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Life is not a puzzle, so why should RPGs be?

fnordcircle

Liturgist
Joined
Jan 6, 2004
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Frowning at my monitor as I read your dumb post.
I'll admit it - I hate puzzles. I don't buy puzzle games and RPGs that do contain puzzles either go back to the game shop in short order or I just whiz through the puzzle parts using walkthroughs. Call it what you will, I just don't like them.

In life there are no puzzles. Either you have no freaking clue what to do (if you aren't familiar with the software and are breaking into a heavily-secured complex the answer in real life is that you are caught, not that you have to pound on the 5 consoles in right order.) or you know what is going on and can take care of it in straightahead fashion.

Take the cliched 'fueding family member/lovers' puzzle quest in almost every RPG.

NPC-1 and NPC-2 have had a long standing fued. NPC-1 wants something NPC-2 has. NPC-2 won't give it up unless given something in return by you the player or a third party or the player has to take up a quest. Normally the 'good' answer is you go on the quest or to happily part with this very expensive gem, ring, whatever in return for the experience points.

How often does that happen in life? You are walking down the street and meet some guy who has been mad at his brother for 20 years but shows no signs of tiring of it. You then agree to take care of it, go talk to his brother who agrees to return the item and make ammends if you give him your car. Happens every day, right?

Anyways, back to the point, take my wife and her mother. They get on each other every now and then. In order to help smooth the waters I don't generally have to go into the woods and kill 5 wolves. Generally it involves saying the right thing.

And that's what I think could be done with the cliched personal-relationship quest. Dialog choices. There should be more of them and they should not represent so black and white an approach. With some NPCs an analogy might work, others can be guilted into changing their minds. Or maybe they can be convinced that the ring or whatever is not worth their stupid brother's constant whining. I digress.

I'm getting off on a tangent here, but I guess what I'm trying to get across here is that I would prefer to see an RPG not rely on stupid puzzles. Am I alone?
 

Ghetto Goose

Novice
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Oct 23, 2002
Messages
67
Location
In my pimped out love bunker.
For a smarter character the dialogue choices would make sense, but for Bubba Tardwood the solution involves either bashing and/or smashing, or giving the right objects to the right people in the correct order.

In alot of situations the former wouldn't work, so depending on the character you play with, you mayhave to find 5 rat pelts and give them to Jim-Bob so he can win back his girlfriend's affection with his home-made rat pelt hand bag.
 

Diogo Ribeiro

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Jun 23, 2003
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5,706
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Lisboa, Portugal
Ghetto Goose said:
In alot of situations the former wouldn't work, so depending on the character you play with, you mayhave to find 5 rat pelts and give them to Jim-Bob so he can win back his girlfriend's affection with his home-made rat pelt hand bag.

That sounds like a hobo love story.
 

Saint_Proverbius

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Behind you.
I don't mind puzzles that make sense. It's the puzzles that are tossed in to a game that make you sit back and think, "Dear lord, this is a puzzle that was just tossed in for the hell of it." that bother me. For example, I didn't mind the whole series of things you had to do in Fallout 2 to get the tanker set up to go to the Enclave. Let's face it, that was somewhat of a puzzle there, but it didn't really feel like one. On the other hand, you also had that horrible Electric Floor Door Maze in the Enclave's rig, which was obviously a puzzle and made no freaking sense as to why it would exist.

Some of the puzzles in the Avernum games were a little odd, considering every dungeon had a puzzle, but there weren't many of those that annoyed me.
 

chiefnewo

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 18, 2003
Messages
118
Saint_Proverbius said:
Some of the puzzles in the Avernum games were a little odd, considering every dungeon had a puzzle, but there weren't many of those that annoyed me.

The most annoying puzzle I've come across recently has been in Blades of Avernum, specifically the Za-Khazi Run laser room. After sprinting through an annoying scenario attempting to get in under the two week time limit, I have to get through a castle owned by a dragon. The entrance test to see the dragon? Lasers with Movable Mirrors! It's like a sliding block puzzle with sudden death and reloads! After trying for about half an hour and getting sick of accidentally killing a party member I used the character editor to get through it.

The most annoying thing about the puzzle was how out of place it felt, as if it was there only to boost the playing time of the scenario.
 

