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Puzzles? Puzzles! ('Cause why not?)

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CoriSparks
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Puzzles? Puzzles! ('Cause why not?)

I was just playing, of all things, The Sims 3, and the RPG-like dungeons that the adventure expansion puts into the game brought me to an interesting realization...

Am I the only one who's noticed that actual puzzles are a rarity in MMORPG dungeons? Sure, there are several games that have interactable objects that you click on, a bar shows up, and after waiting for it to fill up you progress onto the next part of the map. It makes things easier and quicker, but it's not very challenging. Instead, most of the challenge is saved for combat and combat alone.

I say, what exactly is it that prevents us from putting "Legend of Zelda" or "Elder Scrolls"-style puzzles in certain rooms? Heck, the harder ones don't even need to be necessary, but could be challenges you could complete to be awarded a large amount of credits or a special enhancement or salvage item. Things like doors that only open when you stand on a switch, so you have to put a heavy thing on top of it and walk through, or a door that opens only when certain switches are activated in a certain order, with vague hints preceeding them, etc.

In fact, it could be a possibility that some puzzles could be completely bypassed if you have the right powers for it; such as an ancient tomb where you have to light torches to open a door with some kind of mirror array being no problem at all because you just happen to have fire-based powers and can light them yourself! Besides, it's not like this isn't something that happens in superhero comics; I can think of countless times where superheroes have been forced to solve some sort of riddle or figure out a puzzle in order to get out of some sort of death trap or enter a secret location.

A good example of a game that actually uses puzzles in its dungeons is The Secret World. While I personally find the combat in that game rather boring, one thing that did keep me coming back was the EXCELLENT puzzle system. I remember moments when playing TSW where I felt like a bona-fide detective trying to unravel some of the brain-teasers in those missions.

Another idea - perhaps missions that involve heavy use of puzzles could be part of a specific character "Path" as defined by CoT's "Paths" system, an "Investigator" or "Detective" path, or for a more villainous version a sort of "Chessmaster" or "Mastermind (not the pet class)" path?

Anyone wanna discuss? Do you think a few puzzles here and there would spice things up?

Nyxz
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For the most part I like the

For the most part I like the puzzles in TSW; with the exception of those that require researching on the net for the answer. I want to play the game; not conduct research. Also not a fan of having to run around and click four items in a limited time (but that's due to the technology limitations of being on a sat connection). One mission in ESO that I just can't finish solo due to latency with activating items in limited time. Some of TSW's puzzles can literally be murder for those of us on sat connections as well (ZAP).

One thing I see is that it may be more appropriate for solo play and a hindrance in groups (or meaningless because the one person in the group that knows the solution just does it w/o the rest of the teams participation.

As an altaholic, I'm concerned that the puzzles may become stale with repetition on multiple toons. This may result in avoiding those missions.

What if there was an option on some missions to include random puzzles?

blacke4dawn
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If the puzzles are purely

If the puzzles are purely optional then sure I could see them being included in a significant amount. If they are required to actually progress then not so much.

Radiac
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What if you are in a mission,

What if you are in a mission, and it's the last mission of the arc, and you know you're going to have to defeat the end boss. So there's a puzzle game in there that's optional, which you get by clicking on a glowwie someplace, and if you manage to solve it, you get a buff to use against the end boss. If you don't, you've got a tougher end boss to fight, but if you beat it "the hard way", you get a badge for that.

I'm not a badge hunter, and I know puzzles are just more work for the programmers to have to put in, so I don't know exactly how doable that is or whether anyone will love it.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising

Grimfox
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I think they've talked about

I think they've talked about mini-games of a sort for things like defusing bombs. So instead of clicking the glowie and getting a "defusing" countdown bar, you'd get a little picture with a bomb and 3 wires that you have to cut in sequence. As far as what happens for failure or what happens for success it's not be discussed as much. It's also been discussed for things like crafting where doing a puzzle, swapping tiles to create an image or putting pieces of a pipe together to allow the progress bar to fill up faster.

In GW2 there are a couple puzzles in the game. One features a large statue head with 9 eyes some of which glow and you have to move glowing rocks on to a set of nine pads set in the water to match the eyes to get the door to open. This is further compounded by having to do it 3 times. If I didn't have someone show me how to do it the first time I wouldn't have know how to do any of it. In gw2 there are locked doors all over the place. Most are opened by some combat event. So I rarely look for a "weird statue and some matching marks on the ground" to indicate there might be a puzzle to open the door instead. If COT is going to have puzzles of that sort they need to be common or they need to have a chime like in zelda to tell someone like me to look around and use my head.

Radiac
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Cues to actually engage with

Cues to actually engage with the content are good, I agree. Of course, eventually, one hopes the wiki will have all the spoilers for that you'd ever want.

I just wonder how much work these puzzles are to actually put in. CoX devs used to say that making the pinball machine in the disco wouls have been a total pain and not worth the effort, so I don't know about this kind of stuff.

On the one hand, you could have puzzles that the player does in the 3D space of the game, like moving rocks around on the map as you mentioned. Another approach is to make a separate 2D interface that you go into when you click a glowwie and interact with the puzzle. Something as simple as "Enter the secret code into the console to open the door" could be done like this, but I wonder how much extra effort that is and if it's really worth it.

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Grimfox
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I don't think it is terribly

I don't think it is terribly hard in modern engines. For simple games like those that have been discussed already it might take a few hours to do each and they can be used fairly often. For a Pinball game like you are talking about, things are more difficult because the game itself is much more complicated. Still if a developer can sit down and spend the time with it then it can be done. In Unity speak these minigames would be loading a new "scene" into the UI window. I suspect it works pretty similarly in Unreal. COH was built on a much different engine that was very difficult to work with at the UI level. Displaying much more than text and a static image was quite difficult and having that feedback to game was also quite difficult. As I recall the power customization UI was as difficult and time consuming as the power customization back end (not including the actual graphics work)

Doing these sorts of simple mini games early on makes it a lot easier to implement new variations later. By including the simple picture matching mini game early they can later include the pinball game if some dev decided to pick that up as a pet project.

Radiac
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Well, it would be nice stuff

Well, it would be nice stuff to have, but it's not costuming, powers, classes, fighting mobs, or related to the game economy in any way, as far as I can tell, so it should probably be "back burner" compared to that stuff. And there's a lot of that stuff.

R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising