Game Design: Skipping failed missions

[EvanT]

Hi,

I heard that one may skip action sequences/missions in GTA V if one failed to accomplish them in three(a number of) trys.
If that is not true consider the following as a rant to the "easy-mode everywhere" philosophy showing in actual games.

So basically the game determines that you suck at playing the game so it gives you the option to skip the hard part and go on. That's like "Oh you lost the last three games of chess. So - shall I let you win?".
I fully understand that games come with different difficulty levels or pair players based on skill level in multi player so they are compatible with a broader player base. But giving a medal for free is just cheating implemented as a game feature. Where is the challenge?

I can't imagine how that kind of "feature" is helping .. I would consider it an insult.

[warmist]

Although i really understand and almost always agree with not catering to the lowest denominator I understand the problem they are facing: what if you get "stuck" in the first 3% of content? I felt this a few times in e.g. games that are combat oriented and for some reason the game designer felt that jumping puzzles are a great idea (especially with camera always at awkward angles and jumping into void hoping that you will reach the next platform). I think that this is just a quick fix for a bigger some bigger problems and currently don't know of any way to really fix it make it enjoyable for everyone WITHOUT sacrificing something.

[odranoel]

just wanted to confirm that yes, gta v let me skip a couple of sequences/missions. it felt really weird to me, i saw on the hud below the screen on the retry mission screen an option that said skip. i pressed it out of curiousity and it was brought to the mission complet screen, with a bronze medal. so far this is the only time iv seen a game out right let you skip a mission without actualy beating it. it did indeed feel very lame.

[Rob]

That could have been a neat feature, if failing was it's own option. You went down a different line of missions because what was supposed to happen(you completing a mission), never took place. But just skipping it and continuing on as if you did said task is just lame.

[EvanT]

They even regard you skipping content with a medal like one you could have gained by succeeding barely? That is an additional kick in the guts for those who did get a bronze medal for playing the game.

I would consider multiple solution paths a very good option. Like if you fail at doing it one way you may proceed with a complete different approach. like you could gain access to a gang-house by impressing them (but you fail) so you could break in at night or seduce a gang member('s girlfriend). Or gain the resources which are located there from somewhere else. That kind of stuff would be great and is something I would actually expect from a kind-of-adventure.

I guess that there is little need for such branches while everybody who got stuck on a problem just goes to read a wiki or watch some play-through. That way only one way gets promoted.. And the producers will hardly spend money on features/plot branches which are rarely seen.
I would argue that this would increase the replay value because a player wants to see the "whole" content and that it is a feature which others do not have.

[logorouge]

Question: What's stopping a player from skipping all the missions?

[odranoel]

Question: What's stopping a player from skipping all the missions?

i was confused on this as well, after the first time i saw the option i kept an eye out for it because it didnt make much sence to me and had kinda taken me by surprize. i wasnt always availible on the mission restart screen. so im guessing that either it only shows after youv failed a few times (as suggested above) or maybe once you get to a certin point of a mission. GTA V had a checkpoint system within the missions. so pretty much every "objective" you complete in a mission, if you die the mission lets you either restart from that last check point, or do the whole mission all over again, and sometimes the skip mission option would appear.

so again, im sure its either only after failing a few times or if you reached the final checkpoint, or somehting like that. i beat GTA V, got bored of it and came back to BTW befor i could really figure out what was up with the skip mission option. i only used it twice in my whole game, once because i was curious to see if it really would let me skip the mission as indicated (seemed so off to me) and the second time totaly by accident (i hit X instead of A on my controller)

as for the whole bronze medal thing, i think bronze was the crappiest you could get. and was not possible to beat a mission without earning a medal. but dont quote me on that, im not 100% sure. havent played GTA in a few weeks :p

[Gilberreke]

They give you a medal for skipping it? XD

Welcome to video games: soccer mom edition

[CrafterOfMines57]

I guess I didn't notice this, or maybe it only appears on certain missions? I never failed a mission more than like 5 times, except in one case when I think I retried it like 15 times, but even then I never saw the prompt to skip the mission. I think it's an unnecessary addition really, they already put in the checkpoint system to combat the rage inducing "Follow this guy's car around for 10 minutes again because the last enemy in the mission killed you" restart everything when you fail system GTA IV had, but this just seems like they took it too far.

