are scripted levels/missions really that bad?

[shootthebandit]

Im going to start off by making a few sweeping generalisations so i do apologise. First off im going to say that people who regularly play videogames are not too keen on scripted levels and second off im going to assume that a trait that of people who play videogames is that of problem solving and "thinking outside the box". By that i mean gamers tend to be able to exploit the mechanics of the game to complete the objective easily (i wouldnt say glitching just using the tools you have to best use, or maybe even finding a use they are not intended to have). Basically what im trying to get at is that given free reign over an objective the gamer will 9 times out of 10 find the easiest method rather than what may be the most fun or exciting. Some games where the player is given free reign they are often guided towards the "best" approach which i think is probably the best approach as you still have freedom yet the developer subtly points out the way they intended

Here are a few recent examples from GTA V where i feel that id been given a bit too much free reign and made it a bit too easy for myself (coincidentally all heist setups)

1) i had to steal a big garbage truck (could be applied to any vehicle required for a heist set up) for one mission but when you steal it you instantly get a 2* wanted level which as you know can be hard to shake at the best of times but with a sluggish garbage truck that handles like a barge it was very hard. So i dipped into my bag of tricks and pulled out a tow truck. Simply hooked it up to the rear of the truck (in order to lift the rear wheels) and simply towed it to the mission marker (i wouldve prefered a cargobob to a towtruck but sadly i dont have $2,000,000)

2) spoilers of maryweather heist set up:

Spoiler

i had to steal the cargobob which seems like an impossible feat (or at least a really difficult one) however i seemed to pull it off flawlessly first try. I didnt try a specific entrance, i just plummeted trevors helicopter right next to the cargobob before they could lock on to me and simply took it

3) spoilers of bank heist in the sticks set up:

Spoiler

i had to hijack a convoy of military hardware so i decided to follow the convoy until it got to a long straight and i had a fairly accurate guess as to the separation of the 2 humvees so i simply placed 2 sticky bombs at those distances and boom both humvees down then i sniped the truck driver. Minimal mess minimal effort. I dont know if rockstar expected some sort of prolonged firefight

Im sure im not to only one to have used these methods but it just seems that my natural instinct has let most missions (where i have free reign) fall into my lap without any major firefights or incidents. Im not saying that a bad thing, im actually pretty proud of these examples but at the same time i feel like ive just breezed through what shouldve been difficult scenarios

TLR: scripting more often than not gives the player the "best" option however given free reign the player may make it too easy for themself by utilising a massive toolset

 

[Malbourne]

CHEATING THE LEVEL IS THE FAULT OF THE GAME DES-Hghk!

I mean, if the levels were set up that way, then obviously your tactics are legitimate! I haven't played GTAV, but I can pretend like I know what I'm talking about: a good free-roam game will give you tools, not exploits, and a smart player can use those tools to tweak a challenge to their advantage. Other games might be more clever in implementing this sort of thing, but no examples really spring to mind...

I say if helicopters are in your toolbox, you have as much right to use them as the monkey wrench. And that you have a big toolbox.

 

[Silvanus]

Some of my favourite levels or "missions" ever are very much scripted.

I can't speak for GTA specifically (the only ones I played extensively were GTA2 and Vice City), but heavily scripted missions have been some of my greatest video game experiences overall.

...I'll lurk in this thread from now on, because I'm quite interested to know how unpopular heavily scripted stuff is.

 

[shootthebandit]

CHEATING THE LEVEL IS THE FAULT OF THE GAME DES-Hghk!

I mean, if the levels were set up that way, then obviously your tactics are legitimate! I haven't played GTAV, but I can pretend like I know what I'm talking about: a good free-roam game will give you tools, not exploits, and a smart player can use those tools to tweak a challenge to their advantage. Other games might be more clever in implementing this sort of thing, but no examples really spring to mind...

I say if helicopters are in your toolbox, you have as much right to use them as the monkey wrench. And that you have a big toolbox.

