Tai, I think you're onto something that I've never seen discussed before, with this (d)evolution in the way that roadblocks have been presented by game devs!
So if I understand you correctly, there are at least two factors that go into creating an "old-school" roadblock:
- The roadblock is placed so that a player traveling on the most obvious path will find the solution before they find the roadblock (or at least before they realize they are completely roadblocked)
- The roadblock is something the player would expect to be non-negotiable, like a strip of land blocking access from one ocean to another, rather than something the player would expect to be negotiable, like a single whirlpool or a guard boat saying "you can't go further"
- (Anything else? Is lack of backtracking a crucial ingredient here?)
Indeed, I think this kind of design feels a lot less onerous, in theory - almost like you're "opening up the layers of a world" rather than being run through mandatory chores to progress the plot. And most RPGs I've played have been from post-2000, but the few I can remember from before that did seem to follow along with your theory that the roadblocks were less obvious - and felt far less contrived as a result.
I suppose one major drawback is that in those old-school games, I sometimes had no idea what I was even
supposed to be doing to progress, but making it more obvious in the uncommon case you find the roadblock
before you find the solution could be a good compromise.
To anyone who's reading this, I'd be very curious to hear what you think! Were roadblocks in "old-school" games significantly different than roadblocks in "new-school" games? Do you feel the old-school approach was better?
The lack of Backtracking isn't necessarily important, but it does help. As with the example with the Elves, you are given some quests, go further into the continent, complete a dungeon, and then have to come back to the Elven castle to even get your explosives. Though, it's signposted well in that you are essentially rescuing a princess and must bring her back to the castle.
As for the first two factors:
Yes, absolutely. I think these are the best way to roadblock your players. For me, they feel less arbitrary. They feel pretty clever of the dev when you suddenly realize you were roadblocked the whole time and now the restriction has been lifted.
There is no feeling of "I need to come back here later". There is no assumption on the part of the player that "I don't need to explore everything here, because I'll be back later to clear this roadblock". You are just playing the game. You are just playing in the way you would normally play the game. Completing the tasks set before you, moving down the path, exploring everything on the mostly linear road... and suddenly you are given the solution to a roadblock you didn't know existed.
"This black goo that looked like set dressing or for ambiance can be cleared with this laser gun? NICE! What can I find by clearing this stuff???"
There are some modern games that do this. Not very many, but some do (in the black goo example, most games make it 90000% obvious that the black goo can be cleared long before giving you the means to do so... highlighting it as an obvious roadblock, which ruins the sense of wonder and exploration and forces you to remember every single instance of the roadblock so you can come back later to clear it). For me, such a thing is an absolute delight. It reinvigorates my sense of exploration all over again. Just as with getting the ship. "I can traverse the ocean now? Where can I go???" And later, "I get to drive my boat into the actual ocean and get out of this lake? What is waiting for me out there???" A limitation I didn't know I had is suddenly removed. Some unseen shackles have been unlocked.
Though, yeah, you would need to signpost where the player is meant to go. A lot of the old school games tended to do this by just keeping the player to a relatively linear path. Or, opening up the world in "sections". Once you'd seen everything in the section you were in, you were given the means to travel to the next one. Sort of like a "room and corridor" design philosophy, except with world maps. And it wasn't really obvious that you were moving through rooms and corridors. Because... well... great map design.
At the most general level, the best way to ensure your reward will be "valuable" is to make it unique (and just to make sure it's not balanced so terribly that no one wants to use it - that's not a hard task). For example, a Demi spell in a game where all the other damage is based on traditional formulas, or an accessory that makes all your attack magic deal either 30% (half the time) or 200% (half the time) of its usual damage, or an entirely new (optional) party member. All of these things offer an exciting new way to play, and should be a good reward no matter when the player finds it.
