How to design games in an era of wikis & guides?

[NotAI]

"How to design games in an era of wikis and guides?"

Got a substack essay in the works on approximately this issue. That will get done later, but here are the conclusions.

Partial guides are usually available around two days after a game comes out. Complete guides get posted in around a week after it's out. Plus everyone watches streams when it comes out, to decide whether to buy the game.

People often end up watching from 1/2 to 2/3 of the whole game twice at that point. Well, ****.

The broader issue is worse. Half of all players are so familiar with games now, since playing games is normal, that pretty much nothing is surprising (it's close to having a guide in your head). Meanwhile the other half is casual, almost always, and drawn in by word of mouth or visuals. So the difficulty of the same game is always widely different whatever the game does. However it is designed. Some people can't help but play as if they are looking up answers, even if they are not. Game can't be designed around assuming that everybody has already played every other game before this, too many good things have to be forgone.

IMO, the solution is not necessarily randomization....even if it's helpful to have some randomization...randomization can hurt hard. Remember how randomized locations of loot in Gothic 3 felt worse than hand-placed loot in Gothic 2. How the randomized stats of loot in Borderlands felt worse than the fixed stats of loot in nearly anything else that was released.

IMO, the actual solution is to design games where the player can get the best outcome by failing some quests, ignoring some quests, not even discovering some quests, loot, etc, based on build type. So some activities are quite literally traps, in the sense of the story and the role. This is made clear early on, hence the player is encouraged to just continue with a failure state in some activity, rather than reloading or looking up the answer, much like the hero in a novel fails a few times before tremendously succeeding in the end, when the stakes are highest.

The way to do it should also not be unique. Several ways to get a good outcome. So no incentive in looking up what to intentionally fail or pass over during the journey. Randomization might help out specifically here, in maintaining that uncertainty, within the constraints of the story. It should be very plausible.

The player doesn't know where achieving a quest given actually gives a worse outcome later than failing the quest or rejecting it or messing it up or not discovering it. Getting some loot now might have consequences of blocking other loot later, so the choice is not to use a guide or look up the solution to everything encountered but just PLAY THE ROLE the way the player wants and what happens happens. It should be clear that this might actually lead to the best outcome anyway, even if you fail 3/7 main quests and miss 5/10 side quests. Why? For example, some the quest givers are scoundrels, it turns out. Randomize who it is; that's one approach. Some the quest givers betray the PC. So if you help them, you just empower them to screw the PC harder in the end. If you just look up nothing, and do what feel interesting and fits the role the way you decided to play it, that's often enough the right way to play. The best outcome with the highest probability.

[Stack of Turtles]

Got a feeling a lot of you think the souls games would be improved if you could trivialize the saving system with a quick reload

They would be

[rusty_shackleford]

Got a feeling a lot of you think the souls games would be improved if you could trivialize the saving system with a quick reload

They would be

Your opinion is bad

[Oyster Sauce]

Got a feeling a lot of you think the souls games would be improved if you could trivialize the saving system with a quick reload

They would be

Your opinion is bad

Is the amount of Souls games you've beaten higher than 0?

[Stack of Turtles]

Got a feeling a lot of you think the souls games would be improved if you could trivialize the saving system with a quick reload

They would be

Your opinion is bad

All opinions about souls games are bad

[rusty_shackleford]

They would be

Your opinion is bad

Is the amount of Souls games you've beaten higher than 0?

I've probably beaten plenty of games with souls in the title

[DrSneed]

Avid Black Souls enjoyer Rusty

[Lich]

black souls is a hard game

[logincrash]

More like ****** Souls, amirite? And I'm talking about every single game with "Souls" in the title here.

[J1M]

One thing that I've learned from community advice, specifically thinking of examples related to World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy, is that much of the definitive advice on these wikis is total ********* and vastly different advice is given 20 years later.

No reason to believe wikis for less popular games are more accurate.

The initial conclusions were definitively false, and the current conclusions may be as well, but it doesn't really matter because:
a) The games aren't tuned tight enough for it to matter.
b) The game takes place inside your head. The endorphins released when someone hit "BiS max defense gear" were real, even if some day on a private server it would be shown to be strictly inferior to a vanilla warrior tank kitted out with Fury talents and dual wielding for higher threat.