that -5 strength scene makes me wonder, are there any RPGS out there that only let you select an option BECAUSE you have such a low score? Like having a low strength score could allow a bandit to ignore you for someone that is a bigger threat, which now allows you to make your move on them!
Join The Misha Movement There is something similar in Witcher 3. One of the 5 sigils, the magic of the game, is mind control. Of you upgrade it, you can unlock dialog choices that are usually about evading a fight.
Join The Misha Movement Fallout 1 and 2 did - if you ever started with an Intelligence of 3 or less, your entire interaction with the NPCs changed because you were now too dumb to converse properly. Many quests became impossible to take, but a couple of the remaining quests suddenly had new special paths to success, and some secrets and even hidden quests could only be obtained with low INT scores.
When playing Monster Hunter with others, i find that a vary common reaction for players is that when you have just finished hunting a new monster for the first time, everyone always runs to the crafting NPC just to see what new weapons and/or armor they may have unlocked. I guess that would fall under Content Discovery?
Easter-Egg Discovery Bug Discovery Pay-wall Discovery DLC Discovery Disappointment Discovery And the discovery of all the types of discovery, which we're going to call: Discovery discovery
Do we have possitive Extra-Discoveries also apart from Easter Eggs? Like: SELF-DISCOVERY Uhh ... to learn something about yourself as a real person thanks to a game. Could there be a Wisdom-Discovery? Some narrative or mechanical knowledge that theaches you a rare real world lesson?
A really good example for Mechanical Discovery is, in my opinion, Transistor. The game tells you that you can upgrade your functions with other functions, but doesn't tell you to try out specific combinations. It lets you just play around with your abilities and if you figure out an especially useful combination, you feel like a _genius_. And then the game goes "Oh, by the way, here's a second upgrade slot." and the amount of combinations climbs up to ridiculous levels. In some of the Challenge rooms, you are even limited to only a few, select functions, pushing the player even further. If you ask 10 Transistor players about what their favorite function combinations are, you'll get 10 different answers and they will all tell you at length why it's so good. In fact, Transistor uses Narrative Discovery to give players an incentive to experiment with the functions because you get specific bits of backstory if you use functions in different ways. Using those bits of backstory, you can start to piece together what is actually going on.
For mechanical discovery- Magicka The magic combinations can be really volatile. For example, using ice your first element gives a shotgun effect, something it's really easy to discover. Then you might find out you can spray an enemy with water, then freeze them solid with cold. You might start using cold+lightning to keep entire crowds at arm's length, or get things wet to amplify lightning damage. Or you might find out you can use arcane to explode your friend's healing beams :3
Harvey Chesterfield And then there's the random craziness that occurs when you try to spell words using only QWERASDF without breaking the elemental combination rules. (Long-time Yogscast fans will know EXACTLY what I mean.)
My personal favorite form of discovery is mechanical, particularly when the discovery is not of a new mechanic or even of a previously unknown detail of an old mechanic but rather a handful of mechanics which are discovered to interact in a novel fashion. The purest example I can think of is Transistor's weapon design mechanics: combining the same two or three functions in different orders can have a huge impact on that attack (Transistor also cleverly uses the promise of narrative discovery to encourage players to experiment more with the mechanics in this way). I suspect this sort of combinatorial thinking might be the key to getting a handful of mechanics to provide several radically different gameplay experiences, but that's a different discussion altogether.
Darkar Dengeno And don't forget some of the Challenge rooms where the game goes "Here's a small handful of functions, go nuts." and you very often have to try out combinations that you would otherwise never even think about.
Nixitur Good point! I remember picking up new tactics in the Challenge rooms that were very useful in the rest of the game. I also found it interesting that some of the challenges gave access to functions that the player might not have unlocked, providing a bit of a mechanical teaser.
TwilitKage Yeah, despite a bunch of minor flaws like not being able to pick your online team or withholding character suit/weapon set customization, it still is a great IP and I'd love to know how Nintendo obtained such a massive following for a game that is conceptually "standard" in terms of TPS-gameplay.
Pedro Gusmão A good game is vital for sure, but alone I feel it's a gamble because enough people need to actually adopt the game before word of mouth can spread. I've heard a lot of good things about S.T.E.A.M. for example yet it flopped. Looking at some recent sales numbers from Japan the WiiU has been crushing the PS4 and now even 3DS hardware sales thanks to Splatoon. The bump in WiiU sales even exceeds the bump from Mario Kart 8's release! gematsu.com/2015/06/media-create-sales-6115-6715 All this from a title that, while critically praised, also only has an 81 metacritic score. edit: in case the contrary came across I wanna make it clear I really do enjoy Splatoon. The game has been impossible for me to put down lately :)
Also I saw the comment at the end of the video: I am SO glad side quest worked and I hope this gives birth to a whole new world of content from you guys.
Kingdom hearts has awesome narrative discovery. With it's vast, complex, and mysterious backstory and lore, kingdom hearts is the type of game that I not only play for hours upon hours, but I can spend just as much time talking about it, discussing the various implications of the events and hints that are scattered throughout the series, and then trying to predict what could happen later in the game because of the backstory that we piece together, and then it's even more amazing to get the next game and discover what parts turned out to be true, what parts were different than we'd expected, and the various new implications we could discover because of the events and revelations that were in the new game, and then the cycle begins anew.
Ryu D "vast, complex"...sound about right xD I mean, I love the games, but the story is utterly stupid, and surprisingly is not for being the story of a teenager stranded in cartoon worlds with Donald and Goofie :P
Diego Valencia It is true that it's completely unrealistic, but that doesn't mean it's stupid, or in any way bad. You just have to get into the reality within the game, rather than being held back by the reality we all have to live in. It's a deep and detailed world (or World, as the case may be), and it's astonishing how much of it makes sense once you really think about it, so long as you're able to look at it within the context of the game.
Ryu D It astounds me how many deeper concepts are within the Kingdom Hearts games and lore. Lots of philosophy in there, which I adore. I loved the first game as a teenager when it first came out, and I still adore them as an adult now. My siblings and I literally spend hours talking and hypothesizing on KH's narrative discovery.
Emarella Yeah, and one interesting aspect that they wove into the lore is a sense of uncertainty, due to much of the lore being revealed to you by way of reports that were written by people with their own views and agendas, and research reports at that, so you're actually more inclined to question the conclusions they came to, and analyze every bit of information that comes your way, looking deeper into the story than you would have if it had just given you the facts.
I feel like often designers forget about a very important detail that makes discovery/exploration more pleasant and interesting: foreshadowing. While it is enjoyable to explore a world you know nothing about and that you have no idea how it's going to look, you need some form of foreshadowing to really enjoy it. If you see a far away mountain in the mist while playing minecraft and it seems to look odd, you will feel the curiosity necessary to see how it is, and you might feel some form of satisfaction when being near to them. When you read about mew and mewtwo the first time in the lab, you get curious about these two unknown pokémon and when you get to find mewtwo, the joy of discovery is immense. Some games just provide a world to explore, but that falls flat if you don't have a warped and unclear vision of what's waiting for you beforehand. One thing that is often avoided is unclear and "wrong" foreshadowing, but I think that could actually bring to some very interesting games. Imagine thinking that you should find the "island of the gods" somewhere in the ocean in a gritty medieval sailing game, the position of that island in the maps is varying and unclear, but you manage to understand more or less where it's supposed to be, and when you get there you find something completely different, maybe an island full of resources and with the ruins of an ancient civilisation, but nothing like what you expected. I think this kind of "betrayal" of the expectations hasn't been done enough, and the transformation of "exploration" to "investigation" could be brought to a whole new level with the right thinking.
That's actually a very cool idea. Though it have to be made within the world itself, maybe a bard singing about it or a crazy old man blabbaling what everyone else thinks is nonsense.
TsukuneD I think that's something that most medieval/fantasy games can do by default even though game makers completely avoid it. I have been playing with this idea for a while since I wrote my thesis in medieval cartography about phantom islands of the atlantic ocean. Before the sailing era the actual knowledge of the shape of the known world was a chaotic disaster and after sailing restarted to be an important thing the knowledge of the places that were still being explored was very unclear. Everyone tends to forget that there was no print and no way to calculate longitude, so if someone went to an island that they thought was new, they would draw it on their map, and then a map maker would try to position it somewhere where it made somewhat sense on the maps that they sold, then another mapmaker would add it to theirs with additional mistakes and so on and so forth. This brought easily to some islands that weren't supposed to be in the maps, then people started inventing curious legends about them, and these would appear in maps as well. All of this to say that having a clear map of the world that tells you exactly where you are in a fantasy game is a pretty weird thing and it could be very easy to have a new interesting mechanic by making it feel even more "natural" than usual, especially if magic/technology to travel and communicate is not advanced. Even in sci-fi considering how hard space travel can be in certain settings, this kind of extremely warped idea of what to find in certain planets and places can be very easy to implement without having to make it feel "unnatural".
That would make it simple foreshadowing, not really applied to exploration inside the game to make it into an investigative mechanic. It seems more of a marketing concept than a game design concept when it is about creating hype about another game, but not really bringing anything on the table for the game it is in. It's still a good idea though.
Do you mean you haven't seen foreshadowing a spinoff or that you haven't seen foreshadowing things to explore inside the game? I think I've seen foreshadowing of game sequels, even though a spinoff is a little bit different.
I think I am having the best example for how an exploration game turns out without having any foreshadowing at all: Terraria. If you wanna succeed in that game, you need to read the wiki. Cause it will tell you nothing, nearly nothing about why you're here, what you can do, how to explore and what you need to do in order to progress in the game. The only thing presented in the beginning is what items can be crafted by the items the player currently has inside his inventory. And probably the knowledge about the items the mercants sell later in the game. This is also the main reason Terraria is often wrongly labled as Minecraft in 2D: Because the first few nights play like Minecraft in 2D. And many people just quit before this game actually becomes interesting: Because they think they already know the concept without even having heared of what treasure may lay deep under the ground (literally, you need to dig in order to get the true Terraria feeling). I've also seen Dark Souls attempting your forshadowing technique by showing item descriptions during the loading screens. Although I don't think this is a good idea: By doing that FROM SOFTWARE takes away the "I never even knew that thing existed"-feeling completely. And since there is nothing completely sectet, nothing you haven't heared of yet, the sense for exploration gets mostly lost
that's one of the things I love about FO4 - finding some empty, half-decimated house, and piecing together what happened there by way of holotapes, notes, terminal entries, and the like, and even then, you piece it together bit by bit. You have to find all of the pieces to get the story for that place (and sometimes I still wonder if I missed something).
