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Easier playing newer games.


Arch-Mage Solberg

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I almost hate playing the newer games because there's no sense of adventure. In the Exile/Avernum games, you get a quest then you have to ask where to find the place where you go to. Now you get a quest and a marker comes up telling you where to go. While it makes for easier game play, I think some of the adventure is taken away. This isn't just a Spiderweb thing, it's been happening for years. That's just mu 2 cents.

 

Post #733 :cool:

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I understand your complaint but don't completely agree, certainly not from a business perspective.  Most of the people who buy 'x' game aren't looking for a 'this perfectly matches up with how I'd have to do 'y' out in the real world (for example, it comes up in casual conversation that a random bartender in one of the cities that you visited a week ago wants a bag of sugar.  If you didn't write it down you're not likely to remember who or where), but rather a few hours of escapism.  The designer is just taking some of the repetitive drudgery out of the game.  The 'junk bag' is another good example of this.  It really doesn't bother me that I'm able to toss 15 sets of chain mail in there along with a couple of dozen swords for eventual sale once I get back to town.  What would (& did) bother me though was the constant trudging back to town to sell that stuff for a small amount of gold every time I could barely carry any more.

 

By getting rid of much of the dull grind it tends to make it a better experience for 'most' people ... which in the end translates to better word of mouth/more sales & in the end 'that' is what really matters.  And I suppose you could also not open up your journal to look at your assorted quests but rather keep one on a pad of paper yourself (same with the automap, it too can be closed).  So I do understand, but I don't miss those early gaming days (apart from the being younger myself & able to stay up all night with friends without being wiped out the next day - that I wouldn't mind going back to...)

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  • 1 month later...
On 8/13/2020 at 11:48 AM, ladyonthemoon said:

Sign of the times; let's make games for people who pretend that they have limited time and have "a lot of other games to play". 

Yeah, I was answered that once. The worst is that this kind of behaviour from players is going to be that default mode. How many people are willing to read a book nowadays?

That'd be me. Between work, kids, wife, sports and books... I barely know how to finish a comfortable game, let alone one with unnecessary drudgery 

 

Since people like me make signicantly more than when I actually had time, I find it logical that games cater to people with disposable income. 

 

I think it's great that games have become respectful of their fans' time. 

 

As for books. I recently read Ulysses. It was okay, but not nearly as good as The Familiar series which has similar postmodern trappings. What did you read? 

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I envy people who are able to tease people who don't have endless free time. Lucky you. Are you twelve years old?

 

I have nothing but time on my hands for now, but that won't last long. It feels like mere minutes are passing between the Weekend Briefing emails I get from the New York Times. My long-distance best friend is 76 years old and I'm terrified that I won't have the time to spend with him by virtue of his age. Time blows by and I desperately wish it would slow down. I don't want to spend even a precious minute flopping around doing mundane clerical tasks just to play a game.

Edited by The Almighty Doer of Stuff
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It sure seemed like you were complaining about people who have no free time and also don't read books. 

 

Capitalism or not (I prefer not) , I really don't understand why people complain about games being less terrible, with fewer dull mechanics. That's a good development.

 

Maybe next time try to be more clear. It didn't come across nice what you were writing. I like games that respect my time, for whatever reason (although I prefer reasons other than my income). I don't know how old you are but posts like yours, I couldn't write today, but I could when I had zero cares in the world. Unfortunately, I had to grow up but trust me, I wish I didn't have to. Between time or responsibilities+income, I'd choose time. 

Edited by marnick
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I've been debating whether to post in this thread for the past month...

 

On 8/12/2020 at 12:52 AM, Arch-Mage Solberg said:

there's no sense of adventure. In the Exile/Avernum games, you get a quest then you have to ask where to find the place where you go to. Now you get a quest and a marker comes up telling you where to go. While it makes for easier game play, I think some of the adventure is taken away.

 

This is a perfectly valid subjective, personal opinion regarding what makes games "easy" and what provides a "sense of adventure." If one person thinks map markers make a game less fun, and another appreciates map markers, they are both equally right insofar as their individual experience with a game is concerned.

 

The quote is not, however, valid as a sweeping statement about game design. In the first place, we need to define "sense of adventure." The quote seems to equate "adventure" with "absence of map markers." But what about the story? The characters? The visuals? The audio? All the rest of the gameplay beyond from the map markers? If map markers alone can result in "no sense of adventure" for a person, then I can't help but wonder if they have an awfully narrow notion what constitutes "adventure." 

