Why do Sony protagonists insist on not letting me solve puzzles myself?

Fredrik said:
Why would anyone playing the game be glad that they left a game design flaw? Makes no sense. It's like an Elden Ring fan being glad that they left the broken camera mechanic in the Elden Beast fight where the camera literally comes your final boss to beat.
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prett sure he's joking about the ridiculously high review scores (I hope)
 
It's a plague upon the fucking industry that many games these days won't let us explore in peace or solve puzzles for ourselves. Even Psychonauts 2 my GOTY 2021 had this shit in it, though not nearly as bad as some Sony games. I wouldn't find it an issue if you could turn it off/make it trigger only after a long time, like in Plague Tale Requiem, but many don't offer the option.

I'm hoping that by the time I play Ragnarok they'll have patched in a fix to this because it drives me batty.

ACESHIGH said:
Prepare to be bashed OP. It is what it is. Sony games are very successful and have amazing production values but player agency goes down the drain in those AAA games.

I wish they could change their approach but these games sell a lot so why would them?

I don't see modern Sony designing an ICO or Collosus.
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Even Ueda's latest title The Last Guardian had some of this shit forced onto it by Sony execs. Not nearly as bad as other Sony/cinematic AAA games, because Ueda no doubt would only concede so much, but the bits of handholding in TLG are my only flaw with that game.
 
NeoIkaruGAF said:
Did we really? For most games you absolutely did require playground hints and/or tips and solutions from magazines/hotlines, and today the Internet has replaced both.
I doubt you figured out Castlevania 2 all by yourself, let alone some much more obscure games. And most people didn't beat that many games in the 80s anyway.
That said, in-game hints have gotten out of hand. People used to laugh at Nintendo's Wii games, now Fi doesn't seem that bad anymore.
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if the game was well designed you totally figured it out yourself unless you suck at puzzles of course.

Castlevania 2 wasn't a well designed game.

and back then gamedesign was indeed often bad in the other direction, with really shittily designed text adventures like many early Sierra games or Hitchhiker's Guide, and of course some early Action Adventures that were way too cryptic (not seldom due to technical limitations)

I think the 90s and early 2000s is where it all was perfected. games like Super Metroid, A Link to the Past, Ocarina of Time, Tomb Raider, later Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures, Blood Omen 2 etc.
all games with heavy puzzle elements that were usually very fair and solvable without looking up any hints or walkthroughs online/in magazines.
 
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Handel said:
Even Ueda's latest title The Last Guardian had some of this shit forced onto it by Sony execs. Not nearly as bad as other Sony/cinematic AAA games, because Ueda no doubt would only concede so much, but the bits of handholding in TLG are my only flaw with that game.
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These things are decided by game designers, not execs.
 
Reizo Ryuu said:
Y'all, I'm 99.99% sure designers don't like this shit either, nonsense like this comes from research departments.
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I sure as fuck hope so, otherwise this would be depressing.

I also think it's this push for mainstream appeal that's the reason why climbing sections in Uncharted are basically on rails without the possibility of failing.

or the reason why every single time you have to crouch in The Last Guardian a popup comes onto the screen telling you to press X to crouch... as if I had Alzheimer's and am constantly forgetting the controls of the game I played for multiple hours
 
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yurinka said:
These things are decided by game designers, not execs.
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There are people called producers, and yeah they'll suggest/force things on games even if the dev doesn't really want to do it. Ico doesn't tell you anything about how to play it, and SotC only really informs you on how to do a few things like the grip mechanic. The amount of tutorialization in The Last Guardian is much higher than in prior two games, button prompts and narration hints especially, and I can't be convinced that these weren't forced onto the game by higher ups at Sony.
 
UX is hard...its a battle between the sad reality that people can often be quite dumb (or more often just don't think/look properly, or aren't as clued up on common expected core knowledge as you may like), and get frustrated easily vs finding solutions to those frustrations that also don't add clutter or inconvenience for everyone else. There is no perfect solution. Gaming is also more mass market now too, with newer larger audiences of more casual gamers entering the market, which is great for growth of the industry, but also means a larger percent are more prone to those frustrations. You wouldn't believe some of the blindingly obvious issues we have with our own products, that really shouldn't need pointing out, but many people just don't use their eyes or intuition.

