There was one print ad in a Nintendo Magazine
that said you could become the snake from the background of Blanka's
stage on Street Fighter II. And if you could complete all of the levels and get all of the stars,
you could unlock Luigi as a playable character. There are all these rumors about, do this and that,
and go into the hole in Zora's domain, and that's where you're going
to find the Triforce. And you go to the Croft Manor, run around the swimming
pool three times, then swan-dive into the pool. There was a rumor that you could push this
truck that was next to the SSM out of the way, and for some reason, meat would be
hidden underneath. This quest line rewarded you
with a one-hit kill dagger. You could use codes or a game genie to access these broken,
unfinished stages. You would just immediately fall to your death. Meer existence of stuff like this on a cartridge
just blew my young mind. Mystery. Discovery. Two concepts that are fundamental
to the experience of playing most games, but concepts that rarely come up
in the discourse around them. We comfortably chat about mechanics and difficulty,
story, graphics, performance and frame rates. But despite the important role they play in game design,
rare is it that we think about mystery and discovery. I certainly never gave them much notice. That was until March of 2014 when I attended
the game developers conference in San Francisco. GDC is an annual get together for people
working within the video games industry. Programmers, artists, designers, and engineers,
with a light sprinkling of Biz Dev and media. It was there that I first met Jim Crawford. Hi, I'm Jim Crawford, and my title
at Twinbeard is Sandwich Imagineer. I made Frog Fractions. I may or may not
have already shipped Frog Fractions II. Jim was giving a talk at GDC entitled Preserving
a Sense of Discovery in the Age of Spoilers. He argued that before the internet mystery was easy, but in a world
where the answer to every question is just a few clicks away, and where pre-release marketing for games is so aggressive,
that mystery doesn't come free anymore. He said that now more than ever developers
need to be intentional about preserving it. Ever since Jim's talk I've been fascinated by the concept
of mystery and how it touches everything, from design to marketing, to online communities,
and the video games media. To help me understand the important role of discovery
in game design, I entrusted the help of some ringers: Derek Yu, creator of platforming road-like Spelunky;
Jonathan Blow, the mind behind Braid and last years The Witness; and of course Jim, who I met at his co-working
space at the Oakland video game museum. Over the next few weeks, we're going to release spoiler-filled
episodes about how wonderful and mysterious their games are. While in this one we're going to take a look at how
games from our childhood made us wonder, and the modern games that are working
to keep player discovery alive. Growing up it was usually the midway games
that were the source of most rumors. One of the more common ones was that in Mortal Kombat II
you could unlock and play as Kano and Sonya. However, I had a friend who had one hundred percent convinced
himself that he actually saw this happen in an arcade. He said a guy showed him how
to do it and he was playing as Jax, and the game took him to some sort of
platforming level in outer-space, and when he got to the end of the level
he freed Kano and got to play as Kano. I really think my friend actually believed
he saw this happen because occasionally he would admit that he didn't write the method down because
he was sure at the time that it was going to be in all the magazines. The secrets that aren't real are the ones that are just in
the players head, I would say they are way more important. One of my favorite examples is in Battlezone.
Battlezone is a game about, you're in a tank and you're shooting other tanks,
and that's really all there is to the game. But in the background, there is an active
volcano, just drawn with vector art lines, and one of the creators of the game talked about receiving
letters from players about how they heard a rumor that if you drove far enough in your tank you could climb
the volcano and go into the volcano and explore a castle. The fact that this was just a rumor, that it was all
in the player's heads and not part of the game, it is still part of the cultural
value that Battlezone has. Every game was more or less like that back then,
and part of that was that I was a kid. So when I was a kid in elementary school, we were obsessed
with Street Fighter II. It's literally all we talked about during recess. We'd talk about the special moves. We'd talk about which
character was the best. And we'd talk about the rumors. And the biggest rumor at that
time was fighting Sheng Long. So Sheng Long is Ryu's mentor, and when Ryu
defeats you in Street Fighter II he says, "You must defeat Sheng Long to stand a chance." So EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly, ran an article. They said,
"You can actually fight Sheng Long, and here's how you do it." And it was absolutely bonkers, like how you do it. You've got
to use Ryu, perfect rounds all the way until you get to M. Bison, and then when you get to M. Bison you have
to have ten consecutive draw matches with him. That's so mean.
