DEALING WITH EXPLOROPHOBIA

There's something to be said about exploration in games, and I think everyone takes it for granted. I'm not talking about exploration as in "Oh hey look at this new town let me go talk to everyone and find secrets!" Sure, that's part of it, but there's a lot more to exploration than wandering around. I'm talking about systems exploration. You know, configuring your character classes and picking skills and whatnot.

Now, I'm sure you already have a few games in mind that have a lot of exploration in them. And probably a few that have absolutely no exploration in them. So I'm going to go ahead and make a bold claim: too much exploration is a bad thing.

Now, I'm a JRPG person all the way, and I've never really been able to deal with anything western, but that doesn't mean I don't want to. Every now and again I say "Hey, an exploration-heavy game? Well, I'm feeling adventurous. Let's try it out!" But I always quit less than an hour into it because I've lost interest.

So what's the problem? Am I just not cut out for games with heavy exploration? Maybe not, but I think that there's a way to make it work: introduce everything slowly. See, I have a compulsive desire to fully understand the game I'm playing. I like to know if 2 points in my Strength stat is going to add 2 damage, 4 damage, or allow me to carry heavier swords. Let me go into detail on three situations where slow introduction to the game systems would make the game much more interesting to me.

1) Stats and skills
There is nothing that is a bigger turnoff to me than when I load up a game and it says "Create a character!" and I get a list of about 70 stats to choose from and 8-12 points to allocate among them. So I decide to be a fighter (fighters have NEVER been underpowered), and decide to put 6 points into Strength so I can actually deal damage. So then I go looking about the other stats. Do I want to be able to buy things cheaper? Oh, I have to take at least basic lockpicking so I can get through doors! Wait, what about item finding? And what on earth is "Operate machinery"? So after being completely perplexed for a little while (there's usually a short description of the stats so I have at least some idea what's going on), I finally get a set of stats that I like ready, and begin the game.

So I make it through the intro, realize that I'm poor, and that there are a couple of things in the starting town that I can't access because I forgot some skills (for example, whoops, I forgot to put a point in Understand Runes). I buy maybe one thing that doesn't really benefit my character much, then head out into the world to do battle. I encounter 5 goblins. Whoops! I didn't put enough points in Endurance and Dexterity! I can't hit a thing and I'm dead in about four rounds. Game over.

At this point, I usually restart the game, open up TSearch and give myself 80 stat points instead of 8, play for an hour or two, and then quit because it's boring (I'm way overpowered now!)

Okay, some people like this sort of thing. I don't. But I don't think that changing it up to make it a little slower would affect how much those people enjoy the game, and it would certainly make me happier.

I would certainly prefer it if I wasn't given ANY choices at the beginning of the game. Maybe physical appearance and such, but nothing that actually affects the gameplay mechanics. Then have a tutorial of sorts where you show me the ropes. Show me that some stats are actually important while others are not. Then once I level up, give me a short list of things I can improve. Wait until I hit level 5 to add in some of the secondary skills, and level 10 for the others. Maybe include iconic representations of each skill. Just don't throw a wall of text at me and force me to wander around like a lost sheep.

Maybe include some in-game cues that will help people choose what they want to do. Let people play around with swords and bows and magic to figure out what they like before they're forced to play a specific class. And show off a few locked doors before people have access to the lockpicking skill in order to entice people to pick it up, instead of taunting them with locked doors after they've already decided that they don't need to be able to open them.

2) The System
This is more of a JRPG thing, but you'll be playing along in a fairly linear storyline with linear characters, then all of a sudden wow! The game's central customization system is open to you! Guess what, you can equip mini-dragons on your characters, each of which boosts a certain stat. Here's 8 mini-dragons to play with, now go scour the world for more! Later we'll tell you how to fuse mini-dragons together, and even how to use full-grown dragons!

It sounds okay, but even this generally tends to annoy me. The problem again is the quantity of options being thrown at me all at once. If I have to pick from 8 mini-dragons and I can only equip one on my character, which do I pick? I don't know! I have no experience with any of them! I can change it later, but what do I do now?! So I pick a red one (red is good, right?) for my character and continue on. I can't really tell what the mini-dragon is doing for me, so I don't really know whether or not I should swap it out. Maybe I decide to try another one. But by this point I've already found four more and I just don't care anymore.

There's a really simple solution to this. Only give me one mini-dragon! Or maybe even two, just make sure they're widely different. So what happens? I grow accustomed to the one dragon (we'll call him Blaze), and when I finally get a new one, I immediately try it out, and compare my results with the results I got from Blaze. What generally happens at this point is that I like Blaze better, switch back to him, and don't change mini-dragons for the rest of the game. What can I say, I'm a JRPG person and don't always love to explore. But the point is that I'm happy with Blaze and want to play the rest of the game with him on my shoulder. Whereas I don't get that feeling of satisfaction when I'm presented with all 8 mini-dragons at once, even if one of them is Blaze!

Another point about these systems is that they usually incorporate some sort of crafting aspect where you can mix them together different items for a price, and get wildly differing results. This is all well and good, but too many games simply introduce the player to the crafting system and say "Go forth, young man, and craft many things." So I pick two things and put them together, and I usually end up with something I don't want. I never craft again.

Some crafting guidance would be nice. Either tell me what's going to happen beforehand, or have NPCs or "secret recipes" scattered throughout the game that tell you how to make particular things. And I don't just mean one or two things. I mean nearly all possible items you could make (I guess it's okay to keep one or two a secret just for the really hardcore people). If you don't do this, you're just going to end up with one dedicated guy writing an FAQ and no one else bothering to figure it out for themselves.

3) Cards
We've all played one or two games where you collect cards to use in battle. There are usually cards of all kinds scattered throughout the world, and card shops with large inventories. And when you start the game, you usually have a deck of 30-50 cards (most of them duplicates). So you really have about 12-14 card types.

That's still too many. What I generally do in these games is find a card that I like and then every time I get a card in the same category, I put it in my deck. By the end of the game I have a deck with basically all the same kind of card, just the more powerful versions of the original one that I decided I liked. I'm missing out on most of the cards in the game and I hardly experiment with any of them.

So how do you get me to explore the depths of your system? Give me fewer cards at the start. Let me get acquainted with the system before you give me enough options to be able to specialize my deck. That way, at least, I'll have a basic understanding of the other types of cards before I reject them (and maybe I'll even choose to include some!). And most importantly, you know those card shops with large inventories? The cards they sell always seem to cost a lot. Think about it. The more the cards cost, the fewer of them I'm going to be able to buy. The fewer cards I'm able to buy, the less experimentation I'm going to be able to do. And giving me a lot of cards is bad, but showing me a bunch of cards and then NOT giving them to me is worse. Especially when the only way to get those cards is to buy them; then I'm certainly never going to try them out.

And there's usually a combination system with the cards, where if you use them in the right order you get a cool combo. This is the same principle as crafting. It's cool and all, just don't make it completely arbitrary. People shouldn't have to use an FAQ to find out what the combos are.


There's a lot more depth than this. Why you shouldn't ever allow players to make decisions they can't take back, why you should try and balance out all of the options so that most of them don't turn out to be worthless, and why it's always better to allow the player to follow a set route of development from the beginning instead of forcing them to take strange side-roads in a needlessly-complicated skill tree. But the principle remains. Introduce the systems slowly, and you will capture the attention of everyone, regardless of their thirst and tolerance for exploration.