Is a game bad if it requires a wiki to play?

[Rio]

What do you think.

[snlᴉʇnɐNɔᴉɯsoƆ]

Lore and loot should be discovered. If there is a lot of both, a wiki is fair enough for non-purists.

If you can't make any progress without researching web pages, I don't see how that game would be fun.

[Rio]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Crazed Rabbit:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Radene:

But you can play MC without ever touching the wiki.

before they introduced crafting recipes in the game I have literally zero idea how people could have played the game without a wiki, so many items that you wouldn't even know existed because you wouldn't think of crafting them

Back in the day I used mods like recipie book. A lot of people used not enough items mod.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcuWKpyUGHo

[Incarnate]

I would say it is a bad game if you need to constantly consult walkthroughs.

That was my problem with games like Blood, Hexen, or Unreal. There's a reason old-school games had no clip and cheats to give all keys and skip levels. Pre-2000 level design is basically just Pac-Man levels with 3D textures.

[Polverrati]

No, I'd be more annoyed if a game complicated enough or with so much content to need one instead fed you all that information, imagine all the little notifications every
time you try to do something, "you can do this thing" "learn to craft this thing".

[Martin Harris]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Radene:

Ursprungligen skrivet av MoJean:

well minecraft has a wiki. and that game is pretty simple and very popular

But you can play MC without ever touching the wiki.

Actually before recipe book update, if you never watched any minecraft content I think it'd be pretty hard to figure out how to craft things

[AustrAlien2010]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Incarnate:

I would say it is a bad game if you need to constantly consult walkthroughs.

That was my problem with games like Blood, Hexen, or Unreal. There's a reason old-school games had no clip and cheats to give all keys and skip levels. Pre-2000 level design is basically just Pac-Man levels with 3D textures.

Blood and Unreal can be finished without a walkthrough. I don't know about Hexen. But there must be someone who played that without consulting a guide somewhere on this planet.

[Ash]

Nah. Depending on the game it is fine.

[Tito Shivan]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Mona Lizzard:

Before you start in a world left to your own devices figuring out how to craft a portal to the Nether. Or how to craft a boat.

Or people throwing stuff at the crafting table, guessing out the crafting recipes for the new stuff when an update happened.

Ursprungligen skrivet av ⛧Vexation⛧:

Is a game bad if it requires a wiki to play?

Complex doesn't equate with bad.

The right question is why you're supposed to go to a wiki in order to play the game.

If the only way to advance in the game is through knowledge or mechanics the game doesn't introduce the players to, well that's bad game design and that's bad.

But there's games where the purpose of the wikis is to give easy access to knwoledge the player doesn't need to know by heart all the time. On those cases the wiki just provide ease of access to the game's knowledge base.

That said, in such cases IMHO the wiki should be integrated into the game somehow instead of relying in going out of the game (which can feel a bit like 'metagaming')

It's like walkthroughs. If you need to look at one because the game leaves you stranded with no pointers, that's bad.

[Rio]

I played Ark the first year without a wiki and it went poorly.

Could never find all the caves on the island (Theres 1 cave on scorched earth I would have absolutely never found)
Would have never figured out some dino's prefered tame food

Warped into the boss area with most of my army not warping because the game doesn't tell you boss arenas are restricted based on drag weight (A made up number for how heavy a dino is), no dinos that fly, no dinos that can climb. And each boss area is different.

Would have never learned about custom food/drink crafting.

Theres many situations where I would have died and lost immense amounts of progress. Like who could have known inside a volcano is a forcefield and behind it, it is colder than the arctic? A cave which kills all your army if you die and you can't walk out of if you don't beat its boss.

Without a wiki to learn destroywilddinos The center would become unplayable due to broken dungeon over spawning the surface with mobs.

[Ramonkey]

No

[Incarnate]

Ursprungligen skrivet av AustrAlien2010:

Ursprungligen skrivet av Incarnate:

I would say it is a bad game if you need to constantly consult walkthroughs.

That was my problem with games like Blood, Hexen, or Unreal. There's a reason old-school games had no clip and cheats to give all keys and skip levels. Pre-2000 level design is basically just Pac-Man levels with 3D textures.

Blood and Unreal can be finished without a walkthrough. I don't know about Hexen. But there must be someone who played that without consulting a guide somewhere on this planet.

I'm sure most people did. But if you spend more time backtracking looking for a hidden switch or key than killing monsters that's an annoying game. Devs mostly figured out how to build real levels by Quake and Half Life, but go back and play Wolfenstein 3D or even DOOM. Even nostalgic boomers whine about the map design. Hexen is pure torture.

[Volfogg]

If it's for data limitation reasons happenning with many of old RPG games, I'd understand. Not all old games could afford expanded bestiary, loot tables and dozen or two of help and tips pages for in-game mechanics. Very likely they had such things on booklets included with physical games and later PDFs.

[gugnihr]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Radene:

Yes. If it "requires" it, that's bad design.

Probably a game like that would be an ARG rather than bad design. I mean, how likely it would be for a game to require a wiki to be played and to not be intentional?

[snlᴉʇnɐNɔᴉɯsoƆ]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Incarnate:

Ursprungligen skrivet av AustrAlien2010:

Blood and Unreal can be finished without a walkthrough. I don't know about Hexen. But there must be someone who played that without consulting a guide somewhere on this planet.

I'm sure most people did. But if you spend more time backtracking looking for a hidden switch or key than killing monsters that's an annoying game. Devs mostly figured out how to build real levels by Quake and Half Life, but go back and play Wolfenstein 3D or even DOOM. Even nostalgic boomers whine about the map design. Hexen is pure torture.

Never had the slightest of problems with classic Doom and Quake maps. They were simple. I don't have to wonder where the ♥♥♥♥ I am supposed to go for twenty minutes like Doom III, the 2016 remake, and Fallout 4.

[AWAWA Liz]

Imagine being a kid playing Minecraft for the first time in early alpha. Those were wild, untamed times. Back then I was lucky to play Minecraft at like 14 fps.