Gaming Usability 101 305
Next Generation (now happily fully merged with Edge) is carrying a story entitled Videogame Usability 101, attempting to lay out some standards for interacting with games. Some of them, like '3. Always let players remap controller buttons to suit their preferences' seems fairly straightforward and hard to disagree with. Others may be a bit more controversial: "4. Always let players skip cut scenes no matter how important they are to the story.
What a predicament cut scenes create. As a designer, you want all your hard work to be acknowledged, even the cut scenes. Sadly, interactive entertainment is the name of the game, and it always comes first. That's why gamers play these things. So rather than assume every player wants to watch your story-telling chops, allow them to bypass cut scenes, tutorials, and even speed up the showing of logos when a game boots up. Tell your story through engaging gameplay, and you'll easily be remembered and praised regardless of what you accomplished in a cut scene, tutorial, or start screen branding." Anything on there that you categorically disagree with?
I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, you're correct in that there are downsides to this: the "one save" can make it so frustrating as to outweigh any gain that can come form the greater immersion. And unless the game is designed not to dump you into dead ends, it will condemn you to replays you may not have time for. A better compromise is to have a special mode where you are permitted one save, like "Iron Man" option in Alpha Centauri (and I assume, Civilization).
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or, for example, rock climbing on Half Dome rather than in the gym with all those silly ropes and pads. Heck, why use ropes? It kills the immersion!
Even worse are when the saves are totally worthless, like in Ninja Gaiden for Gameboy Advance where the save game is a stupid cipher.
Would you want to quickload in EVE Online? (Score:4, Informative)
NetHack (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm still trying to figure out why I shouldn't be allowed to play a japanese style RPG only 20 minutes in a row. And please, realize than even FF4 to FF5 on GBA have quick save. If a GBA can quick save, why a PS2 could not? I don't care if it takes a whole memory card as long as I can have the damn instant save.
Dear game creators, please take in account that most gamers are not kids any more and that they have a life. Even a half assed save like in the 360 version of Oblivion is far better than nothing, at least I can save whenever I want, though the character will not spawn exactly at the same place on load.
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Unusable controller mappings (Score:2)
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Hit player 2 on the back of the head for taking so long.
Easy, don't let them remap the start button and have the remapped controls be the gameplay controls, not the menu navigation controls.
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Have you ever encountered a game where re-mapping the IN-GAME controls also remaps the MENU controls?
I have, several times, on the PC. Unlike console controllers, PC game controllers do not have a consistent mapping from position on the controller to button ID number, so games have to make everything remappable. StepMania for PC is intended to be navigated entirely with a dance pad if the player chooses. Pressing left on the dance pad moves to the previous song; pressing right on the dance pad moves to the next song; pressing Start on the dance pad starts the game. This game allows two keys per function,
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Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:5, Insightful)
If they wanted 'consequences for actions' they should have perma-death and NO saves. There have been games like that and they generally just piss me off, but there are those that like them.
Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I couldn't agree with TFA more.... (Score:5, Interesting)
I was about to bring up nethack myself. The trick is how you look at the game. I'll give you a moderately similar example -- chess.
The first few games of chess you play, you'll get your arse handed to you in a platter within 10 moves. Then you start making sense of how to protect yourself from elementary attacks, and you get owned after, say, 20 moves. Then you actually start getting the hang of the early game, and can keep yourself alive for long enough to see the mid-game. At this point you might even win a few matches, get a few neat combo plays, whatever. Etc. etc. etc. Anybody who ever got into chess knows what I'm talking about.
The key issue here is how the game is designed. Some games (JRPGs come to mind) are meant to take you through one looooong, mostly linear, trip. Replay value is either nil, or limited to a few different endings, and there's no real reward for playing it much more after you've cracked all the secrets and explored all the finales. So you save and you save and you save yet again, trying to keep your options open, so you won't have to go through 20 hours of gameplay to change the course of that one decision you made that killed off half the game world or whatever. Other games, like Tetris, Chess, Checkers, etc are oriented towards playing loads of individual matches. As a learner in chess, you might want to take back a play or two to explore different angles and as a learning experience, but mostly these games are made of having a very real chance to lose. How quickly would chess become BORING as hell if you were allowed to backtrack all your mistakes once you found out they were wrong? Such a game model should give the possibility to adjourn the game, but never, EVER to allow you to actually backtrack without consequences.
