Many great parts about arcane adventures, were caused by inconvenience or difficulty in traveling from place to place.
If its really hard to reach a place you want to go, then the value of actually reaching the place, is enhanced.
Here are some examples of what I mean.
When it became night in AA, there would be black fog that prevented you from seeing very far. I remember using absence of stars in the night sky to find islands, which can be pretty fun sometimes, but most of the time it is tiresome.
The separation between Cerulea and the other islands. It is very difficult to get to Cerulea, because you can only get to the island by either using sky skates at whiteridge, or spawning there. This not only makes being at the island have value, it also creates a high combat environment for players, because everybody there is max level.
The bugs in AA would also sometimes give this effect, like when your boat doesn’t despawn making you get stuck on one island.
I noticed a problem in World of Magic. The places you stay at as the player, have little value because its so easy to reach those places.
The tiresome and boring parts of AA, like traveling and being killed, made the easy and fun parts have a feeling of value.
However, it is important to not take this literally. This is just my idea/theory, it’s not a suggestion, and most of the problems in the game were bad for the game. What I’m saying is that some problems made the game more memorable.
Your boat bugging out and stranding you on an island is the kind of problem that, in the right situation, can result in a unique and memorable experience. I’ve been stranded by bad game design plenty of times while playing modded minecraft - working through adversity and making it back can genuinely be fun.
But 95% of the time, it results in a reset and 10/15 minutes of sailing to get back to where you were. It’s a net negative - the game is better without these inconveniences.
Being unable to see the end of your nose 70% of the time adds a sense of mystery, but only until you get sick of not being able to go anywhere and look up a map. Or just learn it via masochism.
There’s a reason you don’t see these kinds of inconveniences anymore in modern games, and that’s not because game design has regressed.
There’s just better ways to add mystery and adversity to your game.
a compass tells me which way I’m pointing
it doesn’t tell me which way savaria is
learning the direction you need to sail in to get to every island from every other island is the masochism, not learning which way is north
It’s easy to remember the direction of the island from a relative island.
I don’t think there’s a scenario where you just suddenly spawned in on a ship in the middle of nowhere with no islands in sight. Only scenario this would happen is if you weren’t aiming for a specific location and then decided you wanted to go to it midsail.
So you’re saying that making a game annoying and unfun makes the occasional fun parts better?
No??? Maybe a little but not enough to actually be worth designing the game around it.
What about just have the entire game actually be fun without just repeating its self over and over so it doesn’t immediately get boring?
There are situations where bugs make the game better, but its not when you just get stranded at wilderness island #5 and have nothing to do there other than swim the rest of the way to your destination or reset.
During that time period of Roblox, maybe, but nowadays that would feel slow and more like a slap in the face. I will admit though, sometimes inconvenience leads to interesting moments.
I will admit that most of the time these parts of a game are not good, but my point is that they have their place in a game.
As I said before, I believe that world of magic actually suffers from not having these things, since the game is just grindy most of the time, with no randomized situations that AA had.
Its better to rage at a game than not care about it at all, because you are feeling something.
yeah i like being fucked over by the game sometimes
makes it less boring, less monotonous, and more interesting overall.
don’t like getting fucked over too hard though.
like the boat glitch. that one was really fucking annoying.
honestly something like AA with a decent amount of PvE elements should’ve been a permadeath game.
perhaps the game would only be avaliable to play every 4 hours? like 4 hours of being up, 4 hours of being shut down
would make the times that you are on wom more fun, honestly
No, preventing the player from playing the game is not inconvenience in the game itself, that is just a time gauge, which is never a good thing for a game.
Examples of adding good inconvenience to world of magic, would be to remove quest markers, or make travel more dangerous.
Not all problems in arcane adventures are necessarily good, I just mean that having some, the types have proven value, can create adventure in the game.
removing quest markers sounds like the most painful thing imaginable
it starts at “masochistic but playable” for the fetch quests - just find a guide to every ink spawn and check all the spots, questing is about 5x slower but still doable
and then quickly spirals out of control as you’re told to go kill Jerry the Dark Wizard, or “a group of bounty hunters”
where is jerry the dark wizard?
who knows! go search the entire continent in a 400m radius
which group of bounty hunters?
beats me! kill all of them until the game tells you to stop
there’s a reason why the kill dark wizards in the area quests are the worst fucking quests in WoM, they don’t give you a tracker so you have to pray to RNG Jesus himself in hopes that dark wizards spawn enough to let you kill some
in this case, literally every quest will have the same effect as the dark wizards quest, making them full of pain and suffering. and imagine when you have to find an item literally smaller than your cursor for a fetch quest without a fuckign tracker