Ryyudo

i tend to think there's a huge disconnect between designers and audiences that aren't theirs. like, i can fully see mainstream AAA games going for maximum signposting, in the most obnoxious way possible.

just, there are other audiences than that, and more specific ones, and a lot of them are actively turned off by that level of patronization. ...and sometimes we kinda go the other direction too hard with extremely muddy visuals everywhere, for the sake of a dark and brooding atmosphere.

there is no real way to design a game for everyone, i think, but conversely i don't think there's a right or wrong way to design a game either. it's all about knowing why you're doing what you're doing and who it's for.

(as an aside, i actually really hated Portal when it was new because it always felt like it was telling me where to go, at all times. it's kind of remarkable to me how beloved that game is when i never felt like i was the one playing the game at all...)

i saw some rebuttal like "people would google "how to get out of room name" and watch a youtube video of a guy climbing the ladder" which made me think about what i do and how it's not always the same thing. like sometimes i wanna get it over with and i do look for gamefaqs or someone asking the question on reddit bc i'm definitely not the first person to have gotten stuck, and sometimes i turn the game off and then maybe play it again in a year. and sometimes i sit there and look around and backtrack for an hour till i find it the hardest way possible. it's got a lot to do with what's going on in the game and in my brain, i guess. i don't think i'm very predictable and i don't think people as a whole are

Yea I saw some of the dev threads and immediately rolled me eyes at this whole "no you have to see it from our perspective we HAD to" angle, like even if I understand why the decision is made its still a decision you made, own up to it!

Short answer: most game developers are not good at conveyance.

This has become clear with the rise of hyper-detail and photorealism.

In low-detail environments, conveyance is free, so most game developers did not need to be good at it. If there was a box in a room, you could open it. If there was a lever in a room, you could flip it. The things you could not use were not present in the room.

So now that there are too many things in the rooms, many players know they want good conveyance, and many players have played games that either had good conveyance or did not need good conveyance. Thus when one does it poorly, because it is a skill that not all developers have, it's easier to notice.

Thanks for saying this, this is exactly how I feel. I probably have a decade+ industry experience on most of the veteran designers who have come out in this discourse to explain to the plebs why the patronizing thing is Inevitable (sometimes with assertions of the unwavering "stupidity" of players), and like... I feel bad for them that they have become so The Market-brained that they're no longer working in a creative medium so much as they are working in a very low immediacy high labor sort of customer service.

Some Gamers would rather swing their sword at every barrel in a room trying to find the one that breaks instead of just Knowing. (And even then you can sometimes find interactable things in an environment just due to model/rendering differences).

I call it Designing For DSP

Managing expectations also seems important. People will tolerate things taking a long time in some games, but get frustrated very quickly in others. It's also easier to spot details if you're mentally primed for it.

I think achievements kind of fucked with designer's brains a little. When you release a game and see that less than half of players make it to the first checkpoint and only a quarter have beat the first boss, that makes you think you're doing something wrong.

On the Yellow Ladder topic, there's been this undercurrent for a decade now that modern games don't respect the player's intelligence or autonomy, and a lot of players dislike this kind of "hand-holdy" thing. I think that the discourse would be better served if people distinguished between game design that makes the game learnable for people playing their first ever video game and game design that wastes people's time. The yellow ladder is trivial and inconsequential, it's just an easy target. A tutorial with unskippable cutscenes is worse.

That and I just give absolutely no fucks about realism or fictional consistency. I don't get immersed, I just want to play with relatively little UI friction.