Second, we should talk about what it means to have an "easier" game, since the OP also links being "easier" with having less adventure. "Does anybody really know what time game difficulty it is? Does anybody really care? 🎶" The truth is that games be difficult in many ways. Game devs don't face a simplistic binary choice between making a challenging game or an easy game. They face a slew of choices regarding where and how to inject "difficulty" to their creations. The fact that a game users map markers to tell you where to go next proves absolutely NOTHING about whether the game is "easy" or "difficult." Indeed, devs don't normally try to make a game "difficult" along every conceivable dimension. Instead, they tend to focus the challenge in certain areas of their game, while going easier on the player in other areas.

 

Like other creative arts, games are a collaborative process, where the creator's efforts and intentions can result in different experiences for different people, according to individual tastes, ability, personal history, etc. Not everyone is challenged by the same aspects of a game, and not everyone enjoys the same kinds of challenges. In the context of this discussion, some people have a great sense of direction, an aptitude for exploring and maintaining a mental map of where they've been / haven't been. And other people don't. Devs have significant influence over game difficulty in an abstract sense, but the difficulty level of each player's in-game experience is heavily shaped by players themselves. Just because one person finds a game "easier," that doesn't necessarily prove that the game actually is "easier" in some broad, general sense.

 

On 8/13/2020 at 5:48 AM, ladyonthemoon said:

Sign of the times; let's make games for people who pretend that they have limited time and have "a lot of other games to play". Yeah, I was answered that once. The worst is that this kind of behaviour from players is going to be that default mode. How many people are willing to read a book nowadays?

 

6 hours ago, ladyonthemoon said:

even if they have all the time they need to actually take their time and enjoy what they are doing, they don't, they rush through like they were fleeing something.

 

Where are you getting this idea that people "pretend that they have limited time?" And why would anyone lie about that in the first place?! Also, about the "lot of other games to play" part: how would you know someone is pretending to have many games they want to play? And then there's that last bit, about how people rush through games instead of taking their time to enjoy it. How could you possibly be equipped to know how much time another person has available for playing a game and how much time they would need to spend playing it to actually "enjoy" it? You can't. The snide comment about how people don't read books is equally problematic. In this very forum, just a few topics down from this one, there's a 47-page thread about the books people have been reading. It was started in 2008, and the most recent post (as of the time I'm writing this) is YOURS, earlier this month. Who are these people you have in mind who don't read books? Or maybe they read books, but they don't read the kind of books you think they ought to read? Or do they, according your authoritative standard, read books too quickly to properly enjoy them? Look, maybe when you made these comments you had in mind specific people you've known. But without context, your comments come across as pretentious judgments against people who don't share your tastes.

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Games don't have to be hard. They have to be enjoyable, you can be lured in by a sense of achievement you get, by a sense of wonder you get to a world so alien, by a good story and solid, immersive characters, with multiple and understandable motivations, by the level of control you hold into shaping the world according to your own aesthetics and logics, by just the simple fact that its pretty, because you like watching things go boom, etc.. etc.. a very good game, would ideally, seamlessly include multiple of these at the same time. But difficulty alone is rarely a good marker for a game, and even then, i personally don't think a map is a reflection of that on its own, and I much prefer Jeff's move to rely a lot more on placement of people, and managing abilities in battles, i feel there are some kinks still to figure out. But that in itself provides difficulty that wasn't often available in the earlier games further than "Weakness/Resistance".

 

Also wrt time, as triumph, marnick and ados said. Very few people have free time like that, and even fewer would lie about the time they have. An 8 hour work day, added to at least a full hour of commuting, and another of getting ready, and if you're able to and diligent, at least 6 hours of cooking and cleaning, and at least 8 hours of sleep. leaves you at exactly 0 hours of your day left. And thats the reality of most people, who will often sacrifice cooking and cleaning so that they have some me time, but eventually the cooking and cleaning will have to be done, which means bye bye weekends, and if im not mistaken the american government has no such thing as mandatory leave. Most people do not have time, and rely on fast, and easily consumable goods and services to maintain any amount of mental stability. To think otherwise comes from a place of privilege.

 

That being said, most people are ready to consume long games, long books, long movies, long series, provided they don't give the impression of wasting one's time. And unfortunately trailing along doing repetitive things that don't really add much to the experience of a game bar personal taste, often feels to people as a waste of their time, and that definitely affects people's willingness to engage with something. And even then, games like Dragon age inquisition, which needs upwards of 150 hours to fully complete, are easily hailed as worthy and enjoyable, and people will easily throw themselves to the story. And there are many quests and mechanics that feel... unnecessary. 