Nethack clearly fits into the category of games where you can play through the game several times in one day, and the focus is on playing loads of individual games, not on progressing in one long thread of gaming. So having only the option to adjourn the game is the way to go.
Since we already have nethack up, let's measure it against these usability rules!
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Like I said before: You're reacting to the game as if it were meant to be played like you play most computer games, where the board game perspective is much more adequate. You're not supposed to win first time 'round. Or the 20th time 'round either, for that matter. It's all about the learning experience. You'll soon be able to get to the bottom of the gnomish mines in a couple of hours tops, or perhaps to Sokoban if your class/race/alignment combo isn't very favourable to doing the mines right away.
Don't
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Right, don't bother trying to make the actual GAME more interesting. Cripple the save function so the game appears more dynamic.....
You know, pervasive saving in games is a fairly recent development. You speak as if it was a basic principle of all games that has to be removed, instead of being something added to a game.
For me, pervasive saving in PC games is what turned me off most of the platform. It changes the gameplay from a smooth flow to a chopped-up sequence of obsessive re-loads to get through the next fight as well as possible.
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Blank screen? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Blank screen? (Score:4, Informative)
Crackdown, for example, has a series of unskippable logos when you put the disc in. At the end of those you get to "press start" and then you get the loading screen.
Thank god for pic in pic so I can watch tv and still see when the game is finished with its unskippable logos and has finally actually loaded.
Misconception (Score:2)
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Unskippable cutscenes are just wrong. (Score:2)
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This presents a different problem for me: because of the time between plays, I sometimes forget what's going on in the story. It would be really nice if all games gave you the option to replay cutscenes you've already seen.
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The saved game dilemma (Score:4, Insightful)
If it took 20 times to get by the spot, that was 20 forced brain-numbing times through the cutscene, and often after a few tries I would just put the game down. It wasn't worth a 5 minute wait to get killed again.
When I fail I want to retry as soon as possible.
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Bloody Metroid bloody Prime.
Oh, look, here's a boss. I've just met it for the first time and it's killed me. Fair enough, that's what bosses do. Okay, back up to the save point and let's try again. Uh... the closest save point to the boss is five minutes' walk away. On the other side of a puzzle room. And a room-fu
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Oh, look, here's a boss. I've just met it for the first time and it's killed me. Fair enough, that's what bosses do. Okay, back up to the save point and let's try again. Uh... the closest save point to the boss is five minutes' walk away. On the other side of a puzzle room. And a room-full of low level monsters I have to fight through. Every time.
You must've been missing the save points. There was only one boss in Metroid Prime that was any significant distance away from a save p
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The thing is, it only takes one of them to break the whole game. In both Prime1 and Prime2 I ditched the game after being stuck on those bosses for to long and only picked it back up month or even years later. What made the Prime games especially annoying is their tendency to respawn enemies, so you can't do it in a tactical way as in other games (move forward, kill enemies, fall back, save, repeat, till the way to the boss is clear). Prime games only are fun as l
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Prime 2 I will agree was extremely frustrating when it came to that boss without a save.
Anyway, I'm not trying say those cases weren't design mistakes. I'm just responding to someone who was claiming these issues occurred early and often, r
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Nope. Here's a map [gamefaqs.com]. Look up Varia Suit, which you get after defeating Flaahgra, the first real boss. It's in the middle of the Chozo Ruins. The nearest save point, the black dot in the yellow circle, is two rooms away, southeast. The room immediately to the north of the save point is full of stuff you need to shoot to get past; the room immedately south of Flaahgra is a puzzle room which requires you to do stuff in the right order, shoot things, and climb up a seri
Amen (Score:2)
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Ugh. In fact, I think that game breaks every single usability rule in this article.
