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Currently, I don't think difficulty affects the generation of cases at all. If it would (preferably as a separate setting from economic or combat difficulty), then that would be useful.
Drama aside, everyone seems to agree that the information provided at the start of a case must meet some minimum threshold of uniqueness to have just one correct answer that can be found by the player alone (without the game filling in the blanks for you). The disagreement seems to be mainly about how to fix it, if it needs fixing, and/or what that minimum threshold of unique info should be considered to be.
Suggestions given in this thread so far:
- Allow more than one answer to be accepted as the "solution", provided it meets the criteria of the initial description.
- Control amount/overall specificity of target details to ensure all cases meet the minimum acceptable threshold of uniqueness (wherever that may lie)
- Make certain traits easier to trace to a citizen without brute force.
- Have job listings tell you what info will be provided about your target before you accept it.
- Some jobs (e.g. arrests) may need a higher threshold of uniqueness than others (e.g. photograph described citizen) in order to maintain suspension of disbelief.
- Scale pay for side jobs according to vagueness of initial evidence.
I'm also going to put my own suggestion here, and I'm sure if the devs have been reading this thread they're probably already thinking of it...
If a system is put in place to control initial intel specificity (see the second item in the list above), it could be controllable by a setting to make everyone happy. Something like:
Minimum briefing detail: Chaotic (no restrictions) | Vague | Moderate | Specific
It is in no way a question of difficulty in this case and that misunderstanding on your part is the single most frustrating part of your responses; Nobody is advocating for the game to give you a bunch of clues. Here, I'm really just saying that it is entirely illogical to have missions assigned to you by the enforcer division in which they tell you to arrest somebody based on characteristics that many, many people share.
At that point, the one and only thing that you can do is systematically door knock until the GAME, not you, tells you that you have the right guy. There is no difficult logical deductions to be made in that situation.
If the only evidence given was enough to substantively identify one single individual amongst a pool of potential suspects, it would be fine. Not everyone in the building is going to have green eyes AND a specific blood type AND a certain job; there needs to be a checksum that validates the clues effectively point towards a single person, regardless of how vague they are.
You cannot take action and arrest somebody in the real world based off exclusively a hair color and eye color alone; when multiple people match that description the onus is solely and entirely on the game itself to fill in the blank when you click on the target civillian.
That is not difficulty or detective work, it's poorly handled mission generation.
Edit: replied to the wrong specific comment, but it's addressed to the right person anyhow.
That is missing entirely in arrest missions and the like.
I can agree with your ideas are adapt for a simulative oriented game.
And yes when finally i founded the guy was rewarding in some way, was even last case i played because i was approching the time limit for refund time.
But we must be realistic.
If this game want to be good supported must sell copies.
And i doubt add a simulative oriented feature like the possibility of case to be dead end or too long in depth investigation with lacking reward, can work to sell the game.
And Developers can't simple raise the rewards because this will create balance problem with the economy of the game.
Developers not need to make it purely casual game like majority of modern triple a.
But must take in consideration the balance of the game to make the game enough "salable".
The funny thing is true even the opposite, some case are too easy.
I remember a case where i get phone number and a description of hair and shoes size.
But the name too, for steal a document.
Basically even only the name was more than enough to finish the investigation.
I think there is a need of better balance the quantity and combination of clues.
This without considerating the logic problem of some type of cases, like other people are saying.
However, this is not the only thing that is being discussed in this thread - voluntarily or not, the general difficulty of cases (and the amount of effort needed to solve them) is a topic in this thread as well.
I'm not sure why you would assume that every post in this thread refers to the topic that (out of those two) feels more important to you. Mine, the one I replied to, and the one that poster replied to, all clearly weren't.
