Jon: We didn’t have too many early players I tend not to playtest very much! We had a bunch of players come and try the game at PSX 2015, but by then the game was mostly done being designed. It’ll be interesting to see how our design evolves to embrace this. Interestingly, I feel like VR throws more challenges into this discussion – looking around is so natural and effortless, having the player look in a particular direction for a short time can feel like keeping the attention of a three year old. Did you have any of that frustration watching early players of The Witness?
It makes me think back fondly on the Myst 2D images where we control the exact position for optimal interaction. Watching players get to the correct angle and the right distance can be cringe inducing – a little left, step back, too far, strafe right a bit, etc. I must say that as much as I love realtime 3D it seems like it is always more awkward lining up with devices for interaction with them. It’s a much larger and more dynamic hint to entice the player in a particular direction, but it serves the same purpose that the dagger serves in Riven. The idea being that if the player has chosen to ignore the house, we’d like to remind them that it was something that they were instructed to inspect. Approaching this pinch point triggers a rather large insect-like creature to fly out of a mine, across the prairie, and onto the roof of the house with the white picket fence. But we also built in a “pinch point” before the player can move on to another section. At this point the canyon is almost gone, and the player has a choice to visit the house with the white picket fence or explore in various other directions. At one point in the canyon a recorded message directs the player to a house with a white picket fence. At the beginning of the game the player can only move forward through a canyon. Obduction has an example of how that idea has to change in realtime 3D. That example precisely illustrates how, by having control of the view we could move the player forward in subtle ways. Further, if the player clicked on the dagger the player’s point of view changed to a view of the gate from a much lower perspective – a view that seemed to suggest that they might be able to crawl under the gate. We placed a dagger in the ground under the gate to draw the player’s attention to that lower area. It wasn’t immediately evident, but the player could slide under the gate.
Early in Riven there was a gate that was locked. I think we’ve learned as we’ve transitioned to realtime 3D that the path guidance that we might have previously achieved on a “per frame” basis, we now have to do on a different scale. Rand Miller: The nature of exploration/adventure games is that you want the player to feel like they have complete freedom, but at the same time provide some kind of path guidance that insures that the player gets the story/information they need.
How have things changed between those games and now? This isn’t Cyan’s first realtime 3D game both Uru and Myst 5 were 3D, but I would describe those as occurring in the earlier days of 3D when it was at least a little daring to make a 3D puzzle adventure game. How do you deal with that? Does it affect the basic design of the puzzles in some way, or is the difference more down to the way specific details are authored?
When building things to be explored in full 3D, it’s a much less-concrete discipline because you don’t exactly know where the player is coming from.
The advantage of something like Myst is that you can curate each individual image very closely - you know exactly where the player is standing and what she’s looking at, and if you want to make some important clue more obvious, it’s clear how to do that. I’m interested in how this affected puzzle design.
There are some obvious benefits, like the fact that you can walk around the world of Obduction in full realtime 3D, whereas the original Myst was a series of 2D images. Today’s consoles are insane supercomputers compared to the machines people played Myst on, back in the day. Jonathan Blow: One very obvious trend, looking at the series of games from Myst through Obduction, has been the advancement of technology.