» Fri Mar 08, 2013 10:52 pm So this video caused a lot of discussion, and yet you all know that Skyrim is the best selling TES so far.
What Bethesda is not likely to do is ignore this, however, they may have conflated two separate things ideals of why Skyrim was a success.
In game design there's the concept of depth, or rather just making the gameplay interesting and reactive. Making your input, as a player, have multiple different outcomes would be a way to put it. As the video discusses, in Skyrim your input is almost anything, and your output is "you succeed". There's no particular chance for succeeding less. At times the game "wins" the quests and scenarios for you, regardless of what you do. If you are hiding in the bushes and shoot some, anything, at an enemy you will remain undetected.
This isn't particularly interesting, but it is a reward if you consider wanting to stay undetected a reward. If you wanted to be noticed, then it's a failure. There's no way to actually "reward" players all the time. But that's what Skyrim tries to do.
And with the success of it Bethesda's designer may take this as a sign that such design is successful. One I would contend isn't necessarily true, in part.
There's another concept in game design, called accessibility. As in, how easy it is for someone to pick up and play and do what it is they want to do. How confused a player gets and doesn't get by everything from their own failures to the UI to other elements of the game. The more obvious it is how to do something, usually (unless it's a puzzle game) the better, in all consideration.
And Skyrim is a very accessible game, because it is so, for lack of a better word, "easy". You sneak by pressing the sneak button, you kill that dude by pressing the attack button a lot. Bethesda's designers it seems, have conflated the idea the idea of "rewarding" with "easy to understand". By making everything "easy" they get the "easy to understand" part down with less work.
But you can accomplish getting people to understand what's going on, and how to do things, without sacrificing the "depth" part of the game, as Skyrim has done. But this requires more thought put into how the game is designed. Let's take sneaking for example. Skyrim is "you press sneak, you're sneaking and will hardly ever be discovered." What do people want to do? Sneak. By pressing a button it allows them to do this, but doesn't allow them to do anything else. If, however, you added failure to that, the chance to actually be seen, based on some parameters, you have depth. You can be caught, and have results from that, or you can not, and have results from that, or maybe even an NPC could "notice something" and investigate, and you might try to kill him, or go further into hiding, or run away. Much more depth.
But to accomplish this, and to get the same sort of accessibility as Skyrim, Bethesda would have to do a very good job of explaining all this. They'd have to have a way to show the player whether they're about to get caught, and that if they stay in the shadows and out of sight they won't get caught, and if they go into the light and in sight they will be, and if they make too much sound they might get "investigated" and what that means. That's a lot to teach the average player, but it most certainly can be done, and in a way easy for the average play to digest.
But that requires a lot of work and thought, and can be difficult to pull off. Whether Bethesda is up to the task is not for me to say.