I remember when I played my first pokemon (ememald) and I found the secret regi cave. That was an amazing experience with exploration, with the deciphering of braille and then scouring the world for the regis. It's an adventure I will never forget.
***** I know what you mean! It was a really cool experience figuring that stuff out on your own. I had a little dictionary given to me by my elementary school and it had braille translated in the back, so I used it.
The instruction booklet of emerald actually had braille on the back, i never figured out why it was there. The moment I figured it out is probably the most magical exploration experience I've had in any game.
I don't understand the Great Ball part, to me those are just like upgrading your equipments in any other games. Just like how you can potentially beat any monsters with a weak weapon if you're good enough, you can potentially catch any wild Pokemons with a normal Pokeball if you're insistent or lucky enough, not to mention the catch rates of each zones are often designed to fit to this evolving supply of Pokeballs you obtain, I don't see how it inspires you to go back and explore some old places like Dan is talking about. If you're talking about Dusk, Repeat or maybe Net Ball, where they are (kinda) terrain specific in use, then I can understand, but Great Ball just doesn't fit that bill at all, you're not going to need a Great Ball to catch a Caterpie, nor do you need it to find a rare Pokemon or a shiny either.
Reito Shizaki It varies from player to player I suppose. I know I'm never likely to try and catch an Onix or the second Snorlax unless I have some ultra balls in hand. I think perhaps that HM and/or TM with terrain effects might be a better example. In some Pokemon games getting Cut adds a whole new dimension to the first couple of routes, then Surf adds another, and may lead you to items that help you evolve certain Pokemon, interesting NPC's, etc.
Reito Shizaki I agree. Better Pokeballs just give you a better chance of catching new pokemon, not finding new ones. I guess what they were going for is some pokemon that have low catch rates, like Onix, that you find at some point where you don't have better pokeballs to try and catch it with a good chance of success, but later on you find Great or Ultraballs and then you have better chances, so you decided "Ok, now I want to try it again". Still, they could have used the HMs and field-effect TMs as an example, like yellowtheyellow said... Guess they (put glasses on) dropped the ball there B-) -Ok, fine, I'll leave... =C-
The part where they talk about spoiler lists says: the card does the thing. this other card does a slightly different thing. this is the best card. It's banned probably. good luck finding this card. this card works with another card. this card does not work with another card. this card is a card. this card is purple??? I have no idea what to say about...(trails off screen) if your still reading...(trails off screen) scott is ...(trails off screen)
Witcher 3 maybe the best in my experience of exploration most of it contains: " Oh hey a griffin... ( sees the red skull) oh fuck a griffin. RUN!!!" and "What a weird bush... That's not a bush. RUN!!!"
Now that you mentioned Dark Souls, i just started playing that game and damn that game hits me hard right in the feelings. The backstories of some of the NPCs and bosses are just amazing and sad. They should have called it Dark Souls: Prepare to Cry Edition because it does make you cry... And not because of the difficulty.
Mechanical discovery, I LOVE this in games. This may be on reason I enjoyed Don't Starve so much. "Oh what's that over there, chances are it's going to kill me but I must find out!"
I love how branching in games like TWD and The Witcher 3 are much more about the moment of making the decision itself rather than the differences between each branch of the history; if you replay these games you realize that the choices you've made often changes very little or even nothing in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't change the fact that they're very meaningful to you the first time you deal with the necessity of making a decision. It's a perfect example of how designers can "deceive" players in order to deliver a great experience.
Yulan Cardoso Finally someone who understands this! Everyone is always bitching about TWD for its lack of decision, but it was the decisions that make my understanding of Lee and Clem unique, even when it didn't change anything.
Yulan Cardoso That's true, but something else the Witcher 3 does well in terms of "branching" is that it usually tries to give some kind of feedback for your decisions wether it's immediate or just casually dropped into a conversation at some point. Even if what you did was ultimately insignificant, they probably accounted for it have and let it stick around instead of giving you Good Guy/Bad Guy points and having it be erased after that.
***** Yeah, I love these comebacks. Some of them are just random encounters that happen so much time after the decision was made that you gotta admire the devs for just putting them in the game.
So, visual novels use narrative discovery to make the player re play the same game but with a completely different plot each time, and even if you miss some scenes by making a certain minor choice it doesn't change mutch because the main plot is the same, you only need to find one of the many ways to get to that good ending.
Mechanical discovery is the reason i find fighting games so enjoyable. You start with something basic like a bnb combo, then u think hmmm... What if i delay this move or end with a different one to set up my opponent for another one and so on
I didn't think I cared much for exploration until I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 60 hours of gameplay and I still have whole chunks of the map that I haven't ventured to.
GW2 discovery panel in the crafting mechanic is a great example of this. You have so much more than just a list of recipes, you get to find every permutation of recipes, and (especially in cooking and artificing) find recipes you may not have suspected existed.
2 years later and there is a game that take those 3 types of exploration and get them to another level, therefore becoming in my opinion the best adventure game of all time: TLOZ: BOTW
Antichamber perfectly combines Mechanical Discovery with Geographic Discovery. It turns out there's a lot you can explore and do from the beginning of the game, but it's not until certain mechanical tricks are taught that you realize that you could have explored certain areas much sooner. It's brilliant.
As confusing as things can be sometimes, and as small as the text is, I'm getting this with Xenoblade Chronicles X right now. You get the joy of just exploring the world, scaling a mountain, swimming into a cave, etc....and then within that cave, maybe you hit a landmark that gives you some safe respawning, or maybe even a probe for convenient fast travel. And then you can use these places to mine for resources or money. And then that whole aspect is tied in to the whole game's economy, letting you upgrade gear, then letting you inch farther into the world map, possibly enabling new missions by making new types of enemies accessible, etc. You practically get rewarded for everything, making all of the game aspects kind of fold into each other and collide at some point.
The fact that the game gives you battle points and EXP for exploration is genius. It means that even if you're not the type of person who goes around slaying every monster you see, you'll still be able to level up and improve the Arts and Skills you use.
Morafo Regnos I get what you're saying, but in my opinion, that works out quite nicely in some scenes. I love every scene where The Way plays. The way the singer, well, _sings_ adds so much to the moment.
Great video as always. I'm hoping we see more Dark Souls esq Narrative Discovery in games. As a side note, you and James have gotten me hooked on Dark Souls. After buying it, attempting it, then forgetting about it after not getting through the early part of the game, I've picked it back up and gotten to the first bell of awakening. Now I can't stop going back to it.
Brendan Kane There is no 'best weapon' at any point of the game. In this case, on level 8 you're most likely not even strong enough to use the Zweihander effectively. Of course you can take it two-handed and then it's probably the strongest weapon you can find for a long time, but it's still slow and you don't have a shield, so you might be better off with the simple longsword which has a great moveset.
Pendragon I think the first Bioshock game may be an excellent example of Narrative discovery with the audio logs. You don't have to listen to any of them, but they enrich the world so much.
The Tales Of... series skit mechanic is one the best ways I've seen to do narrative discovery. You want to see the characters interact all the time in those games. Everything you do triggers one, like the one where you have to eat ice cream on a snow-filled place. And in the end it keeps track of all the skits you've seen.
Moonwalklover well I think it may be funny but it barely adds to the game it’s more of a random choice when it comes too it like let’s say when you fight sans vs that dog guard sans was well crafted and had emotions the dog was a poor silly speed bump
And most of the dialogue was a speed bump other then the other a few specials and sense every fights was designed to feel like a specialty but it flops because you don’t really remember them
One aspect of why undertale's varying dialogue choices (and other kinds of branching choices) work better than other games, is because that game is built around providing the option to play the story more than once. It is not necessary, but it is encouraged. Because of this, additional playthroughs have in universe lore support, and the dialogue and choices have enough variety to properly reward additional playthroughs. In other words, playing the game again not only makes sense in the context of the world, but the narrative experience is also built to accommodate for extra playthroughs. Games like Tell Tale's Walking Dead have far less support built in for second playthroughs (both narratively and mechanically), so replaying scenes to do alternate choices can weaken the experience. It feels more like deconstructing the world to soft reset or replay branching choices in a scene, dismantling the tension and unknown possibilities. It makes a big difference if a game has been designed to be played only once instead of multiple times to see other possibilities.
Wow wow wow, okay, so I'm going back and watching a bunch of episodes I missed, and what you said about Narrative discovery immediately reminded me of Undertale. In that game there is a TON of narrative to discover, but the more you play it, the more the characters start to feel less believable and more like lines of code. The crazy part is, the dilemma of satiating your curiosity at the cost of losing your immersion is DIRECTLY addressed BY THE CHARACTERS in the game (in a certain replay route). This video put it so succinctly MONTHS before the game ever came out. Bravo.
4:38 "Suffice it to say, that there's an open debate in the design community as to whether dialogue choices add or take away from, specifically a sense of narrative discovery within games" Is there any links that could be shared so that one may read either side of the debate?
I'd have to disagree Melee was not an accident, Even some of the trophy's in the game describe some of the minute details of character properties. i.e. you can double jump out of fox's shine.
isaac masters As PudgeTalks pointed out, a lot of Melee's mechanics that have been brought to the fore by the competitive scene were indeed intentionally designed to be so. Of course, the designers didn't (and probably couldn't have) expected people to take those mechanics quite as far as they have, but the mechanics were still designed with competition very clearly in mind. The character trophy descriptions, the balance changes made between the NTSC and PAL versions, and the inclusion of mechanics like L-canceling, which was 100 percent intentional, shows that they had taken into account the fact that people would play for long periods of time and slowly discover various mechanics and ways of using them.