Thank you!! (Score:2)
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Oh, wait, I can think of one thing, though it's more a variation on a theme: The un-skipable Summons in a Final Fantasy.
FFVII's summons were absolutely awesome... the first time. They were still pretty cool up through let's say the twentieth time. But after the thousandth time you've used your summon you'll just want to gouge your eyes out waiting. Especially since the power of the summon seems to scale with the length of the cutscene
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That said, I never had an issue with the summon animations in FFVII, and I've played it tons of times.
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Of course, my party all had Final Attack -> Phoenix, the master materia with their respective W's... the game aspect was already
Cutscenes MUST always be skippable (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think that's very controversial. Cutscenes really must always be skippable, simply because it's foolish to assume that everyone is playing for the first time. Even if the game "knows" it's a new game (think DS game fresh out of the case) it can't be sure that the player hasn't played the game before and therefore doesn't want to see the stupid cutscene for the fiftieth time.
Don't get me wrong, I generally will allow the cutscenes to play. But some cutscenes are just annoying. For example, when you start the Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, it gives you a recap of the events that occurred during Wind Waker. However I've already played Wind Waker and would have very much liked to skip past the recap to the new stuff.
Massive bonus points for any developers who add TiVo-style controls to their cutscenes. Sometimes I just want to jump back and rehear a line I missed.
In fact, I'd say that the first item, "Never ask a player if they want to save their game" is much more controversial. In a perfect world, that works (when there are enough save slots that auto-save is possible) however the world isn't perfect. In Phantom Hourglass I might not want to overwrite my save slot just because I hit a "save point." This is a limitation of the DS - there are no memory cards, so you're limited to whatever space the game gives you.
However for something like Half-Life 2, the autosaves work well. I don't need to be asked if I want yet another autosave, so it doesn't bother asking.
Otherwise I generally agree with the list.
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It seems to be stretched out to 10. (Score:2)
An in-game tutorial is a good idea for lots of games. Sometimes an out-of-game tutorial as a separate program or perhaps a manual and web site make more sense.
For a FPS, stay in the game engine and allow the respwan from there. That's standard. If it's a memory or logic puzzle, then the player shouldn't be allowed extra time outside the level to look at
Always let players... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is one of the items I disagree with:
One man's "impossible" is another man's "challenge". Just because it's impossible for you doesn't mean that it's truly impossible. Go check out some Youtube videos of people playing a Bullet-hell shmup on one life. Inspiring feats, to say the least. Yet I know that I need infinite lives to pass these games because I'm simply not that good. Therefore, #8 should really say, "Know thy audience." That way you'll make sure you put the right level of difficulty in the right game.
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Of all the things wrong with Lair, this is the worst. Why on Earth they think I need a 10-second cut scene to show the thing I just blew up blowing up is beyond me. All it serves to do is make it even more confusing where you actually are in relation to everything else. Cut scenes should only appear in periods where there is no action, like between levels/missions.
Of course, the ideal is to go the Half-Life route and design the game so you can tell your
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That said, one of the things I hated about Half-Life 2 was the loooong stretch of time in Barney's hideout where you can't do anything but dink around while the characters are all running their mouths. If they're going to talk about something I don't care about for a long time, making me retain control
Subtitles! (Score:5, Insightful)
This helps solve one of the biggest gaming problems:
"Am I supposed to escort the Foozle or KILL the Foozle???"
But also let us pause the cutscenes... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, but.. (Score:5, Interesting)
If I've decided to skip something that actually has important information, or I decide I want to watch something later because I'm in a groove, where is the harm in letting me access it when I want to?
A good example of piss poor usability in a game (Score:2)
The Battlefield series.
Fantastic core gameplay. Horrible menu system/options etc. Take 2142 for example. Who's brilliant idea was it to force users to redo their kit loadout EVERY SINGLE TIME THEY CONNECT TO A SERVER. This is shit that is obvious after using the game for 10 minutes. Also how the key assignments for assault rifle and rockets change depending on which team you are playing for. Ummm hello?
I remember reading a quote along the lines of "It
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I'd Include (Score:5, Interesting)
So if you put a fight in the game that the party is "supposed" to lose, you should either include the option of them not losing or make it a (skippable) cut scene because no degree of interaction from the player is going to change the outcome at all.