GTA 5 is just so big that when they let you loose and say "you need car x for this mission" you dont just enter a mission, car x will just be driving around (usually a preset route) so you basically freeroam until you get it. So you have every tool available on the map to help you including but not limited to helicopters (including a chinook style lifting chopper), jetskis, planes, tanks (assuming you have 3mil or are skilled enough to steal one) and 3 separate guys. Like i said i dont think ive cheated the system i just think ive made good use of the tools available but perhaps ive taken some of the challenge away (its worth noting that all 3 examples i did first time by sheer gut instinct)

Some of my favourite levels or "missions" ever are very much scripted.

I can't speak for GTA specifically (the only ones I played extensively were GTA2 and Vice City), but heavily scripted missions have been some of my greatest video game experiences overall.

...I'll lurk in this thread from now on, because I'm quite interested to know how unpopular heavily scripted stuff is.

I agree entirely i think some scripted events are amazing. I (like most people) am obssessed with GTA at the minute and its a good mix because the set ups (eg steal vehicle or piece of equipment needed for the task/heist) tend to take place seamlessly inside freeroam yet when you get into the big missions they tend to be very scripted but these are the highlights of the game

I think a good game should incorporate both heavily scripted set pieces and player choice and have a good balance and pacing between the 2. Which is something rockstar has pulled off with a slight dip in pace at points but overall very impressive

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

I'd say scripted levels only become bad if they restrict the player AND the player becomes acutely aware of this.

I don't remember all the details but there is a section in MoH: Warfighter where you breach a door and then you have to call in an airstrike on a building. The way the level design is set up makes it look like there are alternatives, but there aren't. You can't turn back because the door you breached is now whole again and indestructible. You can't circle around and call in the strike from a different position, because moving too far left, right or forward kills you. You can't move into the building to clear it, because of the same reason. You can't snipe the occupants because they'll just keep spawning. The only possible way of advancing is to call the airstrike in exactly the way the game tells you to and the game does a poor job of hiding that scripted nature.

If you only have one solution, then design your level so it guides the player towards that one solution, fool him into thinking it is the only feasible way. If not, don't punish the player for breaking the mold.

 

[sneakypenguin]

I don't mind scripting except when I can tell exactly when something is gonna happen like RE6 o this random dead guy is gonna hop up when i pass him probably at this texture.(pass texture and yep hear him get up)

Good scripting ie you don't notice it unless you replay or really analyze something is awesome.

 

[skywolfblue]

Scripting is great, so long as there are a few guidelines to keep it from restricting too much:

1) Give a reason for why they're taking an ability/freedom away. Superman is in a warehouse surrounded by boxes labeled "Kyrptonite"...

2) Provide some leeway and gameplay within the new context. Superman is now weak and helpless, he'll have to stealth his way out of here because he doesn't have powers... cue several stealth routes/options.

3) Entice players to follow the script via gameplay and story, don't force them to via invisible walls or inexplicably closed doors. Rather then being bumbed that their freedom is taken away and they're being railroaded down a path they have no choice in, a player should be excited by the sequence.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

I'd say scripted levels only become bad if they restrict the player AND the player becomes acutely aware of this.

I don't remember all the details but there is a section in MoH: Warfighter where you breach a door and then you have to call in an airstrike on a building. The way the level design is set up makes it look like there are alternatives, but there aren't. You can't turn back because the door you breached is now whole again and indestructible. You can't circle around and call in the strike from a different position, because moving too far left, right or forward kills you. You can't move into the building to clear it, because of the same reason. You can't snipe the occupants because they'll just keep spawning. The only possible way of advancing is to call the airstrike in exactly the way the game tells you to and the game does a poor job of hiding that scripted nature.

If you only have one solution, then design your level so it guides the player towards that one solution, fool him into thinking it is the only feasible way. If not, don't punish the player for breaking the mold.

Ahh, TotalBiscuits 'every wrong with MMS in a nutshell' video.

 

[RJ 17]

Snip.

What you're describing isn't really a "scripted" event.