 

In short we live in a society and its hard to blame gamers or developers for their preferences, since they don't exist in a vacuum and have very understandable reasons as fuel.

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I suppose I can chime in on this, too. I don't think there's anything wrong with the older, often "less friendly" games - they have a charm all their own. The only problem is if they can still be made to run well or not. There will forever be a niche audience for games of those types, and as such, there will be a market, and likewise there will also be a maker of those products.

 

...Sometimes, even if you like that sort of thing, you need the time to deal with it. For example, I recently bought "Serpent in the Staglands" via GOG.com. If you like being forced to invest a lot of time into figuring out how a CRPG is supposed to be run effectively, that's your game. My first Spiderweb games were WAY easier, simpler, and by virtue of that, kind of more fun as well. The challenge is intriguing, but I have other duties and projects I want to be invested in. Looking back, games were fun as a child, but I think there were better things I could have or should have been doing. That said, I don't anticipate forcing myself into the nooks and crannies of that game sooner than later - there are other things I should be doing, that will actually have results if I attend to them.

 

So, the trend of "streamlining" things has merit in multiple degrees. The old Spiderweb games were full of grinding - it was kind of a simulation of real life, when I didn't have a real life as a kid. Now I have far less time I should spend on that stuff - it's still great, but life beckons, you know. If the streamlining allows enough time for enjoying the game and the story without throttling other commitments, for better or for worse, that's a marketable feature, and it sells. It sells for a reason.

 

If I was to throw back to the point of the OP, it would be this: I do agree, part of being an adventurer is an RPG is adventuring. It is fun to explore, and I don't think that should be lost on game designers. My perspective now is that it's grinding you want to stifle. People play games to not need a grind, to have fun, etc. It is fun to figure out a challenging puzzle, or manage a tricky feat, or venture somewhere and do something you've not done before. But when you have to keep carrying on to go... nowhere fast... not too many people have time for that.

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1 hour ago, Thaeris said:

The old Spiderweb games were full of grinding

 

This is where you lose me.  What games exactly are you thinking of?  Most Spiderweb games have such a sharp reduction in experience gain as your level rises that there's not even much point to grinding -- and this actually includes Exile!  It certainly wasn't encouraged or incentivized.

 

The only real exception I can think of is original Nethergate (not Nethergate: Resurrection), and even then it's not something that was necessary or encouraged.

 

If you just mean "hacking and slashing through the cannon fodder monsters that populate a given dungeon, the first time you explore it" that's... just not what grinding is.

 

EDIT: I'd also add that I don't think you can tie grinding to old school RPGs so easily.  No question that it was expected in some, especially the JRPGs, but nowhere near the degree to which MMOs and sandbox games and related RPGs have built around it.

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3 hours ago, "Nothing Left" said:

What games exactly are you thinking of? 

A4 springs to mind.

 

At the beginning with your strength low, once you hit the goblins just south of Ft Remote, it would generally take 3-4 trips back to town to sell everything that had value there as you were so encumbered that you could barely move (& God help you if you bumped into some sort of monster on the way back). And with it being the start & you needing lots of gold for various nefarious purposes, 'everything' with value got hauled back to town.

 

I cheered when the junk bag arrived on scene.  Yes it's silly to think that you can shove 20 sets of chain mail & other instruments of mayhem into it, but it's also silly to think that you can carry 3 sets (plus the one that you're wearing) without it back to town to get a few gold coins.  That kind of grinding I do not miss.

 

Similarly I'll break out the "Imdrained/restoreme" cheat code (non beta testing anyway) if I'm in a dungeon and running out of magic/mana.  If I can get back to the front of the area & then it's a clear shot back to town.  I'll use control d rather than hike back to town, step inside the gate, suddenly feel better, & then slog back to the dungeon to continue it's clearing out (note, this does not apply to QW as those are designed to drain you without recharging except by potion/battle recovery).  Not a huge deal but it does eliminate/save a few minutes (at most) of 'dead time'.

 

That kind of streamlining I'm all for as it's eliminating/greatly reducing the hassle of doing things that need to be done & yet they're pure drudgery to do so.

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A4 is 15 years old, while not one of the traditional 6-7 traditional 'old' SW games, it's still pretty old.  The grind/slog therein seemed to fit the original premise of the thread.

 

Ok, a real (optional) 'grind' from a few SW games spring to mind.  Running around killing game time to allow assorted herb patches to regenerate so that you have the ingredients for wisdom potions to eventually gain levels.  Also I know in A2, before heading down the river, during a couple of play throughs I've been close enough to leveling up/needing juuust a bit more gold for some training, that it was worth doing the Formello to Ft Draco loop several times looking for wandering monsters to kick things over the top.

 

No, it's not to the level of grinding/farming that you see in quite a few games, but it's there & it can give you a slight advantage in having that extra level/training before moving the main story along... if you're willing to trade your real life time to get those few extra hit points/extra point in first aid or cave lore (or whatever the Formello trainer/s had, it's been a while).  Again, purely optional on a player's part, but available.

 

And I do agree, SW 'grinding' is nothing like you find in other games.  Grim Dawn is one of my favorite nonSW games.  I love the essentially endless ways that you can go through the story line with more or less a 'new' experience each time depending on how you set up/which character class/other numerous variables.  And yet, even with all that I've on numerous occasions, restarted a section when an expected item drop (with 'x'% chance of dropping) didn't drop & I've really needed whatever component it was to build something good.  Nothing to the level of farming/grinding that I've read about many players doing, but if it's available...many people will. 

 

Anyway, to drag things back to sort of being on topic... I'm glad Jeff has been working on, over the years, streamlining the drudge/slog as that really is wasted game playing time (even if doing so would be more realistic).  Grinding is available in some/many games but there is a cost.  With the end game level caps, grinding early on to gain a slight advantage can come back to bite you if you hit that cap 2/3rds of the way through the game & you're left to finish things off with no 'reward' to your character/s (other than the assorted loot & knowing that you're moving the story along).

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Yeah, you can grind for resources, EXP, or Knowledge Brews in Exile games, although it only takes you so far, due not just to the level cap, but also due to the fact that outdoor wandering mobs will start fleeing and there's no "fight anyway" option in Exile. It's optional though. Even without grinding, I've become more or less unstoppable in my current play through Exile 3 just from doing half of Upper Exile before heading to the surface. The grinding, optional or not, isn't really the main thrust of this discussion though.

 

As has been discussed elsewhere on the forum, the number of formal "quests" increases dramatically as more and more games are developed. In Exile, you don't have quest markers on the map, but there's not really a lot of quests to keep track of in the first place. I think that might be significant.

Edited by The Almighty Doer of Stuff
"literal" grinding is indeed not the thrust of the argument but that's still not what I meant
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Slarty,

 

When I made the grinding comment, I was actually referring to Avernum 2 (the first one). I recall so many repeat trips back and fourth between dungeons just to gather loot, because cash, you know. That's the kind of grinding I'm talking about. And yes, that same thing was part of the original Nethergate as well. It's a part of those games, and there's a reason you might have had to do it (lots of casters in a party that need to be trained or special skills you don't want to spend valuable skill points on, mostly). And, it's OK that it's there! But, I did spend many, many hours going back and forth between towns and dungeons to sell loot. Battles are part of adventuring. Being a merchant is a grind. In that respect, games like Elite (the old ones, at least) and its open-source remake, Pioneer, are basically set around that kind of grinding. THAT can suck up a lot of time and not really be all that much fun. This is at least my opinion.

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"Grinding" in video games means repeating a monotonous action for an extended number of times to increase a statistic or resource to an arbitrary level. There are a few respawning mobs but mostly you're only making a few trips back and forth to gather the loot that's already on the ground after you've cleared the dungeon. There's a mostly set amount of work to be done. That's figuratively "a grind" but it's not "grinding" in the video games jargon sense.

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Yeah, ADoS is right.  "Grinding" has a much more specific meaning in RPGs than simply something being a grind.  The purpose for doing it is a necessary criteria.

 

I guess I'm also a little confused by the premise here:

 

"many, many hours going back and forth between towns and dungeons to sell loot"

 

In both of the games at issue (A2 and A4), enemies either don't respawn or respawn at incredibly slow rates, and it's very rare to have a dungeon located so far from a town that it takes more than, I don't know, 15 to 30 seconds of real life time to walk between the dungeon and the town, if there are no combats.  OK, OK, maybe a minute if you don't pound the numpad as much as I do ;)  But it really confuses me how this travel time could amount to "many, many hours."  There aren't many dungeons in those games that are all that large, even.  (I guess if you constantly rest outdoors in A2, that could lead to more wandering monster fights, but it's not necessarily to do that.)

