LEVEL OF EXPLORATION: EXAMINE EVERYTHING!

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>Roy examined the box. But nothing was found inside.
>Roy examined the drawer. It contains clothing.
>Roy examined the stove. A lovely steak is being roasted.
>Roy examined the window. You can see all the way to the town square from here.
>Roy examined the mattress. It contained someone's secret savings! Obtained 100G!
>Roy examined the tree. It's a large oak. It was likely planted here during the second era when...
>Roy examined the ground...


Uhm, yeah, we can see where this is going. Depending on the type of game, you're allowed to examine your surroundings in some form. Some games will only give you messages when you examine something of importance, or when you actually find something, giving you a bare-bones message such as "You found 10G!".

Then there are other games where almost everything you examine will give you a descriptive box. And it that case, it can vary even more. Worst case would be close to giving you the whole back-story of an object, but that is not common.
Some people like that extra step, but most times what you see is what you need in terms of the game scope.

Most gamers love to explore and loot. In that regard, most people will dig through whole houses to find hidden trinkets. Descriptions will be at times appreciated, but when there's an allure to checking everything, it will grow tiresome pretty fast.

Some games will counter this by adding small hints on the object, or use utility-items or magic that show or give a hint of hidden items to avoid mindlessly examining everything.

What level of examine do you put in your game, or how much do you prefer when playing the game yourself?

Secondary question: What are your thoughts on hiding items in an environment that requires such form of exploration?

---
For myself, I prefer minimal descriptions. Seeing lengthy dialogue boxes is enough. Examining everything can be such a repetition. All I want to know in the end is if there's anything hidden. It's also comforting to know that not every tree needs to be examined, or else I'd hate every forest segment...
I prefer simple descriptions where necessary (cupboards, barrels, etc. sofa cushions sometimes) with maybe a longer scene every now and then for when you find something strange or someone yells at you for snooping through their stuff.

It would be awful if everything you clicked on just said "a barrel", "a cupboard" or whatever. A game I can think of where I enjoyed inspecting everything was Guardian's Crusade. Each town had different architecture, different foods and drinks stocked in their barrels and there was an occasion where you found a huge amount of money stuffed in a couch, but then realised it was fake. Those sort of little details add flavour - they're not really necessary, but they're definitely worth more than "an empty box", or nothing at all.

I wouldn't want long descriptions for everything, though, as that would probably be quite tedious.
Craze
why would i heal when i could equip a morningstar
15150
There needs to be extremely obvious system for what can be interacted with, and what cannot be interacted with. It could be a small twinkle, or the ping/search feature in Diablo/Dragon Age games/etc., or just a very clear-cut "chests, bookcases and barrels can be interacted with, and nothing else." It needs to stay consistent the entire game, and it needs to be taught to the player somehow.

The actual text I don't care about. I just care if it's consistent or not. (Although you could try no text for when there's ntohing there, just a little "grumble" pop-up above the hero, or a "wa-waaa" sound effect or something.")
It can mostly be fun. In my older age, I've noticed that the difference between missing a powerful piece of equipment through not searching enough and just using something bought from the store isn't so big. Usually only a few rounds of combat is the difference in difficulty.

It can create the illusion of losing for people who don't want to search everything all the time. But it also makes looking around much more fun.
CashmereCat
Self-proclaimed Puzzle Snob
11638
I think that rather than giving elaborate descriptions of the actual object, you could give the thoughts of the character when they're interacting with it. For example, instead of "a painting by my mother of the sea", you could replace it with "my mother used to paint pictures of the sea. Now she only paints buildings, but I find them so boring."

IDK i haven't made an RPG so i'm just guessing here.

e.g. then again you could have the problem of explaining way too many things to be interacted. i had that experience with a certain unnamed RPG that gave lengthy descriptions of every object where I interacted with everything but learned almost nothing. what i'm trying to say is, those objects you can interact with, please make it count.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
When I learn that I don't have to investigate every object in every room in the game to get everything out of the game, I breathe a huge sigh of relief.

Several people doing video reviews of Iniquity & Vindication expressed notable disappointment that nothing happened when they walked up to an interesting object and pressed Enter, and said that I really needed to add flavor text for all the cool stuff sitting around in my dungeons. I am not sure this is a worthwhile endeavor, but I ended up doing it to a few things to see if it added any ambiance. Conclusion: It does, but it's also time-consuming to come up with stuff to say about random crap. It is definitely not consistent, but it's also not gameplay-related. The things that are actually interactive in a gameplay-related way are much more consistent.
Sooz
They told me I was mad when I said I was going to create a spidertable. Who’s laughing now!!!
5354
I absolutely love examining objects in RPGs. I don't mind if there's few to no extra objects to check out, but it's a fun little extra thing.

Rather than describing the objects, though, I prefer having the characters react to them. My favorite examples come from Phantasy Star IV- You could get different reactions depending on who was in front of the party at the time. It really helped to get more of a feel for them.

It's also fun if the state of an object adds some detail to the setting: a cluttered cabinet for one NPC versus a tidy but dusty one for another versus a third that's covered in scrapes and stains. Just that little detail adds a lot of realism to the flavor.