- Yeah, it's... That's so mean.
- ...it's ridiculous. And then, supposedly, Sheng Long would jump on the screen, grab M. Bison, throw him off the screen,
and then you'd fight him. And of course he was crazy, and EGM said, you know, we couldn't
even beat him because like he threw fireballs with no recovery time, and he could throw you out of the air,
and he had this like crazy dragon punch. I remember hearing that the actual problem
there was that Sheng Long was a mistranslation. That it meant like dragon punch or something. That it was like,
"You must defeat my dragon punch to stand a chance." You know, with my limited amount of Chinese, I think that's
actually right, yeah. Because ‘Long' in Chinese is dragon. Oh really?
- Yeah, but it's cool because that actually added to the lore, you know like, eventually you could play as Gouken or Sheng Long in the Street Fighter series.
- Right. So it was like, it was actual world building, just from a hoax
based on this one mistranslation in Street Fighter II. To me, that's just so cool. There are all kinds
of other rumors in Street Fighter II. There was like Guile could pull out a gun and shoot you,
or he had handcuffs he could like put on you and then trap you with. In E. Honda's stage, there is like a bathhouse,
it's in a bathhouse, and there's a bath in the background. And there's a rumor that you could jump
into the bath after the match is over. So yeah, this fighting game, it's like not
an exploration game or anything like that. I remember distinctly all these rumors and
just talking about these games so much. You know, the special moves,
back then like they're mostly secret. Like you had to find out how to do them
in magazines and things like that. At the time, like one of the reasons for
those games' popularity was the fact that like one guy in the arcade knew how to do
the Hadouken, and nobody else did. One guy knew how to do the fatality cause he'd
downloaded a fact from Gopher on the internet. So, there are all those rumors that everyone knew about,
like Sheng Long, and the Guile handcuffs, and things like that. And then there are all the rumors that my friend
just made up to try to like, scam us. He told us that he had this like secret way of getting this information.
I think it was like an older cousin or something like that. That worked at Capcom or... No, I think you're right.
- Really? I think he literally said like, "My cousin got a job
at this company, this video game company. That's how he knows. If you give me a quarter,
or like your Oreo cookies at lunch, I'll tell you how to do it." I remember some of these moves so distinctly.
There was Blanka's Super Nuclear Meltdown. Okay. Yeah, that was one of the moves. And kind of like the EGM hoax,
like the way you did these moves was so crazy. It was like multiple 360 motions, right,
and of course, it was like the best move. Blanka would explode, there'd be a mushroom cloud,
and like your opponent would instantly die. And I remember going to the arcade with him and I'm like playing him,
and I'm trying to do Blanka's Super Nuclear Meltdown, and he's just kicking my butt. Eating your Oreo cookies. Yeah, eating my Oreo cookies and just kicking my butt,
cause I'm trying to do this crazy move and I just can't do it. In Japan, they had communal notebooks where people would
if they'd discovered something important in the game, they would go write it down, and you could go read like,
"Here's how you get past this boss in Tower of Druaga." Like all sorts of little just, the tiniest, dumb secrets
that just give the impression of a complete world. It had a whole world beyond just the arenas. You know,
you've got these 2D stages that are pretty small, and it was so cool because it made
Street Fighter II seem so much bigger. So the Halo series really started coming
into its own while I was in high school, and I always felt like it kind of embodied
a certain aura of mystery. It sort of engendered that discussion with the hidden skulls and terminals,
tons of Easter eggs, numerous and varied glitches, stuff like that. The one that really got me though, was talk of a flying
dumpster in Halo III. I thought, surely you can't be serious. That's not a thing. I was never quite able
to pull it off myself, but of course, it didn't take too long for videos to surface with people doing
exactly that, flying around maps in a dumpster in glorious 240p. If you want to make a secret these days that lasts,
you really got to either dig deep or just as a developer, you got to just not even know it exists yourself.