While this is true, you then have to balance the rest of the game around such powerful spells, items, and characters. You'll have to operate on the assumption that the player will have them the moment the game offers them to the player. So, you'll now be balancing for two types of players. The type that never bothered to get the reward... and the type who did manage to get the reward. Not just for the next boss encounter... but for the entire rest of the game. A player with access to extra power is naturally going to be a much more powerful party down the line (not just from this reward, but from quickly and easily vacuuming up more XP, monster drops, and currency due to being able to handle more powerful threats and needing to expend less resources) than one without this extra power. It can easily turn into a "snowball effect". The more of these "optional challenges" you have, the more types of players you'll need to balance for. What if someone skipped the first challenge, but did the second one? You now need to balance for their scale of power as well as the person who did both optional challenges and the one who did neither. You then also have to balance for the player who did the first challenge, but skipped the second. You now need to balance for four levels of power. It gets exponentially more difficult as you continue to add more "optional challenges" with spells/items/new characters as rewards.
And that's nothing to say of then needing to consider that some players will go backwards to the previous challenges after completing new ones in order to reap those rewards as well.
Which is, of course, assuming the reward is valuable as "direct power" to the player to begin with. Very tricky to make "direct power" valuable to both players at the beginning of the game and players at the end of the game, without destroying balance of your encounters and boss fights altogether.
I think something of utility to the player would go over better. "Indirect Power". Something they can use at any level and stage in the game in order to obtain direct power. A membership card to the Casino, perhaps (where you can trade chips for valuable weapons/armor/items/etcetera)? An item that lets them teleport back to the beginning of a dungeon and doesn't get consumed?
I think indirect power would work best. But, that's just my opinion. I can not imagine trying to balance a game around direct power like that. Or at least... attempting to preserve the challenge I'd wanted for the players.
With that said, if the optional path is mostly challenging because of the high-level enemies there, I would question whether we even need to make sure the reward is good for a player who comes back much later in the game and stomps it with their highly-leveled party. After all, if there's no longer any great challenge, then why should there be a great reward? I think it's nice to have something exciting still awaiting at the end of that path, but not necessary for the player who didn't take it on when it was difficult. That's why I think that a spell or equip that you normally wouldn't get until considerably later in the game is a fine reward. Because it's still very exciting for a player who takes on the challenge when it's... you know, challenging.
On paper, that seems very reasonable. They skipped the reward, so when they come back to do it, the reward isn't worth as much.
However... in practice... you're then not creating "optional" rewards. The reward is only valuable at low levels, so the challenge must be tackled the instant it is available. There is no option to come back later. Get it now to gain the edge, because it's not an edge later. By and large... a player will seek out that edge if they know it is one. The optional path is now the Optimal way to Play. We're then running into the issue Pokémon had quite a while back with one of their "challenges".
There was a gym in which it was a "quiz show" (they've repeated this mistake quite a lot, but haven't repeated the quiz show idea). You had to answer a piece of trivia. If you answered correctly, the door opened and you didn't have to fight. This is the least optimal way to play. Ever. Here's how you should approach it: Challenge the person to a fight, win the fight. Trainer encounters give more experience than wild encounters. Trainer encounters are also the only way to get Currency (aside from selling items you find). Deliberately fail the trivia portion, get the fight, unlock the door when it's over. Pokémon has repeated this mistake in many gyms (Oh, you failed this portion of the puzzle, now you have to fight a Trainer!). The failure state is better than the success state.
I see a similar issue here if you don't balance the item for a player to pick it up at any stage in the game. The only real way to play is to tackle it regardless. It's only an option for players ignorant of the design of it. The moment they complete any optional challenge and realize what power lies in wait... they'll go back to the previous ones. At higher power levels, they'll immediately realize that what they're given is only valuable the moment they get access to the area. All future optional challenges then cease to become challenges and instead become mandatory content (as a dev, you didn't plan it as mandatory, but the player will feel it is, will act as if it is, and will operate on the assumption that your game is balanced for this content and they need it in order to curb stomp your content).
It is difficult to manage the expectations of your players. Very difficult to hit the target of "reward equals the challenge". Especially if that reward has to be balanced for the rest of a 20 hour game (or more). Especially if you want to keep the reward from allowing the player to trounce the rest of your game with ease.
The fact that there was a clear, wide, bright, forward-facing "main path", as well as a shadowy, crookedy (but still clearly visible) "side path", at a fork in the dungeon was certainly a good hint.
