that -5 strength scene makes me wonder, are there any RPGS out there that only let you select an option BECAUSE you have such a low score? Like having a low strength score could allow a bandit to ignore you for someone that is a bigger threat, which now allows you to make your move on them!

I would love to see an episode about dialogue choices / branching narratives!

When playing Monster Hunter with others, i find that a vary common reaction for players is that when you have just finished hunting a new monster for the first time, everyone always runs to the crafting NPC just to see what new weapons and/or armor they may have unlocked. I guess that would fall under Content Discovery?

Easter-Egg Discovery Bug Discovery Pay-wall Discovery DLC Discovery Disappointment Discovery And the discovery of all the types of discovery, which we're going to call: Discovery discovery

"-5 stength" I need to increase my stength by lifting more wights!

A really good example for Mechanical Discovery is, in my opinion, Transistor. The game tells you that you can upgrade your functions with other functions, but doesn't tell you to try out specific combinations. It lets you just play around with your abilities and if you figure out an especially useful combination, you feel like a _genius_. And then the game goes "Oh, by the way, here's a second upgrade slot." and the amount of combinations climbs up to ridiculous levels. In some of the Challenge rooms, you are even limited to only a few, select functions, pushing the player even further. If you ask 10 Transistor players about what their favorite function combinations are, you'll get 10 different answers and they will all tell you at length why it's so good. In fact, Transistor uses Narrative Discovery to give players an incentive to experiment with the functions because you get specific bits of backstory if you use functions in different ways. Using those bits of backstory, you can start to piece together what is actually going on.

For mechanical discovery- Magicka The magic combinations can be really volatile. For example, using ice your first element gives a shotgun effect, something it's really easy to discover. Then you might find out you can spray an enemy with water, then freeze them solid with cold. You might start using cold+lightning to keep entire crowds at arm's length, or get things wet to amplify lightning damage. Or you might find out you can use arcane to explode your friend's healing beams :3

In light of Splatoon's success can you do an episode on what it takes to launch a new IP?

I don't understand the Great Ball part, to me those are just like upgrading your equipments in any other games. Just like how you can potentially beat any monsters with a weak weapon if you're good enough, you can potentially catch any wild Pokemons with a normal Pokeball if you're insistent or lucky enough, not to mention the catch rates of each zones are often designed to fit to this evolving supply of Pokeballs you obtain, I don't see how it inspires you to go back and explore some old places like Dan is talking about. If you're talking about Dusk, Repeat or maybe Net Ball, where they are (kinda) terrain specific in use, then I can understand, but Great Ball just doesn't fit that bill at all, you're not going to need a Great Ball to catch a Caterpie, nor do you need it to find a rare Pokemon or a shiny either.

The part where they talk about spoiler lists says: the card does the thing. this other card does a slightly different thing. this is the best card. It's banned probably. good luck finding this card. this card works with another card. this card does not work with another card. this card is a card. this card is purple??? I have no idea what to say about...(trails off screen) if your still reading...(trails off screen) scott is ...(trails off screen)

My personal favorite form of discovery is mechanical, particularly when the discovery is not of a new mechanic or even of a previously unknown detail of an old mechanic but rather a handful of mechanics which are discovered to interact in a novel fashion. The purest example I can think of is Transistor's weapon design mechanics: combining the same two or three functions in different orders can have a huge impact on that attack (Transistor also cleverly uses the promise of narrative discovery to encourage players to experiment more with the mechanics in this way). I suspect this sort of combinatorial thinking might be the key to getting a handful of mechanics to provide several radically different gameplay experiences, but that's a different discussion altogether.

Haha love the shoelace tied to the finger when you said 'And remember!'. Nice detail. A-G-L-E-T!