Additionally, do not kill members of my party off without giving me some way to rescue them. If I completely dominate the boss that was supposed to beat my party and kill that guy, don't kill that guy.
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Yep (Score:2)
Always been a pet peeve of mine when the story is forced with a battle that you have to lose. I've got no problem with the fact that many games stories are mostly or totally linear. However what I do have a problem with is when they want to do that by putting you in an unwinnable situation. Do better writing instead, don't expect me to play along.
This is especially true because in some games you find that the situations ARE winnable, but then
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The only unwinnable fight I recall from that game was the one where Gunther ambushes you in the subway - you may be remembering the wrong fight.
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No, that would be a huge mistake, and it's one that many JRPGs have made. If the player has too much control over which characters are around, it becomes impossible to write good dialog. The writers won't know which characters are part of the conversation, so they have to s
Make the "Groundhog Day Effect" Illegal (Score:3, Insightful)
I call this one the "Groundhog Day Effect."
I hate it when a game is clearly designed in such a way that the ONLY way you can learn how to solve a puzzle or beat a boss is to be killed (GAME OVER) and try again from the last save. I don't mind dying from my own stupidity, but the game should be solvable in theory without ever having to back up to the previous save point. There are quite a few games where there was no information available about the solution until after you'd committed the fatal mistake
TFA mostly right (Score:2, Redundant)
#2 - always say "press any button" to start game. whatever. I'd say its more important to just work with the common ones. Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.
#3 - go one further - acknowledge left handed players and design a map, sure it won't match every lefties preference but nothing sucks worse than having to remap a game from SCRATCH because its totally
Backwards like O vs. X? (Score:2)
#1 - save games automatically - good point. do it. But don't overwrite their last save. Create a new one.
And then do what once the player has exhausted the space on the memory cards? Offer to rent the player more space to save games on the Internet?
Nothings more annoying than games with non-standard or backwards 'menu navigation'.
Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS? And what happens when the player has remapped the buttons such that the menus become useless?
And for those new 'games for windows' that apparently have to support xbox controllers, if i don't have an xbox controller don't effing show me what my control layout looks like on one.
Then what graphic is the game expected to use to represent your controller? Most players don't know where "Button 0" through "Button 15" are. Or should
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On systems with only "memory cards" sure the behaviour should take that into account, and having rolling autosaves separate from explicit player saves or something.
Backwards like O vs. X in PlayStation games from different regions, or the placement of A and B buttons on Xbox vs. DS?
Backwards like every game lets you push start or 'A' to start, except one which requ
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supposed to be:
"push {picture of xbox 'z' button} to {perform action}"
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Starcraft is about what I had in mind when I wrote that. The second time I play the starcraft campaign I may not need to start at the "I've never played an
The two I disagree with. (Score:2, Redundant)
Because the office world has taught us that auto-save never, ever ends up writing over data we wanted to keep. Ditch the word "never", let players save when they want to, but also auto-save to a different save file.
2. Always say "press any button" to start a game.
So after years of having to press the Start button, gamers can't seem to remember where that button is located? Weird. What if the main screen has some different options that the player
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For instance, don't make me decide whether to send Xbox Live invites, then decide what game mode I want to play, then decide what character I want to play, then decide which level you want to start at, and then strand me at the equipment buying screen, and then play a long cutscene. Make it so the default button to start (A or Start) the game just starts. Some games get this horribly wrong, and it
controls (Score:5, Insightful)
L1, L2, L3, R1, R2, R3, triangle, O, X, Square. That's ten. Start and Select make 12. The "analog" button isn't used in gameplay, but that's 13. Then what? Counting the d-pad as 4 buttons is silly because in MOST games it, like the joysticks, simply serves one purpose.
Most games ignore L3 and R3, or use it for some function that's tied to the joystick it's on (e.g. using R3 to recenter the camera when the right stick controls the camera).
