Now I’m wondering how you could subvert that. I’m imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:
A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don’t know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.
A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you’ve got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they’ve got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn’t have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.
I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let’s Play videos.
I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.
A couple of roguelikes work this way. ADOM, in particular, gives you a very fixed period of time to save the world from an incursion of Chaos before said incursion and its radiation-like effects start making it very much harder.
That sounds a lot like the actual game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. You have a fixed time limit in which to save the world, and if you don’t, you have to go back in time and watch most of your progress become undone.
Yeah, right! I’m playing through this right now, and all the important things get saved when you play the Song of Time. But the most important part is that there’s no penalty to wasting time: you could spend all 3 days looking for one heart piece, and whether you did or didn’t find it, you’d be no worse off after playing the Song of Time again.
Persona 3 and 4 actually do integrate something like this; they run on a calendar with fixed dates for important plot events. They’re very compelling because of it; you really have to time-manage if you want to optimise for content-seen (and you are rewarded for managing it).
Now I’m wondering how you could subvert that. I’m imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:
A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don’t know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.
A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you’ve got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they’ve got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn’t have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.
I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let’s Play videos.
I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.
A couple of roguelikes work this way. ADOM, in particular, gives you a very fixed period of time to save the world from an incursion of Chaos before said incursion and its radiation-like effects start making it very much harder.
Dead rising had a bunch of that going on.
That sounds a lot like the actual game The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. You have a fixed time limit in which to save the world, and if you don’t, you have to go back in time and watch most of your progress become undone.
Yeah, right! I’m playing through this right now, and all the important things get saved when you play the Song of Time. But the most important part is that there’s no penalty to wasting time: you could spend all 3 days looking for one heart piece, and whether you did or didn’t find it, you’d be no worse off after playing the Song of Time again.
Persona 3 and 4 actually do integrate something like this; they run on a calendar with fixed dates for important plot events. They’re very compelling because of it; you really have to time-manage if you want to optimise for content-seen (and you are rewarded for managing it).