I've been noticing an irritating trend lately. Or rather, I've been noticing it for some time, but lately it's been getting really obnoxious. Why is it that some game developers assume their players are basically stupid? They put so many hints, waypoints, and outright instructions on what to do next that there's hardly any intrigue to their game anymore. And I'm not talking about "here's how to play the game" kind of instructions viewed once at the start of the game, but the kind that keep popping up every single time you need to do something. Not only is it annoying to read for the hundredth time "Use your weapon to take down enemies!" as if you hadn't already been doing that for the last ten hours, it completely removes the challenge of thinking things through for yourself. It's maddening! Why play these games at all, when all you end up doing is connecting the dots using your character and your tasks require less intelligence than rats in a maze?

Let's take the recent Far Cry as an example. A game of exploration and survival, on an island with seemingly endless possibility. And yet every single opportunity to explore is shattered by the fact that the game tells you exactly where you need to go. For example, you get a quest to search an area for three stone tablets. Not only are they all within 100m of the starting point, the game puts a giant, yellow waypoint right on the spot you're supposed to look; not just the general area, but exactly where the tablets are. The game literally finds them for you, and all you do is go press a button while standing next to them, three times over. A perfectly good search mission ruined by the game itself.

Far Cry 3 is far from the only game to exhibit this sort of design. The newest Hitman, Assassin's Creed, and many others - what's worse is that in most cases this spoiling hint interface can't be turned off! Games used to be about challenge, about teaching you the rules of the game and then giving you the chance to learn for yourself by playing. Half-Life's "hazard course" is a great example of how to roll all you need to know into a single tutorial before the game begins, while still remaining true to the game's immersion; or more often games start with an easy level that walks you through the basics (which is annoying since you need to play through it each time, but at least it's only once at the start of the game.) Why now is there this insistence that everything needs a tooltip prompt, for fear that the player might stare at the screen blankly? Do they assume that players simply don't retain any information for longer than 30 seconds, are incapable of abstract problem solving on their own, or otherwise lose interest if it's not immediately apparent exactly what they need to do? While there are also examples of games with far too little information and poor signposting, leaving the player lost, this over-compensation is in my opinion far more intrusive and immersion-breaking.

So, what's happening here? I feel the aforementioned mission from Far Cry 3 has been designed well enough, and only after the fact may have been gimped by some clueless QA team inserting a hand-holding interface mechanic that spoils the fun. Or has it been designed from the ground up to use such a system, with the level/mission designers fully aware that the task is entirely trivial? Is this simply a regrettable facet of modern games development because every game needs to be beatable even by braindead zombies? I wish we could get a developer to weigh in on the question, because it honestly baffles me, but short of that perhaps we can together suss out just why some insist on designing their games for the absolute lowest common denominator.

Your thoughts, please, and/or gripes about the state of modern game design.

P.S: This will be my 5000th post at long last, most of which have been spent here in Community Discussion. Woo!