I feel like often designers forget about a very important detail that makes discovery/exploration more pleasant and interesting: foreshadowing. While it is enjoyable to explore a world you know nothing about and that you have no idea how it's going to look, you need some form of foreshadowing to really enjoy it. If you see a far away mountain in the mist while playing minecraft and it seems to look odd, you will feel the curiosity necessary to see how it is, and you might feel some form of satisfaction when being near to them. When you read about mew and mewtwo the first time in the lab, you get curious about these two unknown pokémon and when you get to find mewtwo, the joy of discovery is immense. Some games just provide a world to explore, but that falls flat if you don't have a warped and unclear vision of what's waiting for you beforehand. One thing that is often avoided is unclear and "wrong" foreshadowing, but I think that could actually bring to some very interesting games. Imagine thinking that you should find the "island of the gods" somewhere in the ocean in a gritty medieval sailing game, the position of that island in the maps is varying and unclear, but you manage to understand more or less where it's supposed to be, and when you get there you find something completely different, maybe an island full of resources and with the ruins of an ancient civilisation, but nothing like what you expected. I think this kind of "betrayal" of the expectations hasn't been done enough, and the transformation of "exploration" to "investigation" could be brought to a whole new level with the right thinking.

Kingdom hearts has awesome narrative discovery. With it's vast, complex, and mysterious backstory and lore, kingdom hearts is the type of game that I not only play for hours upon hours, but I can spend just as much time talking about it, discussing the various implications of the events and hints that are scattered throughout the series, and then trying to predict what could happen later in the game because of the backstory that we piece together, and then it's even more amazing to get the next game and discover what parts turned out to be true, what parts were different than we'd expected, and the various new implications we could discover because of the events and revelations that were in the new game, and then the cycle begins anew.

that's one of the things I love about FO4 - finding some empty, half-decimated house, and piecing together what happened there by way of holotapes, notes, terminal entries, and the like, and even then, you piece it together bit by bit. You have to find all of the pieces to get the story for that place (and sometimes I still wonder if I missed something).

The Extra Credits drinking game: take a drink every time you hear the words discovery or pokemon.

Witcher 3 maybe the best in my experience of exploration most of it contains: " Oh hey a griffin... ( sees the red skull) oh fuck a griffin. RUN!!!" and "What a weird bush... That's not a bush. RUN!!!"

I remember when I played my first pokemon (ememald) and I found the secret regi cave. That was an amazing experience with exploration, with the deciphering of braille and then scouring the world for the regis. It's an adventure I will never forget.

Also I saw the comment at the end of the video: I am SO glad side quest worked and I hope this gives birth to a whole new world of content from you guys.

The legend of zelda Is one of thee best game franchises when it comes to the Joy of discovery .

So, visual novels use narrative discovery to make the player re play the same game but with a completely different plot each time, and even if you miss some scenes by making a certain minor choice it doesn't change mutch because the main plot is the same, you only need to find one of the many ways to get to that good ending.

Bastion: not even exploration-focused and it manages to hit a high notes on all 4 of these aspects.

GW2 discovery panel in the crafting mechanic is a great example of this. You have so much more than just a list of recipes, you get to find every permutation of recipes, and (especially in cooking and artificing) find recipes you may not have suspected existed.

Mechanical discovery is the reason i find fighting games so enjoyable. You start with something basic like a bnb combo, then u think hmmm... What if i delay this move or end with a different one to set up my opponent for another one and so on

I would love to see an episode on dialogue choices and if they help a game's variety/narrative/etc

I didn't think I cared much for exploration until I played Zelda: Breath of the Wild. 60 hours of gameplay and I still have whole chunks of the map that I haven't ventured to.

Man I love it when that 2'nd one happens. For me, It turns a 'Meh' game into a HOOOOLY POOOP game

Good timing with this episode. It was exactly the thing that I needed right now.

Now that you mentioned Dark Souls, i just started playing that game and damn that game hits me hard right in the feelings. The backstories of some of the NPCs and bosses are just amazing and sad. They should have called it Dark Souls: Prepare to Cry Edition because it does make you cry... And not because of the difficulty.

is it just me or does Dan's pronounciation of 'Pokémon' make you smile? :P

The Tales Of... series skit mechanic is one the best ways I've seen to do narrative discovery. You want to see the characters interact all the time in those games. Everything you do triggers one, like the one where you have to eat ice cream on a snow-filled place. And in the end it keeps track of all the skits you've seen.

gone home might be a quite pure example of narrative discovery and no branching dialoges where needed. i really appreciated it therefore.

