As another example, I’m playing Jet Set Radio Future right now, which in a way is a sort of fast puzzle platform type game. Again, the primary puzzle is of the form “I want to get there, how do I do it?”, and the physics of the game world are the primary tool. How do I jump, grind, and perform tricks in the air in such a way as to reach that ever-so-high spot?

Puzzles that are in context can get old if there are too many of them, but game designers who are working in a game context where puzzles are one of the primary parts of the game seem to have a much better idea what works and what doesn’t. I think part of this is that an RPG like KOTOR is so very open-ended that it makes people think that they can get away with just about anything. Instead of making puzzles-through-conversation they should be thinking in terms of puzzles-through-environment.

It could be that part of the reason they don’t is that, well, that kind of puzzle can be difficult in a very very free-form game. In JSRF, it’s pretty easy to do, because the primary puzzle-factor is the core of the game. In BG&E, it’s slightly harder to make non-obvious puzzles. At first, you don’t know what to look for, but later, you begin to see the environmental elements that you have to touch to move forward. BG&E succeeds because interactions with your sidekick and events off-screen eventually complicate the puzzles sufficiently to keep it interesting. As I recall, the middle 2/3 of the game pretty much have the same environmental pieces, slowly moving up in complexity, and the last stage of the game introduces some new pieces.

In a totally free-form game like KOTOR, the designers need to think ahead on how to build environmental pieces that can be manipulated and won’t be obvious. And when that’s not the central part of the game, making that work right seems more or less pointless. Why put cables that can be cut through in every room and make a neat cable-swinging animation just for a single puzzle or set of puzzles? And in terms of the game engine used for KOTOR, this would be very hard, I know.

But–if you’re not going to go through the effort to make the puzzles make sense in the environment, yes, please leave them out. They don’t even have to look perfect to be reasonable, they just need to fit into the narrative flow. Do you need an excuse to produce a swinging-cable animation? Consider making an entire level of swinging cable and pushing crate type puzzles as the characters infiltrate the depths of some base. Sure, “talking” to the cable and saying “I slice it with my lightsaber” is a little cheezy–but it’s going to disturb the narrative flow a lot less than talking to Strahd and having him say “Can you beat me at a game of chinese checkers? If you do, I will open this door, laugh mysteriously, and disappear.”

In short: If you’re not going to do it right, don’t do it at all.

I have this hazy recollection that in, say, Fallout, having a character with a high IQ would cause the correct answer to show up in the dialogue tree options. (The flip side, of course, being that playing a character with a very low IQ caused most of your options to be “Uh,” and “Smash!”, which had its own charm.)

RPGs generally tend to deal with the whole increasing difficulty thing by improving your avatar’s stats, rather than training the player to get better at learning button mashing patterns, which makes the “let’s drop in some puzzles” pattern that much more jarring. And I have to think that the puzzles are so mind-numbingly easy *because* it’s an RPG and not a puzzle game, and they couldn’t justify to themselves breaking the difficulty flow by that much. Which again begs the question: why do it at all?