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"Oh, hi Sora. What's up?"
"Hey, Huey. I just have these spare items to sell."
"OK, let me see them. Hmm, carry the 1...there's 7 of those... Oh, =
I'm sorry, I can't take these."
"What? Why not?"
"You'd end up with more money than you're allowed to hold."
Don't you just hate when that happens? And yes, in that game, it
can.
There's a trend in role-playing games that's really developed over
the past few years that I hate. I call it dummy mode, and what it
amounts to is protecting the players from themselves. The developers
build in systems that prevent the player not only from making bad
decisions, but from having to decide at all. This not only adds a
frustrating element to games, but actually encourages gamers to be lazy
and unthinking.
The most common, and one of the most annoying, aspects of dummy mode
is the inability to take an item from a treasure chest if you already
have the maximum amount of that item. In most games this is merely
annoying, especially to players like me who dislike leaving full chests
behind. Skies of Arcadia: Legends takes it one step further,
even. The game keeps track of which chests you've collected, and you are
rewarded near the end of the game if you've gotten them all. But should
you be unable to claim something from a chest in one of the several
dungeons that you can't ever go back to, you're screwed. Bad design, and
entirely avoidable if they'd just left dummy mode off.
Kingdom Hearts, the game in the example above, shows another
example of why dummy mode is detrimental. Many of the gummi items in the
game can't be sold--and none can be discarded, so by the end of the game
most players will have no choice but to leave many chests behind because
there is no way to make room in their inventory for the chests'
contents. Again, mostly an annoyance, but one that the designers should
have fixed.
Another aspect of dummy mode that some games use is to spoon-feed
where to go next and what to do there to the player. To use an example
from Fable, a grevious offender, there a quest in which a Demon
Door all but gives you the solution to the puzzle necessary to get past
it before you've even begun to try. What's the point? Am I supposed to
play the game or just follow the cue cards from start to end? The
tendency to accent place names in regular conversation or to provide
directions to the next objective is detrimental to the sense of
exploration in games. Simply put, it makes them less fun.
The final bit of dummy mode that I wish to talk about is mandatory
training segments. While these are useful for inexperienced players, or
for easing into complex battle systems, they are completely unnecessary
in most of the games that feature them. Again, Kingdom Hearts
does this. I find it difficult to begin a new game because I know I'd
have to go through the training sequence again. It would have been much
better to let players have the option of skipping directly into the
game, with only short stops for the choices that must be made at two
points in the training.
The real problem I have with dummy mode is that it assumes the
players are lazy and don't want to have to figure out anything on their
own. And you know what, they're right, or they will be. The more they
take away the need to think, the less the players will be able to.
What's the last dungeon you recall that had multiple branching paths, no
automap, and it wasn't made obvious which paths were dead ends and which
led to the boss? They don't make them anymore (that I've seen), because
getting through them requires thought and effort. Instead we get linear
dungeons, with the occasional branching path that shortly leads to a
treasure. More mediocrity. Hooray.
So, what can be done about this? For starters, give the players back
the ability to choose. For example, with the treasure chest issue, they
should at minimum ask the player if he or she wants to take the item
anyway and lose it, instead of forcing them to leave it behind. They
could also stop giving the player explicit directions to every
destination. "Go talk to Bill in a nearby town." is more challenging,
and more fun, than "Go ask Bill Townsman
in the third house on the left in Podunk,
which is directly northeast of here.
Check your automap for the target blip."
The issue of mandatory training sequences is harder to solve, because
it requires that the developers assume the player has read the manual.
Sadly, many gamers are unwilling to take the five to ten minutes
necessary for that simple step. Maybe this reflects on people's
expectations of convenience, but is it really that odious to do? Some
games, such as Shadow Hearts: Covenant, include a help section in
the main menu, which lets them bypass mandatory training, and allows for
players who won't ever see past the front cover of the paper manual.
It's a workable solution, at least.
So here's my request to game makers: stop helping us be stupid. I
want to have to figure out where to go and what to do. Hints are fine,
but don't bold or colorize things; I'll find the place on my own, thank
you very much. And don't treat me like an imbecile; I well know the
conseqences of taking that 100th potion out of a chest. Respect me, and
I'll like your games better for it, that's all.
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