Angel Dust on 29/1/2009 at 21:42

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It isn't impossible, with that one exception when you have shoot out the van that's taking your sister, as I did it on my first-ish, after restarting a 1/4 of the way throuhg, playthrough. That's not to say that combat, albeit meelee in my case, was pretty much forced on the player far too much in the later stages of the game.

Zillameth on 29/1/2009 at 21:57

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I'm sorry, I meant to say it was impossible to me specifically. My problem is that I like pretending in games, but I don't like fighting uphill. Some arenas are made as if to force player to engage in combat; for instance, there is a relatively open rooftop with four enemies and a long vertical pipe you need to climb. If you do so without neutralizing the enemies, you'll expose yourself and they'll shoot you, because climbing is slow. If you attack them in melee, they will have a large advantage of firepower. Knocking one of them out and taking his gun is by far the easiest solution, everything else is inconvenient at best. The game is basically saying "no, you can't do this", and while it's still technically possible, I just don't have the morale to try.

Zillameth on 30/1/2009 at 10:04

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I'm sure there are, only it doesn't really matter. One of those "basic design flaws" I mentioned is how this game makes it difficult for the player to analyze it, but requires deliberate decisions at the same time. Everything is white in this game. It takes a long pause to take a look and spot all the routes (not to mention that some elements are only visible when not obscured by something else). And at the same time, you always need to hurry, because the damn helicopter or whatever keeps shooting. In this particular case, I spent good twenty minutes looking for alternate routes and tactics, and I kept dying every 30-40 seconds, and of course the game wouldn't let me find a safe spot and save. Then I lost patience. For pity's sake, it's a classic Twinkie Denial Condition.

And "runner vision" just keeps misleading the player. It paints the pipe red, only you don't really need to climb that pipe. You need to jump on top of that container, then that booth over there, then wall jump to the opposite side of the street, but none of these elements are painted red. The red pipe is supposed to help, but it distracts instead.

This is so much different than, say, Thief. In Thief, they didn't use any explicit guidance systems, but all you needed in order to be able to consider your options was a quick glance, because all the climbable elements were brown. They were all made of wood, you see. Brown spot = you can get there, easy. This is such a basic technique, and they could have used it in Mirror's Edge without significantly changing the way game looks. Paradoxically, Thief is a much, much slower game, but it allows me to make decisions faster most of the time.

Zillameth on 30/1/2009 at 11:41

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I agree that this game gets better with each subsequent playthroguh, but that's bad design exactly (edit - I mean, it's fine when game exhibits new layers of interaction with each playthrough, but it's not fine when you don't get the game until after you've played it through). By the time I finished the campaign, my credit of trust was depleted. Most players uninstall the game at this point. The only reason why I tried time trials at all was that I have an occupational interest in such things.

There are many ways to get around these problems (that's why I said they are basic flaws). First of all, if your design goals are conflicting, then maybe you should change them. Sometimes you just can't have them all at the same time. In this case, I don't think it was necessary, however some ideas used don't fit this kind of gameplay. Namely, the mechanics of combat belong to a completely different game. What they did was create a parkour game and then insert parts where the game tries to force you to behave in a completely non-parkourish way. Encounters with runner-cops work better, because in order to defeat those enemies you need to be as parkourish as possible. I remember how at some point I kept running from them around a small rooftop for a few minutes, because I couldn't find the way out. It was a bit funny, but not frustrating, because I didn't die in that time. I just kept running until I spotted the exit. The challenge was compatible with player actions.

Mirror's Edge suffers because it's fast but demands "slowness" in some circumstances. The general solution would be to get rid of that "slowness" by making relevant player actions faster. Particularly, the decision making process should be more intuitive. A quick glance should be all you need in order to understand the arena you're entering.

I think the biggest benefit-to-effort option would be to develop a more sophisticated visual code. There are more primary colours than just red. Instead of painting some in-game objects red and giving the colour red the meaning "this where you need to go", you can do something like this:
- red - this is an exit,
- yellow - this is a climbable, Fun fact: here where I live the law says all gas pipes must be painted yellow for safety reasons.
- green - this is something you can step on,
- orange - this is something you can wall-run on,
- dark gray - this is a pole for swinging. You could probably reuse yellow in this case, because climbables are vertical and poles are horizontal; also, both are used for a kind of "climbing".
- pale blue - this is an obstacle, avoid,
- deep blue - turn around, you're going the wrong way.
You can potentially do this without seeming imposing. For instance, you can have a wall-runnable billboard advertising a company, and the logo of that company can look like (http://foto.favore.pl/2007/10/1/20/15057_1191259804412_n.jpg) this.
You could still use those huge splashes of primary colours as decorations, because when player sees a whole building painted yellow, then obviously enough it's not climbable. But if there's a red spot on the wall of that building, then the message is "you need to get there". As a bonus, you can have the player enter a building painted in deep blue and count on them feeling they're going where they're not supposed to be.

Another obstacle is the fact that in 3D surroundings some parts of a level are obscured by other parts. Sometimes you're running blindly, hoping that when you jump from that ledge, there will be something to jump on down below. Frankly, I'm surprised that there's so little glass in this ultra-modern town. The easiest way to show the player what's behind a wall or a rooftop is to make that wall or rooftop transparent.

There's also a whole bunch of more obscure tricks. For instance, note how the level becomes instantly more "readable" when you're on a large rooftop and there are some boxes, pipes and booths ahead of you. This is because all these elements form horizontal lines, and your mind "reads" them instantly. Some neat tricks are described in developer commentaries to Portal and HL Episodes. Portal is practically a big excercise in intuitiveness.

What Mirror's Edge is really missing, though, is a good tutorial level. The one it has is not good enough, because it only teaches you how to perform moves. It doesn't teach you how to interpret your surroundings. It doesn't even give you the notion that you're going to need to interpret the surroundings at all. And when the action starts, it's too late for learning. I believe the first mission of this game should be either a race, where you can't pass until you beat a certain record, or a collection of small delivery tasks that force you to traverse the same area in different directions a few times.

Zillameth on 30/1/2009 at 15:17

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No, you see, good colour scheme is transparent in the sense that you don't perceive it as such. It only sounds obvious because I described it explicitly. Thief has a visual code, too. It works on the subconscious level. I didn't mean to suggest "et's paint everything orange", because that's not how visual codes are implemented.

Personally, I didn't like the "runner's vision", either.

As for zombies, legend has it that those levels were put into game because authors weren't sure if players would like such a different game, so they decided to include some action just in case. They did hurt the game, in my opinion. However, zombies don't try to force you to give up your sneaksie ways in the same way cops in ME try to force you into combat.