 

Anyway, to tackle the original assertion -- and I'll just treat it as addressing gameplay that is a grind generally --

1 - G3 and A4 were definitely the height of this in SW games.  They both had an encumbrance system that was applied to the PC's backpack; A4 did have a lot of 1gp value trinkets, and in G3 item management was made worse by those awful boats.

2 - A1-3 had fewer random items to sell, and Exile fewer yet.  So I have a hard time locating this problem with "older" Spiderweb games.  (Or, as I said above, with older games in general.)

3 - If we focus specifically on this "having to walk back and forth repeatedly" issue, Avadon really had more of this than anything else, with its profusion of tiny sidequests that required backtracking -- often watching your PCs walk slowly through multiple zones to get to the right portals, etc., that were required.  At that point we're clearly in modern SW game territory.

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I remember having a rule of thumb about weight-to-value ratios for items to pick up and sell in the original Nethergate and Avernum Trilogy, because if you wanted to pick up and sell absolutely everything that was sellable, even for 1 coin, you'd make a huge number of trips back and forth to dungeons. If you weren't obsessive about selling absolutely everything and were reasonably disciplined about inventory management, you could avoid a lot of tedium.

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5 hours ago, Kelandon said:

I remember having a rule of thumb about weight-to-value ratios for items to pick up and sell in the original Nethergate and Avernum Trilogy

 

I have one of those ratios too. It changes as the game goes on. Early on, when money is tight, I'm more acceptable of the dungeon-to-town-to-dungeon-repeat loop than later in the game. I'm on my third replay of the original Avernums (in two years) and I find it harder to tolerate that "grind".

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I replayed Geneforge 1 and the boredom of hauling every bit of sellable items to a merchant and draining every last gold disk from the economy to buy training is tedious. At least the remake should have the junk bag so I won't get the message about not being able to carry an item because I ran out of slots. 

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5 hours ago, "Nothing Left" said:

Yeah, ADoS is right.  "Grinding" has a much more specific meaning in RPGs than simply something being a grind.  The purpose for doing it is a necessary criteria.

 

I guess I'm also a little confused by the premise here:

 

"many, many hours going back and forth between towns and dungeons to sell loot"

 

...

 

Perhaps you have a point about terminology, but I see grinding as grinding. I am likely not hip enough to see the nuances between game grinding, grain grinding, and daily grinding, aside from the fact that in the end, they're all a grind.

 

...As per my "hours and hours" comment, understand this is a cumulative thing about... mostly Avernum and Nethergate. Growing up, I didn't have a ton of games, but they were always either challenging enough that outright beating them was generally not something I could do (yes, I am that lame), or they were open-ended enough that you could play them indefinitely and they were never quite the same. Jeff's games - the ones of which I actually owned, and also loved - were huge as advertised. I think I beat Nethergate twice and Avernum 2 once, though I certainly had many, many more games started and ended than just those ones. I might have related this story before, but once when I was a young, irresponsible person, I basically vegetated for a week doing just about nothing but playing Nethergate. It took the entire week to beat that game. So, to draw my narrative to a close:

 

22 minutes ago, Chopkinsca said:

 

I have one of those ratios too. It changes as the game goes on. Early on, when money is tight, I'm more acceptable of the dungeon-to-town-to-dungeon-repeat loop than later in the game. I'm on my third replay of the original Avernums (in two years) and I find it harder to tolerate that "grind".

 

...See? This guy gets it. Probably stated much more concisely than I ever could, at that.

 

In contrast, from a game design perspective - just sticking to Jeff's games only - perhaps Exile did something better here regarding the selling of loot. Not everything drops, and in fact getting more drops is something you have to invest points in. If you leave something, it probably won't be there when you come back for it. On the downside, being able to cart off everything is really hard, and at least Avernum leaves you with the impression that you can walk off with a good bit of loot, but now there's too much of it. Perhaps simulating being able to strip everything off your vanquished foes is too much realism, and too much realism results in the realism of grinding? At least, from the perspective in which I'm framing grindind?

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4 hours ago, Randomizer said:

I replayed Geneforge 1 and the boredom of hauling every bit of sellable items to a merchant and draining every last gold disk from the economy to buy training is tedious. At least the remake should have the junk bag so I won't get the message about not being able to carry an item because I ran out of slots. 

 

I try to collect every trowel and put them in a pile. Those unsellable trowels know what they've done!

 

—Alorael, who hopes for a better Geneforge economy in the remake. The individual shop limits are more annoying than interesting.