The start button has done the same thing in every game since the Super Nintendo era, so complaining about it is silly. It's standard. It pauses the game and/or brings up the menu. Period. Select is rarely used and could be gotten rid of. Analog was used on the PSX and some PS2 games for toggling the controller mode (again, standard among every game because it actually applied to the controller), but it had no role in game.
The joystick or d-pad is always used for movement. Granted, some FPS's use the d-pad for things like "switch weapons with left/right and zoom with up/down" in which case it's really two additional functions. (not 4! It's a logical pair and if you know that "right on the d-pad is next weapon" it's obvious that "left on the d-pad is previous weapon"!)
Ultimately, I think the most complicated console game I've played in terms of keymapping are the FPS'es like Timesplitters where all 8 shoulder+face buttons were used and you used the left-right and up-down pairs for weapon swapping and zooming, and the two joysticks did move/strafe and turn/look; making for a total of 12 functions- counting "fire" and "secondary fire" as different concepts.
I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game.
Compare this to a fighting game, say Virtua Fighter, which technically has an 8-way joystick (or uses the d-pad for 8-way movement) and 3 buttons. Kick, punch, guard. That's simple, right? Well, there's kick+punch, punch+guard, kick+guard, kick+punch, kick+punch+guard, down-forward kick, etc, making for movelists with over 100 commands. Almost every modern fighting game (minus Smash Brothers) has upwards of 50 commands and even Smash Brothers has quite a high number of moves with just "attack, special, shield" thanks to being able to smash them, smash in the air, smash while running, etc.
Shoot, compare it to Nethack, which used nearly every button on the keyboard (lower AND uppercase) for something.
Complaining about console games having "too many buttons" is absurd. PC games are where this "problem" really lies, and if done right (such as Civilization 4- all the buttons were really just shortcut keys to something you could get at through the GUI somehow) it's not a problem.
Granted, if every direction on the d-pad and the 8 general directions on each joystick did different functions that weren't even logically connected, he'd have a complaint, but I'd argue that such a design would be a bad user interface in general because it's not using the expected behavior of the joystick/d-pad.
He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off, forced-death boss fights (I remember one in Chrono Cross where I used a massive number of potions, curative spells, ethers, etc to survive and continually damaged the boss, ultimately giving up and letting him kill me just to see if I was "supposed" to lose it- and promptly reset so I could redo it without losing all the items.)
Also, tutorial levels should damn well be optional. Cutscenes should be skippable (though make it buttonmasher-proof like Xenosaga did) and re-viewable. Not everyone is playing the game for the first time.
I fully disagree with "never ask the player if he wants to save his game", as does anyone else who's ever gotten stuck in Riovanes Castle in Final Fantasy Tactics without a backup save. (Yes, I got through. Yell and Auto-potion are a ridiculous
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Subtitles for deaf people vs. for foreigners (Score:2)
I don't think 12 functions is too much to expect someone to know for a complicated game.
I think the gist is that games should be less complicated, at least through the early levels. Using features on the other buttons should be an option, not a requirement. For instance, I've seen a video on YouTube of someone beating Super Mario Bros. without pressing the B button (except for one "press B to continue" screen).
He's spot on about allowing controller remapping, subtitles for deaf people or kids whose parents make them turn the volume off
He doesn't mention deaf people or the Deaf community. Instead, he mentions speakers of a different language. Sometimes, excluding non-native speakers is intentional, as many video game
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2 things not on the list. (Score:2, Insightful)
Allow fast alt tabbing. Basically every PC game needs to function like World of Warcraft in "maximized windowed mode" I simply can't stand games that hitch and make your PC nearly freeze for quickly changing to another task while you are playing. LET ME READ THE WEB WHILE YOUR GAME LOADS!
YES (Score:2)
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A lot of games are running in a special full screen mode and at an increased process priority - this gives the game a larger than normal portion of your CPU time, increasing your frame rate. Running it in windowed mode makes it behave a little more like a normal app, making your web browsing and switching faster but slowing your frame rate.