This wondrous feeling of discovery you talk about... Metroid Prime. People keep going on about awful backtracking in this game, but I constantly had that sense of wonder you described in the episode. Metroid Prime especially gave you so many tools and so many places to use them that "backtracking" was a familiar but also new experience.
Transistors mix and match skill system is the single greatest mechanical discovery I have ever experience. I had great "Joy of Discovery" on all fronts really. You guys should do an episode on Transistor and how different and refreshing it was and still is.
content discovery is probably the reason why i played skyrim, the fallout games and the far cry games (and probably many more that have been lost in the depths of my steam account... i really have a problem D:) so much... i have ~250 hours in fonv just because i wanted to see how the game plays if you have 9 luck, 9 strength or 9 survival right from the beginning... and it was a different play through experience each time, in far cry it was more about finding all the places and trying to stealth everything which brought me 80h in this game
Sir Zoidberg Same here for FarCry. Tried to do full stealth, and use very weak weapons with limited ammo (so a bow and a scilenced pistol). Also had a run where I'd never take a com tower because not having the map made the game so much more challenging and scary.
FlyingJetpack1 yeah, i tried a full melee run in far cry 3 which becomes surprisingly easy once you get the chain upgrade for it since most enemys are grouped together and once you get the heavy takedown its just a breeze :D
Christian Weibrecht yeah, that was my biggest complaint with fo3 and fonv... if you start with 9 speech the entire game becomes super easy and leaving it out makes the game incredibly hard when it comes to quests, story line and pretty much everything else npc and money related (in a few cases strength helps because you can scare the npcs into doing what you want)
great video, "discovery" is one of the big reasons im a gamer, i like exploring/cartography/finding secrets, new enemies, new items, new mechanics its also why i love "unfolding" games so much like candy box
In the end Tell Tale's Walking Dead Season 1 had all of 3, maybe four actual choices. The rest of the time, even if given a choice, you really have no choice, as the they all come back to the same outcome. Still a great story and a good game.
jesternario You have a choice as long as you believe you have a choice. Your decisions don't impact the progression of the narrative much, but they do say a lot about you. That's why you have the choices in the first place.
Slail I thought they hit it right on the head in the video: replaying a scene to find out that the choice actually didn't affect the outcome slightly damaged my enjoyment of the game (I think it was when the angry old man dies in Chapter 3). As long as I didn't look at the other result my mind created a much more fleshed-out world than the game actually delivered on. Realizing how the mechanics of the conversation "tree" worked led me to approach each decision in a more analytical way that was, yes, kind of hollow. The strength of Walking Dead really was in its emotional effect so losing even a little bit was too much to ignore.
Peter S I can agree with that. My main beef with telltale is how much they build up your choices in their marketing which is really just a lie at the end of the day. TWD 1 only had one ended, and characters who were going to die were going to die. (And those that you could save died shortly thereafter anyway). That being said, choices making real changes in a story is very resource intensive. So.. I don't know what a good solution is. I think witcher 2 was really cool in that it had two separate branching paths for the game based on who you chose to side with. But then, it was a lot of work for content %50 (made up statistic) of your players aren't likely to see.
Slail I think it was slick design choice (agree with your resource intensive comment). I feel TWD isn't supposed to be replayed really. You made your choices and you have to roll with them. They couldn't stop you replaying but I think if you don't you're left with a fuller experience. I also feel it emphasised the fact you can't control other people's actions: no matter what you do certain people are going to die or go crazy or whatever. I think to call the choices a lie is too simplistic.
Around 2:56 there is some reversed text, it reads; -the card does the thing -the card does a slightly different thing -this is the best card. It's banned probably -good luck finding this card -this card works with another card -this card does not work with another card -this card is a card -this card is purple??? -I have no idea about (cut off) -if you're still reading (cut off) -scott is a (cut off) Extra Credits, I love you and your silly little easter eggs. Keep up the good work! :D
Zelda Ocarina of Time and FF7 were the best exploration games for me. I love riding Epona and wonder around the world of Hyrule. And I love discovering new treasures and secrets hidden in the world of FF7. it was all awesome. I prefer it over Skyrim or other games.
Well if you really think the exploration factor in Ocarina of Time was executed well, ther is A LOT you have missed. Grow Up, Dark Souls, Terraria, Hover, Psychonauts, Mario Odyssey and of course *Breath of the Wild* , just to name some examples
This was a fantastic episode! Exploration and discovery in games has been a big focus of mine at university, and is likely going to be a major focus of my thesis next year. Keep up the great work!
Yeah... Exploration, Discovery, and roleplaying is what got me into playing videogames. To play someone that isn't me or - even better - to play myself doing things I could have never done before. The immersion if games like Fallout and Skyrim (once I had mods for the latter), were great for this, giving me quite literally everything I could ever want. The ability to explore, to get stronger, to learn the lore and find new things, and to be a version of myself while doing it. I still remember one of my favorite things to do in Skyrim, and any other Elder Scrolls game for that matter, was the Dwemer ruins. I loved going through the bigger ones, finding these vast rooms, or narrow corridors and catacombs, and all the while I would be looking around and thinking "I wonder what this room was used for?", or finding homes with place settings, and thinking "This was a house!", or finding some archaic, intimidating construct of precision metal and stone, and pure magical power, and being able to activate them and see them work (like one of the quests for a Scroll). Those were hands-down the best moments in that game for me. The dragons were nothing compared to exploring anything the Dwemer constructed.
I know this is no secret, but Legend of Zelda games have been good at using all four of these types of discovery (less so with narrative discovery, but they've been improving there lately). I live for the "discovery" tune you hear after solving a puzzle.
I think if you're going to allow multiple narratives, you will have to ensure the players won't get stuck with any choice they make. You have to ensure that with every choice, if there is a benefit, there is also a downside, and vice versa. That way, the player won't feel pushed towards any particular choice. Also, one should consider ways to recover from mistaken choices.
L33tImagination Or perhaps, ensuring that every choice feels like the right choice, regardless of which one you take. One example of that are both Devil Survivor games, it has lesser branching narratives leading you towards various very different endings, but all of those feel really good and fulfilling but in different ways. It makes you want to try again, go back and see what's behind the other choices (even moreso when you know it's going to be just as good)
L33tImagination A when I played the Witcher 3 I decided to do a certain choice not knowing the outcome of that choice.......I kinda regret having made that choice but.....yeah, i have to go with it...
what you said about mechanical discovery is my favorite ay because you always get it in fighting games and after you understand everything in the game it compleatly changes how you play and how fun the game is
This is really funny when you are actually studying the different Aesthetics for your finals and during your break you are watching this. Good video ^^
He said it right. Pokemon is a portmanteau of the words "Pocket" and "Monster". Therefore when said the correct pronunciation is "Poh-KAY-mon" I hear people (mostly Americans) mispronounce it as "Poh-KEE-mon" often. The accent aigu above the e is meant to make it a soft e...this rant was less for you and more for the people after you. Sorry.
Please make an episode about parents who think video games are horrible and addictive!!!!!!! IT WOULD BE AMAZING, and a good step for the gaming industry to shake off that STERIO-type of how bad games are.
With my experience, my parents are the kind of people who think that games are horrible things made to get addicted to and ruin your life, just like the parents from the 60's who hated pop music because of the stereotype that the media gave it
Legogunlord They've already made episodes about Game Compulsion (not addiction) and the ignorance concerning it as well as the grain of truth. Also, that's "stereotype" not sure what "sterio-type" is or why you felt the need to allcaps part of it.
I have to comment on the adorable character designs in these videos, btw. The girl with the pink headscarf and the girl with wavy red hair are my new favourites. :3
And for the love of all that is holy please do not have "narrative exploration" turn into "to get the whole story you need to play the game, plus the sequel, and the prequel, and watch the followup movie, and read a manga, and even then you may want to read the wiki for it to make sense." That is not fun. :P
+SkyWolfAlpha I dunno, I think every Metal Gear Solid, minus maybe MGS 2, all are relatively good "stopping point" to the story. In the sense that, while you can't really play MGS 2 or 4 without knowledge of the games before, you can realistically finish MGS 1, 3 and 4 and feeling that you had a satisfactory ending. I mean yes, every game besides 4 all end with the obligatory after credit scene of "Revolver Ocelot sequel bait the next story", but they still all tie up the loose ends within their own story pretty well, so I don't think you *need* to play the next game to make sense of what you just played.
***** i think they were going more with the prime trilogy with that example they used. So technically they have three, geographic, mechanical, and narrative.
patu8010 i don't think that's part of what content meant. in metroid you have to use all of the gear options in order to beat the game so it doesn't leave much for discovery. Im not sure on this though.
I think it function with content discovery, at his core. Metroid on NES wasn't pretty appealing to the eye, so it can't work with just geographic discovery. Even mechanical discovery wasn't that preponderous (the super métroïd was GENIUS about that, with the walk jump, the hidden shield technique, regeneration, etc.), So, the content discovery were the sole purpose for the player to play. It's all the hidden missile, capabilities, new life boost you gain that makes metroid ... Metroïd ! And like you say, it's not even necessary ! So we've done it because we enjoyed it ! For the narrative, the first done it too (samus being reveled as a woman).
questioninconnu um what. Geographic discovery was there at the beginning. Just cause it doesn't look pretty doesn't mean its not there. There were so many areas in the first metroid. I'm not going to argue content discovery cause I'm not exactly sure if finding items is what they meant by that. I was thinking that trying out a different method of beating the game through skill sets and such was content discovery. But im kinda hoping they elaborate on which ones metroid has. Please?
