[drw85]

Yes and No, i think modern games lead more people to be like this. Because quest markers and gps navigations and hints and creative/story modes. Also a heavy emphasis on the rewards rather than the quest.

I notice this myself when going back to older games like Final Fantasy 7 or 8 and misremembering how complex and complicated the UI, Menus and systems are.

You just get used to these things, but i also think they are a bit immersion breaking and shift the focus a lot on the destination and not the journey.

[Cyberdog]

Don't forget the Yellow Paint Epidemic.

Some game devs don't even want to risk the chance that players might have to stop and explore a little bit before they find the right path to continue the game.

[Bjartr]

That's not the fear. The fear is that the player will get stuck and simply stop playing because it's frustrating instead of fun.

The way that devs determine where the line is for "most people that play get frustrated and give up" and "most people figure it out and keep playing"

It's certainly possible to design a game where the intuition of the player matches a less contrived looking world, bit it's a lot harder. On the other hand, having a convention that climbable surfaces will be blazed yellow, and teaching it early in the game is comparatively easy.

There's also aspects of pacing and focus to consider. A game that ebbs and flows in it's intensity often feels better to play than one that's high intensity all the time. So if your game is mostly about combat, you'll want to break up big fights with lower energy experiences. But those lower energy experiences really aren't "the game" in a sense, they're a kind of filler that makes the high energy experiences feel more fun. It can't be completely boring, but it should be easier than the primary gameplay experience and also have lower stakes. That's a big reason why do many actiony games have blatantly obvious climbing and puzzles. It keeps the player lightly engaged while letting them catch their breath before the next set piece.

It's not the only way to build games by any means, but it is a generally effective, and consistently reliable, template.

[drw85]

But this is exactly one of the problems of today. Everything uses UX metrics to base their design around. It makes the end result boring and predictable and the opposite of immersive.

I agree that there needs to be pacing, but there are great ways to do that. GTA and RDR are great examples. You drive somewhere and get a funny conversation, or something happens on the way to the objective that pretty naturally distracts you in a way that makes sense to the world the game is playing in.

Ubisoft games are basically full of these boring filler activities. What point does a huge open world have, if it's just the same 5 things copy and pasted all over the place?

I'd much rather condense those 590 busy work tasks to 5 really nice side quests like in The Witcher 3. At least they give you an experience and not some UX concept of "the user needs to go climb a tree now".

[Bjartr]

Absolutely, I 100% agree. Ubisoft especially is terrible at this.

[johnnyanmac]

it's a very interesting divide when you have games that worry about this, and then genres/subgenres like the "soulslike" that take pride in its difficulty and precise maneuvering involved just to beat a boss.