An interesting thing happened to me playing the most recent Splinter Cell game, Chaos Theory. Generally I always pick the "normal" difficulty setting on a game, but opted for "hard" on this one. After all, I'd played both of the previous SC games all the way through, and I know that in games with a strong stealth element setting if the difficulty is too low you can just run-and-gun through, missing a lot of the core gameplay.
Skip forward 20 minutes... I can't even get past the initial few encounters, and I'm dying all the time. Frustrated, I start over again on "normal". I keep dying and having trouble. Then, suddenly, something clicks for me. I'm back in the Splinter Cell Zone, moving stealthily, distracting guards, and generally having a grand time. In fact, I re-start the game on "hard" again, and I'm zooming through it, having a great time.
So what happened? I never had this problem ramping up on the first two games, and reflecting on this I think it completely has to do with the fact that Splinter Cell has no tutorial. Instead they have training videos, and while they are clearly inferior as a training tool and I didn't have the patience to sit through them. But more importantly than the information that was missing, it was a chance to "find my footing" in the interface. While a tutorial is generally useful for instruction, in the previous SC games it also provided a crucial role of getting me comfortable with the controls and the very distinctive pace of the game.
Once I did knuckle down and sit through the training videos I learned a few interesting things but I don't think even watching them up front would have gotten me in the zone. It was all about having the interface become transparent again, to think in the problem space of the game.
Ultimately I finished Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory a week or two ago, and had a great time with it overall. There was a bit of a sticky point near the end, difficulty-wise (another fine topic to explore some other day), but on the whole it was another high quality game from the SC team.
There's just about nothing more important than the opening moments of a game. Finding the right mix of compelling experience to hook the player, and instruction about how the game really works is totally critical. I look back at when we were doing System Shock 1, and I can't believe how blind we were to the importance of that. Some people in our testing were taking literally an hour to get through the first few rooms and that should have set of massive red warning flags for us. Ah well.
It was quite an educational experience to see the massive amount of usability testing and UI analysis that we go through with all our games at Ensemble. Microsoft has a great usability lab up in Redmond and we have a full-time usability person down here in Dallas who does a great job collecting data for us. You really learn a lot when you see true novices play your game. But that rigorous approach really pays off, and it was fascinating to be able to measure than in an objective fashion via tools like the usability lab.
My expectations for interface quality do change a bit with the scope and genre of the game. I've been playing a lot of Gary Grigsby's World At War lately, and to be blunt about it, the interface for that game is less than stellar. It's completely playable for what it is, and the game has many strengths, but clarity and design of interface is not one of them. However, it's positively a masterpiece of interface design compared to War in the Pacific, Grigsby's game before that. On the whole the state of the art for wargame UI is just well behind that of other games.
As if there weren't enough other great games out, I've recently been playing a lot of Jade Empire. It's a fascinating mix of RPG and action-based combat, and the writing and world are definitely up to Bioware's usual high standards. Definitely worth checking out.