- Right. Right, cause like a lot of the best
secrets are just glitches, right. Like if you think about Minus World from Super Mario Brothers,
that was not something that Nintendo intended to put in the game. I think Super Mario Brothers makes a really good example because,
well, first of all, there were a lot of intentional secrets as well, like they played on that a lot, with like all the things
hidden in blocks, in unmarked blocks. But also then there were the secrets that
weren't intentional, like the Minus World, which was just a coding glitch, where some other
kind of game data was being interpreted as a level. And if you play the Japanese version of the game
it's actually a lot more extensive. Like the data that it's misinterpreting as a level there,
like actually becomes a much more interesting level with Princess Peach's all over
the place, like flying Bloopers. I mean there was adventure on the Atari 2600,
which had the weird, invisible dot thing. So you know, there's a maze in the game that you have to go through to get
to one of the castles, and there's a room in the middle of the maze you actually can't walk directly into. You have to get
a bridge, which is parodied in Frog Fractions II. You have to get a bridge to get into the room,
and then once you get into the room you can grab this dot that you can't even
see unless you like, overlap it on a wall, and then you can use that to get
into another secret room somewhere. And so you know, the little developer
room with you know, Warrens name in it, is sort of what gets the most attention out of that, but actually...
so as a kid I was playing with the system of those things, like a lot, cause the bridge was a weird thing that was a little bit game breaking.
Like if you went over the bridge from one room into another, like off the screen onto the next screen, then it would
sometimes surprise you where you ended up. So you'd have some map in your head of where the rooms were
with respect to each other, and maybe that wasn't totally right. And then just the thing with the dot and all the...
you know there's this thing where the dot makes things flash, but it actually flashes more with more objects in the room.
- Okay. So you could do weird stuff like pile up
a bunch of objects and the dot in a room, and it would be hard for the dragons to eat you because
the timing was off somehow, because of all the flashing. There was just weird stuff going on that was beyond the basic game,
but it was exciting because it involved secret objects and stuff. So the Eggplant run is kind of the ultimate,
ultimate secret in the game. And what it is, is there's an item in the game
called the Eggplant, it's an eggplant. You get it by sacrificing a present that you get
from the shop, on the alter. It's totally random. You get the Eggplant and it plays a special little melody,
and you can pick it up. It does absolutely nothing, asterisk. It does almost absolutely nothing.
It's very fragile. It breaks. But what happened is toward the very end
of the development of the Xbox version of Spelunky, I had a discussion with Andy and Eric about the Eggplant,
about actually having it do something. Cause I figured, people are going to find this,
they're going to be so pissed off if it doesn't do anything. And so I was trying to think about
what it would do and I said, "Okay, I'll make it so that if you hit the hidden
boss at the end of the game in Hell, King Yama if you hit his head with the Eggplant,
his head will turn into an eggplant. That's it. I just added that and that was it.
I didn't even think about whether it was really possible. I kind of ran through the steps in my mind and I figured
out that, oh it's probably possible multi-player. You have like one person holding the Eggplant, the other person is getting
all the items you need to get into the City of Gold and then into Hell. So it's probably possible, but whatever, we've got, you know,
we've got to do certification and all this other stuff. Let's move on. And what happened is, when the game eventually got
ported to PC I think people started hacking around the files more. They saw this big eggplant head and they're like,
"Okay, that must be what it's for," right. Before that people did experiments with the Eggplant,
but it was all like actually in the game. "Oh, what happens when you
drop the Eggplant in acid?" Nothing. But on PC they saw the face, someone hacked the game,
went straight to Yama, hit Yama with the Eggplant, and viola. After the multi-player Eggplant run, the speed runners and Let's players
started talking about a solo Eggplant run and whether it was possible. Then at some point, it was like someone sent me the first solo Eggplant run,
and I was just, you know, it just completely blew my mind. It involved so many tricks, and glitches, and stuff like that,
that were put together separately, by different players even. It just makes Spelunky just feel like so much bigger for me. Like all of a sudden
Spelunky for me is now this new world, and I feel like a stranger in it. Right.
- Which is just a great feeling. Is there anything in Spelunky that
people haven't found yet? See the thing is, I would say no, but the fact is people
have found stuff that I didn't even know about. Like I was saying no long before people you know,
did the solo Eggplant run and killed the Ghost, so you can kill the Ghost in Spelunky by...
