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How do you feel about branching paths in linear games?
Drew-B
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Edit: Feel free to post your own OCD-like gaming habits.
I'm wondering about your guys' take on this. Mostly because, branching paths look good on paper, and they're generally more highly praised than linear paths. However, branching paths in certain genres absolutely PUNISH my susceptibility to gamer OCD.
That is, if you give me two paths to go down, I often groan--and I'm wondering if any of you out there can relate. The reason is, my choices (In the scenerio I'm speaking of) are either the right path, which takes me further down the level, or a side path, which takes me to a dead end area--yet rewards me with items and what have you.
Now, I don't mind these dead end branches at all. What I mind is this whole process I go through wherein I choose one path...continue down that path...and slowly the realizing hits me that, "Shit, I'm progressing farther down the level, I chose the wrong (i.e. right) path. When this realization begins to dawn on me, I may venture down a little further just to make sure. Nope, the level keeps going. This is where my gamer OCD kicks in, and my next step is to backtrack all the way to that fork in the road...choose the other path...progress to the end of that path...backtrack back to the forth, then go back down my original path I had chosen.
This is pretty much what I go through every time I encounter a branch...apologies for the image being a little complex, but just follow the red line from the bottom and see if you can relate.
It's like I'm gambling, 50:50 every time I reach a branch...hoping to god that the first branch I choose is the one that comes to an end.
How do you guys feel about this? Do you just take a branch, and if it keeps going, you continue down further through the level? Or are you like me, totally worried you might miss something, where you sort of poke your head down each branch, choose the one you hope is a dead end first...find out it's not...backtrack...backtrack again, etc. etc.
This is much adu about something pretty trivial, but this has been at the back of my mind for years now...I guess this is me just venting it out. :winky:
I even do it in games as simple as F.E.A.R. I might see two doors...choose one...follow it for a minute or two, and have that "oh shit" realization...backtrack all the way back, and find out the second door was simply three connected rooms with some health and ammo...Yet no matter how hard I try, I simply can't leave those rooms unexplored.
I'm wondering about your guys' take on this. Mostly because, branching paths look good on paper, and they're generally more highly praised than linear paths. However, branching paths in certain genres absolutely PUNISH my susceptibility to gamer OCD.
That is, if you give me two paths to go down, I often groan--and I'm wondering if any of you out there can relate. The reason is, my choices (In the scenerio I'm speaking of) are either the right path, which takes me further down the level, or a side path, which takes me to a dead end area--yet rewards me with items and what have you.
Now, I don't mind these dead end branches at all. What I mind is this whole process I go through wherein I choose one path...continue down that path...and slowly the realizing hits me that, "Shit, I'm progressing farther down the level, I chose the wrong (i.e. right) path. When this realization begins to dawn on me, I may venture down a little further just to make sure. Nope, the level keeps going. This is where my gamer OCD kicks in, and my next step is to backtrack all the way to that fork in the road...choose the other path...progress to the end of that path...backtrack back to the forth, then go back down my original path I had chosen.
This is pretty much what I go through every time I encounter a branch...apologies for the image being a little complex, but just follow the red line from the bottom and see if you can relate.
It's like I'm gambling, 50:50 every time I reach a branch...hoping to god that the first branch I choose is the one that comes to an end.
How do you guys feel about this? Do you just take a branch, and if it keeps going, you continue down further through the level? Or are you like me, totally worried you might miss something, where you sort of poke your head down each branch, choose the one you hope is a dead end first...find out it's not...backtrack...backtrack again, etc. etc.
This is much adu about something pretty trivial, but this has been at the back of my mind for years now...I guess this is me just venting it out. :winky:
I even do it in games as simple as F.E.A.R. I might see two doors...choose one...follow it for a minute or two, and have that "oh shit" realization...backtrack all the way back, and find out the second door was simply three connected rooms with some health and ammo...Yet no matter how hard I try, I simply can't leave those rooms unexplored.
Drew-B on
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Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
Obviously I don't expect a thread like this to go on for twenty pages...so feel free to expand the topic, anyone.
Previous account
Another option is to have no dead ends, all branches wind back towards the main goal. But this puts the burden of creating more content on the developer.. and even makes the junction problem worse, where the player has no clue which direction to take twice as much.
Bungie talked about this around the time of Halo 3, the initial jungle levels they regularly had testers getting lost because the scenery had so few landmarks, even though there was only one path to take! They got around this by putting in one-way dropoffs to keep people from backtracking.
I also have to try to bash in everything I see, just in case.
(Please do not gift. My game bank is already full.)
Mo'fucker, I even digged REDGUARD!
Previous account
The sad thing is I'd probably still do it anyway if somebody were sitting next to me saying "Don't worry, it's just a potion down that way."
But hey, on the plus side, doing this helps usually helps maintain the slight overlevel I like to keep.
An addendum to "gotta check everywhere" OCD complex is the "gotta save all items" complex, where you end up lugging around 50 of every item, many of which are completely useless to you, but you still have that nagging suspicion that you shouldn't sell anything. By the end of the game, you have a ton of everything, but never use any of the one-shot items.
