tepples wrote:
Used games often come without their accompanying manuals.
I don't think this matters. The user doesn't have to read the copyright for it to be valid, it just has to be available for it to be valid. That's the whole point behind "fine print". Nobody actually cares about it or reads it, but if there's a legal problem, lawyers can point to it and say "we told you about it here".
Granted neither of us are lawyers, so this whole discussion is rather pointless. But I'm pretty sure a game's copyrights and trademarks are just as protected whether the fine print is subtle in a manual, or in your face for 5 minutes. Legally, I doubt it makes any difference at all. As long as it's there, it counts.
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Everyone knows things are copyrighted and trademarked.
But not everybody knows from whom the publisher has licensed the underlying copyrights, patents, and trademarks that make up a work.
But nobody cares.
People who care can go through the trouble of looking it up in the manual or online.
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From the first level of Goldeneye 007: Put a satellite modem on the outdoor data terminal, go into the bunker under the dam, and run a remote backup at the computer's main terminal. How do you make that objective discoverable to a casual player?
When you approach the outdoor data terminal have some kind of icon pop up indicating you're supposed to do something there (like a "!" symbol or something). That combined with a "help" option in the menu or something similar that tells you want the "!" symbol means.
Do the same thing with the computer's main terminal. If you do things out of order, then the "!" should indicate that you need to do something else first.
(note many games already do this. See Borderlands for XBox 360. Your mission objective and how to fulfill it is easily viewable anytime)
For players that have gone through the game a hundred times and find such guides distracting/annoying, they can disable it in the game's menu.
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So that means you need to keep two copies of the description of each mission objective: one formatted as the cut scene and one formatted for display within the menu
Yes.
Is it really so unreasonable to put a few additional sentences of text in a game? What is it, like 100 bytes of data?
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But whenever there are two copies of anything, and one can't be automatically generated from the other, they'll accidentally fall out of sync during development.
Not if the game testers are on their toes. That's exactly the kind of thing they get paid to look for.
I've played games like this in the past. Most recently was Shadow Complex for XBox 360. It had:
- cutscenes giving you a basic idea of what you need to do (could all be skipped)
- a map with a path line drawn on it telling you where you need to go (could be disabled if you choose)
- a brief description of your current mission at the top of the map screen.
It was great. I love playing that game. Extremely high replay value.
Does it make life a little harder for the game developers? Sure. But so does any worthwhile game feature. It's a tradeoff, more work for a better product.
Skippable cutscenes make for a much better product. Always. I stand by that.
Let me turn that around on you, too. What if you watched the cutscene and
forgot your objective. Or say you saved the game mid-level and didn't play the game again for another 2 months, and when you pick it up you don't have the foggiest idea of what you were doing last time you played.
Is the player supposed to start over?
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Also, I find it strange that you bring up a point about redundant data in a game
in advocacy of cutscenes. Cutscenes are pretty much always redundant. Whatever the cutscene tells you to do will already have to be duplicated in the game logic, so you're already doubling up on information.
/EDIT
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3) Have a mark on the map indicating where you go next
Which isn't ideal if one of the objectives is to extend your automap into the fog of war.
Well then obviously you would do one of the previous two options.