A full episode on the narrative choice topic is a great idea. I've thought a lot about that when encountering the many people who complain about how limited Telltale's games actually are. I'm not sure I could possibly say that Telltale's dialogue choices *limit* its narrative discovery, though. You're absolutely right that the second playthrough can have that effect - but an interesting experiment is to do your first playthrough, then drop into the midpoint-episode on a fresh game with random auto-choices. Suddenly the contrast becomes very clear: though you are on the same path, everything feels different. Your trusted friends are now your barely-tolerated enemies, your detractors are now your supporters, everything feels like Bizarro-land. And that's what Telltale truly excels at: when you play your first game, and make your choices, you get a fairly personal experience. The events are the same, but the *story* is different, because it *feels* different. You also get the tantalizing hints of other possible ways things could have gone -- and that's the part that generates disappointment for some on a second playthrough. But the feel of that first playthrough -- the investment in your critical, time-limited choices -- is so beautiful and engaging that I can't imagine trying to replicate it without dialogue options...
I'm glad to see an episode on this topic. Exploration has always been one of the primary motivations that drives me to keep playing games, especially geographic discovery. But for me that appeal began long before open world games. As a kid, the desire to see future environments and enemies of later levels was one of the main factors pushing me to beat early side scrollers. This was especially true when games provided me with a map that gave me a glimpse of what was coming up. Castlevania, Ghosts n' Goblins, and Final Fight all had this impact. I actually got bored of Final Fight really quickly as a kid, but I was really curious to see what the Bay Area level involved, so I kept playing. In this sense it really wasn't about exploration since all I could do was keep moving right, but (as the video said) discovery: I wanted to discover everything this little world had to offer. This was also something that gave arcade machines an incredible degree of allure to my young imagination. As a 9-year-old, the thought that there were more super villains in the X-Men arcade beat-em up that I could have seen if I hadn't ran out of quarters motivated me to get a full $5 of change the next time I my parents took me to the mall. It's interesting, but what really compels me to follow a video game's narrative is rarely ever the actual plot, but the visual story telling that does most of the world building.
Keith F Perhaps this is content discovery, but I was never interested in what I could find in terms of new abilities, items, or gameplay options. These were always just things that helped me satisfy my desire for seeing new areas.
Mionikoi There's a let's play of Dark Souls going on on the EC channel right now. Also, several members of the Dark Souls community have actually made their careers off of discovering and making youtube videos exploring the story of the game, because almost all of it is done atmospherically and through contextual cues, as well as speculation. (My personal favorite speculation is the one behind why the body of Kirk, the Knight of Thorns, ends up in the hidden area with The Fair Lady, the sister of Quelaag. 100% speculation, but still amazing.)
That's why I like games with procedurally generated worlds. With most games, you learn all the secrets and get bored. With a randomized world, you always have a new exciting experience to discover.
Woo! Metroid Prime is the greatest example of narative discovery. I mean there are barely any conversations (can't remember if there even are any) in the game, yet it is able to build an impressive mythos on the world you are exploring.
Daniel Settle It's not a bad example; that *is* what makes it problematic. The illusion of choice only works until when you go for another path, and you realize it left you dissatisfied with the variety.
For their choices to feel like they had weight, they had to feel as though your decisions changed the course of the narrative, which is impossible because 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 builds up. Therefore, only thing you discover by going back and looking at the paths you didn't take, is the reality that the game couldn't change and your decisions had very little weight at all. *~Spoilers I guess?~* Someone still might not have played it. This actually happened before I finished Walking Dead Series 1 when What's-Her-Face shot Carly. I liked Carly, so I loaded and tried the other options, only to find she has to die... which made me realise that that was the cutoff for the character you saved. That realisation took away from every further decision in the game because I knew whatever happened, always happens... the ending in particular.
Daniel Settle So does mass effect, but it does it better because there is enough divergence on the way to change your experience, while in the walking dead its "you shot a nerd" or "you did not shoot a nerd who leaves anyway"
Holy cow, when they introduced the Underground digging and exploration mechanics in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, I straight up forgot I was playing a Pokemon game. I spent hours digging up rare Stones, Fossils, and other goodies (and I know for a fact I wasn't alone). The only times I returned to the surface were to empty my bag and see what else I was still in need of more of. Finally, six hours later, I was like, "Oh, yeah. I bought this game for the new Pokemon and new world, huh...?"
When you explained mechanical discovery I came to think of Anno 1602. I remember looking up exact production values for each building and tried to make efficient chains of production which met the needs of my people while at the same time minimized the surplus production in order to lower upkeep costs.
Dark Souls games are overrated, I dont say that they are bad, but a little bit overrated. There is better action rpgs out there, just dig a lil bit deeply.
Милош Максић They were talking about narrative discovery, which is one of the most poignant features of the souls series, with very few other games taking it to the extreme the souls games do. I'm sure there are other examples out there that do it to a similar extent, but I personally couldn't name a single example and most of it would probably be some obscure niché thing. So I'd say using dark souls as an example here is pretty well justified, regardless of how you'd rate its action rpg gameplay.
Милош Максић Well of course it isn't bad. It is impossible for something that is over-rated to actually be bad. When you say something is "over-rated", you are actually praising it. What you are really saying is that you think other people should not enjoy a game more than you do. In short, you feel others should have the same preferences as you. If a game is bad, you would have said so. You would only call a game "over-rated" if you want to criticise a good game.
Милош Максић like someone say, that's not the point of the video. But i'm actually agree with you. I love this game, but sometime i just feel people overpraised them. What kind of game do you think, when you say better action-rpg ?
I feel like a strong example of a narative discovery would be Fire Watch. It really compelled you to discover the story and learn more, but when you found out is pretty much always ended the same it was really saddening and really just cried out for a better sequel!
One game that does this discovery thing very well is Fallen London. In the beginning of the game, you get to access a handful of areas and are limited by your progress. As you progress, you can unlock new areas in separate quests, until you've unlocked them all. Then, when your stats reach a certain point, you can become a Person of Some Importance, which unlocks a ton of new quests in the base areas, and also drives you to the greater secrets of the game. It is also important to note the incredible world that comes with it and the stunning variety of stories that are told in it. Seriously, if you haven't given it a chance yet, go try it.
that -5 strength scene makes me wonder, are there any RPGS out there that only let you select an option BECAUSE you have such a low score? Like having a low strength score could allow a bandit to ignore you for someone that is a bigger threat, which now allows you to make your move on them!
That would be very interesting. I think Xenoblade Chronicles may do something like that...I haven't played that tho, so idk
joesatmoes Yeah. The "aggro" feature, used to draw enemies' attention with attacks or other moves, is in Xenoblade Chronicles and other RPGs.
Join The Misha Movement There is something similar in Witcher 3.
One of the 5 sigils, the magic of the game, is mind control. Of you upgrade it, you can unlock dialog choices that are usually about evading a fight.
Join The Misha Movement Fallout 1 and 2 did - if you ever started with an Intelligence of 3 or less, your entire interaction with the NPCs changed because you were now too dumb to converse properly. Many quests became impossible to take, but a couple of the remaining quests suddenly had new special paths to success, and some secrets and even hidden quests could only be obtained with low INT scores.
Fallout 3 has a perk like that. I
You can get it very early on and it requires your Agility to be high and your Strength to be low, IIRC
When playing Monster Hunter with others, i find that a vary common reaction for players is that when you have just finished hunting a new monster for the first time, everyone always runs to the crafting NPC just to see what new weapons and/or armor they may have unlocked. I guess that would fall under Content Discovery?
I would love to see an episode about dialogue choices / branching narratives!
TheKiss look for "the illusion of choice". They cover it there.
Diego Valencia Thanks! I hadn't seen that one.
+TheKiss all my yes!
Easter-Egg Discovery
Bug Discovery
Pay-wall Discovery
DLC Discovery
Disappointment Discovery
And the discovery of all the types of discovery, which we're going to call: Discovery discovery
Do we have possitive Extra-Discoveries also apart from Easter Eggs?
Like: SELF-DISCOVERY
Uhh ... to learn something about yourself as a real person thanks to a game.
Could there be a Wisdom-Discovery? Some narrative or mechanical knowledge that theaches you a rare real world lesson?
A really good example for Mechanical Discovery is, in my opinion, Transistor. The game tells you that you can upgrade your functions with other functions, but doesn't tell you to try out specific combinations. It lets you just play around with your abilities and if you figure out an especially useful combination, you feel like a _genius_.
And then the game goes "Oh, by the way, here's a second upgrade slot." and the amount of combinations climbs up to ridiculous levels. In some of the Challenge rooms, you are even limited to only a few, select functions, pushing the player even further.
If you ask 10 Transistor players about what their favorite function combinations are, you'll get 10 different answers and they will all tell you at length why it's so good.
In fact, Transistor uses Narrative Discovery to give players an incentive to experiment with the functions because you get specific bits of backstory if you use functions in different ways. Using those bits of backstory, you can start to piece together what is actually going on.
For mechanical discovery- Magicka
The magic combinations can be really volatile. For example, using ice your first element gives a shotgun effect, something it's really easy to discover. Then you might find out you can spray an enemy with water, then freeze them solid with cold. You might start using cold+lightning to keep entire crowds at arm's length, or get things wet to amplify lightning damage.
Or you might find out you can use arcane to explode your friend's healing beams :3
Harvey Chesterfield And then there's the random craziness that occurs when you try to spell words using only QWERASDF without breaking the elemental combination rules. (Long-time Yogscast fans will know EXACTLY what I mean.)
Harvey Chesterfield "Friends".
NickNiccelson EQFF. Creates a ring of fire that DOES NOTHING
"-5 stength"
I need to increase my stength by lifting more wights!
***** i read wights wrong too...
***** squat shoes increase your strength by 5. x
I need to take a bath to take off that stength
My personal favorite form of discovery is mechanical, particularly when the discovery is not of a new mechanic or even of a previously unknown detail of an old mechanic but rather a handful of mechanics which are discovered to interact in a novel fashion.
The purest example I can think of is Transistor's weapon design mechanics: combining the same two or three functions in different orders can have a huge impact on that attack (Transistor also cleverly uses the promise of narrative discovery to encourage players to experiment more with the mechanics in this way).
