GTD: Picking up objects

[Ilyich]

I'm with Andail on this one, although that has much to do with the fact that I somewhat dislike the fact that most adventurers seem to suffer from acute case of kleptomania. I mean, sure, it's a genre convention and all, and it's completely fine(even charming) for LucasArts and Sierra style comedies, but if your game is supposed to be more realistic and serious in tone - that's where it starts to get quite problematic. It's not only the question of player's comfort and how does the puzzle work better, it's also about the immersion and boundaries of an in-game logic. After all, is it the player who tries to pick everything up, or is it the main character? And if it's the latter - what's wrong with this person?

To be fair, this is true for the whole "inventory puzzles" system, not only for the "picking-up everything that's not nailed-down, and if it is - use the crowbar to unnail it first and then pick it up" aspect of it. Blackwell games(and Gemini Rue with Resonance to a slightly lesser extent) are very good at avoiding those, while still remaining point-n-click adventures at heart, so I guess it's a problem that can be avoided altogether with a good design, but it's still very much a matter of context.

It also depends on the interface, of course - if you have a "Pick up" verb it would be quite strange not to let the player pick it up, but if it's a two-click interface - it gets  a bit weird.

The main decisive factor here should be, in my opinion, the weirdness-of-the-action-to-be-performed to weirdness-of-the-game ratio. For example - picking up a random rock can only be considered slightly peculiar(4/10 weirdness) and wouldn't raise eyebrows even in a moderately serious game(3/10 weirdness). 1.33(3) is a pretty decent WOTATBP-to-WOTG rating in my book. On the other hand, tearing apart a whale carcass with your bare hands for no apparent reason, but finding a golden ring inside is a tad more disturbing(9/10 weirdness), and might be considered strange without the prior knowledge of the golden ring's location (if you know it's there, though, it's a completely sensible thing to do ), and wouldn't fly even in a slightly sillier game (5/10). My rating system could use some work, yes.

[blueskirt]

DISCLAIMER: This poster is so damn behind in catching up with AGS and adventure games released in the last year that his opinion may not even matter if you disagree with him, everything this curmudgeon says, feel free to not take into account when you design your games.[/disclaimer]

Typically, when I can't pick up something, I flag it in my brain as not pickable and then I proceed to forget about it.

Under such proposed circumstances, not only I'll need to figure out the solution to a puzzle, not only I'll need to figure out which object can be picked up, not only I'll need to figure out which object in my immediate surrounding can act as a replacement for the tool or item I am looking for when I can't find it, but I will have to magically figure out the chain of seemingly unrelated actions that will pull up the flags that will allow me to pick up an item I already tried to pick up in a room I explored an hour ago... Can this be any more obtuse?*

It may even be an object I tried to pick up several times in the past to solve three or four other puzzles, how will I know which of these three or four puzzles is the one that will let me pick up an object, will the game tell me why I couldn't pick up something for the four other puzzles? Or you know, sometimes you can solve a puzzle before your character does, I think Dave Gilbert toned down clues combination in recent Blackwell games because his players were figuring stuff on their own but the game didn't let them move forward because they had not made Rosangela piece out the clues herself. Let's not forget the backtracking that involves too.

Nah, it's a bad idea if you ask me. Realism is nice and all but at some point one got to decide what is more important between maintaining the seriousness of one's plot and keeping the immersion intact or not pissing off one's players. Senseless gratuitous deaths, dead-ends and walking deads are realistic too, you know.

Although, feel free to have the character mentally pick up/commit to memory items as much as you want, if the gameplay remains intact, if there's no backtracking involved, if you don't mind explaining time and again the idea of committing items to memory and keeping track of what can be accessed and what can't at anytime.

Also, nice point, Stupot! The ginormous amount of clutter you can carry in Monkey Island games, especially in Lechuck's Revenge, and having to figure out which item in your pile of hubcaps and Elvis plates was needed to solve some puzzles late in the game was certainly part of the fun for me. The game wouldn't have been as fun if Guybrush kept on discarding and cleaning his pockets from useless clutter.

* Yes, text parser and guess the verb, I know.