- How can you kill the Ghost? Mystery in games can come in many forms. Rumors
on the playground sparked by an interesting world, glitches in code that break the game free of its indented framework,
but there are far more intentional ways to create mystery in games. But over the past decade trends in Triple-A development have
made this type of discovery far more rare than it ought to be. To understand how discovery is crafted,
we must also talk about how it's been spoiled. Once in awhile someone makes a puzzle game, or you like
go into a new room and you start trying to figure it out, and like after like sixty seconds, if you haven't done
the first thing, it pops up a box with like a hint. And it's like dude, let me just do the thing, right.
You know, I like being treated like I'm a person who has the capacity to approach problems,
and inquire about them, and play around with them, and find a solution. And that's also how I like to treat my players,
of whoever decides to play the games that I design. And I feel like there's a little bit of a shortage of that.
It's not necessarily true anymore that all Triple-A games are linear, but basically, all of them were at some time, and especially
when I was starting to design The Witness, right. The whole like open world trendiness
thing happened way later. I mean, the thing about a linear game is if someone
went to the store and they bought your game for $60, and it's like God of War or something,
and they want to beat dudes up, if you put a puzzle in the middle of that and they can't
figure it out, you're stopping them from beating dudes up. I don't know why action games felt like they
had to have puzzles in them, but they did. If you block someone from proceeding
in a linear game, that's not great. So they kind of streamlined that stuff out for the most part,
but then also they got really heavy about handholding and making sure that they tell you everything that you need
to proceed, like, and that's not just even tutorials or anything, it's like, you know, take a game like
Assassin's Creed style thing, right. I think that would be a really exciting game if you had to use your
powers of perception to like see what was happening in the city and go like, "Oh, there's a mugging happening, right. I'm going
to go break that up and get some reputation," or something, right. But instead, there's like HUD icons everywhere.
There's always a thing telling you where to go and you could ignore the 3D graphics almost, and just follow
the HUD stuff, and just complete the game, right. So, and that's not just to rag on Assassin's Creed,
that's basically the direction that Triple-A has gone in, right. I understand why they do that. I don't like that and
as a player, I feel like it shuts part of my brain off. The thing is, I understand the temptation as a creator
to want to have a lot of control over your creation. And I think especially with a big budget game they want to have
a lot of control, you know. You don't want to leave things to chance. You don't want to have glitches and you don't
want the players doing unexpected things. You worry about whether the player
is going to get from beginning to end. These are all things that I just try not to think about, and I think I have
a little more freedom as an independent game developer, to do. Which is honestly, to not have
so much control over my creation. It's different with games and with other art forms
because the player is actually like playing your game. There's someone there controlling what's
going on, and you have to give them agency. You have to give them the tools that they
need to do that and the freedom to do that. You don't want to be like hovering around them the whole time, being like,
"Go there, go there. No, no, no, no, no, no, go there, go there." Which Fable... it was Fable 2 that had the dog?
And so the PR for that, before it came out, was like, "You're going to really build a relationship
with your dog," right. He's going to like, be your friend, and he's going to help you out.
But having some kind of a relationship with an MPC creature involves, like, maybe paying attention to it and seeing what, you know,
maybe you could see what the dog's mood is right now or something. But when they shipped the game... maybe they experimented
with that stuff, but when they shipped the game, the function of the dog was to tell you when
there's a buried treasure nearby, right. And he would go bark, but like there would be a HUD icon
under him that says, "Treasure over here," right. So it's like, why didn't you just give me a...