So many of the things that we take as just simple normal unwritten rules/expectations of how games work, and the language of games really are not obvious to newcomers to genres they are not familiar with.
 
mdkirby said:
So many of the things that we take as just simple normal unwritten rules/expectations of how games work, and the language of games really are not obvious to newcomers to genres they are not familiar with.
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weirdly this was never an issue before... video games became the biggest entertainment medium long before these game journalist helpers were implemented.

also there is a very simple answer to this all: MAKE IT AN OPTION.

just ask "is your IQ above 70" at the start of the game, if you answer yes it's turned off :)
 
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I don't have much problem with this because when i'm focusing on the puzzle and exploration i barely hear what atreus and mimir say (also not native english speaker so i don't get exactly everything at first glance) but it is pretty absurd that the game has accessibility options even to clean kratos ass after he take a dump, but nothing about disabling help for puzzles, how did they forget that? And how did they forget the backlash received by hfw?
 
These puzzles are only quick and cheap pace and loop changers because you can't have 30h of let's say combat alone.

That's why you have dialogues, cutscenes, exploration, traversal, puzzles etc.

Depending on the focus of the game each of these are either strong or weak. Seeing that OP's examples are heavily focused on story, character narrative interaction and combat, it lacks in other departments.

It's also a design philosophy whether you have reduced gameplay loops or try to be a jack of all trades and only expel in few of the offered systems. AAA games tend to the latter because mainstream target audience seem to like it ("coool you can craft, you have characters, combat, puzzles, action, story, side quests, graphics, challenges!"... it can't be enough for them) and shareholders calculating the risk and reward seem to agree and that's what you get.

Why they didn't give an option, I don't know. They should be. A Plague Tale has an option for the duration that needs to pass before getting hints. They also can be disabled entirely.

Personally, I play a lot of click and point adventures and other puzzle games so I don't need them in games like GoW or HZ. In fact, I could go without them entirely, so if I'm getting the hints right away I don't mind because I don't put myself into that mindset of "ok, now I need to solve this, and on my own!".

Usually. This can vary though and options are good.
 
01011001 said:
weirdly this was never an issue before... video games became the biggest entertainment medium long before these game journalist helpers were implemented.

also there is a very simple answer to this all: MAKE IT AN OPTION.

just ask "is your IQ above 70" at the start of the game, if you answer yes it's turned off :)
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Its deciding 'which' to turn off tho, all of them? there's plenty of people in the middle where the too much handholding is too much, but some is good for them... A clever way to do it would be tying it to difficulty setting. If you select hard it changes/or disabled those things. It would be pretty funny if for instance in the god of war example, the narrated hints, instead of giving hints, they just start taking the piss out of you on hard mode.

And whilst gaming has been the biggest entertainment medium for a while, big games take 5-6 years to make, so over the years more casual gamers have dripped in or broadened the games they play, and these features have slowly started dripping into games more and more.

And I'd argue that IQ isn't really a factor, its just someone who plays a lot of games like god of war, could see an ice wall blocking their path, or a chunk of water blocking their path, and instantly have a bank of gamer knowledge that suggests to them 'oh I guess at some point I'll just get a fireball or fire sword and be able to melt that ice wall' they will think that even before you get the power to do it. We just know, because we've done/seen it a hundred times. If you don't play those sort of games much, that unwritten rule you would be oblivious to, so even when you get the fire spell you could easily not put 2 and 2 together, you just see an ice wall, and think it's just a wall. We take those things for granted, when they really aren't.
 
zkorejo said:
I noticed that too it's annoying. I would prefer to have them give players atleast 10 minutes before starting with suggestions and hints instead of turning it off completely.

Also another thing I noticed, they do it more often on main path and not side mission/exploration. I could be wrong but that's what I noticed in my 4 hours of gameplay.
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They don't tell you where the runes are for these treasure chests tho.
 
I think the real solution is to take these dumb puzzles out of the games altogether. I'm playing God of War. I want to do war things, not push around fucking boxes.

Or Last of Us whenever it turned into Ladder Simulator 2012. NO ONE likes it.
 
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Good luck OP.

Big triple AAA games in a nutshell. But From showed the world this year, what we really want....The feeling of exploration...of wonder. Sony big AAAs arent going to do that. They have to be safe. Maybe Elden ring and BOTW before it will finally get the message to these western devs.
 
mdkirby said:
And I'd argue that IQ isn't really a factor, its just someone who plays a lot of games like god of war, could see an ice wall blocking their path, or a chunk of water blocking their path, and instantly have a bank of gamer knowledge that suggests to them 'oh I guess at some point I'll just get a fireball or fire sword and be able to melt that ice wall' they will think that even before you get the power to do it. We just know, because we've done/seen it a hundred times. If you don't play those sort of games much, that unwritten rule you would be oblivious to, so even when you get the fire spell you could easily not put 2 and 2 together, you just see an ice wall, and think it's just a wall. We take those things for granted, when they really aren't.
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While all this is true, we also found out these things in time.

