To demonstrate, I'll refer to two characters from the original Baldur's Gate. Alora was a particularly cheery halfling thief that you could only get to join your party if you happened to go to Hall of Wonders at night. Alternatively, there was the character Skie, where you had to traipse around with a bard named Eldoth (who was somewhat annoying) and take him to a particular location to get her into the party. For Alora, it required that you be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right to get her to join your party. For Skie, you had to keep Eldoth around and potentially travel with him for quite some time. How many people really would have ended up using these characters?
Alora and Skie, rare party members
The point here is that content in general should be made fairly accessible to the player. I have no problem with content being located in an obscure location; say, I have to visit the abandoned building off the market at midnight. But, there should be something (maybe a book, scrap of paper or an overheard conversation) that I could reasonably encounter as part of my ordinary adventure to indicate that I have to follow this set of steps to find this additional content. I'm not saying that everything should be handed to the player on a silver platter, and there should be some content that players must search for. That content is a reward for the dedicated player, but typically should be a relatively small amount of content. Perhaps the only exception might be if you're playing a sandbox game where exploration itself is a major part of the gameplay.
We should be careful not to confuse content that comes around as a result of consequence with content that comes about because of exploration of a location in obscure circumstances. The two are completely different things.
Compare and contrast:
- A sidequest with two alternate paths of content because of a choice the player makes, each amounting to 2 hours playtime each. 95% of players will experience this content, and the two alternate content paths are experienced by approximately 50% of that player base.
- A sidequest with one linear path amounting to approximately 5 hours playtime. 95% of players will not experience this content because it can only be discovered through an obscure series of events.
Both might take approximately the same amount of development time, but the former offers far greater value for the player base in terms of average hours of gameplay per hours of developer time.
Miranda will be unhappy if you don't do her side quest...
But designers must also not confuse easily-accessible with optional. Some players explore every nook and cranny, talk to every NPC and generally try to exhaust every available option within the game. However, these players are not the norm. The statistics for both Dragon Age and Mass Effect were that approximately 50% of people finished the either game. That's right, only half of the people who played the games finished them. Content that is extremely difficult for players to find is probably only going to be experienced by a very small percentage of the player base.
I'm not arguing that content should be stripped down to cater for the lowest common denominator, but designers have to understand their audience and what will make their game popular. If content is not accessible in a reasonably straightforward manner, it will be missed by a large proportion of the player base. Designers should reward the curious player, but they have to keep in mind that if they only cater to 5% of their potential audience when making AAA titles, they're probably not going to be making a commercially successful game.
Posts
"but typically should be a relatively small amount of content." With the 20 or so companions in BG1, Alora and Skie are a relatively small amount of content.
ReplyDelete"95% of players will experience this content" Is it really a sidequest anymore then? At what point is it a sidequest versus a "sidequest that everyone does so it's not really a side-quest"
"only half of the people who played the games finished them." That can also mean the game wasn't good, or 5000 hours long, or impossibly hard. DAO I understand is very long, 100+ hours easily.
"but designers have to understand their audience and what will make their game popular." To whom? Not all games need to or should strive for mass market 10 million sales popular. Smaller titles can actually give a developer more ability to add the 5% audience detail. Adding some non-voiced 2d sprite models for example is probably easier than adding multiple new fully voiced and animated 3d models (other time like writing and such is probably the same).
"With the 20 or so companions in BG1, Alora and Skie are a relatively small amount of content."
ReplyDeleteYes, Alora and Skie are a small amount of content. But what if they were companions on par with companions from NWN2, ME1/2 or DAO? Suddenly the hit is a lot bigger.
""95% of players will experience this content" Is it really a sidequest anymore then?"
It's still optional content. If the designers/writers have created a hook that attracts 95% of players to play it, then they've obviously done something right.
"Not all games need to or should strive for mass market 10 million sales popular".
Hence why I specified "AAA titles". Smaller games with small budgets can potentially afford to take more risks and more their games a little less accessible.
Again, it comes down to knowing your audience. If you have a target audience who will love 2D sprites and will meticulously explore every square centimetre of your world, then by all means cater to that demographic. That is making content "accessible" to your target audience.
If half the people didn't complete DA:O, that was because of the ridiculous, unnecessary length of the game. Content was there just to reach that playtime target of 60 or whatever hours. Trim down Deep Roads to 2 dungeon levels, the Nature of the Beast quest to a better designed dungeon, one lesser floor in the Circle Tower and remove those Mages' Collective, mercenaries and Chanter's Board frills and you will have a higher percentage of gamers completing it. None of what I mentioned above offer anything more than killing a few monsters/people or doing some Fedex quests. Pack the main quest content more densely and design meaningful side-quests and it will be enjoyed more.
ReplyDeleteAccessibility to content can be a reward in itself - for pursuing certain conversations in depth or exploring areas that need not be explored as part of the main story-arc or for trying things differently. It need not be easily accessible to everyone nor should hints to that be easily accessible to everyone.
"But what if they were companions on par with companions from NWN2, ME1/2 or DAO? Suddenly the hit is a lot bigger."
How? In DA, you can play with at most 3 companions out of the 10 available (compared to 5 out of 20 in BG). With the forums, promos and internet usage these days, you would likely know that you've lost out if you didn't find those companions and the player can make it a point to find them on the next play-through.
"It's still optional content. If the designers/writers have created a hook that attracts 95% of players to play it, then they've obviously done something right."
It's not a hook. There is no hook. Your argument is to make everything readily available so that the players won't miss it. That's different from a hook. You are also trivializing the amount of players who replay games and take a real interest in playing and trying to find out everything the game offers. I am sure they would amount to more than 5%.
In the end, I think we'll disagree on this anyway :) but my take is that content is made more accessible nowadays because the devs can't create content that becomes optional or obscure. This is not due to game design but more due to the constraints involving VO, levels, etc.
I think we're debating slightly at cross purposes here. Accessibility of content and the quality of that content are two different things. True, they both combine to create the average playtime for a game, but I would imagine most designers would prefer quality of quantity. Issues like budgets and marketing are likely what results in shallow content like the board quests in DAO.
ReplyDeleteThe Deep Roads needed some serious trimming, and I'd be the first to argue that. I wholeheartedly agree that there are sections of DAO that feel a bit like a grind rather than an enjoyable dungeon romp.
In DA you can recruit everyone into your party and you can talk with them whenever you like. Sure, you're missing out on the content from when they're in your party, but there's still plenty of dialogue to be had in the party camp. Also, you mentioned the words "next play-through". Given the completion rate, anyone who plays more than once immediately falls into the "dedicated player" niche.
Optional content is optional! Let's take Melicamp the talking chicken from BG. It's a totally optional quest that is pretty easy to find, but it has a great hook, meaning that if a player finds it, they're more than likely to go complete it.
What if we transform an example from DAO? The "Blood of Warning" quest from the Mages Collective. The "hook" is some text on a board asking you to help relatives of blood mages. Now imagine that instead of the board, someone from the Mages Collective approaches you and ask you to meet them in an abandoned building in a back alley. They won't even tell you why. That is a hook, and is more likely to pique the player's interest and get them to complete the quest. Admittedly the quest should have better content than clicking on a few doors, but again, that's an argument of quality, not accessibility.
It's definitely a budget issue. Why spend a large amount of time (and money) on content that only a handful of people are going to experience?
The Shattered War has a reasonable amount of optional content, and some players will not experience all of it. Heck, players will be forced to replay if they want to experience all of the content that is available. But because I'm taking that route, I'm not going to hide quest givers in some hidden corner of the map. I'm aiming for a shorter game that will have more engaging quests, choices and consequences.