like the dog didn't matter, right. All the animations and all that, it was like you just
looked for the HUD icon that said, "Treasure here." Yeah, I think to make a world feel really real
and immersive you have to take a step back and you have to try not to guide the player
so much, and show them everything. Because that is the fun part about games,
discovering things on my own, making my own mistakes. That's what gives the games meaning. Like when I feel like someone just
has their hand on my shoulder, and their just kind of pushing me around, you know, I just feel like I'm losing a lot of the meaning
of games, which is that joy of discovery. But that's like an outcome of this Triple-A process,
right, of like, they put it in focus testing. If people get confused about something in focus testing, then that's like
a rough edge on the thing that you get out the file and you file it off. On the one hand, sometimes those are legitimate problems,
right, like the game is confusing in some way. But, on the other hand, I feel like this particular way of solving those problems,
like kills the games a little bit. It squeezes some life out of them. I'm not saying that the Triple-A games putting all that
handholding in is not the best business decision, it may be. On the other hand, Minecraft sure made
a ton of money and it doesn't do that. That was one of the great things about the first Zelda,
is it was like pure exploration, and I remember reading a quote from Shigeru Miyamoto
saying that he was nervous about releasing the game. Because it was, at the time, it felt like such a risky design move to not
tell the player what to do to in such a like, expansive, open world. And you know, I think it totally paid off, because
I love the game and I remember playing the game and having my dad sitting next to me,
and he was just drawing maps and like writing down all the riddles,
and the answers to the riddles, and stuff like that. And on the map, which I still have, there are all
these X's on the walls where you could bomb, like or where we tried bombing and you know, whether there was
an entrance there or not, right. Like, he'd mark it on the map. In Zelda I, you have no idea where to bomb, in Zelda III all of the places
that you could bomb just had cracks, like in a door shape. - Right. And to me, that's not even really a secret, that's just you
may as well put a door there that has a lock on it, right. Whereas before, when there was no cracks,
there could have been caves everywhere? Right, and you could, you know, use the candle
to hurt enemies. You could use it to light up rooms. You could also use it to burn bushes
and uncover secret entrances. It just felt like each item or whatever else, had kind of
a separate use beyond just opening up a secret, right. And that made the secrets feel a lot more real.
I'm using this candle which has all these other purposes. I just randomly threw it on this bush, cause that's something you'd think
about like, "Oh can I burn this bush?", as a kid or even as an adult. Like, I'm going to try this fire and leaves, right. And then it doesn't always work, but when it does,
and you see a ladder or a staircase going down, that's huge. And then the funny thing is, you go in there, and then you have
some old man that makes you pay for breaking his door. Like, it's not even -- you would expect to find some treasure or something,
but it's just like some old man, and that also, I think, contributes to it. Because if you have every secret lead to some fabulous treasure,
I think that kind of takes away a little bit from the secret. - Right. If the content of the game is really actually good,
you should want to play it because it's interesting and cool, not because you got a little gold
star at the end for solving it, right. And at the time when I started The Witness, it was this time of great
cynicism in game design, which we're still kind of still in, in some territories. Where, you know, Facebook games were happening,
and IOS games were starting to happen a little later than that. And they were just all about grinding little achievements or micro-achievements, or whatever you want to call it.
- [inaudible] Yeah, and there's no actual game there anymore.
- Right. And, I wanted to go the opposite
direction of that. As a designer, I don't know exactly what
experience people are going to have, right. Some people are going to find some things hard and other things easy,
and then other people will have those roles swapped, right. If you design such that you kill anything that people
find hard, if you design such that you kill everything that some percentage of people find hard, then you
end up getting this subset of what all those people can do, right. So, which might you know, if your game could be this big mass,
right, you end up getting this nucleus in the middle... there's all this potential that you killed, you know, just
because somebody might not have a good time with it. Having all this information out there does empower you to not worry about
whether your secrets are too difficult like you can really bury stuff. So there's things in Spelunky that are like one out of a thousand.
- Right. People find them and when people do find them, it feels legendary because the chances are so small.
- Right. It's as simple as that, and Spelunky itself,
just not even the secrets that I put in the game, but just because of the random level generator,
it generates dead-ends and things like that. And you'd think that would be bad, but the thing is,
you need to have some of that, because it's like, you have to contrast that with when you
actually do find treasure and cool stuff. Going to the end of a corridor and hitting a dead-end
just makes it that much better when you do find treasure. You don't want to have the feeling that every
corridor is going to have treasure at the end of it, or everything you do is going to have some kind of tangible reward.
- Right. Because I think that actually makes the game less immersive.
You don't feel like it's a real place anymore. You feel like this is something that was designed for me.
This is like a roller coaster where, you know, I'm just going to go through all of the cool
things that the designer has laid out. One of the most fun things about games is learning, it's learning the game
and sort of getting that knowledge for yourself about this little world, right. The only way you can really do that
is by figuring it out yourself. If the game tells me something before I get a chance
to learn it myself, one, that's just really annoying, but two, it robs you of that experience. And it's interesting, because
I have a three-year-old and you know, every day she's doing all kinds of new stuff and learning new things, and there are obviously
plenty of times where she has trouble with something, right. Like she's putting together a puzzle and she can't figure it out,
and she says, "Dad, can you help me?", like or, "Can you just do this for me?
