I bought Valve’s Orange Box shortly after it came out. My main reason for wanting it was Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but a close second in terms of desire was Portal. So, needless to say, it’s been months since I played through the game. And I loved it.
But I was in the shower a few moments ago when the following question struck me: “Why didn’t I hate this game?”
I’ve played a lot of FPS games, and I can say that as an almost universal rule that, whenever these games decide to throw a “puzzle” at you, I am annoyed. Whether it’s stacking boxes or hitting switches or navigating an arbitrary maze, I just get annoyed.
So why is it that Portal — an FPS game that is entirely based around puzzles — was so enthralling for me? So enthralling, in fact, that I became a maven for the game, touting its virtues far and wide and citing it as a game that everyone should play.
I see a few possibilities:
(1) Despite years of advocating for games with richer and broader gameplay options — games like Deus Ex where it is equally possible to overcome a challenge through stealth, socialization, or violence — I’m actually fairly narrow in what I want from a game. I want a game to stay on point with a single type of gameplay.
The supporting evidence for this is how often, in recent days, I’ve borrowed from Yahtzee’s Zero Punctuation in saying: “They forgot what makes their game fun!” For example, the designers of God of War kept forgetting what made their game fun (awesome combat combined with epic storytelling) whenever they stuck in a lengthy sequence of balance beams or platform-hopping.
On the flip-side, I can actually point to lots of games — like the aforementioned Deus Ex or Ultima VII or Thief — where I adored the different gameplay options.
(2) Maybe it’s that I want to be able to choose my gameplay. For example, I don’t necessarily want to be forced to first play through a shooter; then a puzzler; then a stealth game — I want to be able to choose, when facing a given challenge, what form of gameplay I want to use to overcome it.
This is probably true to at least some degree. But it doesn’t explain Portal, because there is no choice there: The entire game is puzzle-based and there aren’t any non-puzzle solutions.
(3) It’s possible that what I’m reacting to here is the degree to which the puzzles break my willing suspension of disbelief. For example, it seems odd to hit a section of Half-Life 2 where the only way out of a bomb-shelled ruin is to stack the conveniently placed cement blocks onto one side of the conveniently placed teeter-totter. On the other hand, the entire scenario of Portal explains exactly why these puzzles exist. (And even once you get outside of the structured portion of the game and into a more freeform environment, the designs don’t feel arbitrary.)
(4) Maybe it’s the originality of the gameplay behind Portal‘s puzzles. All of them, after all, rely on the amazingly cool implementation of portal technology. This is just inherently more interesting than loading up the teeter-totter, shoving boxes around to create staircases (Half-Life 1), or whacking random switches (Doom 3).
I suspect that the answer lies somewhere in the combination between the third and the fourth options.
In other words, if I hit a section of Half-Life 2 where I need to move bricks around in order to progress I am immediately (a) bored by it and (b) left with an overwhelming sense that the only reason this section of the game exists is so that they can pad out the “total playing time” stat on the game box. (To Half-Life 2‘s credit, there are very few places where it does this.)
(And I’m pretty much all about quality over quantity: I have absolutely zero interest in grinding XP for 40 hours in your CRPG so that I can enjoy the story and the characters in the other 20 hours of your game.)
Similarly, in God of War, I have no problem navigating my way through the Rube Goldberg machinations of the crazed architect of Pandora’s Temple: Shoving massive bricks around, standing on pressure switches, and searching for hidden passages are all pretty awesome. These mechanics are not only intrinsic to the game world, but are also fairly interesting in their execution.
On the other hand, the pain-in-the-ass balance beam sections in God of War are frustrating not because they switch up the gameplay, but because the resultant gameplay is simply boring. (And, in fact, only challenging because they randomly move the camera around while you’re trying to complete the puzzle.)
So I guess what we can distill from all this are three maxims:
First, remember what makes your game fun.
Second, increase the amount of fun stuff in your games.
Third, if it’s not fun it shouldn’t be in your game.
I would also add to this by saying that, if you give your players the option to choose between different types of gameplay, you dramatically increase the likelihood that they will be able to find a path through your game which they find fun at all times (instead of just some of the time). (Although, on the other hand, you have to weigh that consideration against the difficulty of balancing and polishing multiple types of gameplay.)
I think it is more something between 1) and 2).
In Portal, puzzles are the entire point.
In a game where stealth or combat can work, the choice of strategy is the point. (also, if stealth fails, it isn’t a mission failure, but rather a forced transition to the combat strategy, yet mission success is still possible, thus penalizing failure without making it a mission failure)
In a game like Halo, shooting aliens is the point. Thus, adding in a puzzle, even a fun puzzle, breaks things because it is outside the “promised” scope of gameplay.