Bad game design fundamentals; minimaps

@splodge: The super underscore got a good laugh from me, perfect! I also had the same problem with those markers.

Somehow the Elder Scrolls compass and I jive well enough, it at least keeps me moving in the right direction and not having to check the map every 10 steps. I think the only real solution to this is familiarity. When I moved to a new city the first year or so everything was gmap'd or GPS'd, but not so much anymore. Videogames always end up with weird specific locations in worlds that tend to lack landmarks, so chasing waypoints on a minimap is inevitable? Seems there has to be a better way (edit: than just saying "get familiar with the map") but dang if I can't think of one.

My brain when it see's a mini map is like this

Okay so I need to go this far, this way, then I will quickly look again in a bit when its nearing time to change direction.

I don't sit there staring at it

That remains the best solution to the problem (in my mind at least). It reverses what's going on, instead of looking at a small map out of the corner of your eye to find out where to go, you're looking at the environment even closer to find out where to go, it's brilliant.

I was about to completely disagree with you until I read the rest of your post. I agree completely instead. I hate playing a driving game and seeing nothing but the tiny circle at the bottom left corner. It reminds me of playing a healer in an MMO, but even that had the enjoyment of watching bars go up and down.

Game design does seem a bit stagnant in big games in general. But it takes a little while into a new console generation for new ideas to surface. I'm optimistic someone will invent some new approach to open world games, it just isn't Watch_Dogs or inFamous: Second Son that's for sure.

It's funny that you mention the removal of health packs and the rise of regenerating health as "bad game design," because I have hated that shit since it started.

The main reason why "minimaps" let alone a general "mapping system" exists in most styles of games is that it is hard to convey the sense of distance and scale from the character viewpoint where getting lost and frustrated you can't find the thing you are searching for in the "game space" is frustrating as hell.

It takes a lot of careful design to solve that issue (think Half-Life 2) where every step involves careful direction and cues from all sorts of vantages and viewpoints. Or they can just make the area functional and throw in a minimap.

Yeah you are right, I don't know what specifically it is about Watch__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________Dogs that annoys me, I just have it in my head that other games have done that better.

I don't know what you mean about the underscore.

@sweep: you should do one of these on bad inventory management. It's literally the worst part of skyrim, a fantastic game with almost unlimited budget that failed so hard putting together this simple but very important part of the experience. Seriously, I don't know what they were thinking with that horrible UI and limited shortcuts especialy on consoles.

SkyUI all the way, man! Seriously, I can never go back to playing Skyrim with the vanilla UI.

Oh you have 73002029823740234732984 potions? Too bad!

I remember Bethesda being very proud of all the work they put into their interface, but if you wanted to do more than take a selfie in front of it with your iPhone 5s™ it ends up being a poor experience.

@yinstarrunner: Planetary Annihilation has a really cool alternative to the RTS mini map with its little pip window that you can control and use just like you would the main screen

As those games became more and more of a side-quest hunt, I found myself opening my full map constantly (taking me even more out of the experience than a minimap) just to find the nearest quest which made sense to check off the list. I can't remember much about how I played the first game, but I didn't have as much of an issue with that. Maybe that was more because I didn't spend so much time seeking out every little side mission anyway, whereas in future games I already knew that was a big part of the experience.

As far as the minimap, Saints Row 3 fixed it enough for me because I could jump in, set a waypoint, and follow those magical holographically projected arrows. It's just a hard problem to solve overall. Think about every new open world game being you visiting an entirely new city (or multiple cities) without any knowledge about the layout or landmarks whatsoever. Until you know the lay of the land that's just daunting. Heck, I remember feeling lost in GTA 3, and that was teensy compared to any modern open world environment. Now I have the whole map ingrained into my mind - just about every nook and cranny (short of the those hidden packages... I never actively sought them out).

@yi_orange: @cornbredx: @corruptedevil:

Since you called him out on that Bastion thing, In Cold Blood did the same thing way back on the PS1. The story was told in flashback and if you died, he'd say something along the lines of "No, it couldn't have happened that way..."

If anybody has some earlier examples of that idea, I'd love to hear them!

With regards to the idea of spending time looking at a minimap and ignoring a lovingly crafted open world etc, one thing that does sort of stick out in my mind is GTAIII. The map was kind of a pain, but nobody knew any better at the time etc. But one of the side effects of that, where I'm actually reading a map and working out where to go, rather than following a GPS or signals to turn that are augmented to the gameworld or whatever, I actually learned a lot more about my surroundings. I feel like every time a game comes up with some innovative new way to guide me to my destinations, I learn the layout of their cities less and less. As much as the lack of guidance systems in GTAIII could be a hassle, the familiarity of the city that I gained better helped me to connect with the world they were trying to immerse me in. I know my way around the maps of games like Saints Row: The Third and Sleeping Dogs because I played them a hell of a lot, but I think the way I learned in GTAIII was a bit more organic, starting from the areas around my crib and expanding out from there.