I suspect this sort of combinatorial thinking might be the key to getting a handful of mechanics to provide several radically different gameplay experiences, but that's a different discussion altogether.
Darkar Dengeno And don't forget some of the Challenge rooms where the game goes "Here's a small handful of functions, go nuts." and you very often have to try out combinations that you would otherwise never even think about.
Nixitur Good point! I remember picking up new tactics in the Challenge rooms that were very useful in the rest of the game. I also found it interesting that some of the challenges gave access to functions that the player might not have unlocked, providing a bit of a mechanical teaser.
In light of Splatoon's success can you do an episode on what it takes to launch a new IP?
TwilitKage I would love an episode on that!
TwilitKage Yeah, despite a bunch of minor flaws like not being able to pick your online team or withholding character suit/weapon set customization, it still is a great IP and I'd love to know how Nintendo obtained such a massive following for a game that is conceptually "standard" in terms of TPS-gameplay.
Pedro Gusmão A good game is vital for sure, but alone I feel it's a gamble because enough people need to actually adopt the game before word of mouth can spread. I've heard a lot of good things about S.T.E.A.M. for example yet it flopped.
Looking at some recent sales numbers from Japan the WiiU has been crushing the PS4 and now even 3DS hardware sales thanks to Splatoon. The bump in WiiU sales even exceeds the bump from Mario Kart 8's release! gematsu.com/2015/06/media-create-sales-6115-6715
All this from a title that, while critically praised, also only has an 81 metacritic score.
edit: in case the contrary came across I wanna make it clear I really do enjoy Splatoon. The game has been impossible for me to put down lately :)
TwilitKage Despite being a good game? Marketing
minch333 Ha, Nintendo really needs to get more of that. At least a bit more to improve sales.
Also I saw the comment at the end of the video: I am SO glad side quest worked and I hope this gives birth to a whole new world of content from you guys.
Kingdom hearts has awesome narrative discovery. With it's vast, complex, and mysterious backstory and lore, kingdom hearts is the type of game that I not only play for hours upon hours, but I can spend just as much time talking about it, discussing the various implications of the events and hints that are scattered throughout the series, and then trying to predict what could happen later in the game because of the backstory that we piece together, and then it's even more amazing to get the next game and discover what parts turned out to be true, what parts were different than we'd expected, and the various new implications we could discover because of the events and revelations that were in the new game, and then the cycle begins anew.
Ryu D "vast, complex"...sound about right xD
I mean, I love the games, but the story is utterly stupid, and surprisingly is not for being the story of a teenager stranded in cartoon worlds with Donald and Goofie :P
Diego Valencia It is true that it's completely unrealistic, but that doesn't mean it's stupid, or in any way bad. You just have to get into the reality within the game, rather than being held back by the reality we all have to live in. It's a deep and detailed world (or World, as the case may be), and it's astonishing how much of it makes sense once you really think about it, so long as you're able to look at it within the context of the game.
Ryu D It astounds me how many deeper concepts are within the Kingdom Hearts games and lore. Lots of philosophy in there, which I adore. I loved the first game as a teenager when it first came out, and I still adore them as an adult now. My siblings and I literally spend hours talking and hypothesizing on KH's narrative discovery.
Emarella Yeah, and one interesting aspect that they wove into the lore is a sense of uncertainty, due to much of the lore being revealed to you by way of reports that were written by people with their own views and agendas, and research reports at that, so you're actually more inclined to question the conclusions they came to, and analyze every bit of information that comes your way, looking deeper into the story than you would have if it had just given you the facts.
Haha love the shoelace tied to the finger when you said 'And remember!'. Nice detail.
A-G-L-E-T!
I feel like often designers forget about a very important detail that makes discovery/exploration more pleasant and interesting: foreshadowing. While it is enjoyable to explore a world you know nothing about and that you have no idea how it's going to look, you need some form of foreshadowing to really enjoy it. If you see a far away mountain in the mist while playing minecraft and it seems to look odd, you will feel the curiosity necessary to see how it is, and you might feel some form of satisfaction when being near to them. When you read about mew and mewtwo the first time in the lab, you get curious about these two unknown pokémon and when you get to find mewtwo, the joy of discovery is immense. Some games just provide a world to explore, but that falls flat if you don't have a warped and unclear vision of what's waiting for you beforehand.
One thing that is often avoided is unclear and "wrong" foreshadowing, but I think that could actually bring to some very interesting games. Imagine thinking that you should find the "island of the gods" somewhere in the ocean in a gritty medieval sailing game, the position of that island in the maps is varying and unclear, but you manage to understand more or less where it's supposed to be, and when you get there you find something completely different, maybe an island full of resources and with the ruins of an ancient civilisation, but nothing like what you expected. I think this kind of "betrayal" of the expectations hasn't been done enough, and the transformation of "exploration" to "investigation" could be brought to a whole new level with the right thinking.
That's actually a very cool idea. Though it have to be made within the world itself, maybe a bard singing about it or a crazy old man blabbaling what everyone else thinks is nonsense.
TsukuneD I think that's something that most medieval/fantasy games can do by default even though game makers completely avoid it. I have been playing with this idea for a while since I wrote my thesis in medieval cartography about phantom islands of the atlantic ocean.
Before the sailing era the actual knowledge of the shape of the known world was a chaotic disaster and after sailing restarted to be an important thing the knowledge of the places that were still being explored was very unclear. Everyone tends to forget that there was no print and no way to calculate longitude, so if someone went to an island that they thought was new, they would draw it on their map, and then a map maker would try to position it somewhere where it made somewhat sense on the maps that they sold, then another mapmaker would add it to theirs with additional mistakes and so on and so forth. This brought easily to some islands that weren't supposed to be in the maps, then people started inventing curious legends about them, and these would appear in maps as well.
All of this to say that having a clear map of the world that tells you exactly where you are in a fantasy game is a pretty weird thing and it could be very easy to have a new interesting mechanic by making it feel even more "natural" than usual, especially if magic/technology to travel and communicate is not advanced. Even in sci-fi considering how hard space travel can be in certain settings, this kind of extremely warped idea of what to find in certain planets and places can be very easy to implement without having to make it feel "unnatural".
That would make it simple foreshadowing, not really applied to exploration inside the game to make it into an investigative mechanic. It seems more of a marketing concept than a game design concept when it is about creating hype about another game, but not really bringing anything on the table for the game it is in. It's still a good idea though.
Do you mean you haven't seen foreshadowing a spinoff or that you haven't seen foreshadowing things to explore inside the game? I think I've seen foreshadowing of game sequels, even though a spinoff is a little bit different.
I think I am having the best example for how an exploration game turns out without having any foreshadowing at all: Terraria.
If you wanna succeed in that game, you need to read the wiki. Cause it will tell you nothing, nearly nothing about why you're here, what you can do, how to explore and what you need to do in order to progress in the game. The only thing presented in the beginning is what items can be crafted by the items the player currently has inside his inventory. And probably the knowledge about the items the mercants sell later in the game.
This is also the main reason Terraria is often wrongly labled as Minecraft in 2D: Because the first few nights play like Minecraft in 2D. And many people just quit before this game actually becomes interesting: Because they think they already know the concept without even having heared of what treasure may lay deep under the ground (literally, you need to dig in order to get the true Terraria feeling).
I've also seen Dark Souls attempting your forshadowing technique by showing item descriptions during the loading screens. Although I don't think this is a good idea: By doing that FROM SOFTWARE takes away the "I never even knew that thing existed"-feeling completely. And since there is nothing completely sectet, nothing you haven't heared of yet, the sense for exploration gets mostly lost
that's one of the things I love about FO4 - finding some empty, half-decimated house, and piecing together what happened there by way of holotapes, notes, terminal entries, and the like, and even then, you piece it together bit by bit. You have to find all of the pieces to get the story for that place (and sometimes I still wonder if I missed something).
I remember when I played my first pokemon (ememald) and I found the secret regi cave. That was an amazing experience with exploration, with the deciphering of braille and then scouring the world for the regis. It's an adventure I will never forget.
***** I know what you mean! It was a really cool experience figuring that stuff out on your own. I had a little dictionary given to me by my elementary school and it had braille translated in the back, so I used it.
The instruction booklet of emerald actually had braille on the back, i never figured out why it was there. The moment I figured it out is probably the most magical exploration experience I've had in any game.
I didn't have a new copy of Emerald, but that's very interesting to know. Makes sense.
I don't understand the Great Ball part, to me those are just like upgrading your equipments in any other games. Just like how you can potentially beat any monsters with a weak weapon if you're good enough, you can potentially catch any wild Pokemons with a normal Pokeball if you're insistent or lucky enough, not to mention the catch rates of each zones are often designed to fit to this evolving supply of Pokeballs you obtain, I don't see how it inspires you to go back and explore some old places like Dan is talking about.
If you're talking about Dusk, Repeat or maybe Net Ball, where they are (kinda) terrain specific in use, then I can understand, but Great Ball just doesn't fit that bill at all, you're not going to need a Great Ball to catch a Caterpie, nor do you need it to find a rare Pokemon or a shiny either.
Reito Shizaki It varies from player to player I suppose. I know I'm never likely to try and catch an Onix or the second Snorlax unless I have some ultra balls in hand. I think perhaps that HM and/or TM with terrain effects might be a better example. In some Pokemon games getting Cut adds a whole new dimension to the first couple of routes, then Surf adds another, and may lead you to items that help you evolve certain Pokemon, interesting NPC's, etc.
Reito Shizaki I agree. Better Pokeballs just give you a better chance of catching new pokemon, not finding new ones. I guess what they were going for is some pokemon that have low catch rates, like Onix, that you find at some point where you don't have better pokeballs to try and catch it with a good chance of success, but later on you find Great or Ultraballs and then you have better chances, so you decided "Ok, now I want to try it again". Still, they could have used the HMs and field-effect TMs as an example, like yellowtheyellow said... Guess they (put glasses on) dropped the ball there B-)
-Ok, fine, I'll leave... =C-
The part where they talk about spoiler lists says:
the card does the thing.
this other card does a slightly different thing.
this is the best card. It's banned probably.
good luck finding this card.
this card works with another card.
this card does not work with another card.
this card is a card.
this card is purple???