It's still not always obvious. Is this just a regular side path or is it optional challenge? Is this optional challenge, or a second path through this area and I'm meant to backtrack through here later at a later point for plot reasons?
As a player, you have no way to know. Not until you're already on the path.
An instant-death roadblock here might be a good indicator to the player that they don't have what is necessary to progress this way if it's meant to be a roadblock...
But... aren't really strong monsters a roadblock? Some devs think so.
In Fallout: New Vegas, the "main path" to New Vegas is blocked off to you as a new player at Level 1 by extremely annoying and powerful enemies that will kill you in nearly one shot. However, a clever/lucky player can get through this path without issue and bypass about 40% of the game's content by doing so. At level 1. With crap gear.
If they miss that way to get to New Vegas, there's a secondary road you can take a little later that gives you a direct route to New Vegas as well. It's similarly guarded by strong creatures (less strong than the first ones). A clever player can take this path and use the geometry to kill the strong enemies without getting touched/killed, and bypass about 30% of the content of the game in doing so. At about Level 3-5, provided they have enough ammo to kill a single enemy. Or, maybe two, if they're unlucky with the spawns.
In both instances, the player can reach the goal of the game, which is "New Vegas", at very early levels, and immediately jump several scales in power by doing so. New Vegas has encounters near it that are fairly trivial and drop very good equipment for low levels (the equipment isn't worth picking up if you had come around the intended path). The power jump in this equipment is so pronounced to a Level 1-5, that it allows those players to actually tackle enemies meant for Level 11-15 without too much issue and "power level" their character in doing so. The challenge of the game has been broken. It isn't much longer after that, that they can then go back to those "road blocks" of tough enemies and kill them legitimately and farm them for more levels. End game enemies able to be farmed in the game in about 5 hours of play time. All a player has to do is be moderately clever and slightly lucky.
So, how is a player to know that your "optional content" of strong enemies isn't just a road block instead? Or know that it's not a path they come back through into this location later (this also happens a lot in games, where you loop back around to previous areas by tackling high level content along your way)?
Signposting is crucial, but I'm not sure there's much of a way to do it in this instance without breaking some immersion. If the monsters appear too strong, it appears as a roadblock. If too weak, it doesn't appear they're an "optional challenge" either.
Basically... stronger enemies don't make for very good gating. Clever players will always find a way around them to break your game.
Sure, that's funny, but would it be as funny if you knew you had to go back and redo the last hour of your game? At best, it would be akin to those Whammies from Press Your Luck - (humorous) insult to injury.
That happens to me quite frequently. In the example I listed from Halo, where the enemies mock you or say funny things after killing you... sometimes the checkpoint was 10-15 minutes ago. Sometimes it was 30 minutes ago. Depending on when you hit it and how hard you had to struggle to get to the location you died at. Sometimes, you were a single room away from triggering the next checkpoint.
Death was frustrating, but the enemy's reaction to it lessened the blow for me in a lot of cases. This time they wanted my helmet. Last time, they were ecstatic that "the Demon is dead!". Saying it in a slightly incredulous voice as if I'd been quite the challenge to them. As if I were the stuff of nightmares to them. As if I had been "the final boss" to THEIR video game.
It's a nice detail in games that I enjoy, regardless. If the death animation/actions feel worth it to me, I don't mind the death. Do I like losing an hour of progress? No. But, if the death was fairly amusing or interesting... I'm far more likely to forgive it since I'm still getting something out of it. It isn't just, "reload last save?". It is, "oh, you died, but here's a 10 second animation of how horrific that death was" or "the NPC's are absolutely horrified and scared that you died". Or, maybe, just maybe... it's the enemies who killed you complimenting you by wanting to turn you into a trophy... or being completely and utterly surprised that THEY won the fight instead.
It's the little things.
That's why I really like what
@kirbwarrior pointed out: that these instant death sequences can be a great add to a game as a substitute for a traditional roadblock,
as long as they put you right back where you were a few seconds before you walked into them. Best of both worlds, I think, as long as your game doesn't heavily rely on risk/reward as a core dynamic for building tension.
