I was talking with my brother and at one point he mentioned how more games needed detailed maps.
The thing about this is he can get lost walking down a straight corridor. He played a bit of my copy of Resident Evil 4 this past weekend and it drove me nuts that he spent forever walking in circles. He has difficulty with even the most elementary navigation. I’ve seen him get lost in straight paths. Repeatedly. And I don’t mean he’s gotten lost in a few different straight paths, I mean he’s somehow managed to double back on himself halfway down the same straight hallway multiple times.
It takes a completely crazy map to get me lost in a game and it’s a rare game these days which feature a complicated enough environment with too few visual cues to throw me off even slightly. I cannot think of the last time I had a real problem navigating in game or I would give an example but I’m not so full of myself to say that it never happens (probably a sandbox game which may have taken me a little bit of time to learn the general layout of the area).
So I’m curious on this topic. Do you find that the visual cues and simple maps of modern games make navigation extremely simple or do you still have trouble finding your way around in games?
City of Heroes features different environments for the instanced missions. One is a mystical cave environment, which features soft lighting in purple and blue. The problem is that, due to the uniformity of lighting and the irregular terrain, it’s very hard to glean proper visual cues, and several of my friends easily get lost despite the minimap. It just looks like a big mess of blue, and determining what’s a passage and what’s a wall is extremely difficult.
I get really freaking lost. All the time. I find them disorienting. I still like to play, but the more 3-D they get the worse it is.
I also suck really, really hard at any game where you have to control vehicles. I want to play the new GTA, and I bought it, but I’m having a bitch of a time driving. I can’t help but hit all the pedestrians and miss the turns and drive into buildings. I also can’t keep the camera so I can see where I’m going. On the other hand, the Rockstar minimap does work for me.
ETA - the first game I played where the navigation helped at all was the first Halo, where when it decided you’d wandered enough an arrow popped up. I loved that.
I found myself frequently checking the maps in Metroid Prime Echoes a lot. That’s a big ass map and when you have to start switching between the light & dark dimensions and all the doors you’re used to aren’t there - that’s a bitch. Fun though.
You know, the weird thing is, I have really good spatial sense, particularly for a girl. I’m great at those “which one of these is this shape if I turned it over” puzzles. I think it’s that video game spaces are so “not-real” that I can’t process them, and when I 'turn" in them I’m so obviously not turning that I get disoriented.
That doubling back without ever leaving a straight path thing? Done it. A lot.
I’m playing Final Fantasy XII right now…was almost a hundred hours in before I could navigate Rabanastre without getting lost. (Edit - oh, and this is my second run through the game I’m talking about here…)
The Sphere building in Star Ocean 3? With its identical walkways? Good luck.
I only get lost in FPS multiplayer maps. Until I get my bearings and/or have played the map several times in a row, I’m just a blind guy with a gun running around hoping to find somebody to shoot at. Single-player games don’t really give me any trouble unless it’s supposed to get me lost, i.e. a maze or the game doesn’t give you a mini-map for the purpose of confusing you.
For the record, I came into this thread thinking it was going to be “lost in video games” more in the sense of ‘wow I just spent 12 hours playing a game and really invested myself into it.’ Not the more literal sense of actually being lost. :smack:
I’m very, very good at telling exactly where I am in video games. Most often, I only need to go through an area once to know where I am and how to backtrack efficiently. I also have friends who can never tell where they are in RE4. You know that first part of the village where the church is? My friend Joe ran up to the church 4 or 5 times to check the same door after running in circles around the village!
I don’t know what it is, but video game maps usually just make sense to me. It’s probably from experience. Designer create layouts in a certain way for certain purposes, after all. A lot of times I can figure out what’s ahead on a map just from the beginning section. If I find myself in an area I didn’t expect, sometimes I get a bit miffed at the designers for laying it out so poorly!
I don’t really get lost all that much but I exert a incredible amount of energy towards knowing where I’m going. I almost never make a turn without spinning around twice to make sure I’m turning where I think I am and locating something like a landmark to know when I arrive back there. It’s exhausting and it takes most of the fun out of games for me. I have stopped playing first person games almost entirely because of it. It just isn’t fun for me. Complicating matters is that some games seem to make navigating and learning the map a big part of the challenge of a game and that seem like lazy game designing to me. Give me a map and make things distinctive. Getting lost in a maze of similar looking corridors isn’t my idea of a fun puzzle.
Aha! There’s one I did get lost in and it also had to do with the fact that the maps were all built from the same prefabs. It’s a situation where a good memory and lack of strong visual cues could play some annoying tricks on you.
the only game i got lost in was AvP as an alien, i had to drop down to the floor just to tell where up and down is! otherwise it’s usually quite straightforward. in games like World of Warcraft with distinct landscapes i turn the map off.
I didn’t get lost in RE4, but I’ve been lost in nearly every other game I’ve played. I just started playing Deus Ex and the lack of a mini-map is killing me. The game I felt silliest getting lost in was Kingdom Hearts. The multiple bright colors and unusual geometry made many levels hard to negotiate, but I really felt like a dweeb getting lost in the whale’s stomach in the Pinocchio level. I mean, come on, a little wooden puppet got out of there!
I always get lost in interactive fiction games unless I make a map. As for the rest, it really depends on how good a job the company did in making it understandable.
I got so lost in the outer space part of Super Paper Mario that I handed the WiiMote over to an 8 year old to have him finish the level. I hate “doors” that you have to know the sequence of going through to be able to end the level. Mazes in videogames do the opposite of entertain me.
But games like Resident Evil 4, BioShock, or Assassin’s Creed I’ve had no problem with.
I don’t get “lost” but I overlook the correct way to go all the time. It’s really, really frustrating to spend 20 minutes going around and around in a circle trying to find the stupid little button you’re supposed to push or the tightrope you’re supposed to walk across or the air vent you’re supposed to crawl through that I missed on the first pass-through.
If it wasn’t for the minimap in World of Warcraft, this would happen to me regularly. I’ve been heading due north, gotten in a rough multi-mob fight, and then “continued” south. That minimap is a wonderful feature in the game.
I’ve been playing for a year and a half, and I still have to check the map sometimes in my faction’s capital cities.
I tend to get somewhat confused on FPS maps. Not completely lost, necessarily, but disoriented. I check the map a lot, when I have one. I’m not much of an FPS player in general, though.
Rabanastre was a little confusing. The Great Crystal, on the other hand, nearly drove me to drink. Everything looked alike, there were cryptically named and numbered switches and forcefields, and the “map” was just a picture of the crystal as it might look from a distant airship.
The cave that sort of loops around under itself still throws me off occasionally, even after seeing it for years. I’ve seen people get horribly confused in the Oranbega portal and spire rooms, too.