optional scavenger hunts: please stop
I just spent about 2 hours writing what would have been this post, then hit preview. I was taken to a blank page and everything was lost. Here's an attempt to rewrite it (spoiler alert):
Adding a scavenger hunt element to video games in an attempt to increase replay value is one of the worst trends in entertainment. Replay value is not affected by hidden content; I am not compelled to thoughtlessly replay the entire game to see what I missed the first time (I didn't know about 'extended play mode' until it was too late.) In fact, it causes 2 major problems that denigrate what makes Telltale great.
The first problem: missed content. Since I am not compelled to play through the entire game again, I will miss how to get the best TGS score or how to get Strong Sad out of the house. When I played through the Sam & Max games, I felt satisfied that I had seen all of the content and heard all of the hilarious commentary and conversation the first time. With SBCG4AP, I have no idea how much of the deliberately hidden fruits of hours of TTG Developers' labor I missed (that I paid for) because I didn't click the Videlectrix poster twice.
The above grievances apply to all games that use scavenger hunt unlockables. The next major problem is specific to Telltale: interference with gameplay. Solving puzzles in TT games involves creative thinking and looking for hidden objects and ways to use them. Finding easter eggs in SBCG4AP requires the exact same thing. By doing this, you have constructed a system of red herrings that is needlessly cruel and that rules out the process of elimination as a solving heuristic. It's frustrating trying to figure out what's stuck in the speaker only to find out it doesn't bring you any closer to getting PomPom disqualified from the race.
I'm really disappointed that Telltale has decided to go in this direction and I already regret buying the season pass. With future games, this is a dealbreaker. If the scavenger hunt system were to infect Wallace and Gromit and, God forbid, Sam and Max, I would never buy games from Telltale again.
Adding a scavenger hunt element to video games in an attempt to increase replay value is one of the worst trends in entertainment. Replay value is not affected by hidden content; I am not compelled to thoughtlessly replay the entire game to see what I missed the first time (I didn't know about 'extended play mode' until it was too late.) In fact, it causes 2 major problems that denigrate what makes Telltale great.
The first problem: missed content. Since I am not compelled to play through the entire game again, I will miss how to get the best TGS score or how to get Strong Sad out of the house. When I played through the Sam & Max games, I felt satisfied that I had seen all of the content and heard all of the hilarious commentary and conversation the first time. With SBCG4AP, I have no idea how much of the deliberately hidden fruits of hours of TTG Developers' labor I missed (that I paid for) because I didn't click the Videlectrix poster twice.
The above grievances apply to all games that use scavenger hunt unlockables. The next major problem is specific to Telltale: interference with gameplay. Solving puzzles in TT games involves creative thinking and looking for hidden objects and ways to use them. Finding easter eggs in SBCG4AP requires the exact same thing. By doing this, you have constructed a system of red herrings that is needlessly cruel and that rules out the process of elimination as a solving heuristic. It's frustrating trying to figure out what's stuck in the speaker only to find out it doesn't bring you any closer to getting PomPom disqualified from the race.
I'm really disappointed that Telltale has decided to go in this direction and I already regret buying the season pass. With future games, this is a dealbreaker. If the scavenger hunt system were to infect Wallace and Gromit and, God forbid, Sam and Max, I would never buy games from Telltale again.
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Comments
Personally, I think that TellTale games handled the "scavenger hunt" aspect just fine. I found all the hidden items simply by playing the game the way I've ALWAYS played these style games. By clicking on just about everything so I could see/find anything that might be there. Like the scans in Metroid Prime, I always do a "find everything" play my first time through, which means I don't have to worry about it so much any subsequent play-throughs of Strong Bad. because I'll know where it all is.
And even if I forgot, it isn't exactly rocket science trying to discover them. I mean, my cousin who is an excellent gamer, better than me at a lot of games, but he totally doesn't grasp the concept of games like this and flounders horribley - not enough lateral thinking skills, I guess - so yeah, I suppose if you're not used to games like this, then it could be a real problem for you.
But as it stands, the current contents of the Strong Bad game are nothing incorrect or to be ashamed of. Unless you thought it was too short - which, to be fair, it was kinda - but with a Wii-Ware game you'd be willing to accept it as there is a size limit on the games they allow.