I don't have an issue with them putting you right back to the moment you died. The moment before you jumped off the cliff. Some games do this and it allows me to jump off a second time... or third time... or twenty fifth time... as the mood suits me and if the death is amusing.
Yes, I've jumped off of the highest mountain in Skyrim at least 200 times in varying methods and degrees, just to watch myself ragdoll down to ground level. I've done the same to my horses.
I think there's an argument to be made either way when the challenges are consistent. When you have a lot of puzzles/challenges of the same type, sure, there's a pride that comes with being able to solve/overcome, and the game may feel a bit pointless or empty if you can skip anything that you want to. (That should be balanced against the very real frustration that comes with not being able to enjoy the rest of the game if you happen to get stuck on one of those puzzles/challenges.)
And of course, if you're going to see a lot of a certain type of challenge later, the game should make sure you're ready for it by forcing you to complete the earlier version.
However, my problem isn't as much with the consistent challenges, as the ones that feel very arbitrary. Puzzles in RPGs (where the core challenge dynamic is from party management and combat) are a good example, and the instant deaths like FF3's Swamp are an even better example. But even a pure puzzle game can have challenge element that feels completely arbitrary. For example, a puzzle game filled with logic puzzles, math puzzles, search-for-items type puzzles, detective work... and then out of the blue they throw some random poem at you as a puzzle that requires Biblical knowledge to decipher. You're enjoying those logic puzzles or that detective work. You came for it. You learned the skills and you're applying them. And now you can't do any of those anymore, because you didn't know that certain words from the poem made up a passage from Jacob 27:19, and all of those other puzzles you enjoy are behind a padlock whose code is 2-7-1-9.
I'm probably the only one who feels like any puzzles in an RPG are completely arbitrary.
If that puzzle isn't related to resource management or combat, it tends to just feel completely arbitrary to me.
I also hate them as roadblocks.
Seriously, I don't want to track down 3 key fragments of some emblem for a door in order to get it to unlock. This is silly. It's a waste of time. It's padding. Either let me open the door the moment I find it... or make your dungeon longer so I spend the requisite amount of time you wanted me to spend in here searching for your freakin' key things before I find the door.
If I want to solve puzzles, I'll play a puzzle game. I'll play "Portal", which does it better than any RPG. I'll play "The Witness" if I want something truly frustrating in terms of puzzles. If I want to solve logic puzzles, I'll go online to a website that hosts them and allows me to solve them for points or ranking or whatever instead. I'll go somewhere where solving the puzzle actually has value beyond "you get to complete the rest of the game now" or "you get something really powerful to make completing the game much easier now".
There's a reason I tend to use guides for so many games these days...
Arbitrary inclusion of puzzles is one of them.
No, I don't care if your RPG has puzzles a core gameplay component either (a la Golden Sun). If you stop me every 5 minutes to do a puzzle of some sort, when I'm here to play an RPG... your game is gonna be completed by Walkthrough... if I still care enough to actually complete your game.
There are just much better roadblocks and progression blockades than
puzzles.
I'll leave the picture in here to illustrate the way I feel about encountering a puzzle in an RPG.
I sure hope most players don't think this way!! The most fun part of these optional solutions is the idea that anything you come up with - things the game didn't tell you upfront - might be a legitimate way to do things. You feel smart that you figured something out. You feel a sense of wonder about how your own solution will affect things. And you can't help but smile as the game gracefully handles your input like a clever DM that's always ready for whatever crazy shenanigans your party wants to try to pull.
Looking up every single solution after playing the game through once makes a lot of sense, to vicariously enjoy the creativity that went into the game (I did this with Undertale for instance), or to try out things that you missed and get the entire experience... but playing such a game with a walkthrough on your first run - in my eyes, at least - would be entirely missing the point!
I start most games without a guide. I tend to enjoy exploring on my own, figuring things out on my own, enjoying the experience.
However, most games take the "Deus Ex" approach to choices of solving things. What I think would be the easiest and most logical solution to any given issue... is never accounted for. So, I have to search for the solutions the game developer intended of me. Then, they have the issue of "not all solutions are equal". Even if I didn't place my own personal value on a solution... games often put their own tangible value on their solutions. If you don't kill all the people, your coworkers like you better. If you don't bust open this wall, it is difficult to save all the hostages (still doable, but far more difficult than busting the wall).
