session. I don't fear dead ends, but I have occasionally experienced corrupted saves and then it's a good to have backup saves so you don't have to start new game.
I still like how it was done in KQ1VGA, KQ5 and KQ6 (and a lesser extent in 7) the best with the pop ups with a funny message and sometimes a special animation, much like the space quest deaths. Like space quest I loved discoveryimg how you could kill off a character. In the earliest KQ they sometimes had special animations to show a death like graham turning into a green possessed zombie and committing suicide, or turning purple afte drinking poison water. Rosella becoming a zombie too. Sometimes you gotta go out of your way to discover some of the deaths.
http://gamecritics.com/guest-critic/the-slow-decay-of-survival-horror
As for King's Quest... I've never been a fan of dead ends, seeing as how they force you to start the game all over again, which isn't something I find a particularly pleasant thing to do (having been forced to do so in action games due to glitches, most recently in Lego Harry Potter). I'm not usually into deaths in adventure games either (unless there's plenty of warning), though I will concede that when done well, allowing the player to die can add a lot of tension and intensity to a story - provided you disable saving during the scene in question, otherwise you can accidentally save mere seconds before you die and essentially screw yourself over (Hi, 7 Days a Skeptic!).
But given how the KQ series is known for both, how about this. When you first start the game, you're given an option. Classic or Modern? If you select 'Classic', you get no hints and no option to retry when you die, just like the good old days. If you select 'Modern', then hints are available should you need them (while still being disabled in the options for people who want a compromise) and when you die, you go back to a nearby checkpoint to try again.
Best of both worlds?
I would like a Demon's Souls / Dark Souls way of doing things; it was not easy and it didn't hold your hand, yet if you missed an item / killed an NPC they were not integral to finish the game but you missed out on these items which could have helped you or learned more about the story.
I know they are not the same genre but my worst experience with Sierra games as a kid were those unwinnable situations and the completely obtuse puzzles (KQ4 etc)
That's why I mentioned both.
Oh, why am I getting into this again...never mind.
Either way, there are multiple opinions on the subject and the very fact that there's a sizable audience out there for Sierra style games means that it's not bad game design. People enjoy it. No group of people can call it bad game design when even one person appreciates it. And there's far more than one person that does.
No one said that games should be easy and only hold your hand. We as lovers of adventure games and other types such as RPG's etc don't want to have everything handed to us. But it does not justify ruining your whole game because you didn't have that one item.
I recently replayed first King's Quest and Space Quest games. Sure there are some unwinnable situations, but most are relatively easy to avoid if you explore the locations carefully. And even if you have to restart, so what? Those games aren't long and if you know what you're doing you can play those from start to finish in hour or two. You spend at least the same time in replaying one mission of modern shoot em up game, because you accidentally saved over your only save just before sniper's shot kills you.
Hence why I brought up the Demon's/Dark Souls concept.
Dead ends? No way. Most dead ends ocurred when a player followed a path that altered from the one intended by the designer. This often meant that if a player decided to follow a path other than the most obvious one, because they wanted to experience every delicious morsel of the game possible prior to advancing the story, they would often end up stuck in the game with no way to continue. What's worse, the games never told the player they had just entered a dead end, so the player is forced to go back and continuosly beat their head against the wall thinking there might still be some hope of advancing if they could just figure out the solution to the puzzle. A puzzle that didn't even exist. This can reduce an adventure game to a methodical labor of clicking every item on every object in every screen sequentially until you hopefully hit the sweet spot. Only with a dead end, you would exhaust that process and still be stuck. What is the point in punishing the player by causing them that level of frustration, uncertainty and wasted time. Dead ends are bad in gaming in general. Their level of bad is compounded exponentially in adventure games.
The control must be in the hands of the player. That's a truth that works on multiple levels and on multiple arguments. Excessive cutscenes, for example.
I agree with this. Why should adventure game have checkpoints (I don't oppose those, but I just don't think those are necessary, because good player saves often). But I admit that while I play many games in "ironman mode" it doesn't serve much purpose in adventure game unless there are dead ends, because you'll just end up doing the same things again. If we could get rid of that, then I think that a great adventure game could have dead ends, but it also should offer alternative solutions, so you could still save the situation if you didn't pick some object in first scene. But the alternative solution should be more difficult to achieve (and you still could miss it) and you would also miss the chance to get perfect score.
The checkpoints can be as far back as you like. Hell, you could even replace them with autosaves made every half an hour or so. But if you're going to punish players just because they didn't have the frame of mind to physically save the game in case they happened to die, then you're still punishing players. That's never cool.
Yes - checkpoints can remove tension, and they can make certain sections repetitive. But if that's the price I have to pay to avoid starting over or having to lose an hour's worth of progress, then I'm more than happy to pay it.
It's the same failure in understanding game design that led to Jurassic Park's removing of walking around between scenes because "it's annoying to take the time to walk from place to place when you can just go there with a click". Well, golly gee why don't we just remove all interactiveness in a game then? It's annoying to take the time to actually play through the game, let's just get to the ending and see how it all turns out! You're not really playing the game anymore anyway. You're watching it. And that's all games are becoming now. Cinematic. Gameplay-less. And then after you fail a number of times it starts making things easier for you to make sure you beat it like hints, or dynamic game difficulties, etc. They make you feel at first like you're an amazing gamer and you solved/beat it, but really all you did was follow the signs and follow them down the brightly lit and completely safe path, instead of finding your own way through the dark woods with dangers everywhere, so to speak. Some games even offer you the option of skipping the section if you fail too many times!! It's insane!!
Are games progressing? No, they're devolving and getting more and more dumbed down to appeal to the LCD, resulting in gaming trash. That's why I appreciate games like Super Meat Boy and Binding of Isaac for pulling no punches and slamming you right in the face with its difficulty. Sure it can make you livid sometimes, but then after you beat it that feeling of satisfaction is like nothing else. Sierra games were the same way, until they added retries.
I'm sorry, if the price means losing my enjoyment of my game, then I refuse to pay it.