Psilon

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Codex retirement
chiefnewo said:
The most annoying thing about the puzzle was how out of place it felt, as if it was there only to boost the playing time of the scenario.
Close, but probably wrong. It was there most likely to show off the laser effects (such as they are) in the engine. As I recall, there aren't any lasers elsewhere in the game.

As I recall, the original Blades of Exile version of that scenario had a pain-in-the-ass puzzle there too, but I don't remember what it was.
 

voodoo1man

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Feb 10, 2003
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568
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Icy Highlands of Canada
fnordcircle said:
How often does that happen in life? You are walking down the street and meet some guy who has been mad at his brother for 20 years but shows no signs of tiring of it. You then agree to take care of it, go talk to his brother who agrees to return the item and make ammends if you give him your car.

This is why walking down the street in real life is not real exciting, and why I prefer to play these types of video games in the first place. BTW, if this ever happened in real life, I'd go back, beat the brother up, and steal my car back! That's what I'd like to see in CRPGs - I hate just having all the cool FedEx lewt disappear once I'm finished with the delivery.

fnordcircle said:
Anyways, back to the point, take my wife and her mother. They get on each other every now and then. In order to help smooth the waters I don't generally have to go into the woods and kill 5 wolves.

If only relationships were that easy! But when you say "generally", I take it there was a time when you did have to go out into the woods and kill 5 wolves to help things between your wife and her mother. Did you make them both a pair of fur coats or something?

fnordcircle said:
And that's what I think could be done with the cliched personal-relationship quest. Dialog choices.

I think this should always be provided as an alternative to puzzles (many quests in Arcanum and PS:T are like that). But sometimes, I really do feel the urge to run out into the woods and take on 5 wolves with my bare hands. Yarr! Arr! I once again demand a Hulk emoticon!!
 

Saint_Proverbius

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chiefnewo said:
Lasers with Movable Mirrors! It's like a sliding block puzzle with sudden death and reloads! After trying for about half an hour and getting sick of accidentally killing a party member I used the character editor to get through it.

The best way to do those is to go in to combat mode and just use one character to move the mirrors. There's a command to make those characters who you're not using simply wait indefinitely, too, which makes it fairly easy to do.
 

DarkUnderlord

Professional Throne Sitter
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I never really had an appreciation for the same puzzles appearing in several games. The Towers of Hanoi comes to mind. The problem is that once you figure it out once (or can't figure it out and so get the answer from a walkthrough) you've figured it out forever. Every time you see it, you roll your eyes, go through the motions and move on. It's like the designers weren't paid enough to think creatively.

fnordcircle said:
How often does that happen in life? You are walking down the street and meet some guy who has been mad at his brother for 20 years but shows no signs of tiring of it. You then agree to take care of it, go talk to his brother who agrees to return the item and make ammends if you give him your car. Happens every day, right?
The problem is that if it didn't happen, you wouldn't have any quests like that at all. They'd all be fed-ex. Though the Goldwatch / toilet quest in Modoc, Fallout 2 was quite good. The two arguing, several ways of completing the quest and one of them simply refusing to believe that the other guy didn't take his watch. That quest was well written.

Saint_Proverbius said:
On the other hand, you also had that horrible Electric Floor Door Maze in the Enclave's rig, which was obviously a puzzle and made no freaking sense as to why it would exist.
You don't think a government hiding out in an oil rig in the middle of the sea would build a giant puzzle maze to stop people from intruding on the last level of their base? I always wondered what happened if one of their own guys walked on it. I mean, they'd all get electrocuted too. Must be some kind of moral thing.
 

mr. lamat

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 21, 2003
Messages
463
Location
hongcouver
i think they'd use a doorbell.

*ring ring* pizza's here!

we didn't order a pizza!

*cue the minigun turrets*

puzzle my ass.
 

Stark

Liturgist
Joined
Mar 31, 2004
Messages
770
Anyways, back to the point, take my wife and her mother. They get on each other every now and then. In order to help smooth the waters I don't generally have to go into the woods and kill 5 wolves. Generally it involves saying the right thing.

yeah. problem is, designers need to cater to mature gamers as well as teenagers, and expecting teenagers to know the "right" thing to say is, well...