I love how branching in games like TWD and The Witcher 3 are much more about the moment of making the decision itself rather than the differences between each branch of the history; if you replay these games you realize that the choices you've made often changes very little or even nothing in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't change the fact that they're very meaningful to you the first time you deal with the necessity of making a decision. It's a perfect example of how designers can "deceive" players in order to deliver a great experience.

As confusing as things can be sometimes, and as small as the text is, I'm getting this with Xenoblade Chronicles X right now. You get the joy of just exploring the world, scaling a mountain, swimming into a cave, etc....and then within that cave, maybe you hit a landmark that gives you some safe respawning, or maybe even a probe for convenient fast travel. And then you can use these places to mine for resources or money. And then that whole aspect is tied in to the whole game's economy, letting you upgrade gear, then letting you inch farther into the world map, possibly enabling new missions by making new types of enemies accessible, etc. You practically get rewarded for everything, making all of the game aspects kind of fold into each other and collide at some point.

Mechanical discovery, I LOVE this in games. This may be on reason I enjoyed Don't Starve so much. "Oh what's that over there, chances are it's going to kill me but I must find out!"

Antichamber perfectly combines Mechanical Discovery with Geographic Discovery. It turns out there's a lot you can explore and do from the beginning of the game, but it's not until certain mechanical tricks are taught that you realize that you could have explored certain areas much sooner. It's brilliant.

I agree with James. "Joy of discovery" is much better in my opinion.

god I love that ending music!

Transistors mix and match skill system is the single greatest mechanical discovery I have ever experience. I had great "Joy of Discovery" on all fronts really. You guys should do an episode on Transistor and how different and refreshing it was and still is.

One game that does this discovery thing very well is Fallen London. In the beginning of the game, you get to access a handful of areas and are limited by your progress. As you progress, you can unlock new areas in separate quests, until you've unlocked them all. Then, when your stats reach a certain point, you can become a Person of Some Importance, which unlocks a ton of new quests in the base areas, and also drives you to the greater secrets of the game. It is also important to note the incredible world that comes with it and the stunning variety of stories that are told in it. Seriously, if you haven't given it a chance yet, go try it.

Melee does mechanical Discovery so well.

"Giving the player great balls." Hee hee. I'm 5

Bastion and Transistor nailed all of these types. Seriously, I really want episodes examining those games.

The game called Arx Fatalis came out for PC and later on consoles. It had all forms of discovery discussed in this video! as a short example: you would cast magic spells by drawing runes on the screen with your mouse. As you collect more runes, you can cast more spells. If you notice patterns in the spells you can cast, you can start to decipher what each rune actually means. Some of the meanings are vaguely found throughout old books in the world. With some experimentation and understanding, you could cast spells that were never mentioned in the game or show up in your spell book, but make sense based on the meaning of the runes. One of my favorite gaming "aha!" moments of all time.

2 years later and there is a game that take those 3 types of exploration and get them to another level, therefore becoming in my opinion the best adventure game of all time: TLOZ: BOTW

3:07 "-5 Stength"

what you said about mechanical discovery is my favorite ay because you always get it in fighting games and after you understand everything in the game it compleatly changes how you play and how fun the game is

When you explained mechanical discovery I came to think of Anno 1602. I remember looking up exact production values for each building and tried to make efficient chains of production which met the needs of my people while at the same time minimized the surplus production in order to lower upkeep costs.

Heh, I personally think Undertale does dialogue choices well. Both choices are almost always funny, and it doesn't matter which you pick. Usually.

Great video as always. I'm hoping we see more Dark Souls esq Narrative Discovery in games. As a side note, you and James have gotten me hooked on Dark Souls. After buying it, attempting it, then forgetting about it after not getting through the early part of the game, I've picked it back up and gotten to the first bell of awakening. Now I can't stop going back to it.