I have no idea what to say about...(trails off screen)
if your still reading...(trails off screen)
scott is ...(trails off screen)
Thanks. I read that bit for a minute without a mirror.
Thx
Witcher 3 maybe the best in my experience of exploration most of it contains: " Oh hey a griffin... ( sees the red skull) oh fuck a griffin. RUN!!!" and "What a weird bush... That's not a bush. RUN!!!"
Now that you mentioned Dark Souls, i just started playing that game and damn that game hits me hard right in the feelings. The backstories of some of the NPCs and bosses are just amazing and sad. They should have called it Dark Souls: Prepare to Cry Edition because it does make you cry... And not because of the difficulty.
Good timing with this episode. It was exactly the thing that I needed right now.
I would love to see an episode on dialogue choices and if they help a game's variety/narrative/etc
Mechanical discovery, I LOVE this in games. This may be on reason I enjoyed Don't Starve so much. "Oh what's that over there, chances are it's going to kill me but I must find out!"
I love how branching in games like TWD and The Witcher 3 are much more about the moment of making the decision itself rather than the differences between each branch of the history; if you replay these games you realize that the choices you've made often changes very little or even nothing in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't change the fact that they're very meaningful to you the first time you deal with the necessity of making a decision. It's a perfect example of how designers can "deceive" players in order to deliver a great experience.
Yulan Cardoso Finally someone who understands this! Everyone is always bitching about TWD for its lack of decision, but it was the decisions that make my understanding of Lee and Clem unique, even when it didn't change anything.
Legal! O prazer da descoberta..
Yulan Cardoso That's true, but something else the Witcher 3 does well in terms of "branching" is that it usually tries to give some kind of feedback for your decisions wether it's immediate or just casually dropped into a conversation at some point. Even if what you did was ultimately insignificant, they probably accounted for it have and let it stick around instead of giving you Good Guy/Bad Guy points and having it be erased after that.
***** Yeah, I love these comebacks. Some of them are just random encounters that happen so much time after the decision was made that you gotta admire the devs for just putting them in the game.
the song at the end of this episode is really lovely :)
So, visual novels use narrative discovery to make the player re play the same game but with a completely different plot each time, and even if you miss some scenes by making a certain minor choice it doesn't change mutch because the main plot is the same, you only need to find one of the many ways to get to that good ending.
Mechanical discovery is the reason i find fighting games so enjoyable. You start with something basic like a bnb combo, then u think hmmm... What if i delay this move or end with a different one to set up my opponent for another one and so on
Bastion: not even exploration-focused and it manages to hit a high notes on all 4 of these aspects.
The Extra Credits drinking game: take a drink every time you hear the words discovery or pokemon.
I didn't think I cared much for exploration until I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 60 hours of gameplay and I still have whole chunks of the map that I haven't ventured to.
GW2 discovery panel in the crafting mechanic is a great example of this. You have so much more than just a list of recipes, you get to find every permutation of recipes, and (especially in cooking and artificing) find recipes you may not have suspected existed.
2 years later and there is a game that take those 3 types of exploration and get them to another level, therefore becoming in my opinion the best adventure game of all time: TLOZ: BOTW
The legend of zelda
Is one of thee best game franchises when it comes to the Joy of discovery .
I agree with James.
"Joy of discovery" is much better in my opinion.
Antichamber perfectly combines Mechanical Discovery with Geographic Discovery. It turns out there's a lot you can explore and do from the beginning of the game, but it's not until certain mechanical tricks are taught that you realize that you could have explored certain areas much sooner. It's brilliant.
As confusing as things can be sometimes, and as small as the text is, I'm getting this with Xenoblade Chronicles X right now. You get the joy of just exploring the world, scaling a mountain, swimming into a cave, etc....and then within that cave, maybe you hit a landmark that gives you some safe respawning, or maybe even a probe for convenient fast travel. And then you can use these places to mine for resources or money. And then that whole aspect is tied in to the whole game's economy, letting you upgrade gear, then letting you inch farther into the world map, possibly enabling new missions by making new types of enemies accessible, etc. You practically get rewarded for everything, making all of the game aspects kind of fold into each other and collide at some point.
The fact that the game gives you battle points and EXP for exploration is genius. It means that even if you're not the type of person who goes around slaying every monster you see, you'll still be able to level up and improve the Arts and Skills you use.
I truly enjoy that game :) it's environments are just so damn beautiful (which only adds to the sense of discovering something new)
triplehood The visuals combined with the OST makes stuff so epic. Everytime I go around Noctilum I hum the theme non-stop.
gbrincks The OST was the deal-breaker for me. You don't put lyrics in a background song in a cutscene with important dialogue.
Morafo Regnos I get what you're saying, but in my opinion, that works out quite nicely in some scenes. I love every scene where The Way plays. The way the singer, well, _sings_ adds so much to the moment.
I love it when games have deep enough mechanics to enable continued discovery.
Great video as always. I'm hoping we see more Dark Souls esq Narrative Discovery in games.
As a side note, you and James have gotten me hooked on Dark Souls. After buying it, attempting it, then forgetting about it after not getting through the early part of the game, I've picked it back up and gotten to the first bell of awakening. Now I can't stop going back to it.
Pendragon Upgrade and use the Zweihander.
It's the best weapon in the game at level 8.
Just some advice.
Brendan Kane There is no 'best weapon' at any point of the game. In this case, on level 8 you're most likely not even strong enough to use the Zweihander effectively. Of course you can take it two-handed and then it's probably the strongest weapon you can find for a long time, but it's still slow and you don't have a shield, so you might be better off with the simple longsword which has a great moveset.
Brendan Kane Man, don't spoil the bass canon. Let him have a first blind playthrough
Pendragon I think the first Bioshock game may be an excellent example of Narrative discovery with the audio logs. You don't have to listen to any of them, but they enrich the world so much.
gone home might be a quite pure example of narrative discovery and no branching dialoges where needed. i really appreciated it therefore.
1:58 - What episode did you talk about "Unfolding games", I don't recognize or remember the term from a previous episode.
The Tales Of... series skit mechanic is one the best ways I've seen to do narrative discovery. You want to see the characters interact all the time in those games. Everything you do triggers one, like the one where you have to eat ice cream on a snow-filled place. And in the end it keeps track of all the skits you've seen.
is it just me or does Dan's pronounciation of 'Pokémon' make you smile? :P
You mean how he pronounces it correctly?
Scarybug Not really
icerink239 That's how the accent on the e says it should be pronounced...
Scarybug I'm pretty certain it should be pronounced as 'po - kay - mon' but ofcourse that might be because I'm not American xD
If it's the international translation (not sure if that's the right term) yeah it's correct.
Man I love it when that 2'nd one happens. For me, It turns a 'Meh' game into a HOOOOLY POOOP game
Heh, I personally think Undertale does dialogue choices well. Both choices are almost always funny, and it doesn't matter which you pick. Usually.
Moonwalklover well I think it may be funny but it barely adds to the game it’s more of a random choice when it comes too it like let’s say when you fight sans vs that dog guard sans was well crafted and had emotions the dog was a poor silly speed bump
And most of the dialogue was a speed bump other then the other a few specials and sense every fights was designed to feel like a specialty but it flops because you don’t really remember them
One aspect of why undertale's varying dialogue choices (and other kinds of branching choices) work better than other games, is because that game is built around providing the option to play the story more than once. It is not necessary, but it is encouraged. Because of this, additional playthroughs have in universe lore support, and the dialogue and choices have enough variety to properly reward additional playthroughs. In other words, playing the game again not only makes sense in the context of the world, but the narrative experience is also built to accommodate for extra playthroughs.
Games like Tell Tale's Walking Dead have far less support built in for second playthroughs (both narratively and mechanically), so replaying scenes to do alternate choices can weaken the experience. It feels more like deconstructing the world to soft reset or replay branching choices in a scene, dismantling the tension and unknown possibilities. It makes a big difference if a game has been designed to be played only once instead of multiple times to see other possibilities.
@@everythingisfine8635 If it is fun, then it's definitely adding to the game.
@@everythingisfine8635 You seem to be implying that I don't remember them, and yet I keenly remember them. Hmm, strange.
Wow wow wow, okay, so I'm going back and watching a bunch of episodes I missed, and what you said about Narrative discovery immediately reminded me of Undertale. In that game there is a TON of narrative to discover, but the more you play it, the more the characters start to feel less believable and more like lines of code.
The crazy part is, the dilemma of satiating your curiosity at the cost of losing your immersion is DIRECTLY addressed BY THE CHARACTERS in the game (in a certain replay route). This video put it so succinctly MONTHS before the game ever came out. Bravo.
4:38 "Suffice it to say, that there's an open debate in the design community as to whether dialogue choices add or take away from, specifically a sense of narrative discovery within games"
Is there any links that could be shared so that one may read either side of the debate?
2:14
Yeah, that moment in games is amazing.
"Giving the player great balls." Hee hee. I'm 5
Sporkaganza Serious question, what does "Great balls" do? Apart from being on fire...
im 5 and what is this
N00body 1989 Oh lord geezus! Also they have a higher chance of capturing the pokemon you use them on!
PhoenixSenpai You may not be old enough to understand this..But "Great Balls of Fire" is a song. He was making an allusion to said song.
TheFrozenMoogle I actually do know, but gave a serious awnser because he asked for it.
I absolutely love this channel.
Melee does mechanical Discovery so well.
The funny thing is that's mostly by accident on the developer's part.
It's the community that made the game so vast of strategy
I'd have to disagree Melee was not an accident, Even some of the trophy's in the game describe some of the minute details of character properties. i.e. you can double jump out of fox's shine.
isaac masters As PudgeTalks pointed out, a lot of Melee's mechanics that have been brought to the fore by the competitive scene were indeed intentionally designed to be so. Of course, the designers didn't (and probably couldn't have) expected people to take those mechanics quite as far as they have, but the mechanics were still designed with competition very clearly in mind. The character trophy descriptions, the balance changes made between the NTSC and PAL versions, and the inclusion of mechanics like L-canceling, which was 100 percent intentional, shows that they had taken into account the fact that people would play for long periods of time and slowly discover various mechanics and ways of using them.