[odranoel]

it dosnt promt you nessisarily like, "hey wanna skip this one?" but on the mission failed screen on the bottom of the screen where it tells you what each button does, sometimes it would label X as skip. (square for playstation i assum) but ya wasnt always there.

[Daisjun]

I haven't failed a mission enough times to trigger it so it doesn't really bother me. The option is there if people want it. I was reading a discussion about this a while ago, can't remember where, but I agree with the mentality behind it.

Say for instance you buy a racing game that promotes 'over 400 cars and 50 tracks!' You get the game home, fire it up only to discover you only have access to three shitty cars and a little loop. You're crap at the game so you only ever manage to unlock 50 cars and 4 tracks.

You pay for 100% of the game, so you should have access to 100% of the content. Just because you suck at the game doesn't mean you should be punished by not having access to all the content. I'm a pretty competent gamer so none of the missions have really posed a challenge to me, and it seems kinda silly to skip over parts of the game as like I said, I payed for 100% of the game so I want to experience 100% of it. But not everyone is as competent as me and I can understand that frustration. Keep in mind that GTA5 is going to become one of the best selling games of all time. Thus it has to cater for worst of gamers, right up to the South Korean surgically attached to his PC.

But OH MY GOD that bloody thing in New Super Mario Bros U, it's like 'Ding ding! Ding ding! Hey guy! You obviously suck at this game! Want some help because you're obviously so terrible? Ding ding! DING DING!' At least GTA5 is a little more subtle about it.

[FlowerChild]

Just because you buy a set of golf clubs, it doesn't entitle you to swing a hole in one. In fact, if you were guaranteed to do so, you probably wouldn't buy them in the first place as it would reduce the game to being a trivial affair that absolutely anyone could master.

I don't really care about stuff like this, as I'm not at all drawn to it, and I'd never put it in a game I'm designing, but I do think the above argument is hela lame. Then again, I don't believe in designing games for all people, and likely won't be buying GTA V myself given they tried to tailor the driving to the lowest common denominator as described in the other thread.

I hadn't even heard of the new super mario mechanic, but if I'm reading the above right and it makes you feel like a tard for using it, then more power to them :)

[Daisjun]

I don't really think that's comparable. I'm talking about access to content in video games, not magically being given the skills to play them.

[FlowerChild]

I don't really think that's comparable. I'm talking about access to content in video games, not magically being given the skills to play them.

The sense of accomplishment in golf is largely the content, just like making it to the end of a game provides the same.

I think what you're saying is more akin to linear media such as film or literature where the viewer doesn't play an active role. What you're suggesting is largely taking the interactivity out of a game by removing consequence to the player's actions by making everything accessible to absolutely everyone.

Whatever that is, it's not a game IMO. It's just a parade of game assets rolled out sequentially.

But like I said, I don't believe in that kind of game design, and I am certainly in the minority there. Obviously most of the industry currently agrees with you.

[Daisjun]

I can see what you're saying. I mean I obviously enjoy the challenge and I'd rather complete a game properly to gain the sense of accomplishment you're talking about. But I mean, cheats have been around as long as video games have for the exact reason I just described. It's just now they're actually implementing them into the game as a valid option. Again like I said, I don't really care as it's something I'd never consider anyway, but if you don't want that sense of accomplishment and you just want to access a certain part of the game then the option is there.

[FlowerChild]

Well, like I said, I have a rather different ideology about these things as I've demonstrated time and time again by narrowing down the options available to players to create a more unified and consistent experience.

To me, turning everything into options is just mass market Hollywood style game making attempting to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It revolves more around creating a financially successful game rather than a good one.

Anyways, I've gone on enough about that kind of thing in the past. It's just not my bag.

[Dralnalak]

Just because you buy a set of golf clubs, it doesn't entitle you to swing a hole in one. In fact, if you were guaranteed to do so, you probably wouldn't buy them in the first place as it would reduce the game to being a trivial affair that absolutely anyone could master.

The way I see it, there are really two different aspects of denied content: Progress and "horizontal". Progress is when you can only proceed so far along the game until you're good enough to go further. The concept of horizontal is my description of games that deny you access to effectively equal level content just because you haven't beaten the first set of content yet.