A scripted event usually involves heavy amounts of plot armor and that's why people get pissed off about them. Take Kai Leng in ME3, people HATED that bastard because of scripted events that prevented you from killing him when you first meet him on the Citadel and again on Thessia. A "scripted event" is one where you're forced to lose a fight that you ordinarily could win quite easily. Why? Because the writers say you're supposed to lose that one.

The thing about GTA V is that it's all about problem solving. There is no right, wrong, or expected way to do the missions...at least not most of them. For instance, I'll go with the examples you pointed out:

1: One of the "bonus objectives" (which I gave up a long time ago on fulfilling ) for the garbage truck was to steal it and get it back to base WITH NO DAMAGE DONE TO THE TRUCK. That's literally impossible if you're trying to shake the police in the process, as such busting out a tow truck to do the job is actually probably one of the only ways you could pull that off. You may have thought you were thinking outside the box, but apparently you were playing right into Rockstar's Hands.

3: Same thing with the Convoy, I'm pretty sure one of the bonus objectives was to blow up both the hummers. I did it Mad Max style and rode up along side them with sticky-bombs and just chucked them onto the doors.

2:

Spoiler: Maryweather Heist Spoilers

I'm guessing you went with the heist plan that didn't involve blowing up the ship? Cause I decided to sink the tanker. Still, my point remains that Rockstar often wants you to find the path of least resistance. If a mission felt particularly easy then it's because you thinking along the lines the game was wanted you to. In most missions there will conveniently be a vehicle that will help you out quite a bit, often right where you need it. Why? Because getting into a gun fight with 30 pissed off mercenaries isn't good for your health. So if you just swooped in with a chopper and literally picked up the Cargobob, then you avoided a bit fight...and that's what you're supposed to do.

Keep in mind: professional thieves don't necessary WANT to have to mow down an army of guys just to get what they're after.

GTA is a game built on finding the easiest possible way to complete your objective. That's why almost every mission has a bonus objective of completing it in a timely manner. It WANTS you to find ways to do what you gotta do easily.

Take me, for instance. As soon as the Minigun became available for purchase, you bet your ass I got one for every single one of my characters.

Spoiler: And as such it made some missions a complete joke, like this one that happens towards the end of the game.

The mission where you have to save Michael from the Chinese as Franklin. I walked into that meat processing factory like "Say hello to mah little friend!!!" and just mowed my way through with absolutely no resistance at all...because, you know, I had a frickin' MINIGUN!

 

[Hero of Lime]

I usually like more freedom, but I don't hate scripted moments. Unless the whole game is one giant, heavily scripted set piece, then I will probably be very turned off to the game.

 

[runic knight]

I just finished Farcry 3 recently having found enough free time to play it and not having any games I wanted to play first, or play more of. I liked it except the scripted events. Every time the game took over for the sake of the story I felt like someone took the controller from me and went "no no no, you are doing it wrong, you can't do it that way, you have to see all these set pieces I made with characters you don't care about in situations that reveal how inhuman they are".
I loved having to take down compounds. Making use of the right guns and tools and knowing how enemies would respond was fun. I would often use silenced sniper rifle after carefully paining targets and leaving mines and c4 in certain locations. Then I'd pick off an enemy or two, release the animals penned up and let the mines finish off the ones looking for me. Great fun. and when they failed and I had to change tactics on the fly, it was a nature change from stealth to panicked run and gun nature that was also memorable and fun at times.
Then I had to do story missions that forced using weapons and tactics I disliked, vehicles I hated and turret sections that made me wish I could get out and just use my trusty rifle on foot to cover the escape.
I can't remember much of any story mission I was scripted into outside of general dislike for the vehicles or forced behavior and lots of self congratulations of the creators using the character's voices like puppets. The events I made myself through careful planning, or those that backfired or failed hilariously and forced me to change tactics though are still remembered.

Scripted events take away freedom from the player and no matter how it is presented, there will always be that feeling of being cheated by the game for it. It is bad enough when plot armor is given to bad guys so you can't just break into his compound and execute him even though you have shown the skill to take on entire armies, or that you have to use quick time events to kill him rather then an actual satisfying fight. Scripted events just feel like more like a price to be paid because the developers wanted to show off cool events when instead they should trust the gamers to come up with their own through gameplay itself.

