If a game had an option to simulate a battle or series of choices before you committed to a course of action, would you use it? Would you use it if the game had no quickload? One of the major reasons players save and restore is to experiment, either because they don't know if they can do something, or they want to find out what might happen. So I'm wondering if this can be achieved completely (or mostly) in-game. What options would you need? Would it make sense to go through a battle or series of risky actions in a "danger room" and then do them again, "for real," without the ability to recover from mistakes? Also, do you think the game needs to validate the time you spend experimenting/training/preparing for danger or conflict, for example by boosting your character's stats or giving you some other type of in-game edge that reflects your choice?

For reference, whenever I play emulated games with save states, I feel like I'm cheating. It's only when I play "for real", only using save states when I could save the game normally, that I really enjoy it. If you want to allow experimentation, you'll need to provide it at some granularity greater than what save states provide, or else you'll need to be some kind of amazing game designer to keep the fun in there.

A certain minimum amount of fun, I feel, comes from risk. You may not be risking permadeath, but you're putting the time since you last saved on the line. If you can always go back to just before you made a mistake, then the game can easily turn into "try that; oops, screwed up. Okay, go back, try it again; oops, screwed up again. Okay, go back, ahh made it this time, aw dammit, screwed up *that* part..." The recent Prince of Persia games fixed that by limiting the number of times you could rewind time (as well as how far back you could take it); this seems like a reasonable way to allow some experimentation without opening the game to abuse.

It is my belief that if there is a game, there will be a player who finds a way to abuse it. You can worry about making it as hard as possible for him to abuse it, but in the end, he'll beat you because these people apparently have nothing better to do with their time.

I think it would be better to focus on the fun-factor for the majority of players who aren't looking to cheat the system and just want to have fun playing, what's going to be best for them?

I imagine in your case, Wavinator, being sci-fi, you could also allow the players to "run simulations" to see how a certain battle or what-have-you might play out. This can even take the form of "practice" and perhaps raise the players' skills ever so slightly for every iteration, making them in the long run, not only better at playing the game, but no worse for wear if they need to try a lot before they get it right (perhaps there is only a "significant" gain if they succeed to beat their simulation).

Even stuff like person-vs-person combat could hypothetically be "simulated". I've always thought that Orson Scott Card's "Battle Room" would make an excellent premise for a game or at least mini-game at the very least. (Read "Ender's Game" for what I'm talking about here)

From a personal level I have to agree with Derakon though, I always thought that being able to save in the middle of nowhere, just because I know there might be a tough baddy up ahead... always seemed to take some of the luster away from the game. It was always much more addicting to have to play through that first few hours of getting to the same point and dying over and over and doing it again to make sure you get it right finally and get to go on to the next point.

I believe it was... Resident Evil? That only allowed you to save when you found a typewriter, and of course, this method has been employed by many RPG's over the years, finding certain "saving nodes" if you will. But this always seemed to make more sense, saving from a safe spot. It always afforded me no small amount of frustration when I needed to quit in the middle of a game and my "quicksave" slot got overwritten at a point where I was nearly ambushed by five baddies with 10% life left and no chance of escape.

Anyway, my two cents, something to chew on,

Vopisk

The game is for the player to enjoy. If the player enjoys saving every 3 minutes, so that no more than 3 minutes of gameplay will be wasted by a mistake, then that's the player's choice.

Quote:

Original post by hplus0603 The game is for the player to enjoy. If the player enjoys saving every 3 minutes, so that no more than 3 minutes of gameplay will be wasted by a mistake, then that's the player's choice.

That's true, however, I believe that the OP is directed more towards possible alternatives to players NEEDING to save every three minutes. Why not make the trial and error process part of the actual gameplay rather than forcing quicksaves or clunky menus to save every time you feel your life may be in danger?

Not to mention, in the case of a possibly online RPG, you would not per say, have the ability to save from point X and return to it. So some possible alternative, perhaps like I described above, would help to give the player confidence without having to worry about XP/EQ loss as a result of dying the first time they try and take on the next baddy.

If, however, the player has already faced these creatures in the "simulator" and has a pretty good idea of their tactics and abilities, then they are better prepared to cope what may be thrown at them. An important note to make here though I believe, is that if a "simulator" type environment was implemented, I feel it would be important to have it imperfect. That is to say, a creature/person will not fight exactly like they do in the simulator, so that the player character only gets a general idea of what he's dealing with, leaving in some of the risk factor of just going and doing it.

My two cents, something to chew on,

Vopisk

Ahh...Ender's Game. Such a great book/series of books.

I've always enjoyed the multiplayer RPG method of handling calculation of difficult scenarios: they don't. The world's timeline is linear, and thus any choices made are permanent. I enjoy a certain level of pseudo-realism (e.g. if the game can fool my mind into thinking, "this isn't an arcade toy, it's a simulation"), so when options are seldom presented which contradict that, I appreciate the game system all the more.