Nothing was really wrong with them, I'm pretty sure Telltale will do this again..
Let me explain, after each game they release a little gem called the "did you try?" list. It contains a master list of all (or most of) the easter eggs, and commonly missed dialog in a title (the episode one list is HERE).
There are also lists for each of the Sam and Max games as well (going all the way back to culture shock). I think you would be amazed to see your feeling of completeness over the Sam and Max games get shattered when you read all the things you missed in them.
I would like to note that (for me at least) it was easy to discern what was part of the game, and what was part of the extras... Basically, if it was in strong bads room, it was was part of an extra (the only exceptions being, the prank calls, clothing items, and trophy's... but those were obviously extras)
When I saw the item in the speaker, and saw no obvious way to get to the microphone, (yes i made the connection) I knew it must not be needed at that time...
I also enjoyed the extras, it was the 4th act of the game, and my favorite act as well. Because most of the extras had puzzles to get them (and figuring them out yourself is half the challenge/fun of it).
So, all you are complaining about are things inherent to all adventure games (Easter eggs, red hearings, having to click everything twice, running down dead ends, and not being able to immediately get/use things when you first see them, etc).
[sarcasm] Although if the extra fun and laughs is an inconvenience to you, I am sure that for episode 2 i am sure they will put big a big "X" on all the extras and red hearings... telling you how to avoid them... just for you... [/sarcasm]
I still don't like the overt scavenger hunt system though. I am all for easter eggs, and enjoy looking for them along the way, but being graded for my ability to find them kind of sucks the fun out of it. There's a difference between external "did you try" lists and the game itself going out of its way to tell you how many secrets you haven't found yet.
If the scavenger hunt system and extras are taking up development time and memory that could have been spent making the actual game longer, then this would be another problem. I had no idea that getting Strong Sad out of the house was one of the trophies/optional tasks and wouldn't have known about it at all had I not looked it up. If properly exposited and perhaps written into the story, no one would have missed this sizeable portion of the game. I've decided to play through the game again for that extra puzzle.
If TTG continues creating gameplay outside of the story, I hope they'll do a better job with exposition in future episodes.
Why?
It promotes something that you SHOULD be doing ANYWAY in an adventure game: Finding all sorts of dialogue and situations that are outside of the "required" set of actions. These items are gained for messing around outside the "story" that people sometimes plow through, which is a bit sad. If it takes a carrot on a stick to get some people to bother finding all the fun dialogue, then I fully support said carrot.
I would gladly do so, were it not for the fact that I would be missing a significant amount of game content (such as getting Strong Sad out of the house or playing around with all of the TGS cards). This wouldn't be such a problem if I knew more explicitly what all the optional goals were. I knew about the TGS cards, but not Strobro.
A carrot-stick system would only be mildly annoying, since I do look meticulously for easter eggs anyway. The SBCG4AP scavenger hunt, in addition to grading your ability to find things, dictates what those things are. Because they are on the scavenger hunt list, the world is flooded with clothing items hidden in places that don't make any sense, such as a hat in the mailbox. In many cases, what could have been a brilliant original gag from the combined geniuses of the Chaps and TTG crew was just an inside reference to an old H*R cartoon that didn't add anything.
By the way, I lost my entire original post again.
So yeah, items popping up in seemingly random places? That totally works in Strong Badia. I bet I could lift up a rock and find a sandwich. In fact, I believe I did that while reading Terry Pratchett's Lost Continent. It's not a new concept.
I mean, not trying to be mean or anything, but yeah.. it really sounds redundant to hear you gripping about all this stuff, and then acting like you have played a lot of their games and are familiar with Adventure Games. Because it's a very clear and commen fact that things will turn up in the most bizarre places at least a few times in every single Adventure Game. From King's Quest to Escape from Monkey Island. If you don't like that, maybe Adventure games just aren't your style or something.
Also you keep going on about Strong Sad, but I'm fairly certain they've already confirmed that he doesn't actually leave the house. He simply comments on a couple things. You don't even have to fullfill all the "Scavenger Hunt" stuff in order to see them, at least I didn't. And as a longtime fan of the Teen Girl Squad, I felt that it was an enjoyable part of the game, and spent like an hour or so going through all the possible combinations, just to see what the different effects were.
