Codes vs Saves vs Unlock-All

[geoo]

I think unlock all is particularly useful once you start tinkering with a game. If you start tinkering a couple years after you first encountered and beat the game, chances are you don't have the original lying around anymore. I think it should provide a convenient way to get an overview of all levels and of accessing the one you want. Imagine doing Lemmings Challenging without having means to access all levels.
I think it might encourage players to cheat or look ahead, but then people will pretty much always find a way to do that if they want. Case in point, I've seen enough accounts on this forum of people who got stuck and after some time found codes past the level they got stuck on.
The normal way of progressing should obviously be not using unlock-all. One's sense of pride and achievement should command that, though I don't think it's the best for all games for the player to access only one unsolved level at a time.

One progress system (where the levels had a linear order) I found quite good was what Supaplex used: You can skip up the three levels at a time, and they are marked as skipped. Once you solve one of the three skipped levels, you're allowed to skip the current one. So essentially, at any point in time you're stuck on 4 levels simultaneously, and if you solve any of them you can progress again.
I feel that makes the situation less hopeless than being stuck on a single level preventing you from progressing.

[607]

Hm... this is a tough subject. When I first saw the title I thought I was absolutely against it, but I tried to read the entire thread from a neutral point of view.
And it's not easy. But when unlock-all would be good... why is it used so few? Is there a stigma that should be removed?
An example of what I do most of the time in games with completely linear design (levels, with checkpoints in them, and hard saves at the start of every level) is described below.
You progress to the levels normally, apparently without an option to skip ahead or play any level you want. This makes sure people will not have to weigh the decision of skipping, and they will always get the satisfaction of beating a level. However, they could potentially get stuck.
Then, when they beat the game and after the ending cutscene (this is just an example, it's not like there's an ending cutscene in every game of mine) they get to see one last note: "Oh, and by the way, you can use m to skip a level ahead and n to go a level back." I might also add in a few debug features if I feel like, so people can turn on fly, or get into a level editor mode.
This makes it so that if they ever want to play the game again, much later, when the save file has probably gone, they can actually skip to the level they want to skip to.

I think that's a good way to do it, because I myself have much less motivation for finishing a level for the first time if I already know I could skip it.

[namida]

That reminds me of one of the first video games I played; Kirby's Dream Land on Gameboy. When you first completed the game, it told you a key combo to unlock "Extra Game", which was basically a hard mode. When you beat that, it told you how to access a debug menu. This didn't let you skip levels IIRC, but it let you choose how many lives you got and the size of your health bar, as well as access a sound test mode.

[Luis]

The PSP Lemmings doesn't have unlock all but it lets you start off with five levels in Fun, Tricky, Taxing, Mayhem and Special. When you beat one level a new one is unlocked and if you skipped one and beat another, a new one is still unlocked and you can keep going from there. I'm not the type that likes to skip levels. If I'm stuck on one I'll stay there until I beat it.

[Simon]

There are four arguments against forced linear play so far:

• Tooling
• Anti-stuck, allowing the player to access further content despite not solving everything before. This is probably the main reason.
• Cherry-picking, i.e., not caring about finishing every level, but playing only the interesting content. This is valuable to have. You can get recommended levels by fellow players.
• Late cherry-picking, by which I mean cherry-picking after finishing every level, after losing the savegame.

The Supaplex solution is only good as an anti-stuck. For that alone however, it's valuable.

The unlock-all-by-password + savegame serves all four purposes, because you can google the password if you want to cherry-pick early.

607's cheat codes to be revealed after first complete playthrough are very much like that.

-- Simon