On the other side of things, I disliked features in games which allowed you to guess how difficult an encounter was. I believe Everquest was the first online game I came across which offered the pretense of 'considering' a foe. Of course, where's the realism (versus simulation) of running around killing anything that moves?

Quote:

Original post by MatrixCubed I've always enjoyed the multiplayer RPG method of handling calculation of difficult scenarios: they don't. The world's timeline is linear, and thus any choices made are permanent. I enjoy a certain level of pseudo-realism (e.g. if the game can fool my mind into thinking, "this isn't an arcade toy, it's a simulation"), so when options are seldom presented which contradict that, I appreciate the game system all the more. On the other side of things, I disliked features in games which allowed you to guess how difficult an encounter was. I believe Everquest was the first online game I came across which offered the pretense of 'considering' a foe. Of course, where's the realism (versus simulation) of running around killing anything that moves?

You present a valid argument, but I think that your logic is slightly flawed to some degree. It is quite easy to consider a creature or other person as it pertains to the difficulty of an armed conflict with them. For some examples:

If I see a huge lion in front of me, and I don't have a high-powered rifle to take it down with, I can be pretty certain that I will be it's lunch if I decide to mess with it.

If I see a brawny, muscular street thug bearing down on me from up the street, and I don't have my 9mm on me (being not the strongest or best fighter in the world), I know that I'm probably due to receive a beating.

While it's true that in either of these encounters, I do stand a possiblity of somehow coming away as the victor. However, I can tell, instinctively, that there's a more probably chance of me dying or receiving serious injury as a result of the confrontation. But, the benefit of being in a sci-fi universe, we can "simulate" things (a la the martial arts training simulator in the matrix) and get an idea of what our foes might throw at us and how to counter them.

This can be viewed as more or less the same as saving and reloading as you try and try again until you find a strategy that works. However, as I stated in my above post, this takes that process of trial and error out of the OOC area and moves it into the IC realm.

When it comes to "considering" upcoming encounters, I do think that there should be a limit to what information is revealed. For example, I am predominantly a text-based game player(MUD). In most of these games, when I "consider" an enemy, I will receive a whole paragraph worth of text telling me that I am "healthier"(have more HP) than the enemy, better armored, less good at attacking and blah blah blah. This turns the process into a number cruncher rather than giving me a general idea of how well my character "thinks" he can handle the situation.

It's a lot like considering whether or not I want to kill a spider that's crawling on my wall. Unless the thing is four-feet across, I can be pretty sure to get it dead on the first swing, however, what if I miss and it jumps on me and bites me with its' poisonous fangs? Well, that was an unforseen circumstance that I, in my arrogance (being far larger than the little spider) didn't even factor in.

It's these kinds of surprises that can add a sense of depth and involvement into the game and make the risk factor rise, which of course for most people raises the fun level as there is always an element of danger to any situation.

My two cents, something to chew on,

Vopisk

From my experience, the reason why I save and restore to experiment is that most games reward experimentation with the "Game Over" screen if you do something wrong. If a game designer wants to replace the save/restore system with something else, I think you also have to dampen the loss for failure in some way. Exactly how to do this will depend a lot on how you want the game to play, but I wouldn't make the loss too permanent or cost too much in player time, or you'll be giving a bit psycological incentive for the player to stop playing your game.

One thing I think you'll need to do is make sure there's a good level of feedback as to the level of risk involved in an action. For example if you are making a combat game, giving an approximation of the range and damage that an enemy can do in a clear and concise way will help. Clearly sign-posting areas of high danger is another good approach, although I'd also make it clear that such risky areas are optional.

I think you'd have to have a reason for the training, but depending on the game just learning more about the dangers ahead or the avatar's abilities may be sufficient. However I think there's a risk that the training itself might be a little boring if it's "practice" for the main part of the game.

The way that I invision a "practice" area, especially in something like large-scale combat, is basically playing out the game, only in a simulated environment, so there is no loss associated, perhaps even some minor skill gains.

For example, suppose you want to get an idea of what tactics the "Alien Armada of Doom" might use. So you go to a simulator, plug in the numbers (as far as you know them, i.e. number and type of ships, etc...), choose a combat location and go at it. As I've stated before, it's essential that the actual combat (with life on the line) hold still certain hidden surprises that the simulator was not able to predict, but if you can get an idea of what you're up against, you can feel more confident in your ability to handle this.

This was the entire premise behind the book, "Ender's Game". Being a child genius, he thought he was merely playing out battle simulations when in fact he was controlling humankind's starships as they fought it out with the aliens. Or likewise, with my Matrix example, if you plug in what you know about a certain thing, such as an Agent, then you can go into the combat simulator and fight one and get a general idea of how the combat will evolve, though it won't be perfect.

A simulator system should NOT replace saving in important locations, i.e. the end of a level or what-have-you, but could be a good way to allow players to experiment with the forces they're due to face before they have to put their life on the line and perhaps, slow down the use of frequent saving and breaking the immersion of the game by making this trial and error process a part of the gameworld.

Vopisk