It's too hard, I can't do it." And there is a temptation to go in and be like,
"Okay, well this is how you do it," and then just do it for her. But you know, I know that if I do that like
she's not going to learn how to do it herself. She's not going to grow up to be an independent
and confident person, right, and so I don't. Even though it's hard to watch her struggle with stuff.
And I have the same feeling about people playing my games is, I want them to learn, and grow, and become confident
players of games. I know that, and this is a famous story, Miyamoto when he was a kid, he like
stumbled across this cave in the woods. He was just walking around and he found this cave, and that was
kind of the inspiration for The Legend of Zelda, supposedly right. It's kind of like part of the legend. But I think what's interesting about that story is you never really hear about what was in the cave. - Right. Probably there was not any treasure in there, right. Like it was probably
just an empty cave with some like bat poop in it or something. You know, the story is not about what he found, it's about the fact that
he came across it. That's the important part about these mysteries. It's not so much like even what's in there, what you get
from it, but it's the feeling that it's real, that it's personal, and that when you discover it, it's like, it feels like you've really discovered it.
- Right. Discovery is something that developers have to be quite intentional about.
Mystery involves risk from time to time. A scary proposition for any developer. But doing so creates personal moments of discovery
that can leave a lasting impression on the player. However, there is one thing that threatens this type of rich,
personal discovery. It's the same thing you're staring at right now. Part of it is that games were just a lot more unknowable because
there was no internet and because marketing was a lot more limited. The closest thing you would get to the internet nowadays ruining
a game for you was like, getting the guide in Nintendo Power. Here were all the dungeons
from The Adventure of Link. Are there any genres you think,
that really suffer in the age of the internet? Adventure games, I think are basically like,
I can't play them now. I just don't have the patience. Sierra games and LucasArts games,
I loved everything like in the '80's and '90's, and they're all predicated on the idea that you're going to be stuck
for 99% of the time, and not know what to do to advance. The fun comes from when you get un-stuck for that
1% of the time. That's where the fun is in those games. In order to play those games nowadays,
you really have to have preternatural patience because at any time you could just go look up
the answer and have it immediately. In order to not look up the answer, you really have to work at it,
and there's not much to do while you're doing that work. There's not much to distract you from it. The information surfacing power of the internet causes
a couple of problems when it comes to discovery. Not only does it provide an easy way out for puzzles,
but it also bombards us with a constant stream of information about games we haven't even played yet. One of my favorite memories actually, as a kid, was finding like those
Shareware CD's that had a hundred or a thousand games on them. And just sifting through those and trying
each game, having no idea what it was about. Do you think that we know more about games before
they come out now than we did like twenty years ago? Absolutely, yeah. Like at the time, if you heard about a game, probably
you saw a couple like postage stamp size screen shots in a magazine. Maybe you saw a TV add for it.
Maybe all you heard was your friend describing it. How much it's a good idea to know about a game beforehand
depends really heavily on the specific game, probably. I think for a lot of games it's true that you know too
much about it, but also it's probably true about movies. I mean you have these movies that there's supposed to be a surprise in it somewhere,
and of course, that's also the reason why you would go see it. You know, I had to deal with that
question very directly on The Witness because it ended up being a much more expensive
game to make than I thought it would be. I had to borrow a bunch of money, and I'm like, "Oh, this is going
to come out soon. We better start publicizing it in some way." All of the cool stuff about the game was secrets that
you would discover in the process of playing it. In the absence of that, all we had to show people was,
"Look, you draw lines and these mazes. Isn't that cool?" And, how do you get people
excited about that, right? I do enjoy sitting down and playing a game,
and not knowing what I'm getting into, right. That's the most enjoyable thing,
and I don't want to know, you know. Like, let's say I played
the new Call of Duty game. It would have been much cooler to not know that you launch
into space and spend a lot of time on the spaceship. Like, that would have been exciting. It almost seems like the wheels
of capitalism are... They're at odds with having the best experience, right.