EDIT: At least I'm not the only one :P
The problem with this is that it still makes players go back to the fork and take the other path to see if it leads somewhere else. Hell, this was a problem even way back in Crash Bandicoot. Players expect two different paths to go to two different places, and so the problem of going back to explore what might have been is always going to be an issue, dead end or not.
An interesting solution would be to make these choices permanent, like seal off the way you came from somehow, but this is both a very specific solution to a general problem and a solution that more or less forces the developers to create interesting content for both branches, as you stated.
Personally, I cannot bear the thought of finishing a complex in Moon and seeing little blue bits on the map that I haven't explored.
I do this all the time, and I blame the people bitching for non-linearity in every game ever. Sometimes, a single-player-only, non-linear game is exactly what I'm hankering for.
Heh, I did this to the point where I actually missed important information. On Dantooine, when the two families are fueding, I only ever managed to talk them down (or escalate into a 100% fatality shoot-out when evil). It wasn't until my wife played that she told me you could find the missing bodies in the middle of a field somewhere, which I never found because I kept hugging the wall filling out the map.
All this does is just make my OCD flare up even worse. Now, not only do I not know what was down that other path, but I can never know!
Doing the time trials, trying to find the secret coin pieces requires exploration, but as it's a downhill track, there really is no option to go back at all. Since a run only takes a minute or two, it's easy to repeat, but it's pretty satisfying when you nail the right path to get all the pieces (YOU GOT A COIN!!!), and just as fun, although frustrating, to see one in the distance, up on a grind rail, and realise that you're on the wrong path, and are about to go flying past it. In the format of a game like this, i always enjoy trying the alternate paths, even if there's no actual reward there.
More conventionally, i have the same mentality as others, of 'going down one route, then backtracking just to see if there's any goodies down the other way', but i also kick myself for doing this, since in an RPG i'll tend to do this even in the first dungeon, where the gear that you might receive isn't even that powerful...
Heh, I had this complex in old school FPS's where they'd give you like 9 different weapons. I'd never use the grenade launcher/rocket launcher-type weapons, thinking "Need to save em'" and they'd really just end up getting neglected because of this.
Previous account
Whats worse is that Fear Effect and Resisdent Evil 4 never gave you any rockets except for those precious few which you saved for the final boss.
edit: I was wrong, it was Fear Effect 2 that gave you a few rockets throughout the game that were best saved for the final boss.
Fucking drunk dwemer...
Just stick to the right wall, you'll be out by Sun's Dusk.
What?
Previous account
In a game like I'm playing now, Penumbra (similar in genre to Heavy Rain as far as action/adventure/puzzle), I'm all for it, hypocritically.
Previous account
As for using a new weapon or item, I've gotten over that hoarding complex by using it at the first good opportunity. I used to have to deploy it right away, but I've gotten over the problem to the point where I can wait for a boss fight if it can be useful there. I think this is especially hard for older people, seeing as how back in the 90's, you could easily use a one-use item and fuck up the rest of the game.
About my gaming OCD: Playing through Chrono Trigger DS, I got up to a part where there's a hidden path, not shown on the map. I almost started the game over because I might have missed some hidden treasure, and might not be able to completely fill my beastiary and item encyclopedia. Pretty close to erasing my 40-hour save file (I know there's 3 slots, but that save file would've been useless).
If I knew, for example, that the wrong choice will only ever lead to something nice but not necessary, like a potion or phoenix down or something similar that I can buy from a shop, rather than the a piece of ultimate item extraordinaire that I can never get again or must grind my ass off to get a meager chance at, I wouldn't do this.
It's shoddy game design that causes it, for me. I know that there can be severe consequences for not being ocd. This ancient design aesthetic needs to go. Put it in a hard to find area if you must, but make it so you can ALWAYS go back and get it. It's never locked out.
By the time I beat Mass Effect I'd saved like 500 times doing that
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That same thing happens to me though not as obvious as that diagram, like i've been replaying KOTOR, and i'm all flirting up Bastilla seeing what's what, light spoilers here
The answer of course is to use a loop of game saves so you CAN load back to an hour ago where you missed the non-required-but-holy-shit-awesome item or side-quest.
I also borrowed my friend's copy of Resident Evil that i'm going to kill myself once I start playing because, not only checkpoint saves, but a finite number of checkpoint saves :x
It's not really an issue. There are plenty of ink ribbons. Plenty.
Kinda off topic, but does anybody know where it is in Blue Dragon?
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That said, I do this all the time. I really don't mind it, even with random encounters turned on. I figure it's exp and money, so it's not a big deal to check for those treasure chests with the phat loot in em.
As far as branching story decisions, I dont like it because I start making thousands of saves, then forget what any of them are and end up only beating it once and not wanting to go back.
I like how FF6 did it, where you choose one of three groups of characters and play out that scenario, but you end up doing all 3 before the story cotinues on.
In yet another instance of branching paths, games like Star Fox 64 and Yoshi's Story I loved, but the problem I had was that you only had to play a small % of all the levels to "beat the game". If you had to play through all of them I think I would have liked it better.
Just echoing this; I hate branching paths; even when replaying a game I have to go down the dead-end that only leads to a crummy potion; Dead Space's system was a godsend to me.