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5 hours ago, Thaeris said:

Perhaps simulating being able to strip everything off your vanquished foes is too much realism, and too much realism results in the realism of grinding? At least, from the perspective in which I'm framing grindind?

 

I think this is well put.

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  • 1 month later...
  • 1 month later...

--I don't mind the realism of no quest markers. Bring on the adventure!

--Trudging back and forth to sell excess loot is still OK with me.

 

By far my biggest complaint about Spiderweb games is the limited journal space. I like journaling EVERYTHING so I can re-read later for clues or simply immerse myself in Jeff's great storytelling. Great stories should be savored, not thrown in the trash. The limited journal space makes me feel like a distressed hoarder constantly pressed to a decision on what treasured literary baubles to throw out.  

 

The part I despise is when the journal fills up and I have to trawl back through hundreds of entries, re-reading them only to judge which entries are less important and can be deleted. This usually leaves space for 50 or so more new entries all over again.  Years ago, Jeff himself personally sent me a note saying he would try to create unlimited journal storage space for Avadon 3, but I haven't played that far yet....still only about halfway through Avadon 1.

 

Unlimited journal storage for immediate access in game would leave me ecstatic and SW games would be perfect!

 

EDIT - One of the huge strengths of unlimited journal space is that when a game is finally solved you have a complete "book" from start to finish you can re-read anytime. An epic novel that you 'created' through your own gameplay even though Jeff did the actual writing.

 

Edited by SoulScroll
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Re: Journals

 

One of the things I've lamented the lack of for years & years is having a real journal.  One that notes that you wanted to write could be kept in.  Especially in the early portion of the various games you're constantly running across a door/chest/spellbooks/etc that you need to have 'x' level of tool use/arcane lore to open/read.  It would be wonderful to have a page or three where you could write/type "Chest in sw Formello needs TU 8 to open" or "Barrier in north Slime Pit needs L2 to remove".  Reminders that I need to go back to areas later on to see what I couldn't see way back when.

 

True, I could just write it down on a piece of paper, but invariably that paper will disappear into the void of my desk over the days/weeks in between the times I actually get to sit down & play.

 

Deeply into the category of "First world problems" I realize...but it would be nice...

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I neglected to add another important flaw in Spiderweb's journal system aside from space limitations.

 

If you record all dialogue and go back later to delete selected journal entries to free up storage space, all the surviving entries stay in fixed locations (similar to memory pointers in software programming?). The problem occurs when you continue to play after culling out less important journal entries. New journal entries become inserted in the positions where the old ones were deleted, creating a jumbled mess which doesn't come close to resembling a chronological order suitable for an adventure story.

 

Tiny example: I have 10 chronological journal entries (#1-#10). I delete entries #3, 6, 8, and 9 as less important and continue playing picking up entries #11-#14.

The end result will be ordered as: 1, 2, 11, 4, 5, 12, 7, 13 , 14, 10.

A terrible chronological mess is being created!

 

It would be nice to automatically truncate the journal list on the fly as deletions are created so that everything remains chronological even if storage must remain limited.

It might be a tough programming challenge to pull off, not sure.

 

For now the only solution to this problem is to save your game after deleting trashed entries, exit, and begin playing again. All empty journal spaces are rearranged at the bottom of the list upon completing this procedure.

 

EDIT: I do a little bit of coding at a hobbyist level and I am guessing the journal problem can be solved by some programming trick related to newly-created null index values of arrays whenever journal entries are deleted. Some sort of user-defined function carries the journal array using static index values for journal entries instead of a needed dynamic array. My knowledge is rudimentary here, unfortunately, but that's a guess to where I'd begin searching to solve this problem. 

Edited by SoulScroll
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16 hours ago, Chopkinsca said:

I never really used the journal system, other than in Avernum 1 which lacked a quest tracker. I always have a text file open so I can put down any notes I think/know I'll forget. I'm just used to using notepad for.. uh, notes. Maybe that is more tedious or troublesome for other people.

 

How I see it in a nutshell: Jeff's writing has been enormously creative and competent over the years, providing a broad range of exciting little scenarios within each adventure game helping us see past the limited graphics engines. It provides a great sense of immersion for me, and frequently going back and forth from notepad in windowed mode would break the spell. I just think it's a bit of a tragic waste to keep throwing away Jeff's journal entry stories when a continuous in-game story flow being fully recorded from beginning to end within each game helps with immersion.  