We have internet, guided playthrough videos, written hints, etc. No need to even buy the guide anymore!
 
Yeah it's a drag and it's just not the PlayStation protagonist syndrome. It's like every game AAA or "Indy"
I feel like it's been like this since the start of the ps360 Gen.
 
alabtrosMyster said:
While all this is true, we also found out these things in time.

We have internet, guided playthrough videos, written hints, etc. No need to even buy the guide anymore!
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You're not wrong, but we have entered an era of maximum convenience. Move 2 meters to put a disk in a machine? Fuck that....What do you mean 'go to a shop?', I just push a button and some guy brings me groceries. Whilst yes, the internet and videos are a lot more convenient than when we used to have to buy magazines, its not as convenient as the game just telling you what to do. Maximum convenience in this era, will almost always win out.
 
Spaceman292 said:
I think the real solution is to take these dumb puzzles out of the games altogether. I'm playing God of War. I want to do war things, not push around fucking boxes.

Or Last of Us whenever it turned into Ladder Simulator 2012. NO ONE likes it.
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Nah, environmental puzzles have been in GOW since the beginning, they are a part of the series DNA.
 
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Spaceman292 said:
I think the real solution is to take these dumb puzzles out of the games altogether. I'm playing God of War. I want to do war things, not push around fucking boxes.

Or Last of Us whenever it turned into Ladder Simulator 2012. NO ONE likes it.
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nah, I definitely like having puzzles and some variety to break up the pacing.
 
I think I wouldn't mind if it was Mimir giving the advice, having a 14 year old giving advice to Kratos is really stupid.
 
Dick Jones said:
Not telling. I thought you wanted to solve this puzzle yourself 😉
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That's how we know there isn't an option.

If there was, Atreus would say something like, "when I feel like talking less, I click the Options button, go to Settings and under Accessibility I turn down the NPC Hints slider."
 
Counter point--why does an action game have puzzles in the first place? If I wanted to do puzzles, I'd get out a damn board game. I want to smash faces and blow up shit.

Biggest gripe I had with Uncharted, and couldn't ever finish Lost Legacy. The puzzles are so asinine and unrealistic, it completely takes you out of the game.

Yes, let's interrupt this badass massacre to have you solve some completely unrealistic and convoluted puzzle that was somehow created by primitive natives thousands of years ago, that somehow rivals modern engineering in scope and functionality!
 
Jesus Christ, some people claimed the hints became lighter as the game went on, but I am finding them even more egregious.

Atreus is so desperate to give solutions, that he says them even after they aren't needed. I blow up a pile of ore so we can crawl through a tunnel. A few seconds later he says "we could probably get in that tunnel if we can find a way through the ore".

A bit later I come across a chest that is unlocked by lighting braziers. There is one right next to the chest. Atreus immediately says "hey think you could light that brazier?" immediately followed by Mimir saying "there are probably more of these around here".

This is fucking ridiculous. Give us at least a minute to look around. This needs to be addressed.
 
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Handel said:
There are people called producers, and yeah they'll suggest/force things on games even if the dev doesn't really want to do it. Ico doesn't tell you anything about how to play it, and SotC only really informs you on how to do a few things like the grip mechanic. The amount of tutorialization in The Last Guardian is much higher than in prior two games, button prompts and narration hints especially, and I can't be convinced that these weren't forced onto the game by higher ups at Sony.
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Producers aren't executives and also don't work in tutorials: they only manage the teams: making sure the dev team reach milestones on time, managing resources or budgets, solving issues that may appear in the tasks, hosting meetings. Tutorials are designed by game, UX/UI and maybe even narrative designers, and their boss the creative director (in this case Ueda) may ask them to take certain approach.

For actions that are exactly like in a ton of previous games, or for games where you only have a few possible actions to do, tutorials aren't needed. This was the case of games made time ago. In the past games also were developed in a few months, so they also didn't have time to playtest them properly so they shipped the games without testing them a lot and without detecting if too much people got stuck or frustrated in specific places or they didn't understood stuff. These are the reasons of why old games had a broken difficulty and didn't have tutorials.

