The Witness

[jakonovski]

So what is up with this game? I've watched a number of videos and also some of the hidden stuff, and it seems boring as fuck with random bullshit masquerading as indirect storytelling.

Make trace puzzles in different ways, whee. I hate most puzzle games anyway.

[Rasix]

I didn't care for Braid, and I never really had a thing for Myst/Riven puzzlers.  I'll wait for this to go cheaper.

Anyhow, there's a number of people saying that if FPS can give you motion sickness, this one's a pretty bad offender. I still haven't beaten Half Life 2 because of this.

[Margalis]

Apparently the combination of the FOV and head bob is really bad for some people.

[Nija]

Played 2 hours on PS4 last night. Love it.

[arnulf2]

This game is certainly not for everyone. I think color-blind people should stay away. Some puzzles require to recognize red, orange, green. Also a small subset of puzzles (that I encountered so far) require good hearing. I've got tinnitus, so I have difficulties with those. But they seem to be optional. I'm not 100% sure since I've only solved 300 of reportedly 700 puzzles.

It has its moments. Sometimes it feels that everything has meaning. Even the peculiar art style has a reason. There is no explanation, no help, no text, everything is conveyed via small icons, symbols, arrangements.

Not for the easily frustrated. Most of the time I feel like the solution is just quite there but not there. If you can step away and sleep over it then do that.

Noticed no head bobbing.

[patience]

Colorblind people can play it. Kotacku created a primer to help them with that. People who are getting motion sickness can try to adjust the settings in their PC files but are out of luck if playing on the PS4 until Blow delivers a patch.

It's people who are deaf who are screwed the most when playing this game.


Anyway I have none of those problems. I've played for 15 hours and finished over 100 challenges so far but it's not giving me a constant high like so many others are getting. I definitely feel accomplished when solving the more demanding puzzles but the time it takes doesn't make the reward worth it so far.

What I do like is how it's an open world puzzle game. It's very refreshing over other puzzle games that have linear progression. The best part is that the puzzles inform you on the design of the island and the island itself informs you on how to solve the puzzles. It's a very sophisticated blend of level (well actually world but the regions are levels onto themselves) design with the gameplay.

[Jeff Kelly]

This game suffers from the same general problem most puzzle games do. The puzzles were designed by someone who already knew the solutions. This means that the amount of and type of hints placed in the game are generally too few and too obtuse as they have been placed by people that already know too much and have already bought into the 'obviousness' of the solutions.

It also oozes a very uncomfortable 'hey look just how much smarter I am than you' sort of vibe that is really grating

The game is also incredibly boring because it's exclusively that sort of puzzles (600 of them) you see at the start with almost no story or anything really to break up the monotony.

[Jeff Kelly]

It's basically like those "1001 puzzles, crosswords and sudoku" books you find at the airport or at train stations except as a game. There will be people who like that a lot and the island itself is visually very good.

I was thoroughly bored after about 80 puzzles and two hours of tracing lines in mazes of varying diffculty though.

[patience]

This game suffers from the same general problem most puzzle games do. The puzzles were designed by someone who already knew the solutions. This means that the amount of and type of hints placed in the game are generally too few and too obtuse as they have been placed by people that already know too much and have already bought into the 'obviousness' of the solutions.

This is one of the reasons why it's great that it is in open world format. The clues are there but you have to explore and take advantage of your surroundings. In addition, when a puzzle is too hard youo can skip it midway through and go somewhere else. Trust me when I say you will find the clues you are looking for while playing a couple of other puzzles in different areas.

This game is a big step up from linear puzzle sequences where the devs think they gave you enough clues but didn't. This game does provide the clues but makes sure you move around the map to get them.

[Jeff Kelly]

It's hard to elaborate on this point because ultimately such an argument always gets reduced to a question of intelligence i.e are you smart enough for the game or are the puzzles simply too hard. So you're ultimately pushed into a situation where you first have to prove that you are smart enough before you can criticize the game design of a puzzler.

