DESERTOPA'S PROFILE

I just finished playing through the prologue, and I'm really eager to see where the rest of the game goes from here.

I encountered a bug in my playthrough which didn't impede my progress, but occurred consistently when I re-tested the conditions that led to it, and could theoretically trap a player with an unwinnable save file. After Aeyr and Amalie return from their expedition and Amalie leaves the party, Aeyre can leave the city by himself. However, when he tries to re-enter, the screen doesn't load properly; the screen is black and static, and while it's possible to access the status menu, no other inputs outside it have any effect, so I was forced to reset whenever I reached this point. If the player for some reason saved their game in the forest at this point, it would be impossible to progress on that file.

Since there's no incentive in story terms to let the player go wandering off out of the city at this point, the problem could be resolved simply by adding a message that blocks Aeyr from leaving the city and walking back into the oncoming fog like a dumbass (which I mainly only tried in the first place just to see if the game would let me.)

author=Pancaek
...How would you know a game is that bad if you haven't played it?

Granted it is pretty easy to spot a low quality game, but at the same time it's hard to really accurately judge a game if you haven't played it. Maybe the art is really bad but the writing and game-play is outstanding.

This is one reason I really think any game which rests to any significant extent on the quality of its writing really should contain screenshots of dialogue or other significant text on its game page. Even if it doesn't reveal anything about the narrative structure, you can tell a lot about the quality of writing in a game from just a few lines.

Lacking any particular sign that a game is good though, I'll tend to assume most games are not, and I suspect most people on this site do the same. Most people don't touch the vast majority of games on the site, after all. So it's no surprise if review scores skew higher than "average," since not only are people less likely to review games they weren't enthusiastic enough to finish, but they're going to tend not to bother playing games in the first place which they don't expect to be better than average. If anything, the average unreviewed game would probably garner ratings significantly below 3 stars if members were forced to play and review them.

author=Jeroen_Sol
Considering the heavily lauded Final Fantasy and Legend of Zelda series both do this exact thing, I question your assertion that people feel narrative is trivialized by such player freedom. Some people may feel less invested in the story if it can be put on hold, sure, but I don't think many people do.

Just because they're popular, doesn't mean they're faultless. Certainly I've known many players other than myself to complain about how silly this is.

It's not like there aren't plenty of ways around this. You can make a final dungeon where the Big Bad is waiting for the protagonists to show up for the final confrontation, and won't proceed without them. You can make the bonus content available before the Point Of No Return where the plot becomes time-critical, and make it clear what events will trigger that point so the player knows to get everything else out of the way before moving on. You can put bonus content in an epilogue after the main conflict has already been dealt with. With time travel elements, the protagonists can put the final confrontation on hold indefinitely, because it always takes place at a specific point in time, and they can approach that time whenever it's most convenient for them. You can have a final confrontation which actually occurs on the protagonists' initiative rather than the antagonists', so they can choose when to take the fight to the Big Bad.

If you don't actually care that much about the narrative, then you don't need to worry about these sorts of things. But if you want the narrative to be a major selling point for the audience, it's generally better to keep the gameplay and narrative in support of each other rather than letting one undermine the other.

I agree with RedNova that I'd find it pretty weird in storytelling terms for the player characters to deliberately impose the challenge of an unnecessarily harder dungeon on themselves... just because. But there are ways to keep the final boss seeming climactic in story terms even when you have a bonus dungeon that's more difficult in gameplay terms. For instance, you can invoke Eleventh Hour Superpowers (tvtropes link) which make it clear that even if the final boss is mechanically easier, you wouldn't be able to beat it wielding only the same powers with which you fought the bonus boss. Personas 3 and 4 both provide good examples of this; both have bonus bosses that require extreme leveling and tweaking to beat, but have final bosses which would be undefeatable without powers which you only wield in the specific circumstances of those battles. Also, if the point of the final boss was never that they were the strongest and largest scale threat to the world which nobody else could overcome, but that they're personally behind the conflict which the protagonists are most invested in, then I think you can maintain a lot of weight for the final confrontation even if you give the player the opportunity to face other challenges which are strictly harder.

Dragon Quest VI had an interesting approach to the "bonus dungeon which is also the final dungeon" idea. The plot features a city which was ruined in the distant past by trying to summon a being which could defeat the Final Boss for them. Unfortunately, instead of fighting the Final Boss, the summoned being just destroyed their castle and killed everybody. But once you've beaten the final boss normally (or cheated to unlock every job class before the final dungeon,) you go back to a point before you beat it, but can now access a final dungeon which, after a long winding trip, leads you to that same being which was summoned back then. It provides a much more difficult bonus boss fight, and if you beat it, you get an alternate ending sequence where it performs the service it was originally summoned for: kicking the ass of the final boss for you.

I look for some pretty different things in games from LockeZ, but I'm going to broadly echo his advice here. I personally think that you should never allow the player party to enter NPC houses unless you have some particularly interesting content to justify it. Personally, I love wandering around talking to people and examining things for interesting dialogue and text, but not only does letting player characters randomly walk into strangers' house not make a lot of sense, most games just don't fill them with interesting enough content to reward the completionist impulse to explore them. I'd especially advise against letting the player explore NPCs' houses for the sake of finding random items hidden around them. Yes, it can be nice finding some extra loot to reward your exploration, but when the "exploration" consists of wandering around clicking random objects to see if items come out, you're rewarding activities which are intrinsically not very fun. You don't want to motivate your players to engage in drudgery.

If you have some particularly interesting content in mind to include in NPCs' houses, I think that by all means it's worth keeping in the game, but I think that if you're in the position of already having interesting ideas for the content, you're probably not at the point of contemplating whether to cut it out entirely.