Yeah... Exploration, Discovery, and roleplaying is what got me into playing videogames. To play someone that isn't me or - even better - to play myself doing things I could have never done before. The immersion if games like Fallout and Skyrim (once I had mods for the latter), were great for this, giving me quite literally everything I could ever want. The ability to explore, to get stronger, to learn the lore and find new things, and to be a version of myself while doing it. I still remember one of my favorite things to do in Skyrim, and any other Elder Scrolls game for that matter, was the Dwemer ruins. I loved going through the bigger ones, finding these vast rooms, or narrow corridors and catacombs, and all the while I would be looking around and thinking "I wonder what this room was used for?", or finding homes with place settings, and thinking "This was a house!", or finding some archaic, intimidating construct of precision metal and stone, and pure magical power, and being able to activate them and see them work (like one of the quests for a Scroll). Those were hands-down the best moments in that game for me. The dragons were nothing compared to exploring anything the Dwemer constructed.

I love discovery in games! So great! Thanks guys!

"sow with that in mind" LMAO

In the end Tell Tale's Walking Dead Season 1 had all of 3, maybe four actual choices. The rest of the time, even if given a choice, you really have no choice, as the they all come back to the same outcome. Still a great story and a good game.

That's why I like games with procedurally generated worlds. With most games, you learn all the secrets and get bored. With a randomized world, you always have a new exciting experience to discover.

Perfect timing, Extra Credits! I'm currently working on an rpg and this helped a ton!

content discovery is probably the reason why i played skyrim, the fallout games and the far cry games (and probably many more that have been lost in the depths of my steam account... i really have a problem D:) so much... i have ~250 hours in fonv just because i wanted to see how the game plays if you have 9 luck, 9 strength or 9 survival right from the beginning... and it was a different play through experience each time, in far cry it was more about finding all the places and trying to stealth everything which brought me 80h in this game

1:58 - What episode did you talk about "Unfolding games", I don't recognize or remember the term from a previous episode.

2:14 Yeah, that moment in games is amazing.

This wondrous feeling of discovery you talk about... Metroid Prime. People keep going on about awful backtracking in this game, but I constantly had that sense of wonder you described in the episode. Metroid Prime especially gave you so many tools and so many places to use them that "backtracking" was a familiar but also new experience.

I want to see a game that explores 4 dimentional space.

4:38 "Suffice it to say, that there's an open debate in the design community as to whether dialogue choices add or take away from, specifically a sense of narrative discovery within games" Is there any links that could be shared so that one may read either side of the debate?

I love it when games have deep enough mechanics to enable continued discovery.

The Metroid series is a great example that uses all four types of discovery. Geographical (you explore an overworld), Mechanical (mastering new techniques and sequence-breaking mechanics), Content (finding new upgrades), and Narrative (discovering scan logs that tell more about the lore).

I think if you're going to allow multiple narratives, you will have to ensure the players won't get stuck with any choice they make. You have to ensure that with every choice, if there is a benefit, there is also a downside, and vice versa. That way, the player won't feel pushed towards any particular choice. Also, one should consider ways to recover from mistaken choices.

I'm applying pretty much everything here to my DnD campaign.

Wow wow wow, okay, so I'm going back and watching a bunch of episodes I missed, and what you said about Narrative discovery immediately reminded me of Undertale. In that game there is a TON of narrative to discover, but the more you play it, the more the characters start to feel less believable and more like lines of code. The crazy part is, the dilemma of satiating your curiosity at the cost of losing your immersion is DIRECTLY addressed BY THE CHARACTERS in the game (in a certain replay route). This video put it so succinctly MONTHS before the game ever came out. Bravo.

Perfect timing to release this episode, as I've been playing the fallout series recently

Breath of the wild solved this by finding your own way to find someting instead of having a waypoint in the map.

Zelda Ocarina of Time and FF7 were the best exploration games for me. I love riding Epona and wonder around the world of Hyrule. And I love discovering new treasures and secrets hidden in the world of FF7. it was all awesome. I prefer it over Skyrim or other games.

Exploration is great. I remember playing dungeon siege with a friend and we always made the joke "Is this the right way?" "I'm afraid yes", because we could miss a lot places and secrets

The way you say "Pokémon" sounds exactly like the pokédex xD

3:06 Stength sounds like an interesting stat

I love how you say Pokémon....

This is really funny when you are actually studying the different Aesthetics for your finals and during your break you are watching this. Good video ^^

A good example of what you talked about near the end might be Pokémon ORAS. They had a new mechanic where occasionally you'll see a shaking patch of grass and the Pokémon you encounter will have Hidden Abilities of Egg Moves that they wouldn't normally have. Even though I usually don't go around randomly catching Pokémon everywhere I go like I used to because I know I'm never going to use them, I still always tried to catch the shake-y grass Pokémon out of curiosity to see how they were different.