Yes the game is open world-ish and you can always switch to a different puzzle when you get stuck and yes the game sometimes teaches you concepts with an entirely different set of puzzles that you then need to integrate and adapt. That's technically a step up from Myst or asimilar games. It also works reasonably well for the first third of the game.

It still doesn't really touch on my main point though. To be able to solve a puzzle you need to understand the context and also what the puzzle requires of you to solve it. Both the puzzle and the steps to solve it have been created by a person that already knows how that puzzle should be solved and what steps you need to take in order to solve it. That person is privy to important information you are not - namely the solution - and most of the time the puzzle is actually designed to fit a certain solution or underlying concept. So the solution drives the puzzle design and what kind of hints the game should give you to solve it. There is naturally a disconnect between the designer, who knows the solutions and how the puzzles interact with each other, and the player who has no prior information about how the whole underlying puzzle mechanics work and need to be solved.

So it always comes down to how the game communicates its underyling concepts to a player that has no prior knowledge. This is hard. The witness also almost exclusively teaches you a concept by making you solve puzzles of increasing complexity and difficulty. So an easy version of a puzzle teaches you a concept and the increasing difficulty of subsequent iterations teaches you how to apply it to a problem domain. Then they add another concept or two into the mix you haven't seen before. Until you encounter another set of puzzles that teaches you that abstract concept and how to apply it to that problem domain. Then you can hopefully abstract it and integrate it into other puzzles. The other way the game communicates hints and concepts is by means of environmental storytelling

For this to work though you have to first find that set of puzzles that teaches you a concept you haven't seen before or find that certain item of environmental storytelling that gives you the key clue. Which is hard because the island is relatively big and full of nooks and crannies that entire areas can get lost in. Reviewers can and have missed entire areas. It also breaks down as the puzzles get more complex. It works pretty well for the first set of maybe 80 - 100 puzzles where the underlying concepts are reasonably clear and abstract and the principle on how to 'fuse' those concepts is relatively simple. It breaks down more and more the deeper you go down into the game as the puzzles get more complex and intricate and the game is twisting and turning the concepts more and more on its head.

So you end up scouring the island and running back and forth multiple times in order to look for an area where a new set of puzzles might teach you a trick you didn't know or to catch that piece of environmental story telling you missed the first ten times you searched the island. Since the game design limits the ways the game can tell you information it gets harder and harder for the game to give you the information you need if all communication pathways it has are either 'teach by giving you a puzzle' or 'teach by giving you an environmental hint'. The concepts at some point get to complex for that. This is on top of the general problem that this information is disseminated by a designer that already knows how the solutions work and therefore has already been blinded to shortcomings of how the game tells you things because once you know the solution the solution becomes 'obvious'.

A great puzzle game should give you the hints to solve its riddles from the perspective of someone who doesn't know the answers. Which is almost impossible to do. It also shouldn't assume that every player has the same "mindset" the developer/designer has including the same cultural canon and context. Some of the puzzles might prove to be harder if you are not a western audience for example.

In that respect it is exactly like Riven or Myst except that you have more puzzles to get stuck on and eventually abandon for another. While the game smugly judges you for it.

Another issue I have is that the game offers no way for you to collect hints. There's no scrapbook, no easy way to look up solved puzzles for a concept you can't remember, to doodle or write down notes or to take pictures. At some point you have an assortment of scraps of paper, a notebook and pictures taken with your smartphone camera next to your game iin order for you to keep track of all the bits and pieces of information you need to solve the current puzzle.

Some of the puzzles are also impossible to complete for people with vision or hearing impairments which is something no major game release should suffer from in 2016.

[Nija]

Wow. Tell us how you really feel. Look, that is a lot of words. I'm going to reply with this:

1) I'm not going to read any of those words.
2) I don't know anything about anything leading up to this game other than I enjoy the handmade hero videos and the blog posts talking about challenges faced on this game.
3) This is a puzzle game - I am doing puzzles. It's fun.

It's really true what they say about satisfied customers don't write reviews. I'm going to take it a step further and say that satisfied customers don't even read reviews.

[Yegolev]

It's possible that Jeff isn't intelligent enough for this game.