I think it's worth being aware of the ways in which streamlining games can detach you from them. I think the Assassin's Creed games are an example of this, when your input in regards to the traversal is kept to a minimum and you have a situation where pressing one button will execute a complex series of actions, like some crazy leap off a rooftop to land on a guy and execute him. I don't really feel like I actually did that. They make it as simple as possible to do something like that in order to try and make it so anybody can play and feel like a badass, but I don't because I don't feel like I actually had anything to do with it. It ends up feeling more like "Press B to watch animation".

Another good example is the way that the Elder Scrolls games have changed from Morrowind through to Skyrim. I really loved that Morrowind required you to actually parse information in order to proceed. You'd have a quest to go to Caius Cosades house and all you knew was that it was in Balmora, on the west bank of the river, second house on the opposite end to the thieves guild or whatever it might be. By Skyrim, everything was just waymarkers on your map and compass and that's fine, because I imagine plenty of people just want to be told where to go, rather than have to read their journal and interpret the surrounding land and all that. But the problem was that when they streamlined it this way, they switched solely to doing it that way. You can't turn off the quest markers because there is no information of that sort in your journal to rely on.

In Cold Blood did it 14 years ago.

L.A. Noire I thought was great. Asking your partner for directions at intersections. Driver or Burnout Paradise had a thing where the turn signals were flashing before and where you were supposed to make a turn. Those are neat in-game ways to seamlessly show directions without taking away attention from the game.

The totally other side of that coin is to have a fuckin' map in your lap while you drive like in Far Cry 2. That never broke immersion for me, although driving like that was pretty terrible.

@choi: 14 years ago now, 11 years before Bastion but yes. In Cold Blood however was a niche game while Sands of Time sold extremely well and revitalized a franchise that had been forgotten a decade earlier, thus it is far more likely that they took inspiration from PoP than Cold Blood.

You take that back! That game was great and still one of the best spy games with best spy characters in existance ^_^

I should go play that again...

@choi: Niche doesn't mean bad, it just wasn't successful commercially.

Yeah, didn't Arma have a button to get out your map, and another to shine a light at the map so you could read it in the dark? And then a button to contemplate your own existence? There must be more elegant solutions, surely.

I actually really like the turn signals in Burnout Paradise, that worked really well. I think your car also started indicating automatically before you hit the turning, so you could see which way you were going.

Sacrifice didthe whole"ah yes now I remember" thing too.

@corruptedevil: I know, I was trying to be funny :(

Without minimaps I just tend to open the full map a lot more, which is way worse. While there has been some improvements lately (especially in car games) with directions being displayed in the world etc the one "anti-map" feature I've enjoyed the most is the "click for objective" Sleeping Dogs (and more recently ESO) implemented. I can't imagine mini-maps every going away though, it's just such a powerful tool for situational awareness. It displays way more information than you could ever fit on the entire screen with a normal game perspective, and it usually takes up less than a tenth of the display.

The fact that people complain about spending too much time staring at the minimap only confirms how effective of a tool it is.

What brought it to my attention recently was GTA online, where the standard minimap is zoomed in too far, but if you enlarge it by pressing down on the d-pad, it expands too much:

Honestly, if the world is well-designed to be memorable at every corner, there should be absolutely no need for a mini-map.

I played Grand Theft Auto III and Red Dead Redemption so much that I never needed a goddamn map. I could look at any given building or a landmark and know exactly where I was at, then deduce which way I needed to go.

If we're talking about something like Skyrim, I think they handled it INCREDIBLY well. They give you a little bar on the bottom that says "hey, there is some shit over here" and you move that direction. In the process, you discover other shit.

Someone mentioned Dead Space earlier, and that is another fantastic example of how to make navigation functional in-game without needing a damn map.

However, here's the thing that pisses me off more than anything else: cinematics. Please...kill cinematics. This is an old trend used as a way to force eye candy into your game, and it is now used as a passive way to offer exposition. Seriously? We can't get this shit IN-GAME?! There are so many examples of games that handle this stuff in-game that cinematics just feel obsolete and unnecessary to me. If you ARE going to have cutscenes, at least pull a Resident Evil 4 with the damn things and still keep me SOMEWHAT involved in the game, ya know?

Cutscenes and cinematics make me almost immediately care less about a game. I want to PLAY A GAME, not WATCH A MOVIE!