What you describe seems far closer to what games should do, in allowed the player to tackle things outside of the box. There was options to some degree and you weren't forced on rails to do it exactly the way they wanted or else game over.

 

[Something Amyss]

SNIP

While what you're saying about GTA is true, there certainly are a lot of points where it feels scripted. Almost any chase scene, it seems like it doesn't matter what I'm driving. I understand sometimes this is necessary for the story, but others it doesn't seem to be at all.

And there are several points where stealth isn't an option, though it would seem logically it should be.

Also, am I the only one who shook the cops on that garbage truck acquisition? I just dodged their line of sight for a little bit. I would have a gold, but I can't drive for shit in video games.

But anyway, yeah. His examples aren't really scripted. Those are cool, though sometimes I don't know what the frell I'm doing. Scripted scenes in GTA tend to feel restrictive because you have all these tools and then they're gone. Or restricted.

I don't mind linear and scripted, but I don't want it all the time. Sandboxes are a place where I'd like to see that minimised.

 

[RJ 17]

SNIP

While what you're saying about GTA is true, there certainly are a lot of points where it feels scripted. Almost any chase scene, it seems like it doesn't matter what I'm driving. I understand sometimes this is necessary for the story, but others it doesn't seem to be at all.

Obviously there are some scripted events, such as chasing down someone or in some cases making your get away when you have to follow someone else...the AI car is always going to take the same route. I was just saying that the examples that the OP brought up weren't really scripted events.

Spoiler: Sometimes scripted events can be pretty fun, though...or at least they end up showing us something pretty neat

Like the mission where you have to chase down Molly, the douche-bag's lawyer after she steals the movie Michael's been "working" on, and you end up on a scripted chase. You can never catch her, there's cops flying all over the place, and it ends with the biggest "OH SHIT!" moment in the entire game...at least for me. Seriously, seeing what happens to her at the end of that mission literally made me say "Ohhhhhhh shit!"...it was frickin' awesome. :3

And no, you're not the only one who shook the cops in the garbage truck, I did that too. The way I did it was I just jumped in the truck, got my stars, jumped back out, and ran off and hid until they went away. I've come to find that it's infinitely easier (at least for me) to lose the cops while on foot rather than trying to lose them in a vehicle...especially if said vehicle's a frickin' garbage truck.

 

[OneCatch]

I'd say scripted levels only become bad if they restrict the player AND the player becomes acutely aware of this.

I don't remember all the details but there is a section in MoH: Warfighter where you breach a door and then you have to call in an airstrike on a building. The way the level design is set up makes it look like there are alternatives, but there aren't. You can't turn back because the door you breached is now whole again and indestructible. You can't circle around and call in the strike from a different position, because moving too far left, right or forward kills you. You can't move into the building to clear it, because of the same reason. You can't snipe the occupants because they'll just keep spawning. The only possible way of advancing is to call the airstrike in exactly the way the game tells you to and the game does a poor job of hiding that scripted nature.

If you only have one solution, then design your level so it guides the player towards that one solution, fool him into thinking it is the only feasible way. If not, don't punish the player for breaking the mold.

Pretty much this. All games have limitations, and overcome them in different ways. But when it's so obviously railroaded that you can't do anything but follow a specific sequence in precisely the way the game ordains, it gets irritating. The classic egregious example is the end of MW2 where

Spoiler

you're playing as the new SAS guy retreating down a hill, get knocked down by a scripted event, and get executed by Shepard. Except on harder difficulties the bit before that almost always kills you, so you end up trying it about 30 times not to die, to end up dying anyway at the hand of the game

It would have been much less frustrating if they'd programmed something in where if you get knocked down running to the chopper it just goes to the same cutscene, given you end up getting a scripted knockout anyway.