This wondrous feeling of discovery you talk about... Metroid Prime. People keep going on about awful backtracking in this game, but I constantly had that sense of wonder you described in the episode. Metroid Prime especially gave you so many tools and so many places to use them that "backtracking" was a familiar but also new experience.
god I love that ending music!
Transistors mix and match skill system is the single greatest mechanical discovery I have ever experience. I had great "Joy of Discovery" on all fronts really.
You guys should do an episode on Transistor and how different and refreshing it was and still is.
content discovery is probably the reason why i played skyrim, the fallout games and the far cry games (and probably many more that have been lost in the depths of my steam account... i really have a problem D:) so much... i have ~250 hours in fonv just because i wanted to see how the game plays if you have 9 luck, 9 strength or 9 survival right from the beginning... and it was a different play through experience each time, in far cry it was more about finding all the places and trying to stealth everything which brought me 80h in this game
Agreed ,my only problem with fallout stats is that speech > everything else
Sir Zoidberg Same here for FarCry. Tried to do full stealth, and use very weak weapons with limited ammo (so a bow and a scilenced pistol).
Also had a run where I'd never take a com tower because not having the map made the game so much more challenging and scary.
FlyingJetpack1 yeah, i tried a full melee run in far cry 3 which becomes surprisingly easy once you get the chain upgrade for it since most enemys are grouped together and once you get the heavy takedown its just a breeze :D
Christian Weibrecht yeah, that was my biggest complaint with fo3 and fonv... if you start with 9 speech the entire game becomes super easy and leaving it out makes the game incredibly hard when it comes to quests, story line and pretty much everything else npc and money related (in a few cases strength helps because you can scare the npcs into doing what you want)
Lillu700 i mean all the speech and charisma fun :D....
great video, "discovery" is one of the big reasons im a gamer, i like exploring/cartography/finding secrets, new enemies, new items, new mechanics
its also why i love "unfolding" games so much like candy box
In the end Tell Tale's Walking Dead Season 1 had all of 3, maybe four actual choices. The rest of the time, even if given a choice, you really have no choice, as the they all come back to the same outcome. Still a great story and a good game.
jesternario You have a choice as long as you believe you have a choice. Your decisions don't impact the progression of the narrative much, but they do say a lot about you. That's why you have the choices in the first place.
Dagda Mor You may BELIEVE you have a choice. But you don't actually. Which makes the telltale experience kind of hollow for me.
Slail I thought they hit it right on the head in the video: replaying a scene to find out that the choice actually didn't affect the outcome slightly damaged my enjoyment of the game (I think it was when the angry old man dies in Chapter 3). As long as I didn't look at the other result my mind created a much more fleshed-out world than the game actually delivered on. Realizing how the mechanics of the conversation "tree" worked led me to approach each decision in a more analytical way that was, yes, kind of hollow. The strength of Walking Dead really was in its emotional effect so losing even a little bit was too much to ignore.
Peter S I can agree with that. My main beef with telltale is how much they build up your choices in their marketing which is really just a lie at the end of the day. TWD 1 only had one ended, and characters who were going to die were going to die. (And those that you could save died shortly thereafter anyway).
That being said, choices making real changes in a story is very resource intensive. So.. I don't know what a good solution is. I think witcher 2 was really cool in that it had two separate branching paths for the game based on who you chose to side with. But then, it was a lot of work for content %50 (made up statistic) of your players aren't likely to see.
Slail I think it was slick design choice (agree with your resource intensive comment). I feel TWD isn't supposed to be replayed really. You made your choices and you have to roll with them. They couldn't stop you replaying but I think if you don't you're left with a fuller experience. I also feel it emphasised the fact you can't control other people's actions: no matter what you do certain people are going to die or go crazy or whatever.
I think to call the choices a lie is too simplistic.
Bastion and Transistor nailed all of these types. Seriously, I really want episodes examining those games.
"sow with that in mind" LMAO
Around 2:56 there is some reversed text, it reads;
-the card does the thing
-the card does a slightly different thing
-this is the best card. It's banned probably
-good luck finding this card
-this card works with another card
-this card does not work with another card
-this card is a card
-this card is purple???
-I have no idea about (cut off)
-if you're still reading (cut off)
-scott is a (cut off)
Extra Credits, I love you and your silly little easter eggs. Keep up the good work! :D
3:07 "-5 Stength"
mrROFLstudios Should have been -4
"Stength"
Animators are great at spelling I swear
***** No, my quantum toaster killed the waffle.
+SchrodingersWaffle Which side did it burn?
Christopher Daly II Yes
I wondered why it was taking me so long to download Lime of the Season; then it dawned on me how I got there. You've gotten popular!
Zelda Ocarina of Time and FF7 were the best exploration games for me. I love riding Epona and wonder around the world of Hyrule. And I love discovering new treasures and secrets hidden in the world of FF7. it was all awesome. I prefer it over Skyrim or other games.
Well if you really think the exploration factor in Ocarina of Time was executed well, ther is A LOT you have missed. Grow Up, Dark Souls, Terraria, Hover, Psychonauts, Mario Odyssey and of course *Breath of the Wild* , just to name some examples
This was a fantastic episode! Exploration and discovery in games has been a big focus of mine at university, and is likely going to be a major focus of my thesis next year. Keep up the great work!
I'm applying pretty much everything here to my DnD campaign.
Yeah... Exploration, Discovery, and roleplaying is what got me into playing videogames. To play someone that isn't me or - even better - to play myself doing things I could have never done before. The immersion if games like Fallout and Skyrim (once I had mods for the latter), were great for this, giving me quite literally everything I could ever want. The ability to explore, to get stronger, to learn the lore and find new things, and to be a version of myself while doing it.
I still remember one of my favorite things to do in Skyrim, and any other Elder Scrolls game for that matter, was the Dwemer ruins. I loved going through the bigger ones, finding these vast rooms, or narrow corridors and catacombs, and all the while I would be looking around and thinking "I wonder what this room was used for?", or finding homes with place settings, and thinking "This was a house!", or finding some archaic, intimidating construct of precision metal and stone, and pure magical power, and being able to activate them and see them work (like one of the quests for a Scroll). Those were hands-down the best moments in that game for me. The dragons were nothing compared to exploring anything the Dwemer constructed.
I want to see a game that explores 4 dimentional space.
+Vegard Fjeldberg that would be a sight.
+Vegard Fjeldberg LoZ: A link to the past.
+Vegard Fjeldberg It exists, it's called Miegakure.
+
As cool as that could be, it's impossible, as we have no way of ever understanding the 4th dimension.
I know this is no secret, but Legend of Zelda games have been good at using all four of these types of discovery (less so with narrative discovery, but they've been improving there lately). I live for the "discovery" tune you hear after solving a puzzle.
I think if you're going to allow multiple narratives, you will have to ensure the players won't get stuck with any choice they make. You have to ensure that with every choice, if there is a benefit, there is also a downside, and vice versa. That way, the player won't feel pushed towards any particular choice. Also, one should consider ways to recover from mistaken choices.
***** Would you mind describing it further?
L33tImagination Or perhaps, ensuring that every choice feels like the right choice, regardless of which one you take.
One example of that are both Devil Survivor games, it has lesser branching narratives leading you towards various very different endings, but all of those feel really good and fulfilling but in different ways. It makes you want to try again, go back and see what's behind the other choices (even moreso when you know it's going to be just as good)
***** I see, interesting. I think Pillars of Eternity follows a similar plot scheme.
L33tImagination A when I played the Witcher 3 I decided to do a certain choice not knowing the outcome of that choice.......I kinda regret having made that choice but.....yeah, i have to go with it...
Chourtaird1 In real life, there's always a way of coming back from a mistake.
what you said about mechanical discovery is my favorite ay because you always get it in fighting games and after you understand everything in the game it compleatly changes how you play and how fun the game is
Breath of the wild solved this by finding your own way to find someting instead of having a waypoint in the map.
This is really funny when you are actually studying the different Aesthetics for your finals and during your break you are watching this. Good video ^^
3:06 Stength sounds like an interesting stat
I love how every comment is either about stength or the pronunciation of Pokemon.
I love how you say Pokémon....
Joakim Teig Yes it is, because of the é.
AC3TheArtist ∆∆∆∆∆pok-a-mon confirmed.∆∆∆∆∆
AC3TheArtist No, the é only means that the accent is supposed to be on that syllable. It can be PokEYmon or PokAYmon. Hell, even PokEHmon.
Leinad link But there isn't accent in english, am i right ?
Why does pokemon have an accent ?
He said it right. Pokemon is a portmanteau of the words "Pocket" and "Monster". Therefore when said the correct pronunciation is "Poh-KAY-mon" I hear people (mostly Americans) mispronounce it as "Poh-KEE-mon" often. The accent aigu above the e is meant to make it a soft e...this rant was less for you and more for the people after you. Sorry.
"So... with that in mind" Thumbs up artist! Much enjoyed!
Please make an episode about parents who think video games are horrible and addictive!!!!!!! IT WOULD BE AMAZING, and a good step for the gaming industry to shake off that STERIO-type of how bad games are.
With my experience, my parents are the kind of people who think that games are horrible things made to get addicted to and ruin your life, just like the parents from the 60's who hated pop music because of the stereotype that the media gave it
Legogunlord That would be amazing!
They did do a 3 parter on video game addiction already.
Legogunlord search for 'addiction' on their channel, they did a mini-series on this a while ago
Legogunlord
They've already made episodes about Game Compulsion (not addiction) and the ignorance concerning it as well as the grain of truth.
Also, that's "stereotype" not sure what "sterio-type" is or why you felt the need to allcaps part of it.