Over time development lengths expanded for bigger ganes, game designers started to have access to longer playtests and in-game metrics that stored statistics of how people played and where people gets stuck or frustrated, so they started to fine tune the learning and difficulty curves according to most players needed. They (or we, I also have been working on that during years) also iterated with different types of tutorials or indicators when things were detected that most people didn't get them properly.

Specially in games more targeted to a more casual and mainstream audience or games that had very different/new/weird mechanics as it was the case of Last Guardian, game where that was specially difficult because unlike in the other games here you don't get instant feedback of your action: you have to wait for the ratbird to see if you did or didn't the proper action. And sometimes maybe you did the propear action but the ratbird didn't react as supposed so sometimes you had to try different times, with different timing or having the ratbird at certain distance.

When gameplay doesn't react as the player expects or isn't intuitive enough and doesn't see a clear reaction to their actions, the player thinks it's the game's fault and that the gameplay sucks. So in these cases gameplay must be tweaked to make it more intuitive and with clearer hints/tutorials or visual/audio/rumble feedback, specially rewarding the player at the moment just after doing things well.

In terms of gameplay and mechanics Ico and SotC were pretty much standard outside having the huge enemies/moving levels in SotC so basically didn't need tutorialization/too obvious hints, but in TLG the things I pointed above were specially problematic, and I assume the final game had a gazillion iterations, improvents and tweaks over the original concept and even after that was shipped with a gameplay that many people didn't like.
 
I would love an option have characters shut up 😂. Their dialogue often ruins the weight of serious moments that happened 10 seconds ago. Back to cracking jokes right after losing a close friend lol.
 
#4theplayers

sMiv5j.png
 
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Spaceman292 said:
I think the real solution is to take these dumb puzzles out of the games altogether. I'm playing God of War. I want to do war things, not push around fucking boxes.

Or Last of Us whenever it turned into Ladder Simulator 2012. NO ONE likes it.
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They have always been there, mostly because puzzles offer a change of pace and what not.
GoW 3


GoW 2 on PS2


GoW 1 on PS2


Sometimes a whole level is a giant puzzle, this is part of the series DNA, but having some braindead character calling the shots before you have a minute to even notice that you entered a puzzle room or something is pretty obnoxious.
 
alabtrosMyster said:
They have always been there, mostly because puzzles offer a change of pace and what not.
GoW 3


GoW 2 on PS2


GoW 1 on PS2


Sometimes a whole level is a giant puzzle, this is part of the series DNA, but having some braindead character calling the shots before you have a minute to even notice that you entered a puzzle room or something is pretty obnoxious.
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They were boring in the old games too. It's not a change of pace, it's a killer of pace.
 
The last time I really looked forward to games like this was PS2 era with Shadow of the Colossus and Prince of Persia Sands of Time. The genre got really old and boring for me. Things like characters never shutting up, forced crafting/skill trees/etc and boring level design really sap my interest.
 
Another GOWR play session and OP is sadly spot on. This is seriously ruining my experience. I've got hints to solve a puzzle before I had even seen that there was a puzzle to solve and sometimes hints are said when I've already solved it.
Imo this needs to be patched! No GOTY from me if it stays like this, makes the game feel way too linear, they need to add an option to turn that off asap.
 
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I think Sony should ditch the rudimentary puzzles entirely. The puzzles are all too simple and don't really add to the experience. Characters offering hints to such rudimentary puzzles borders on condescending. I'd rather spend more time fighting.
 
Playing on God of War difficulty mode, I've probably died over 100 times now. Im here for the satisfying combat and story, I'm glad they provide hints for the puzzles.
 
metaverse said:
Playing on God of War difficulty mode, I've probably died over 100 times now. Im here for the satisfying combat and story, I'm glad they provide hints for the puzzles.
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yeah nice to have options for combat difficulty, right?
they have like 580 different options for every aspect of the experience except for this puzzle spoiling shit
 
damidu said:
yeah nice to have options for combat difficulty, right?
they have like 580 different options for every aspect of the experience except for this puzzle spoiling shit
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Yeah, they need to add puzzle options. Just patch in an option to disable audio hints. Should be easy to do. It really hurts the whole experience now.
 
Because the devs are going for realism, just like in real life theres too many interfearing cunts sticking there nose in other peoples bussiness.
 
Brigandier said:
Absolutely should be options to turn hints off and also markings on climbable objects,walls etc
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The markings on ledges can be less obvious if you go into the settings and change the color. They're so close to get it right there, unfortunately "off" isn't off at all but you can choose a color that almost fade into the area color.
 
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