 

[Jeff Kelly]

Always a possibility 

According to the dev 99% of all players are not intelligent enough for the game though.

[jakonovski]

Sales must not be good since the dev is complaining about piracy already (that's so noughts).

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-01-29-the-witness-is-being-heavily-pirated

Personally, there's two things that make this game a no deal even without playing. One, it's fucking puzzles for their own sake, gods no. Two, it's a first person game with super restricted movement and invisible walls everywhere.

fake edit: I think why journos like this so much is because they get no satisfaction solving problems during their workday.

[Hawkbit]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question. But for now it's in my wishlist until it drops. I'm also holding off because this has serious potential to be a free PSN+ game in the next few months; dropping $40 on something I might get for free soon would make me feel salty.

[patience]

Always a possibility 

According to the dev 99% of all players are not intelligent enough for the game though.

Where did you get that impression? Blow's stated goal was to create a gaming language so to speak. As you progress in the game you are supposed to be taught how to string together a bunch of concepts to unravel deeper ones. From what he has said in the past he was interested in giving an experience of discovery and learning unmatched in gaming. He wasn't interested in intentionally laughing at your failed efforts.

Another issue I have is that the game offers no way for you to collect hints. There's no scrapbook, no easy way to look up solved puzzles for a concept you can't remember, to doodle or write down notes or to take pictures. At some point you have an assortment of scraps of paper, a notebook and pictures taken with your smartphone camera next to your game iin order for you to keep track of all the bits and pieces of information you need to solve the current puzzle.

Now you touch on one of the problems I really agree with. This game is worse than MUD's of yore because they weren't built in a 3D world but this game game demands a lot of note taking even though it tries to make the gameplay intuitive.

After 8 years they definitely had a few play testers starting fresh who had to be forced to do this out of game. They should've made in game tools.

So you end up scouring the island and running back and forth multiple times in order to look for an area where a new set of puzzles might teach you a trick you didn't know or to catch that piece of environmental story telling you missed the first ten times you searched the island. Since the game design limits the ways the game can tell you information it gets harder and harder for the game to give you the information you need if all communication pathways it has are either 'teach by giving you a puzzle' or 'teach by giving you an environmental hint'. The concepts at some point get to complex for that. This is on top of the general problem that this information is disseminated by a designer that already knows how the solutions work and therefore has already been blinded to shortcomings of how the game tells you things because once you know the solution the solution becomes 'obvious'.

I personally have only did a little over 100 puzzles as of this moment. I feel with every new revelation he has made some missteps but those mistakes count for 3% of the puzzles so far. I think the overall design is very solid and I'll definitely comeback to this thread if I'm more inclined to agree with you that he didn't avoid this design trap in the future.


That said you sort of been touching on a point that is inherent problem with the design decisions behind this game. Quite a few puzzles were designed for the sake of teaching you how to do other puzzles. Blow has made quite a few challenging puzzles that aren't really fun to do and the sense of accomplishment can be muted when the solution fits a halfway measure instead of a hard rule.For example, there's ambiguity in  how the Tetris puzzles work. The Tetris puzzles defy the conceit of all the other symbols used in the game so far which have solidly fixed rules.

Personally, there's two things that make this game a no deal even without playing. One, it's fucking puzzles for their own sake, gods no. Two, it's a first person game with super restricted movement and invisible walls everywhere.

Where did you encounter invisible barriers? That most likely is a bug. I had the same problem a couple of times and fixed it by restarting the game.

[jakonovski]

Since I haven't played, it's just second hand experiences. Bugs might have played a part, but in any case it's one of those games where you can't jump off ledges and the "movement space" is narrower than the modeled environment. Totally kills any sense of exploration for me.

[patience]

Ok in that case you're right. You can't jump off ledges. I don't see it as a big deal but you may feel differently once playing it.

[Raph]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question.

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this, and leaving aside the PSN sale possibility, there's no question that in terms of money spent on its budget, and game length, it needs to be priced at a premium price. I mean, heck, its budget is in the ballpark of what UO cost to develop.

(FWIW, what I have heard from Jon is that it is doing just fine in the marketplace).