But on the other hand, there's so many games now, right. So would... Call of Duty is a special case, but for any particular game
that doesn't have a two hundred trillion dollar marketing budget, would you actually play that game if you didn't hear about
the cool thing about it? Well maybe not, right. And so I think you know, there are certain
kinds of cool things that are still cool after you know about them generally,
and there's other things that aren't I remember talking to Shaun Murray before about how he thought that
the best thing about Minecraft was that they didn't give you the recipe book. Like, you just have to figure
out what the things were. Minecraft is a game that just drops you into
the world and lets you figure things out. Figuring out how to exist in that space was itself kind of the puzzle.
Having to look up in a Wiki what the recipes are, that's like, on its face that's kind of bad UEX, but the fact that someone
discovered that, they got a really good experience out of that. And like, as it went on and they ended up adding a progression
to that game, I think it actually got less interesting. I think that's actually a really good example of a bad ending to a mystery.
It was really a lot more interesting when you didn't have an ending. While many games are overly marketed or live
at risk of having their secrets spoiled by the internet, a new form of mystery has been born through
the connected communication the internet provides. Mysteries that are deeper
and even more obscure. In a way, it's empowering as a developer
because we have so much information. People can discover these secrets very easily, but it also means that
the sky's the limit as far as how difficult you can make these secrets. That's something that is actually very empowering
for me when I'm trying to design a secret. I just try to make the secret as good as I possibly can,
and I don't worry abut whether people are actually going to find it. One of the most effective ways is just
make your secrets just more obscure. I think one of the most powerful examples of this,
of a design that accommodates for this, is Dark Souls. It is designed to be solved by the community,
and if you're playing the game six months after release, reading Wikis written by those people in the first six months,
you're playing a very different game than they got. No, I mean Dark Souls would have
fit right in in the '80's man. Like that's just a regular game. In fact,
it's probably easier than most of these games, honestly. So what happened?
- Like, did we just get soft or something? Well we went toward longer form experiences, right.
It's long-form and you're at home so you don't have to keep popping quarters in, so why
does it make sense to kill you all the time, like you know. So the design I think, naturally changed,
and I think that's totally fine, but you know, as things change, if the mainstream goes a certain way, it leaves alternatives.
It leaves like vacuum spots that people can occupy, right. So Dark Souls then went into this niche that
was left open that used to be filled, right. You know, I was saying how the Zelda series kind of branched off
and it had its own separate evolutionary path, past like maybe Zelda II. I feel like Dark Souls is kind of like along that
path that feels more connected to Zelda I, where it's this open world that's all about mystery
and having you discover that for yourself. You know, like if Mt. Everest had an elevator I think a lot less people
would try to get to the top. It would just be a lot less special, right. While some games in the past did attain mystery for free,
the best examples were when developers took a risk and gave players the tools and the freedom
to figure it out for themselves. Mystery lives on in games like Frog Fractions, The Witness,
and Spelunky. We'll dive into those in the coming weeks. But it also beats in the heart of games like The Soul Series, and if early
reports are to be believed, perhaps even the new Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Proof that no matter how advanced video games become,
there's nothing we love more than a good mystery. Yeah, it's definitely about the journey
being its own reward. The video games, they're these fantasy worlds
that aren't connected to real life in a way. So it's weird because we spend a lot of time
learning about them and figuring them out, but somehow that's just so empowering because
I feel like it - every time you learn about a new game and the game's world, and you're uncovering
all these secrets, and stuff like that. I don't know. Somehow it just feels like it's shining
a light on ideas that were kind of like darkened before. So even though it's like I'm not actually accomplishing
things that affect real life so to speak, it still feels like my mind is being expanded, like I know more,
and it's just very nourishing in that sense. And then you know, some people also say that we're living in a simulation,
so maybe it's games all the way down, you know what I mean.
In the past Jonathan Blow people have often thought Jonathan Blow to be a bit of a pessimist, or at least a purist. Really cool to see him provide lots of counter points to his own opinion in the interview!
Definitely the most inspiring Noclip documentary so far, loved it!
Half-hour documentary covering Spelunky and Dark Souls, among other things? I know what I'm doing when I get off work.
If you haven't seen noclip's Rocket League documentary yet, block out some time. It's top-notch. Next to Ahoy's weapon showcases, DOTA's Free to Play, and Indie Game there isn't much else out there that hits this kind of quality bar.