I have to comment on the adorable character designs in these videos, btw. The girl with the pink headscarf and the girl with wavy red hair are my new favourites. :3
And for the love of all that is holy please do not have "narrative exploration" turn into "to get the whole story you need to play the game, plus the sequel, and the prequel, and watch the followup movie, and read a manga, and even then you may want to read the wiki for it to make sense." That is not fun. :P
Metal Gear?
I was thinking that or FF7.
+SkyWolfAlpha I dunno, I think every Metal Gear Solid, minus maybe MGS 2, all are relatively good "stopping point" to the story.
In the sense that, while you can't really play MGS 2 or 4 without knowledge of the games before, you can realistically finish MGS 1, 3 and 4 and feeling that you had a satisfactory ending.
I mean yes, every game besides 4 all end with the obligatory after credit scene of "Revolver Ocelot sequel bait the next story", but they still all tie up the loose ends within their own story pretty well, so I don't think you *need* to play the next game to make sense of what you just played.
To be completely fair, I don't think there's such thing as "making sense" of a game that features bosses who are "photosynthetic guy" and "bee guy."
Ben Toth That game made sense to me, and it was the first I played.
I recently beat Link to the Past for the first time. That game had awesome exploration.
Metroidvania games seem like Mechanical Discovery games
***** i think they were going more with the prime trilogy with that example they used. So technically they have three, geographic, mechanical, and narrative.
HKtraidon Why not content discovery too? You get new gear.
patu8010 i don't think that's part of what content meant. in metroid you have to use all of the gear options in order to beat the game so it doesn't leave much for discovery. Im not sure on this though.
I think it function with content discovery, at his core. Metroid on NES wasn't pretty appealing to the eye, so it can't work with just geographic discovery. Even mechanical discovery wasn't that preponderous (the super métroïd was GENIUS about that, with the walk jump, the hidden shield technique, regeneration, etc.), So, the content discovery were the sole purpose for the player to play.
It's all the hidden missile, capabilities, new life boost you gain that makes metroid ... Metroïd ! And like you say, it's not even necessary ! So we've done it because we enjoyed it !
For the narrative, the first done it too (samus being reveled as a woman).
questioninconnu um what. Geographic discovery was there at the beginning. Just cause it doesn't look pretty doesn't mean its not there. There were so many areas in the first metroid. I'm not going to argue content discovery cause I'm not exactly sure if finding items is what they meant by that. I was thinking that trying out a different method of beating the game through skill sets and such was content discovery. But im kinda hoping they elaborate on which ones metroid has. Please?
A full episode on the narrative choice topic is a great idea. I've thought a lot about that when encountering the many people who complain about how limited Telltale's games actually are.
I'm not sure I could possibly say that Telltale's dialogue choices *limit* its narrative discovery, though. You're absolutely right that the second playthrough can have that effect - but an interesting experiment is to do your first playthrough, then drop into the midpoint-episode on a fresh game with random auto-choices. Suddenly the contrast becomes very clear: though you are on the same path, everything feels different. Your trusted friends are now your barely-tolerated enemies, your detractors are now your supporters, everything feels like Bizarro-land.
And that's what Telltale truly excels at: when you play your first game, and make your choices, you get a fairly personal experience. The events are the same, but the *story* is different, because it *feels* different. You also get the tantalizing hints of other possible ways things could have gone -- and that's the part that generates disappointment for some on a second playthrough. But the feel of that first playthrough -- the investment in your critical, time-limited choices -- is so beautiful and engaging that I can't imagine trying to replicate it without dialogue options...
One word:
Fallout.
two words:
hollow knight
I'm glad to see an episode on this topic. Exploration has always been one of the primary motivations that drives me to keep playing games, especially geographic discovery. But for me that appeal began long before open world games. As a kid, the desire to see future environments and enemies of later levels was one of the main factors pushing me to beat early side scrollers. This was especially true when games provided me with a map that gave me a glimpse of what was coming up. Castlevania, Ghosts n' Goblins, and Final Fight all had this impact. I actually got bored of Final Fight really quickly as a kid, but I was really curious to see what the Bay Area level involved, so I kept playing. In this sense it really wasn't about exploration since all I could do was keep moving right, but (as the video said) discovery: I wanted to discover everything this little world had to offer.
This was also something that gave arcade machines an incredible degree of allure to my young imagination. As a 9-year-old, the thought that there were more super villains in the X-Men arcade beat-em up that I could have seen if I hadn't ran out of quarters motivated me to get a full $5 of change the next time I my parents took me to the mall.
It's interesting, but what really compels me to follow a video game's narrative is rarely ever the actual plot, but the visual story telling that does most of the world building.
Keith F Perhaps this is content discovery, but I was never interested in what I could find in terms of new abilities, items, or gameplay options. These were always just things that helped me satisfy my desire for seeing new areas.
I'm interested in hearing about an episode of narrative discovery. : D Anyone else.
Extra Credits I also wanted to ask you guys about something. What would you recommend for schooling and degrees to enter the industry?
Mionikoi I think they did an episode on it already.
Mionikoi Check out the "Game Careers" playlist.
Mionikoi There's a let's play of Dark Souls going on on the EC channel right now. Also, several members of the Dark Souls community have actually made their careers off of discovering and making youtube videos exploring the story of the game, because almost all of it is done atmospherically and through contextual cues, as well as speculation. (My personal favorite speculation is the one behind why the body of Kirk, the Knight of Thorns, ends up in the hidden area with The Fair Lady, the sister of Quelaag. 100% speculation, but still amazing.)
That's why I like games with procedurally generated worlds. With most games, you learn all the secrets and get bored. With a randomized world, you always have a new exciting experience to discover.
"-5 stength"
Woo! Metroid Prime is the greatest example of narative discovery. I mean there are barely any conversations (can't remember if there even are any) in the game, yet it is able to build an impressive mythos on the world you are exploring.
Well the the walking dead is a bad example since the path is the same no matter what you do for the most part.
Daniel Settle People can live or die depending on your choices and not be on your side cause of them as well.
Daniel Settle It's not a bad example; that *is* what makes it problematic. The illusion of choice only works until when you go for another path, and you realize it left you dissatisfied with the variety.
For their choices to feel like they had weight, they had to feel as though your decisions changed the course of the narrative, which is impossible because 2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2 builds up.
Therefore, only thing you discover by going back and looking at the paths you didn't take, is the reality that the game couldn't change and your decisions had very little weight at all.
*~Spoilers I guess?~* Someone still might not have played it.
This actually happened before I finished Walking Dead Series 1 when What's-Her-Face shot Carly.
I liked Carly, so I loaded and tried the other options, only to find she has to die... which made me realise that that was the cutoff for the character you saved. That realisation took away from every further decision in the game because I knew whatever happened, always happens... the ending in particular.
Daniel Settle So does mass effect, but it does it better because there is enough divergence on the way to change your experience, while in the walking dead its "you shot a nerd" or "you did not shoot a nerd who leaves anyway"
Pedro Gusmão And that'd *really* hard - nigh impossible - to do.
Wow, I just realized that the thing I love the most about video games is exploration :o
Witcher 3
?
thatguyunknoe Gwent is an example of mechanical discovery.
Tekoa Zaf
no it's not, there's nothing discovery about that, the game even introduce it to you
Oh yeah
Holy cow, when they introduced the Underground digging and exploration mechanics in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl, I straight up forgot I was playing a Pokemon game.
I spent hours digging up rare Stones, Fossils, and other goodies (and I know for a fact I wasn't alone). The only times I returned to the surface were to empty my bag and see what else I was still in need of more of. Finally, six hours later, I was like, "Oh, yeah. I bought this game for the new Pokemon and new world, huh...?"
Yay, I'm finally first!
When you explained mechanical discovery I came to think of Anno 1602. I remember looking up exact production values for each building and tried to make efficient chains of production which met the needs of my people while at the same time minimized the surplus production in order to lower upkeep costs.
Dark Souls games are overrated, I dont say that they are bad, but a little bit overrated. There is better action rpgs out there, just dig a lil bit deeply.
Милош Максић They were talking about narrative discovery, which is one of the most poignant features of the souls series, with very few other games taking it to the extreme the souls games do. I'm sure there are other examples out there that do it to a similar extent, but I personally couldn't name a single example and most of it would probably be some obscure niché thing.
So I'd say using dark souls as an example here is pretty well justified, regardless of how you'd rate its action rpg gameplay.
Everyone likes different things tho (imenjak hahaha)
Милош Максић Well of course it isn't bad. It is impossible for something that is over-rated to actually be bad. When you say something is "over-rated", you are actually praising it. What you are really saying is that you think other people should not enjoy a game more than you do. In short, you feel others should have the same preferences as you.
If a game is bad, you would have said so. You would only call a game "over-rated" if you want to criticise a good game.
Милош Максић For example? I've never seen any game with gameplay better than Dark Souls, if you know any, tell me about it.
Милош Максић like someone say, that's not the point of the video. But i'm actually agree with you. I love this game, but sometime i just feel people overpraised them.
What kind of game do you think, when you say better action-rpg ?
I feel like a strong example of a narative discovery would be Fire Watch. It really compelled you to discover the story and learn more, but when you found out is pretty much always ended the same it was really saddening and really just cried out for a better sequel!
Perfect timing to release this episode, as I've been playing the fallout series recently
OMG I'm such a geographical and narrative explorer - it drives ALL my gaming.
One game that does this discovery thing very well is Fallen London. In the beginning of the game, you get to access a handful of areas and are limited by your progress. As you progress, you can unlock new areas in separate quests, until you've unlocked them all. Then, when your stats reach a certain point, you can become a Person of Some Importance, which unlocks a ton of new quests in the base areas, and also drives you to the greater secrets of the game.
It is also important to note the incredible world that comes with it and the stunning variety of stories that are told in it.
Seriously, if you haven't given it a chance yet, go try it.
Everytime you said "Pokaymon," I giggled.
Great episode guys!
Perfect timing, Extra Credits! I'm currently working on an rpg and this helped a ton!