Jon tweeted about a PC test you can try out if you get motion sickness btw.

[Kail]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question.

Can I ask why?

I can't answer for Hawkbit, but to me personally it looks like an indie game, and those typically go for ~$20.  The gameplay I've seen (which is just what's in the the trailer) is just very basic puzzle game stuff that plenty of cheaper games are pulling off.  I appreciate that there's a really expensive world you can wander around in between puzzles, but that doesn't make the game fun, and in terms of gameplay it doesn't seem that interesting.  Maybe I'm misreading the game, but if there's more to it then it's not presented on the store page.  The trailer makes it look like a generic maze game like a million others you can find on Newgrounds, the screenshots don't look like they have anything to do with the gameplay, and the description is completely useless (standard "you wake up without your memory and have to discover the secrets of the island, find out the answer to the mystery in this game" bullshit that every first person horror game also uses).

[Margalis]

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this, and leaving aside the PSN sale possibility, there's no question that in terms of money spent on its budget, and game length, it needs to be priced at a premium price. I mean, heck, its budget is in the ballpark of what UO cost to develop.

People don't care about budget, they care about apparent budget.

Everybody's Gone to the Rapture is $20 and has as much or more money on the screen. Without someone telling us there's no reason to believe that The Witness cost a lot more to make.

[Raph]

"Money on the screen." So, confirmed, graphics > gameplay. :) I loved Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, but it had zero game systems in it.

(I knew that, from a marketing POV, of course, silly to argue against it. It just speaks to exactly why veteran gamers complain about games these days).

Kail, the puzzle play is far from basic. It's both brutal and innovative. Not for everyone, for sure. But for example, "the screenshots don't look like they have anything to do with the gameplay" is outright incorrect, but I don't want to say more because spoilers.

Jon just tweeted "The Witness is on track to sell more in a week than Braid sold in its first year" so it does seem to be successful.

[schild]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question.

Can I ask why?

Because Jonathan Blow is a prick?

[Margalis]

(I knew that, from a marketing POV, of course, silly to argue against it. It just speaks to exactly why veteran gamers complain about games these days).

This is a weird point to make given how much the graphics of the Witness are a selling point. I suppose it has more gameplay than Everybody's, but it's still very light on gameplay systems. I mean...it has one gameplay system as opposed to zero.

It's definitely not any sort of example of complex deep systems but maybe iffy graphics.

[Jeff Kelly]

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this,

Because "it's just a [insert game mechanic here] game" and that's enough for a lot of people to comment on price regardless of how much effort it took to make the game.

As if those people would have bought it for half the price anyway.

[Jeff Kelly]

Where did you get that impression?

From Jonathan Blow himself. According to multiple interviews and his own Twitter feed "there will be puzzles 99% of all the Wittness players won't be able to complete".

He might as well have said that he is smarter than the people buying his games.

[KallDrexx]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question.

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this, and leaving aside the PSN sale possibility, there's no question that in terms of money spent on its budget, and game length, it needs to be priced at a premium price. I mean, heck, its budget is in the ballpark of what UO cost to develop.

(FWIW, what I have heard from Jon is that it is doing just fine in the marketplace).

Jon tweeted about a PC test you can try out if you get motion sickness btw.

For me personally, is I haven't totally figured out if there's a big story you are unlocking (like Myst) as part of the exploration and puzzle solving, or if you are just puzzle solving for puzzle solving sake.  It also concerns me from the little bit I've read in reviews about how well everything flows together outside the puzzles.  Also the idea that I have to have a pen and paper to keep notes instead of in game is a massive turnoff. 

All in all, there are a lot of unknowns about the gameplay that haven't been satisfied by reading reviews, and with so many other games I can choose from I don't feel like paying $40 to try it out.  $20 is a lot more at the "sure why not" amount.

[Hawkbit]

$40 is too steep for me on this game. If it were priced at $20, I would have bought it without a question.

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this, and leaving aside the PSN sale possibility, there's no question that in terms of money spent on its budget, and game length, it needs to be priced at a premium price. I mean, heck, its budget is in the ballpark of what UO cost to develop.

