The commentary on rewards reminds me of your other video on "slog" and how to reward open world exploration. Giving story beats or background information as a reward ties the player back into the story and the world, rather than potentially pushing them into the more mechanical aspects and/or disappointing them with some quantifiable item/money/whatever. Tangentially related is something I remember from playing Spec Ops: The Line. There's a few fairly difficult missions where the player is following the orders of someone (Riggs) they assume is acting in their best interest, but who betrays them at the end. After this, there's a scene where Riggs is trapped under debris, and the player can either kill him and end his suffering as he requests, watch him burn, or just walk away. By choosing to not kill him and instead watch him burn as a kind of "fuck you", I was able to vent frustration from repeatedly failing the missions and being betrayed, but I was also pulled further into the story's themes by questioning my own morality for a few minutes (even on my second playthrough, heh). Spec Ops: The Line is a surprisingly compelling game in general, considering the actual mechanics (third person cover-based shooter) are basic and sometimes janky.
On a similar note, something I would like to see more is games without a "current objective" screen or waypoints (there arent many anymore). It forces the dev to make everything feel intuitive, prevents them from overloading the player with too many missions, and prompts exploration if/when the player gets lost. I've been replaying the original Kingdom Hearts on PC with a mod that lets me TP through walls, so I could get a good look at the level design and etc. And because I had been skipping all of the cutscenes, I found myself lost and without a clue where to go next (even though I've played this game 5+ in my life), and to my surprise, there's no way to check what you're actually supposed to be doing. It made me appreciate how well the game flows when you play it the right way.
I think letting the player make their own to-do list is often the most powerful, because each player knows what they find interesting about any given task. But it does require some care!
I like the last few videos the asset flips the puzzles and mission design followed by player choice and things like that! u would love the game infra it is a good example of all of this put together. an overall mission and things to do along the way with POIs littered throughout. you can backtrack! mixed the random and things and interesting use of assets like bottles and turds underneath a busy bridge it’s rough and can leave you with questions but you’ll make yourself laugh filling in gaps. If u don’t decide to play watch the play through by real civil engineer. I promise you will enjoy more than the game I already forgot the name of !
Well, originally that's what this video was going to be about. For example, the mission to "kill 92 wolves" is a grind mission. If it's in the background, it doesn't bother you. But if you're like me and think of missions as something to actively do, it sabotages your interest. Even if I wanted to go kill wolves on my own, I would have thought of each fight as progress towards some personal objective that wasn't too far away. Having that replaced with each fight being 2% of some imposed mission actively makes the fights less interesting for me.
@@CraigPerko there is also an aspect of implicit and explicit missions - explicit - talk to the king , implicit - i found out about a plot to kill the king, i need to find a way to stop it (solution: talk to the king) . I think grinding, if needed, should always be implicit and in my opinion should involve the main game loop as this is the main reason to play the game. Hades is great in that aspect, making you take more runs in order to advance the plot. I think the best missions feel like they are self imposed but actually were engineered to be self imposed by the desingers (like the 'let's see what is this tower over there' feeling you get from a great open world design).
@@z90u6r200 There's a blurry line between explicit and implicit quests, though. After all, the dev put the king in the world. The dev put the fighting and the wolves. How much the dev forces a player's gaze is part of the question, for sure. For me, the question is how to have the situation - explicit or implicit - result in a tidy, compelling todo list when the player gets close.
On the topic of player mental checklist, ambiguity/ unkown information is important. If the player understands exactly what steps to take, and there is no unkown or variable information then it feels 'solved' and is ticked of the mental checklist, but it still needs to be performed which feels tedious.
Interesting. I'm thinking about how in some games I avoid the "main story" missions to focus on low-stakes stuff. I wonder if, as per your video, it's because the significance of what I'm doing in the main story isn't clearly marked. And main story stuff can be very on-rails, with a lot of cutscenes, that just seems less fun than tearing round an open world exploring and getting into scrapes.
I think self-made objectives are really powerful. Maybe it's because when you make your own to-do list, it's weighted optimally for you. Since you made it.