Limitation of DirectX (Score:2, Informative)
A few links on gaming usability and accessibility (Score:3, Interesting)
The site [thefirsthourblog.com] I write for also deals directly with usability and accessibility in video games. I think these aspects of gameplay are often overlooked for various reasons and things like unskippable cutscenes and unskippable story sequences (not necessarily cutscenes but just long drawn out blobs of text - see my First Hour Okami review next Monday) are just plain foolish and obnoxious to the player!
The KoTOR Scenario (Score:5, Interesting)
The challenge was the podrace. My character has the reflexes of a trained Jedi; I do not. Yet *I* had to drive the pod with my pitiful skills. My character's 18 DEX was nowhere to be seen.
So the new rule is:
In a game where the action is judged by statistics based on the character's abilities, such as a role playing game, never add an arcade element that depends on the player's abilities. Or more generally and colloquially stated: remember who is in the driver's seat for a particular style of gameplay.
Article is a little flat (Score:2)
1) Auto-Save: In Halo this works because you have clear cuts between the levels, so when you mess up the checkpoint you can resume at the start of the level. Other games don't have such clear cuts, so you really don't mess up a users game-state without asking first. Another solution would be to have special auto-save slots be
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ONCE! and again on demand (Score:3, Insightful)
What I do object to is having to watch them over...and over...and over. After I've seen them once, I should be allowed to skip them.
However, there is a reciprocal issue. I want to be able to see any cut scene again if I want to.
I can't think how many times this has happened:
I've finally reached a major cutscene, the reward for the last two hours of play, that finally explains critical plot points.
And the phone rings.
So I hit "start" to pause the game, which works everywhere else in the game.
But because it's a cut scene, it thinks that I want to skip instead of pause.
So now I've missed the cut scene, and the only choices the game offers are to start at the beginning of the next level (missing the cutscene)...or go back to my last save and replay part of the level that I JUST BEAT, just to see the cutscene.
Or sometimes, somebody comes in and interrupts me while the cutscene is running, and there is no way to pause it. And then when I want to go back and watch it without interruption, I find that I can't.
The "skip cutscene" button should NEVER be the same as the button you use to pause the game--and that button should pause the cutscene, just like it pauses at any other point in the game. And if you do somehow miss the cut scene, there should be a mechanism for seeing it again without having to replay the entire level.
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i think the best cutscene option would be this... (Score:3, Interesting)
2) allow cutscene skipping BUT don't make it so easy to skip. i hate when i accidentally hit a button and skip a cutscene and all of the sudden i'm in a situation that leaves me with a "wtf?" expression on my face. i think it was one of the xenosaga movies, i mean games, that when you paused the cutscene a little note at the top said "press x to skip" or something of that nature.
i know many people want to be able to skip it very quickly, but you don't want to punish the ones the game was targeted at (those who want the story line). if you want, you could go as far as making it an in-game option to allow quick-skipping or forcing the pause plus an extra button to skip. I think this would satisfy everybody. everybody could set it to what they want.
on a different note, i think saving should be allowed at *any* point in the game. sometimes you just *have* to stop playing but hate it cause you'll lose like an hour's worth of work just because you haven't reached a savepoint yet.
Good Article. I'd like to see one per genre (Score:2, Interesting)
#1 If you want your game to have longevity, make sure you get the best players to spend a lot of time beta testing it. Soul Calibur 3 is a good example of what goes wrong when you don't have good players test your game. There is a character in that game with a move that can instantaneously re
Don't kill my lame but necessary supporting cast (Score:2, Insightful)
If the cutscene can't be skipped, I will not play (Score:2)
But I memorized it 30 plays ago. You've turned a fun game into a tedious experience because You didn't think anyone would like your game enough to re-install it on a new system. Or maybe you don't even bother memorizing that I've watched it before. Or maybe you think my "new character" is played by a new person, so he needs to see it too. Or maybe
Annoyance (Score:2)
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Awesome feature imo.
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Feels good to say it. These 10 points were basically all the same thing: give the player as much control over the experience as possible. I agree completely: when I want a passive non-interactive experience, I will watch a movie. Gaming should be, as much as possible, interaction between player and designer, not merely the player consuming the designers narrative.
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As for the principle of a game d
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