Baughn comments on A "Failure to Evaluate Return-on-Time" Fallacy - Less Wrong

47 Post author: lionhearted 07 September 2010 07:01PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (109)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: sketerpot 07 September 2010 09:53:54PM *  15 points [-]

Now I'm wondering how you could subvert that. I'm imagining something like a Legend of Zelda game which is split into two phases:

  1. A fairly long preliminary phase, where you don't know about saving the world or anything. This should have maybe one or two boss fights and teach you how to play the game well.

  2. A race against time to save the world. Bad stuff starts happening at preset times (plus or minus some randomness), and you've got to hurry and go for the high-probability ideas in order to maximize your chance of not losing. Skip the side-quests and mini-dungeons unless they've got some important items, because Kakariko village will be destroyed in 4-5 hours of game-time. To enhance the sense of urgency, make save-scumming impossible and make it harder to die in order to compensate for the increased difficulty of gameplay. Make sure there are several ways to win in any scenario, so the player doesn't have to rely on trial-and-error to find the one officially blessed way of doing something. And to hell with switch mazes.

I would definitely play this game. It would be intense. And the quest for 100% completion would result in absolutely crazy Let's Play videos.

Comment author: Baughn 10 September 2010 10:39:19AM 2 points [-]

A couple of roguelikes work this way. ADOM, in particular, gives you a very fixed period of time to save the world from an incursion of Chaos before said incursion and its radiation-like effects start making it very much harder.