Oh, and one last thing. When you make a game based on something well-known like Homestar Runner, or Simpsons, or Sam & Max... you're going to find references to previous works/shows/content. It's a given fact. You can't avoid it.
EDIT: Oh, and about losing your post. I have a friend who has that happen a lot. Now she just writes her posts in a notepad before posting them if they're gonna be long. Or, as I do when I write long posts, get in the habit of hitting Ctrl-A and Ctrl-C, before attempting to post or preview. It can save you lots of headache in the long run.
Like during the second trial in episode 2 of Pheonix Wright: Trials and Tribulations. ( I know it doesn't qualify as an adventure game, technically, baut in my opinion it does.), when you gave the detective (not Luke Atmey, the bumbling, stupid sensitive one) the Magatama when he's not in a Phsyce Lock?
Oh well!
I'm "gripping" about the fact that the game world is populated with objects that are there only because they are part of a scavenger hunt and work in the photo booth.
I'm okay with a game that uses content from its original source, but when it doesn't add anything new or when it's there--again--just because it's on a scavenger hunt list, then it's wasted opportunity.
So is putting objects in bizarre places in a Telltale game without taking advantage of the great comedic opportunity it opens. They could have instantly justified the game being scattered with cardboard boxes covering random objects by saying that Bubs had a highly inaccurate shipping service.
I usually do that, but the server glitches only seem to happen when I forget.
For what it's worth, my take on all of the collectibles and whatnot are more a reflection of us trying to stay true to the spirit of Homestar more than it is a reflection of some unified direction Telltale will be taking with everything forever, or something. Strong Bad Emails, and really all of the cartoons on the Homestar site, are riddled with easter eggs and secrets to find. Some are extra little bits of side narrative, some are vaguely tantengial in-jokes which pop-up, and some are total throwaway nonsense.
The Homestar universe also has a lot of strong roots in console gaming, where collectibles, side quests, and other optional item hunts are definitely par for the course. Given that we are making a game that is not only trying to stay true to and honor the spirit of the Homestar Runner site, but also happens to be a console-bound title, it seemed like a perfect fit.
It also dovetailed nicely into one of our early design goals for SBCG4AP: to give you a reason to freely wander and poke at the world in ways not entirely dictated by the main narrative. We were looking for achievable ways to offer players things that they couldn't get from the Homestar website and its Flash cartoons, and one thing that kept coming up was the fact that we were making the first fully realized interactive experience set within the actual world of the cartoons. Encouraging and rewarding people who were interested in exploring the bits and bobs that lay a few paces outside the flow of the story seemed like a good decision. I personally would have liked to take it further, and have some more dialog/character/micro-story-beat focused rewards for that stuff, but there's only so much you can realistically, write, animate, build and polish up to a degree you're proud of before you realize you only have one life to live.
In the end you can always push something further, but I'm pretty pleased with where we landed. The game feels different than Sam & Max, and it will feel very different from Wallace & Gromit as well, which has been an enjoyable thing to witness through development of all of our current titles.
Anyway, those are a few reasons off the top of my head, as someone who was fortunate enough to manage to sit in on a lot of the early design meetings without anyone noticing and tossing me out. You might not agree with them (which is fine, of course!), but hopefully knowing where some of the decisions were coming from will be beneficial in some way.
So yeah, in that respect I do actually applaud H3lix for having the courage to come forth and declare that they don't like something. I just feel it might have been conveyed in a different way without sounding a bit "bent out of shape" as I've been called for saying such things in the past elsewhere.
No hard feelings.
I assume you are referring to GTA when you say, and yes i agree with you there... hiding an insane number of things that the player needs to find (trying to force them to see all of the game) is wrong, mean, and demoralizing when you are faced with the sheer size of the task.
But there is no comparison when comparing those type hunts to the strong bad hunt.
There are only about a dozen of those things that need to be found in the game... Also, the relatively small size and small number of locations (combined with the low number of clickables in them) makes this task very manageable.
