Unwinnable by Design - do we NEED anything past the canonical list?

It's bugged me for the longest that we have two categories for Unwinnable by Design that aren't on Zarf's original list - and judging by how there are less than ten examples for the "Evil" and "Hell" categories combined, I'm tempted to say someone took a look at the list, decided we needed "the same, but MORE!" for "Cruel," and proceeded to unilaterally vandalize the list with no one the wiser.

The definition we have for "Cruel" is "the game can become unwinnable, and there is no immediate indication when this has happened." The definition we have for "Evil" is effectively "the same as Cruel, but with deceptive feedback," and "Hell" is simply "the same as Cruel, but there is no in-game indication of the correct course of action." I would argue that these are meaningless distinctions when we consider that the spirit of the "Cruel" rating in the first place is to denote games that are deliberately unfair, ones that would gleefully employ deceptive feedback or outright force the player to seek outside help.

In short, not only are there only a handful of examples that qualify under "Evil" and "Hell," but the two categories themselves are completely redundant with "Cruel."

edited 13th May '13 1:13:56 PM by Ryusui

Is this a TRS attempt?

Not so much a TRS attempt as "a relatively minor edit that I wanted some feedback on before I went ahead and did it."

I finally found this thread, after ages of not even knowing it might have existed. (And the problem with how I failed to know of this thread's existence in the first place was because there wasn't an indication on the Unwinnable by Design main page or discussion page that you wanted things fixed.)

So you removed Evil and Hell with this explanation:

"Do not add any difficulty ratings beyond the canonical list. "Cruel" represents the deep end of the difficulty scale, full stop - it encompasses ALL games that mislead the player into an unwinnable state, whether through delayed feedback, deceptive feedback, or lack of feedback."

The issue I have with this is, it isn't, and it doesn't. Reason being, you don't think "I should have kept the save I overwrote three hours ago. Now I'll have to start over.", if there was no feedback, because you wouldn't have even thought that the point right before you saved was the part where you went wrong. Suppose you didn't overwrite that save, and where you went wrong was right before said save. How would you know to go back to that save and right your mistakes, if you didn't know where the mistake was? And even if you did know what the mistake was, who's to say that you could correct it so easily?

It's not as simple as that. The definition of Cruel is "no immediate feedback + delayed honest feedback". For Evil it's "immediate deceptive feedback + delayed honest feedback". For Hell is "no honest feedback at all". What you're doing is changing the meaning of Cruel to just "no immediate honest feedback". What you are saying here, is like saying that the distinction between Merciful and Polite is meaningless because "only one save file is needed". The reason why there were no categories beyond Cruel in the original list is probably because the creator of the list didn't think of them.

That is wrong. With each level, they add one layer of sadism to the game. It is one thing to find out on your own that the game locked you into an unwinnable situation without telling you, but it's another thing to have to find the mistake on your own, the mistake that locked you into the unwinnable situation, and yet another thing to find how to correct said mistake. What you are doing is to lump all the difficulties of finding on our own the point where we went wrong (relatively easy in Cruel and Evil, but much harder in Hell), as well as how to correct it after we find it (relatively easy in Cruel, but much harder in Evil), into a single category. In modern gameplay where Anti-Frustration Features abound, this may not seem to matter — but in those days where Trial-and-Error Gameplay was common, it sure as hell did.

To a gamer, having no immediate feedback in such games is better than having immediate deceptive feedback, and having delayed honest feedback is better than having no honest feedback at all ("Better late than never", after all). A player who saves often and doesn't overwrite saves can take steps to prevent themselves from being screwed over by Cruel or Evil examples; on finding themselves in an unwinnable position, they can go back and see where they went wrong. However, this measure doesn't help one bit in preventing them from getting screwed over by Hell examples. That is the difference between Cruel/Evil and Hell.

The difference between Cruel and Evil is harder to describe gameplay wise, but it's there. The difference is that in Cruel, you can easily correct the mistake as soon as you find it, but in Evil, while you can find the mistake, correcting it is a different matter altogether, because the losing path looked that much like the winning path. You need to have to go out of your way to avoid the mistake in Evil, unlike in Cruel where you can just don't make the mistake. While this is a difference in the effects of a Cruel example and an Evil one, and not a difference between Cruel and Evil examples in and of itself, it shows that there is a distinct difference between Cruel and Evil, and it would be folly to disregard that. (EDIT: Evil adds a layer of deception into the game, like how the difference between Tough and Nasty is. The difference is at least that distinct.)

P.S. There was another category called "Ninth Circle of Hell" where part of why the game's Unwinnable is outside of gameplay reasons. The difference between that and in Hell, was that Hell restricted the reasons to within gameplay, so you could find the mistake if you got lucky bruteforcing the game, but this wasn't the case in Ninth Circle of Hell. However, it was removed due to lack of examples. That I can understand, but:

Sierra alone didn't just have "only a handful of examples" of either Evil or Hell. The reason it could have seemed that way was because their hardest games had multiple Evil and/or Hell examples in each of them.

edited 2nd May '14 9:08:42 AM by AhBengI