I have a soft budget of $100/month for all media. It's easier to throw $20 into the wind to see if I like a game or not; $40 is too much on an unproven title or dev. Sometimes it works out and I get Rebel Galaxy for $20; other times we spend blindly and get the release iteration of Diablo 3 for $60. Essentially, this purchase is a risk I'm not ready to take yet.

As a game consumer, I don't consider development time and expense during the purchase process. I consider the game, the game's fun potential and the cost.

As a counterpoint to my own logic, I'm certain I paid full price for the thematically similar Myst back in the mid-90s. It may be the problem isn't the price or perceived value; maybe it's the fact that there's so many other options competing for my time and money. I'm not sure. I know only that a quick assessment put this in a "wait until cheaper" or "wait until there's a month with no other releases" bucket.

As an additional counterpoint, I will almost certainly drop $60 on No Man's Sky in June. So it really isn't that $40 is too much on an unproven dev. The core of the problem is that I'm not sold. Nobody has proven to me that this is worth my $40 yet.

[Quinton]

I picked this up because a friend was enthusing about it.  I'm maybe 50-75 puzzles in and haven't had too much trouble sorting them out, have had some fun "aha" moments, and am enjoying seeing how far the "build a set of puzzles around a common but evolving design language" thing goes.

I definitely fall into the "hello motion sickness" category, unfortunately.  I feel like the fact that it's struggling to maintain framerate on my 12GB, 3.5GHz quadcore machine with a GTX670 is a contributing factor -- it's a pretty looking island, but it doesn't seem that it should thrash the CPU and GPU as much as it does.  The graphics settings are very coarse so turning them down rapidly degrades the visual quality.  Bummer.

I do find the invisible walls (mainly around tiny unclimbable ledges, etc) to be a bit annoying.  I get that he doesn't want players to wander too freely, as the various puzzles lead to various other puzzles, but movement does feel a bit constrained at times.

[Raph]

I definitely fall into the "hello motion sickness" category, unfortunately.  I feel like the fact that it's struggling to maintain framerate on my 12GB, 3.5GHz quadcore machine with a GTX670 is a contributing factor -- it's a pretty looking island, but it doesn't seem that it should thrash the CPU and GPU as much as it does.  The graphics settings are very coarse so turning them down rapidly degrades the visual quality.  Bummer.

If you opt into the "future" beta on Steam, it has some changes that may help.

[Quinton]

I tried that and it seems a bit better, but I've started hitting some trickier stuff that seems to want more hiking around to look at things which balances that out.  For now it remains a game that I will not be playing in long sessions.

[Kail]

Can I ask why? I see lots of players saying this,

Because "it's just a [insert game mechanic here] game" and that's enough for a lot of people to comment on price regardless of how much effort it took to make the game.

As if those people would have bought it for half the price anyway.

If people are talking about the game being great, I'd personally say $20 isn't unreasonable to gamble even if it's not precisely my thing.  There are puzzle games I enjoy even though I'm not a huge puzzle game fanatic.  But $40 is a pretty big risk to me, and nobody has really said anything about what makes this game stand out from the competition, so I'm not really tempted at this point.

[Margalis]

It's amusing to me that after years of "Blow is a mad genius, the most dangerous man in games, turning game design upside down" hagiographies he made a puzzle game with invisible walls, audio logs, etc. So radical!

[Raph]

Wish you guys could see how people in the industry are talking about it. "Masterpiece" is the most frequent word. Near universal admiration. Maybe that's because we're the target demo, I dunno. :)

[Jeff Kelly]

Why, exactly?

This game is almost universally praised by devs and reviewers/journalists and you can feel the disconnect for lack of a better word between the praise it gets from insiders and how the general public reacts to it. I watched a video review recently that consisted of a short 5 minute presentation of the first tutorial area and 25 minutes of walking around the island to 'not spoil the experience'.

This turned what should have been a review into a creepy sales pitch as two reviewers talked about the awesomeness of the game they had played for 40 hours while showing you literally nothing of how the game develops further on.