And for the love of all that is holy please do not have "narrative exploration" turn into "to get the whole story you need to play the game, plus the sequel, and the prequel, and watch the followup movie, and read a manga, and even then you may want to read the wiki for it to make sense." That is not fun. :P

Metroidvania games seem like Mechanical Discovery games

I love the 2:10 image "and then the code gazed back upon her."

Wish it was more than a subtle nod, but I love that you referenced Metroid Prime during the narrative discovery section.

Please make an episode about parents who think video games are horrible and addictive!!!!!!! IT WOULD BE AMAZING, and a good step for the gaming industry to shake off that STERIO-type of how bad games are.

One word: Fallout.

Everytime you said "Pokaymon," I giggled.

A cool thing about Narrative Discovery is that it doesn't always have to be discovered in game. If anyone's ever finished a game and watched through the credits because it shows scenes of what happened to the characters after they finished saving the world or whatnot then they'll know that feeling of finding something new when the game has finished. Meanwhile there's often narrative to be discovered elsewhere entirely such as content which the developers of the game only implied during gameplay and you only fully understand it from articles about the game you read elsewhere. And then there's additional narrative which comes from other games in the series, sequels or prequels which fill in blacks which weren't in the game you played. And then there's also unofficial stuff which are fun to learn about too such as fan theories too which are fun to read occasionally.

I'm interested in hearing about an episode of narrative discovery. : D Anyone else.

"-5 stength"

the song at the end of this episode is really lovely :)

I wanna see a 30 min episode of extra credits, that'd be awesome

Well the the walking dead is a bad example since the path is the same no matter what you do for the most part.

Witcher 3

"So... with that in mind" Thumbs up artist! Much enjoyed!

Sunless Sea is really cool, because it did a fantastic job of putting together geographic and narrative discovery. The entire game is searching out story elements scattered across different geographic locations in order to reach the end of one of the story arcs and retire.

Dark Souls games are overrated, I dont say that they are bad, but a little bit overrated. There is better action rpgs out there, just dig a lil bit deeply.

Yay, I'm finally first!

A full episode on the narrative choice topic is a great idea. I've thought a lot about that when encountering the many people who complain about how limited Telltale's games actually are. I'm not sure I could possibly say that Telltale's dialogue choices *limit* its narrative discovery, though. You're absolutely right that the second playthrough can have that effect - but an interesting experiment is to do your first playthrough, then drop into the midpoint-episode on a fresh game with random auto-choices. Suddenly the contrast becomes very clear: though you are on the same path, everything feels different. Your trusted friends are now your barely-tolerated enemies, your detractors are now your supporters, everything feels like Bizarro-land. And that's what Telltale truly excels at: when you play your first game, and make your choices, you get a fairly personal experience. The events are the same, but the *story* is different, because it *feels* different. You also get the tantalizing hints of other possible ways things could have gone -- and that's the part that generates disappointment for some on a second playthrough. But the feel of that first playthrough -- the investment in your critical, time-limited choices -- is so beautiful and engaging that I can't imagine trying to replicate it without dialogue options...

I feel like Kingdom Hearts 1 does a fantastic job of this (sadly not seen in much of the rest of the series), in everything from interacting with the plants in Wonderland, to the secret hourly doors at the Neverland Clock Tower, to the postcards in Traverse Town, to freezing the braziers in Olympus. There's just so much to interact with and discover.

A lot of people complain about sailing in Wind Waker but for me I really liked it since there was a joy in exploring the Great Sea to find new islands. Ahh, I have found memories of exploring the ocean in that game.

I wondered why it was taking me so long to download Lime of the Season; then it dawned on me how I got there. You've gotten popular!

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 does both Geographycal and Content Discovery thing pretty well, if you ask me. The game allows and rewards experimentation and exploration with new tricks and special places, and the goals that are about "Find 5 tokens" emphazise the idea that there is a lot more than the eye can see.

I recently beat Link to the Past for the first time. That game had awesome exploration.