While i like the scavenger hunts, it would be nice if they could all be completed in extended play mode. So we could do them at our own pace not be forced to do them during the main game when we are worrying about how to do other things
Finally, as jake said, they are optional.. If anyone does not want to spend a little time searching, then thats their prerogative. (and no one had better come out and tell me they do not have the time or the patience to, cause that's a load of B.S. If you have the time to write long posts like these... Then you can search for a few easter eggs.) < thats ME being blunt :rolleyes:
That is probably the most relieving thing I have ever read.
I suppose I was approaching SBCG4AP with too much of an expectation that it would be like a season of Sam & Max but with different charaters/setting. I look forward to seeing how you will embellish the world as the season progresses.
Searching for 100 whatevers in open worlds is pretty annoying, especially when those 100 whatevers are unlockable concept art.
By the way, I noticed somebody tagged this thread with "down with completionists!" With Telltale, it's hard not to be.
"I don't like the extras"
"Well, you don't have to play with them then"
"BUT I MUST!"
Seriously, in Homestar Ruiner you could avoid almost all of this type of crap, assuming you wanted to, by ignoring the boxes, not using the detec-TOR, and staying out of the photo booth. Your reason for not simply avoiding the extra content you dislike is really that you feel you haven't seen everything? If you don't like the extras, why would you want to? Having found them all myself, there really isn't a whole lot of dialogue that goes with them, except that the Teen Girl Squad stuff is sorta involved.
Your post also seems to completely miss the point of the concept of the "easter egg". Things are hidden because they are meant to be hidden. It's supposed to be fun for the player to discover these things. You really don't have to see absolutely everything, and if you do want to without having to put the effort in to find it all yourself, you can just look it up.
Your argument makes no sense. If you don't want to see the extra stuff, you're under no obligation whatever to look at it. If you do, then why on earth are you complaining about its existence? You're essentially saying that you don't want extras but you do have to see them all; it makes no sense. I concede that if you're a completionist, finding everything through somewhat esoteric means can be a bit annoying, but as a completionist who plays a lot of games, I can say that you should really be used to it by now, and the stuff in SBCG4AP is a total doddle compared to a lot of the games out there.
I like your idea of explaining the boxes though. Where do all the boxes come from? They aren't there in the cartoons? Come on, guys, let's have a little narrative justification.
I agree... Cardboard boxes aren't really a staple of FCUSA. I mean, if there's only enough space for one type of look-in-able things, why not make it something more Homestar-commen? Like... ... ...shrubs! Teeny baby ones!
Bone and Sam & Max (our two main franchises before Strong Bad) were structurally similar, which might be coloring people's expectations, but a big goal at Telltale is to find the things about a franchise that make them unique, the things that people enjoy about them, and put them forward in the games. Obviously, a huge priority with all the licenses we go after is that they have engaging characters, stories, and worlds that people enjoy, as that is the thing we put in the foreground of a Telltale project more than any other element, but beyond that, we want the games to be different from each other (while still maintaining a core "Telltale" feel). That means that different franchises may have new or different or more streamlined gameplay elements, different storytelling styles, different pacing, just as their source materials have different writing styles, different tones and humor styles, and different looks.
Actually, I was thinking of open-ended games in general. Hulk, Spiderman, GTA, Spyro, etc. And yes, if it's nothing more than "artwork" that is even more annoying. You are correct in that I did, arguably, use an incorrect comparison. I was merely stating, however, that I do indeed understand the frustration with "scavenger hunts" but only when it's on such a large scale as that. SBCG4AP is on such a small scale that it really needn't offend anyone.
And I am pleased to see that H3lix isn't quite so angry anymore.
Me too
Tim, you seem to be criticizing my position from a composite of all my posts in this topic, while my opinion has changed significantly over the course of this thread. Here it is as of now:
I enjoy extras and easter eggs, being, as they are, a staple of Telltale.
I'm still not crazy about the scavenger hunt system, which may be having too strong an influence on what the aforementioned extras are.
However, as it is a minor part of the game and seems to parodize other console games that use such a system, it doesn't ruin the experience for me.
By the way, don't use quotes if you're paraphrasing or summarizing someone's statements. It damages your credibility.
Anyway, fine. I understand your position better now.