The games also give you no indication on which solutions produce which results and which are "optimal" either.
That's not even getting into actual treasure and loot put behind specific choices either.
I end up using a guide for most of these types of "choice" games. How do I tackle this? Well, let me google what the best solution is here. Ah, it's a persuasion check on the castle guards and convincing them that I'm their new jester. Sneaking in through the treasury is least optimal as stealing the treasure makes them tax the peasants more... but pretending to be a jester just leaves me accountable.
Much as I love a hundred solutions to solving any problem in an RPG... it does quite often lead me to just grabbing a guide. What is the best way to get through this area? What choices give the optimal solution to me... as a player?
The very nature of not signposting all the solutions and making some solutions far better than others... well... kills the fun of "exploring" for me. Kills the fun of "feeling clever". Especially when I know that my solution is probably not the best one, and there was some solution that was even better, that I didn't know about, and probably could've never known about without incredible leaps in logic.
In fact, the most powerful experience I ever had with an RPG was Mass Effect 1. The game is all about choices and trying to do clever things to solve problems (at least through talking and making actions from a wheel, rather than freeform open world type stuff).
I thought the best solution I could make at the time was to sacrifice the crew member that I couldn't romance in order to get the romance achievement later. I thought, for sure, there was a way to save both of them. I didn't know how to do it, but I thought there was a way. There had to be a way. I had no access to the internet at the time. I tried everything I could think of to save them both, and thought it was beyond me when I couldn't. So, I made my choice to preserve the achievement.
The game berated me for doing this. Guilted me into making the choice based on 'romance' and not on any strategic or tactical decision. My romance option felt guilty and ashamed of being chosen over the other crew member.
Later, when I had access to the internet... yeah, there's no way to save both. I had to look it up. Just had to know if there was a way to save them both. I'd tried everything, after all. These games
always have a more clever solution. One you didn't consider. A list of requirements and options that are arbitrary or obscure, so you can do all the good things in the game and save everyone and have the best sunshine rainbow happy ending possible.
But, no. The decision I had made... was the best decision I could have made. There was no trick. I didn't miss anything. Someone had to die.
The realization later that there was nothing I could've done, despite this game and all of the other video games before it telling me I could've done something more... That was powerful. It will stick with me forever. The best decision was the one in which I made, no matter what it was. It was made because I put value on the decision, not because the game did. The game doesn't change depending on who I keep alive. If I had chosen the other person who wasn't my romance interest... they'd have berated me and felt guilty as well. They'd have felt my decision wasn't justified either. There was no way to win here. The best outcome was the one in which I'd convinced myself was the best outcome. There are no negative or lasting consequences for either choice. I was told to make a choice, live with the consequences, and try to justify that choice to myself any way I could.
Let me tell you, that choice rings pretty hollow when you make it for something like an Achievement, and then your surviving teammate calls you out on it. Disapproves of it.
I've never seen a game before or since do that to a player. Not just have a situation in which you have to make an impossible choice, but kick you while you're down over it as well. Berating you for whatever justification you gave for making the choice. Even a non-committal answer. A choice that ultimately matters very little, if at all to the gameplay, the ending, or the overall arc of the story.
Not many games engage in this sort of "choice". Most of it is environmental choice with real and tangible rewards. Some methods are better than others. There are optimal solutions.
I still haven't seen a game like Mass Effect where there is no optimal solution... and the game tells me I should've found one anyway. Then, the characters telling me that I made the wrong choice and my justifications are flimsy at best.
So... I grab a guide for most of these games. Which solutions are optimal? What's the best possible outcome? The game has a best option in mind, after all. Killing fewer people is measured as good in this game. Not robbing people is measured as good in this game. Doing things without being seen is the best option in this game.
If you have choices in overcoming a roadblock... there's always a "best choice". At least, in my experience. It becomes less about what choice I'd personally make and more about what choice the game expects me to make, because it will reward me the best for having chosen it.