I suppose they put in all those puzzles to drag out the game play time, and to break up the monotony of constant battle. (think NWN) without those it'll be just fed-ex, fed-ex, battle, fed-ex, fed-ex, battle, final boss.

actually, why don't they put in quests with detective works, with solutions that's not so obvious? I know there're rpgs with detective sub-quests involving "find out who killed XYZ" but the solutions are generally very obvious, involving u talking to the right people, tag on another sub-quest or two. what i have in mind is detective work that's more "sherlock holmes". Involving gathering evidences and questioning the right people. Depending on the amount of evidences you gather you draw your conclusion, and even then, you may not be absolutely 100% sure you've convicted the right guy, just to spice up some moral ambiguity there. (to make it more fun you can accuse some guy you don't like as oppose to the real criminal)

sub-quests with puzzle-like eliments like these fit into the overal game much better.
 
Joined
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Galway
KOTOR I remember having some annoying puzzles, including a version of the towers of hanoi in on of the sith lords tombs.

That pissed me off since it would stand to reason that if sith lords were going to set up a trial it might be something a little more complex than something the average 8 year old could figure out. Also you had that gay freeze grenade on the .... why am I bothering listing them you all know what i'm talking about.
 

Saint_Proverbius

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I did have a lot of problems with the puzzles in KotOR considering that they were obviously just chucked in there for the sake of having them and the puzzles they used were dirt common puzzles, such as the Towers of Hanoi, the 5 unit + 3 unit -> 4 unit puzzle, and so on. There wasn't much of a point behind them, and they really didn't make sense.

Think about the 5 unit + 3 unit one, how hard is it to destroy a machine? Do you really need something that complex to destroy one when it's surrounded by nice, corrosive/conductive salt water? Just pop one of it's seals somewhere. Smash one of the fuel tanks and let it suck in salt water. Drill a hole in the side of it. Do you really need to jump through the hoops of mixing the fuel so it ends up with 4 units? And wouldn't it have to go through the 4 unit mark to fill the five unit tank in the first place? The Mean Value Thereom says it would.
 

voodoo1man

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Icy Highlands of Canada
Get your math on.

Yo Saint, it's the Intermediate Value Theorem you're talking about. The Mean Value one is that for any f continuous on [a,b], there's always a a<c<b so that the tangent line at c is parallel to the line through points (a,f(a)) and (b,f(b)).
 

Saint_Proverbius

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Re: Get your math on.

voodoo1man said:
Yo Saint, it's the Intermediate Value Theorem you're talking about. The Mean Value one is that for any f continuous on [a,b], there's always a a<c<b so that the tangent line at c is parallel to the line through points (a,f(a)) and (b,f(b)).

They're the same theorem if f(x)=x*m+b.
 

Wysardry

Augur
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Feb 26, 2004
Messages
283
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
That old man was right. I have ended up in the theory depths of hell! :shock:
 

Reklar

Liturgist
Joined
Jun 22, 2004
Messages
395
Location
Port Orchard, WA, USA
Stark said:
Anyways, back to the point, take my wife and her mother. They get on each other every now and then. In order to help smooth the waters I don't generally have to go into the woods and kill 5 wolves. Generally it involves saying the right thing.

yeah. problem is, designers need to cater to mature gamers as well as teenagers, and expecting teenagers to know the "right" thing to say is, well...

I suppose they put in all those puzzles to drag out the game play time, and to break up the monotony of constant battle. (think NWN) without those it'll be just fed-ex, fed-ex, battle, fed-ex, fed-ex, battle, final boss.

actually, why don't they put in quests with detective works, with solutions that's not so obvious? I know there're rpgs with detective sub-quests involving "find out who killed XYZ" but the solutions are generally very obvious, involving u talking to the right people, tag on another sub-quest or two. what i have in mind is detective work that's more "sherlock holmes". Involving gathering evidences and questioning the right people. Depending on the amount of evidences you gather you draw your conclusion, and even then, you may not be absolutely 100% sure you've convicted the right guy, just to spice up some moral ambiguity there. (to make it more fun you can accuse some guy you don't like as oppose to the real criminal)

sub-quests with puzzle-like eliments like these fit into the overal game much better.

Actually, Fallout 2 had at least one quest of the type you are describing. Find who killed the Wright boy in New Reno involved a little bit of detective work and had multiple outcomes based on your character's skills and stats (speech and intelligence mainly). I agree with you though, there need to be more quests of that nature in cRPGs because they are more fun and more intuitive than puzzles quests.

-Reklar
(a Fallout/RPG fan)
 

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