Another one in MW3 is the bit in Sierra Leone, where you're ordered not to kill some stereotypically nasty militiaman because it'll give away your location. A decent way of handling that would have been to have a mini boss fight, drop in some reinforcements, make the rest of the mission tougher, have Captain Whatshisname have a go at you for complicating things. But instead it just instakills you, even if you're prone directly behind some impervious cover. Which is kind of immersion breaking.

Scripted events aren't a bad thing, but because we're all used to organic gameplay now it's much more important that they're well disguised.
Half Life 2 is pretty old now, but the behaviour of the Striders in that was a decent mixture of set pieces and organic gameplay.

 

[OneCatch]

I prefer semi-restricted games like Dragon Age:Origins, Mass Effect or Morrowind. Freedom is pointless if it just means boredom.

I think either end of the scale of rail-roaded-restriction or total freedom is a tough ask to pull off successfully.

In what sense is Morrowind restricted?
I'd have thought that it was about the most openworld game there is (within the constraints of the engine and graphics and so on).
I don't know about Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

 

[Maximum Bert]

I dunno scripted levels can be fun when done properly I mean things like Rhythm action games and on rails shooters and light gun games are pretty much all scripted and they can be done well.

More freedom dosent make it a better or worse game usually I find games that try and offer huge world to be pretty dull as they forget the game and just add in certain scripted events to fill in for that. The Elder Scrolls series tends to get it right while GTA tends to fall flat at least for me and a lot of people I talk to.

Also just finished to the moon and the walking dead not a lot of freedom there but I loved playing them both. I am now playing Skullgirls where it has a system and you have to understand the system to play but it does offer a lot of flexibility within its system which can be self tailored to your skill. However progression in the story mode is very tightly scripted as you would expect.

 

[OneCatch]

I prefer semi-restricted games like Dragon Age:Origins, Mass Effect or Morrowind. Freedom is pointless if it just means boredom.

I think either end of the scale of rail-roaded-restriction or total freedom is a tough ask to pull off successfully.

In what sense is Morrowind restricted?
I'd have thought that it was about the most openworld game there is (within the constraints of the engine and graphics and so on).
I don't know about Dragon Age or Mass Effect.

Traveling is, with fast travel being limited to a specific set of routes and access (I think how they did it was superb - a fantastic balance)

Also the areas are restricted by level/power. Certain areas are pretty much inaccessible until you reach a certain level. Whereas other games have the world level up with you.

I'd never really thought about it in that way, but fair point! I think that limiting by player skill and abilities is absolutely fine, it's scripting that prevents you from doing stuff that you'd otherwise be able to believably do as the player character that's a problem.

And Morrowind never does that (it's one of the things that's so fantastic about it). If you want to go climb Red Mountain or pick a fight with Ordinators at level two you can, it's just very stupid and you'll die very quickly.
Similarly, you aren't prevented from using transport arbitrarily on certain missions, there aren't instakills for doing a mission the 'wrong' way, hell, you can even kill story-critical characters (though it does warn you to reload if you do). Such a good game for roleplaying immersion.

 

[MrBaskerville]

When it comes to level design in action games, some of my favourite designs are those in Final Doom (Both TNT and Plutonia)and Shadow Warrior/Duke3D. One of the main reasons is that i prefer action games that let you play with a set of rules and which relies on exploration, you are playing in a nicely constructed set of boundaries where the usual rules applies, if that makes any sense (i have some trouble formulating these ideas in english :/). I don´t like when a game is too scripted because it usually takes away some of the tools in your toolbox, for instance it might force you to use a sniper rifle in a segment and a turret in another, which is something i find quite frustrating and boring. I want my available choices to change because of the way the level is designed and because of the enemies i encounter and items i find, not because the designers decided to arbitrarily change the rules of the game for whatever reason.

Probably one of the reason why i hate games like GTA, one mission you have to use a turret and another is a car chase where you die if you stray too far from the scripted path and then there´s suddenly a big cover shooting segment... Too messy for my taste and quite annoying because a lot of the segments tend to be poorly executed (Curse the Tar Pits in L.A. Noire and the helicopter mission early in Vice City, not to mention every racing segment in every game ever :/).