I think the Pillars of Eternity series has been able to comprehensively store all dialogue, and Jeff's writing is just as good if not better than the AAA writers. 

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I'm sympathetic -- I know how it feels to have a frustrating user interface element that makes a task I care about not flow the way I want it to.  It can be really irritating, not that any one instance is the end of the world, but having to keep encountering it over and over.  Sometimes it might feel like it's a use case that's unique to me, other times it seems like something that large swathes of users would do.  Either way, it's no fun.

 

That said... I think there may be some extreme statements here.  "Important flaw", "jumbled mess", "tragic waste", "throwing away"...

 

This is a pretty unusual use of the journal system -- it was designed for quick note-taking of important information, not for recording literally every dialogue in the game -- and yet it still works effectively enough, for that purpose, that you prefer it over using a dedicated text editor.  Which is fine -- things don't have to be used as their designer expected them to be; more power to you!  But if it doesn't work perfectly for that purpose -- which it wasn't designed for -- that's not really a flaw, it just means it's not a great fit for this other task that it wasn't designed for.  Ditto for the deletion issue.

 

Again, I can totally understand the annoyance, but this hardly causes the story to be "wasted" or "thrown away."  You have options here: you could save and reload after deleting, you could just use a text editor, you could record fewer entries to begin with.  There isn't a perfect option for you, but there are options.

 

(Relatedly, and still sympathetically: "this game made by a huge development team did it this way, why can't your one-man development outfit do that?" is I think a question that answers itself.)

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  • 1 year later...

My apologies for necro'ing this thread after a year, but I do have a burning question I need to ask about how to externally cope with journal space limitations in Jeff's games.

 

I'm using a Windows OS and I can find stored entries in the necessary journal text file in the Documents/Spiderweb Software/<game><saved games> folder easily enough, but can anyone advise me on which text editor is best for saving and reviewing journal entries?

 

I tried opening the journal file with MS notepad and MS wordpad, but it's a jumbled mess. 

 

Thanks so much if you can provide a better suggestion.

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On 12/21/2021 at 11:55 AM, Ircher said:

It's in a binary format; I don't think you can open it and just straight up read it outside of the game.

 

The journal entry text is actually readable in both MS Wordpad and Notepad, but extremely disorganized and jumbled with sentences scattered all over the place. It would be an utterly hopeless project trying to piece everything together in an organized fashion.

Depth of Thwart in the Dec. 16, 2020 post (see above) suggested a text editor of some sort to deal with the in-game journal space limitations. I'd prefer to keep ALL journal text for the most enjoyable gaming experience rather than painfully having to delete entries periodically based on intuitively deciding what entries are less important.

Jeff's games and writing are completely awesome in all other respects for me. The limited journal space is my only focal point of misery in Spiderweb games.

 

EDIT TO ADD: The reason I wanted to keep all journal text is that I actually enjoy re-reading my adventure from start to finish, to feel the epic saga once more as though I am reading an actual book that I personally participated in. It's a holdover from my loving to read old Dungeons and Dragons paper modules with all the room descriptions without actually playing it when I was a kid.

Edited by SoulScroll
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I'm sympathetic, but again, I think you gotta understand that what you want is a very, very, very niche request.  Nothing wrong with enjoying the game that way, but I don't think you can expect any developer to cater to this preference.

 

Another option would be to get a good custom screenshot program (I recommend ScreenshotCaptor) which can automatically organize screenshots.  Then you just hit your screenshot key instead of "record in journal" and you can scroll through images of all the text you want to hold onto, in order and at your leisure.

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8 hours ago, Depth of Thwart said:

I'm sympathetic, but again, I think you gotta understand that what you want is a very, very, very niche request.  Nothing wrong with enjoying the game that way, but I don't think you can expect any developer to cater to this preference.

 

Another option would be to get a good custom screenshot program (I recommend ScreenshotCaptor) which can automatically organize screenshots.  Then you just hit your screenshot key instead of "record in journal" and you can scroll through images of all the text you want to hold onto, in order and at your leisure.

 

Yeah, I've already accepted that unlimited journal space isn't likely to happen, and I've already moved on from that. I was just passively explaining in my previous post why I like that imaginary feature. Your screenshot organizer idea sounds really good. I'll look into it, thanks!

 

ETA: Jeff had a recent Bottom Feeder post about writing in games where he deemed himself as "reasonably competent" in the face of a forgiving gaming audience with low standards. It's too bad he sells himself short here, for Jeff has some of the most atmospheric writing I've ever come across. He really has a creative talent for turning crappy isometric graphics into an immersive experience.

