I’m not a game designer

I was adding a new feature to the game in response to some of the test results: guides to finding things in the game world, presented in the form of unlockable functionality. We would even remove some guiding systems from the beginning of the game and unlock them as the players makes progress. Rationally I know it makes perfect sense to do this, and it will almost certainly improve the experience for almost all players. It prevents frustration and it allows for communicating play instructions bit by bit. But implementing the feature made me feel so dirty. Withholding information from the player, even if it is for their own good, is not something that comes naturally to us as designers.

Though it does to us as storytellers. So maybe that’s a way to approach the problem…