So yes, it is 100% obvious that a difficulty option for case generation would do nothing for the topic that _you_ want to discuss. I didn't think that I needed to mention this explicitly just to keep you from misinterpreting my posts again, but if it's really necessary, then here's the explicit statement. I hope it's clear now. :)
But for the other topic that is being discussed in this thread - i.e. in how much the game should or shouldn't "protect" the player from getting cases that require a lot of legwork and/or might not be solvable at all - I believe that the suggested difficulty setting absolutely _would_ provide a solution. Players who don't want to be confronted with a "check 60 people until one remains" scenario can take the "easy" setting, players who find that such cases contribute to their immersion can take the "hard" setting. If you feel that this wouldn't be a solution to this particular concern, then feel free to explain why. :)
In short: Please consider that not every post of mine addresses you, or a topic that you've been discussing. :)
Really the only thing I agreed on with Psyringe is the want to have an immersive detective sim and to have some level of difficulty doing it, but I also never said I wanted to be forced to do mindless tasks with no thought process such as knocking on a hundred doors due to having clues that could apply to a hundred people.
In no way was I offering a definite solution.
Like i said earlier you annoy me. You're too old to be acting like a smug little kid. It's frustrating to interact with.
So unless the game is going to start hooking up to Chat GPT or something to generate more interesting and specific clues then I don't know how else clues can be better. Even then, it might only solve the text/written part of the clues and not the visuals or actual programming to actually make it work.
We can agree to disagree on that part. :) The objective of my post was not to convince you of my point of view, but to make it understandable where my point of view is coming from and how it works. It seems that I managed that, and that makes me happy. :)
I will say that as someone who has insight into the sales figures of many games (it's part of my day job), I have a lot of confidence into potential sales figures of indie games that "break the mold". But I obviously can't predict the future, and my expectation that Shadows of Doubt can do well as a niche title that defies some current conventions of game design might be too optimistic. It's impossible to tell.
What I'm thinking about, are things like these:
- Before the "indie revolution" took place, it had become a widely accepted convention of game design that players should be shielded from frustration. Then a little platformer named "Super Meat Boy" came along and presented punishingly difficult gameplay - and it became a bestseller. It was so successful that it spawned literally hundreds of other games who have all been marketed explicitly as "difficult" games. In the years prior to Super Meat Boy, no one in games marketing would have even thought about doing that, because it was "common knowledge" that players don't want to experience frustration. But as it turned out, that "common knowledge" was wrong.
- The game "I Wanna Be The Guy" that I mentioned earlier has a similar story. It was a free-to-play title though, but it was so successful that several commercial titles were released afterwards that advertised "punishing, unfair" as a positive element to their target audience.
- And then there's of course Dark Souls and the way how it transformed modern RPGs and how their difficulty is perceived.
In short, my point is: It's not only worth trying to break established conventions from time to time, it can even lead to great success. I believe that Shadows of Doubt has the potential to be successful as a title that breaks some conventions. But again, this is speculation, and if you have a different opinion, then I'll respect that. :)
Just to be clear: On a general level, I agree with that. I think that tweaking that balance would do the game good. I just don't think that _every_ case needs to be solvable with a standard amount of effort, or have an "adequate" reward by contemporary conventions.
Yes - as I said earlier, the existence of cases where the client "magically" knows things that he logically can't, is a problem (but a different one).
1. You criticized me for (in your eyes) misunderstanding that "the problem" is the existence of cases where (in your own words) "clients know nothing but the shoe size of the target".
2. I clarified that there are several different topics being discussed in this thread. One (mainly put forward by you) is the topic mentioned above, let's call it the "shoe size issue". Another (which can be seen in many posts in this thread) is the general difficulty and amount of effort required to solve cases, let's call that the "difficulty issue".
3. I clarified that the "difficulty option" that Serath suggested would be useful for the difficulty issue, but not the shoe size issue.
4. I expressed my surprise that you would think that my post addressed the shoe size issue when it clearly did not.
In short: I was replying to a different part of this discussion than you thought, and instead of realizing this, you apparently thought that I was just obtuse. But this discussion is not exclusively about you and the topics you care about, others have brought (and keep bringing) their own thoughts and spin-offs into it. And one of those I replied to.