This video was very well done and I am so excited for the video about The Witness. Especially since it is spoiler heavy.
One of the greatest gaming experiences I ever had was with an indie game called Eidolon. It's not a particularly amazing game, most people might even call it an incredibly boring game, but I got it in a humble bundle and played it without knowing what it was. The pacing in the game was perfect and kept giving me a little trail of breadcrumbs in which each piece was more interesting and surprising than the last, until I came to the metaphorical loaf of bread and it was mindblowing. If I had simply read the description on the steam store or even looked at the screenshots before playing, that experience would have become impossible to achieve before I even launched the game.
Discovery in games is part of what drew me to games in the first place. Trying and deciphering ways to approach or solve something, whether it was laid out by the designer, or perhaps not...
What other people have experienced in Zelda 1, about items/abilities that do multiple things, discovering new places etc., I had that experience Skyrim. Joseph Anderson said the "Skyrim is described as "wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle", but I love splashing around in that puddle". Now perhaps I understand what he meant by that. Games before I had played were immensely static (and the RPG I played before it was Dragon Age II), so when I stumbled across cave (which I thought I wasn't supposed to enter), where bandits were eating and chatting with each other, my mind was sort of blown at how this world felt so much more bigger. And reading about the "Dark Brotherhood signs" across the buildings and discovering them made my eyes widen.
Also, on the topic of Blow talking about puzzles in games like God of War. IMO, puzzles are the best sort of quiet time in action games. These pacing contrasts allow to better appreciate the action presented, and without which everything would be a numbing haze of madness. (Recent Doom has a good balance of action and quiet time, where as recent CoD campaign don't).
God of War has a lot of cool moments, of using abilities like fire ball deflection, or time stopping, to solve puzzles, and traverse levels (which many imitators like Darksiders fail to live up to in that aspect). But God of War II has one of the best environmental puzzle I've solved, that gave me the best "Aha!" moments (the one involving two stones and a slope in the Atlus stage), because nowhere in the game they ever tell on how to do it, and I was stuck on it for a long time.
I still remember of beating all Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus, because I didn't look it up on the net, and it made the fights all the more special.
I think one of the best Modern Mysteries in games, was when everyone lost their collective minds over Fez's puzzles
Another sort of mystery that is perhaps only touched in this video is the mystery of the plot/story. The genuine excitement of piecing the dots together. I remember getting so invested in the lore of God of War, how stories of each connected and re-telling my findings to another friend who didn't had Internet at the time, and then later on the lore of Assassin's Creed (until Revelations, after which it went bat-shit crazy).
More recently, I found great enjoyment in linking Metal Gear's plot, as well as each plot's theme and commentary. I just finished reading/watching the Neir-Drakangard lore, and connecting it's dots (and it's very confusing). And look, Dark Souls's lore has created Internet's own bards, who connect the dots of what had happened in the game.
TL;DR : Another fantastic video by Noclip team!
mystery is probably the biggest reason i love video games. my favorite video game moments are always when the game up to that point has seemed to be one way, and then something happens that totally recontextualizes the substance of the game. The Witness and Fez are great modern examples of this moment. No Man's Sky is a conspicuous example of a game that i think would have benefited from one.
Yeah, I was waiting for Danny's announcement about his next project before I decided to see if Patreon was worth it, but the fact that he has been so busy recording not one but 4 new projects for March has fortified my decision to support him.
This kind of content is exactly what I love about the video game media. I will be creating a Patreon account just to support such wonderful content like this!
It wasn't until I watched some Jon Blow talks that I realized why I loved things like Dark Souls and The Witness: discovery. Being mystified by a world, learning about it, and finding new things is incredibly rewarding and fulfilling. I can't wait to hear more from these guys in the doc more in the coming weeks. Great stuff so far.
I loved this, but how ironic is it there are spoilers for the new Dark Souls DLC in clips in the video? This is a PSA for everyone who is like me and is not looking at anything Dark Souls 3 DLC #2 related, be careful when watching this video. EDIT: Just read a comment from noclip on youtube, they realize they fucked up, I just hope people that don't want to get spoiled like I did read this comment before they watch the video, the spoilers occur in the middle and towards the very end.