In the game of golf, there is no one telling you that you can only play this one single golf course until you can get par on every hole, and only then are you allowed to try another course. (Another course which you already paid for when you bought the clubs.) Yet there are plenty of games where you have to unlock similar aspects of the game. As Daisjun said, you can only access some of the cars that came with the game because you have to beat other tracks to unlock the content you already paid for (the rest of the cars).

There's also games that act like horizontal content is really "progress". As an example from a YouTube video someone linked on this forum recently, the fact that in Rock Band you have to master songs you really don't like listening to in order to "progress" to songs that you bought the game for.

In a multiplayer game or an MMO, I recognize the need for direct competition toward completion of game content. I also recognize the human psychology that says that you will value the game accomplishments more if there is no "skip" button. Still, I ultimately believe that if I spend my hard earned money and my even more precious free time on a game for entertainment, there should be a way to unlock the locked content if I'm just not able to master a section or just plain more interested in playing other parts of the game.

[Mr_Hosed]

<snip>
To me, turning everything into options is just mass market Hollywood style game making attempting to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It revolves more around creating a financially successful game rather than a good one.</snip>

Completely unrelated to GTA V, but relevant to the discussion, I REALLY hate game play option-spam in games. I equate it to lazy design. "Game play mechanic A negates mechanic B! Oh, I know, lets make it an option when they're setting up their character/map/clan/etc!"

As for "no-failure game design", maybe I'm missing something because I grew up playing computer games, but I must ask how is it fun to play a game you can't fail at?

[Daisjun]

As for "no-failure game design", maybe I'm missing something because I grew up playing computer games, but I must ask how is it fun to play a game you can't fail at?

It's odd thinking back to the games I used to play as a kid. They were so much more unforgiving. For instance I couldn't even get to the first level boss in Ghosts and Goblins on C64 when I was a kid and the game over music lasted longer than my average game time in Green Beret (Rush'n Attack), that was a horrifically ruthless game.

So there's fun, and then there's PTSD that you still carry with you 20 years later :)

[TheAnarchitect]

I think it's related to the "Videogames as story medium" meme. In the old days, when games were games, then it was acceptable to have fail conditions. Hell, most old-school arcade games didn't even have a win conditions, you played until you died then bragged about how long you lasted. But once games became a story-telling medium, it changed. Shutting a bad player down meant they wouldn't get to see how the story proceeded from that point. Which, if you're a storyteller, is unacceptable. You spent a lot of time, effort, and development money on that story, damn it, and the player is GOING to get it. In the 90's RPGs, you could skip the cut scenes to get back to the game. In modern games, you skip the game to get back to the cut scenes.

[William the tuba]

I think it's just lazy design and testing on Rockstar's part.

They could have had variable difficulty. In a game broken into replayable missions, hooks can be inserted into levels allowing the game to adjust the difficulty based on previous playthroughs. If a player is consistently dying in a certain part of the level, the accuracy of enemy shooters can be adjusted, fewer can be spawned, or friendlies can be buffed. Crash Bandicoot for the PS1 did something like this:

And then there was our annoying way of making players earn continues. This was a major mistake. It makes players that need lives fail while boring players that don’t. It is the opposite of good game balance.

We were already learning. We had realized that if a novice player died a lot of times, we could give them an Aku Aku at the start of a round and they had a better chance to progress. And we figured out that if you died a lot when running from the boulder, we could just slow the boulder down a little each time. If you died too much a fruit crate would suddenly become a continue point. Eventually everyone succeeded at Crash.

Our mantra became help weaker players without changing the game for the better players.

We called all this DDA, Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment, and at the time the extent to which we did it was pretty novel. It would lead later Crash games to be the inclusive, perfectly balanced games they became. Good player, bad player, everyone loved Crash games. They never realized it is because they were all playing a slightly different game, balanced for their specific needs.

This can happen without the player noticing, hopefully leaving them with the same sense of accomplishment without the frustration, and certainly with an uninterrupted gameplay experience. This removes the WTFness of a "skip level" button and the stigma of using some cheaty item to beat a level.

There's also a case to be made for a lack of rigorous testing. If designers aren't watching testers and asking themselves "where, how, and why are people failing this mission?", and then analyzing the cues and incentives in the level (especially ones they didn't notice they inserted), then they can't really know how to fix the level with regards to perceived difficulty. A level could be really easy with a certain play style, but if nobody realizes that they should play that way, then it'll seem really hard. A more thoughtful designer might subtly cue that play style by dropping in a motif associated with that style, rather than allowing the player to skip out on that part of the game. Notice that the more thoughtful option requires a better understanding of the players and levels. This sort of thing happens in Valve's Portal, where important portaling points are marked, usually by a square grid (vs. the normal 2x1 tiles).