Edited by SoulScroll
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Apologies again for the double posting, but this post is only indirectly related to the above.

It's also a bit off-topic for the thread, so I'll only mention it once.

 

Jeff also referred on his Bottom Feeder blog to all the different cultural inspirations he draws from for his game ideas.

I often sense Jeff is my own modern day incarnation of Gary Gygax, who wrote TONS of paper-era Dungeons & Dragons modules.

Playing Jeff's games today transports me directly back to a childhood era of when I would read so many of Gary Gygax's room descriptions 

with my "WOW, oh COOL!" awe and wonderment at reading so many fresh and new atmospheres.

I never had friends who were interested in Dungeons & Dragons and I was an only child, so reading the room descriptions was all the fun I could muster from it.

 

 

Edited by SoulScroll
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On 12/23/2021 at 10:15 PM, SoulScroll said:

Jeff had a recent Bottom Feeder post about writing in games where he deemed himself as "reasonably competent" in the face of a forgiving gaming audience with low standards. It's too bad he sells himself short here, for Jeff has some of the most atmospheric writing I've ever come across. He really has a creative talent for turning crappy isometric graphics into an immersive experience.

 

I think the word you're looking for there is self inflicted 'sardonic'...

 

Re your other observation:  Yeah, Jeff is of an age (as am I so I understand) where his first/early exposure to the genre was through those pen & paper D&D games where the only 'video' you had were the mental images created by the written word.  Something was definitely lost when computers came along & created/took away some of the scene setting duties.   I may complain about the aches & pains my body has these days, but one trade off is being old enough to have lived through that time, something my kids just don't understand when they're blasting their way through an incredibly detailed graphic game of today.  By having to invent/fill in all the details with your imagination, such games became much more 'yours' & memorable than the latest offering from the 'designed by committee, maximize sales, offend as few people as possible' corporate game designers of today.

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21 minutes ago, Depth of Thwart said:

'offend as few people as possible' has definitely fallen off the corporate game design bandwagon

 

Ok, how about keep things bland so as not to accidentally offend people.  The cynic in me thinks that there is most likely some games/designers who do purpose driven/intentionally offensive things.  A calculated "We'll offend 'x' # of people, but 'y' # will be glad to see it & buy the game.  Then too, by being offensive there will be outraged publicity/blogs/reviews/etc posted, exposing even more of the 'y' people to the game...

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Of course AD&D has modified some things with each edition to make them less offensive.  The original material that several of us grew up on is now less offensive in some ways, but very offensive in other ways.  Ultimately, Gary Gygax and company were targeting a certain demographic (of which I was a part) with their games, just like modern game designers do.  The story telling that is required in any addition of D&D or similar games is very similar to what was required in the early text adventure games.

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3 hours ago, Edgwyn said:

The story telling that is required in any addition of D&D or similar games is very similar to what was required in the early text adventure games.

 

Yep yep, I was also enthralled with the early Infocom games, too. Those games, the early Wizardry trilogy, and the Ultima series seemed to be my childhood Apple IIc's only purpose in life. Maybe one school science fair project to lend a patina of legitimacy to the Apple purchase for my family. Apple IIc's were $1,400 in 1980's dollars.

 

ETA: If I had sunk the $1,400 in Apple stock instead of the Apple IIc it would be around $3 million today.

Edited by SoulScroll
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Do you have an example of something that was modified or removed from AD&D solely because people were "offended" by it, rather than for other reasons (e.g., players in general didn't enjoy it, change in design philosophy or target audience, material impact, copyright issues, etc.)?

 

You can probably see where I'm going here -- I'm wondering if there is a more relevant description for this kind of stuff than "offensive".

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3 hours ago, Depth of Thwart said:

Do you have an example of something that was modified or removed from AD&D solely because people were "offended" by it, rather than for other reasons (e.g., players in general didn't enjoy it, change in design philosophy or target audience, material impact, copyright issues, etc.)?

 

You can probably see where I'm going here -- I'm wondering if there is a more relevant description for this kind of stuff than "offensive".

 

Isn't that why demons, daemons and devils became Baatezu, Yugoloth & Tanar'ri?  Cause of Satanic Panic (or so I'm told), which seems to me to be about people being offended, though you might argue that it's not the same.

 

Also nudity in the official material (usually tasteful, mind), comes and goes.

Edited by Thaluikhain
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