If all you can think of to write is something like, "It's a chair," then you should probably nix the examination events, because it's not adding anything at all. Like anything else, if it's not really enhancing the experience, there's no point in cramming it in there.

As for hidden items, I am ALL ABOUT that shit, though I don't really need them to enjoy exploring if the game's particularly well made. Ideally, the exploration itself should function as a reward. (Though if you're, say, making part of the exploration a gameplay challenge, you should absolutely have a more tangible reward for the player at the end.)
I really don't want to believe some people put "it's a chair" in their games... but they do :/
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
There are even people who will criticize a game for not having "It's a chair" when you try to examine a chair.

I wish there weren't.

I wish they didn't send me messages.

But I bring it on myself in my text-based game. I suppose I should talk more about this since it's something I probably have more experience with than almost anyone else here.

Each town and dungeon in my text-based game is split into anywhere from 15 to 50 "rooms" which you can walk between. Each of those rooms has about three sentences worth of description. And every single noun in the descriptions of every single room in the entire game is examinable.

A lot of the nouns are actually different IDs for the same object, so if you look at "bucket" or "supplies" you get the same result. But still. Holy shit. It's kind of horrible to make. People expect a lot more of this in a text-based game, and it definitely improves the quality of the game, and it's good to be consistent, but even the most curious, inquisitive player will only see like 5% of this stuff because the game is so big.

A typical room looks like this, which is room 13 out of 32 in Bal Castle, an area in our Final Fantasy 5 realm.


inherit ROOM;

void setup()
{
set_landtype("stone");
set_brief("Bal Castle");
set_long(" This area has been appropriated for military storage, and numerous
weapons and suits of armor are propped up and ready for use. A tall stained glass
window, depicting a lone knight defeating an army of dragons, reaches from the
stone floor almost all the way up to the ceiling high above.\n");

add_item("area", "floor", "stone", "storage", "military", "military storage",
"The ground is covered in military equipment.");
add_item("armor", "suit", "suits", "suits of armor", "suit of armor", "Some of
these suits of armor are full body platemail, while others are light chain armor.");
add_item("weapon", "weapons", "The weapons stash is comprised of mostly
spears, with a few crossbows and swords mixed in.");
add_item("window", "glass window", "glass", "stained glass", "stained glass window",
"knight", "dragons", "army", "army of dragons", "lone knight", "The enormous
stained glass window depicts one knight in full armor, carrying a spear in each
hand, fighting an army of dragons. In the background, the morning sun rises over
the forest.");
add_item("ceiling", "above", "up", "The vaulted ceiling is high above.");

set_exits( ([
"east" : __DIR__+"balcastle03.c",
]) );

set_objects( ([
"/domains/ffv/bal/mobs/noble" : 2,
"/domains/ffv/bal/mobs/archer" : 1,
]) );
}

Guys.

Guys.

Don't do this.

There is a reason that it took us a decade to finish making the zones for two of the five realms in this game, and then we just pretty much gave up on making areas unless players want to volunteer to code one. The other three realms remain unfinished to this day (though two of them are almost done).

I have written approximately 800 rooms like this, and proofread another 500+ that other people made. I never want to describe another object in a video game ever again.
In my Fragile Hearts games I made pretty much everything explorable/interactive, but I tried to make each description funny/witty in place of a boring "This is a clock" type description. Works well in comedy games, methinks.
The way I see it, if it's not painfully obvious what inspectable objects contain items and what ones don't, there should either be flavor text that's interesting and fun to read, or no hidden items. If the flavor text is boring or nonexistent, looking for items is a chore. If it's fun, then getting items is just a perk of taking your time to read it.
author=Craze
There needs to be extremely obvious system for what can be interacted with, and what cannot be interacted with. It could be a small twinkle, or the ping/search feature in Diablo/Dragon Age games/etc., or just a very clear-cut "chests, bookcases and barrels can be interacted with, and nothing else." It needs to stay consistent the entire game, and it needs to be taught to the player somehow.

The actual text I don't care about. I just care if it's consistent or not. (Although you could try no text for when there's ntohing there, just a little "grumble" pop-up above the hero, or a "wa-waaa" sound effect or something.")


Second for that; I liked the way Dragon Age did exploration. You see a distinctive 'sparkle' around an object, area, etc and you examine it, and you either 1. Get something or 2. You get a quick observation, or a Codex or Quest entry to examine later. It was a handy way to have the player explore the world in an intuitive way.

Final Fantasy IX did it pretty cool too, walking around you can find '!' icons, which either net you an item, something happening, or an observation. The observations in particular were a great worldbuilding tool, Zidane can note his opinions about something 'Didn't I see that play a few years ago in Lindblum?', a historical date, or simply a neat observation or factoid.
Cap_H
DIGITAL IDENTITY CRISIS
6625
Minimalistic design is the way. Don't put any objects to examine in your game. In the end, You will be praised for doing so.

Otherwise I liked Dragon Age's aproach in Origins. It was just the right amount. @Feldschlacht has the truth with this one. And codex was managed superbly in general.
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