This begs the question though, why does GTA have missions? Why isn't it just a giant blow-everything-up sandbox? I haven't really played a GTA game for very long, but from experiences with similar games (Just Cause 2, Saint's Row 3), I imagine that they're just tools of the developer to pace the distribution of new toys. If this is the case, then the actual quality of the levels doesn't matter too much, as they're basically just timewasters. Allowing you to skip levels is basically Rockstar saying "Yeah, you've put in your time--it doesn't matter if you can actually finish it, so here's your new toy," because the actual point of the game is just to run around and shoot people.

[DaveYanakov]

That is really what it boils down to. If you have a linear story to progress through, then you have essentially made a movie, not a game. Games are about an experience, not a single story path.

If your gameplay changes based on how many story missions are passed, that is entirely different. One of these days gaming is going to realize that what they are looking for isn't a story, it is context for their gameplay. There are many, many titles that get this right and unfortunately there are many multi-million dollar franchises that got it exactly wrong.

[dawnraider]

I find that too many games fall into the movie-style sort of thing- not really anything interactive, just a single predetermined path, which makes mission skipping almost a necessity, whatever form it may take (ideally the example provided about crash bandicoot, which used dynamic difficulty to provide a seamless experience). I don't think this can be entirely avoided until game devs realize that story does not make a game- a game makes the story. Just look at minecraft. There is no underlying story there, but the gameplay (at least in BTW) lends itself to explanations as to why things happen. Granted, this is a far more subtle example, but it still serves the point.

[Thorium-232]

In a multiplayer game or an MMO, I recognize the need for direct competition toward completion of game content. I also recognize the human psychology that says that you will value the game accomplishments more if there is no "skip" button. Still, I ultimately believe that if I spend my hard earned money and my even more precious free time on a game for entertainment, there should be a way to unlock the locked content if I'm just not able to master a section or just plain more interested in playing other parts of the game.

This is currently the argument that is absolutely raging around WoW's implementation of LFR (for those not familiar, the Looking For Raid tool in WoW is a way for casual players to experience the endgame content in a very low-skill-requirement way, by auto-assembling a 25 man group with the right class/role balance, then pitting it against extremely weak versions of the endgame bosses, for low-quality versions of the loot they would drop)

On one hand, you have the endgame raiders who are insulted that the casuals are "given" something they had to "earn", whereas the casuals (and Blizzard itself) were upset that they were locked out of the most impressive parts of the game that they payed for. There are almost daily calls to have LFR removed from the game, but Blizzard won't budge because the system is so successful. For myself as a retired semi-hardcore raider, I like the fact that I can hop into an LFR group and at least experience the content I otherwise wouldn't see; however, I know for a fact it is nowhere near as satisfying because I don't have my team with me, and there is no "first kill" magic anymore.

This I feel is similar to GTA's skip feature. Sure you can roll over the game if you want to, but you're ultimately cheating yourself out of the grander experience of completing it legitimately. I probably would have implemented something more in the Crash Bandicoot vein myself, but honestly the GTA series have been more like interactive movies since 3 came out anyway, and "skipping the game to get back to the cutscene" probably made more sense to them in both development and financial terms.

[Dralnalak]

Sure you can roll over the game if you want to, but you're ultimately cheating yourself out of the grander experience of completing it legitimately.

I do agree on the grander experience of fighting through a game to "earn" access to other parts. I rarely use cheat codes or editors or such simply because they make the game less interesting for me.

With the exception being times where I might use those editors to create a custom situation for the entertainment of it.

For me, the frustration of locked game content is more about places where I do not have the capability or the resources to get past a certain point. As an example: I own an off-road racing type game where I simply cannot beat the minimum time on one level. I've tried numerous times. There's a section of the track where my hand-eye coordination is simply not good enough to get past, so I will never get to see the rest of the game because of that one spot. I finally had to give up on the game.


Then again, I have read a number of articles that cite statistics saying that most players never actually finish most of the games they buy. They get bored, they get frustrated, they get distracted and move on to something else. Perhaps I should just accept that games are no longer meant to be finished. :)