Locked door, I hate you.
I hate the way you are resistant to knives, to guns, to sledgehammers, to rocket-propelled grenades, to weapons that rewrite the very laws of physics, to dark unearthly magic, to punches that can knock a man’s head clean off.
I hate the way I could kick or smash you down in real life, with this puny human body of mine. But I cannot in the grand, escapist fantasy of a videogame.
I hate the way you are so often an easy shortcut for developers unable or unwilling to devise more satisfying obstacles and challenges.
I hate the way you so often lead to nowhere, how you are nothing more than decoration for a wall.
I hate the way I’m expected to give up trying to open you when I see the words “this door has been locked from the other side” or “this door opens elsewhere”, as though they’re a command from God himself.
I hate the way you always make that click-click, or clunk or uh-uh noise when I try to open you: the very sound of failure.
I hate the way your key or switch is always so far away.
I hate the way the fate of the world so often hinges upon opening you.
I hate the way the letter ‘E’ has worn off my keyboard because I’ve tried to open you so many times, in so many games.
I hate the way you’ve added hundreds, perhaps thousands of unnecessary extra hours to my lifetime of gaming.
I hate the way you’ve annoyed me so much that I’ve just written 200 words whining pathetically about you.
If you didn’t exist, locked door, videogames as we know them would be radically different.
Locked door, I hate you.
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Massive respect for this post dude… Massive respect!
People, we are going about this all wrong. To solve this conundrum, we must get to the root of the problem: real doors. If we were to eliminate these, then surely we wouldn’t be seeing them much in games anymore!
And when I cannot open you, absurdly un-unlockable door, I curse you. I curse you with one of three wildly divergent response options.
nice poem.
Screw all that – I just hate the times you will only open for a completely door-unrelated reason, such as escorting someone from one location to another.
However, my dear Door, I can understand how life can be boring for you, so will forgive you these little attempts to liven up your existance.
Bah..spoiled kids.
In my day we were held back by invisible walls.
We used to yearn for an actual physical object as a baricade.
I spent my childhood running against nothing like some sad sack mime.
..and don’t get me started about having to look up what all the different blobs were supposed to represent in the manual.
..and we did it all with one joystick and one fire button.
Some people are taking this a bit too seriously….
Fallout 3 taught me that behind that locked door with 100 lockpick skill is a rubbish shotgun and a hat.
This reminds me of the Time to Crate index. It’s measuring how good games are by counting how many seconds it takes for a game designer to put a wooden crate in a game.
Boolean Bob, as much as I appreciate the link, I’m left wondering about the “psychotically single-minded” comment. Would you mind explaining it? Although I suppose the fact that I don’t why you’d use that description is perhaps a form of validation of the single-mindedness that was described. Still, I’d like to hear your thoughts!
As for locked doors, I’m a large fan of the Battlefield: Bad Company “make your own door” approach, which involves running at a solid wall, then blowing it up and leaping though the hole. I’m a little sad that all games don’t use this approach, but if they did then all conventional forms of linear narrative would have to be thrown out with the trash, so it’s an understandable (if no less crushing) disappointment.
That bit about “hiding” locked doors behind rusted cars or other debris is incredibly clever, and something that I’d like to see more of in games. But being able to see that a thing is being hidden ruins the purpose of the hiding, doesn’t it? Sort of how seeing that an object has been designed to draw your attention makes you look elsewhere, if only to see what you aren’t supposed to.
EDIT: I’ve gone and waxed philosophic, which isn’t really helping the discussion at all!
red faction guerrilla has no locked doors because nobody uses the door. sledghammer your way through the wall! :)
I hated the faux doors in Clive Barker’s Undying. Hearing “Wun’t budge…” and “Jammed” over and over again when trying to open them was an annoyance on a higher plane.
Hey, did Repubic Commando have any locked doors? I don’t recall any that you couldn’t slice or breach…
Blocked by debris doesn’t count.
You know what I hate even more than locked doors? The Doors. They were right shit.
I tried to imagine my flat with doors that could never be opened. Man! That would be annoying.
Only two solutions:
1. Remove all doors from virtual worlds. City 17 is just a mass of corridors and strange featureless rectangles; or
2. Make a game where every door can be opened. Development cycles now exceed 10 years.
DNF obviously has many openable doors.
With a unique interior behind each one, no less!
I love those doors so much, I will build one into my first new home. Then I will invite you over.
Fatal Frame is filled with locked doors, but it seems to be for the same reason as HL. Though, and anyone who played this might understand, I am always relieved when a door in Fatal Frame is locked because then I don’t have to go through it. Plus if you explored to much in FF you would ruin it.
I hate to say it, but I agree…locked door is the bane of my video game existence. But, if they’re shooting or a semblance of realism you HAVE to run into a locked door at some point. I know I could probably destroy the door to get it open, but some of them would be locked. Hell, unless you want to scale 4 stories of wall to my window you’d have to go through at least four locked doors to get to the room I’m in now, and two of them are fireproof security doors.
EDIT: And…Stumble, Away!!!
oh the passion a door can create……
Oh, you hate locked doors, do you? Well I hate YOU. You strike me repeatedly, never once giving a thought about MY feelings. All the other keys have noticed the damage you’ve caused, and soon we will rise against you. The revolution is nigh. We will prevail.
If they weren’t locked doors then there would be an unrealistic lack of doors in games… if there were a realistic amount of doors that could all be bypassed there would be too many pointless areas to explore which would no doubt create a blog titled “I hate you pointless areas”… if all those areas weren’t pointless there would be a price hike on those games as the development costs would rocket along with development times, they would also probably suffer from having a bit too much wandering about entering random doors collecting stuff in them… a developer should makes games that don’t make you lower yourself to the level of an obsessive compulsive who just can’t help entering doors looking for guns or ammo only to shoot more doors down looking for guns and ammo… the real complaint should be years of blinkered game development and none intuitive puzzles/story advancing mechanisms… Locked doors are a god in the game world, they stop us from behaving randomly and irrationally, they guide us through our virtual existence, that click or uh oh sound is a polite way of saying “dude what the fuck are you doing that for?”…
I hail you locked doors, they are my guidance through the darkness to the door that IS unlocked, and I know when I find that door there is something to do there that makes my short virtual existence fulfilling and satisfying, or at least its another area where I can shoot stuff thats not inanimate!
This guys obviously not played ‘Locked Door 2′.
1PS FTW.
in the pic you really cant open this door in fallout 3 if you choose to arm the bomb in megaton..just sharing
in silent hill, locked doors pwns you.
Pure poetry!
Hitman 4 is the best. Even if you encounter one of those damn Locked Doors, you can at least look through the keyhole.
EDIT: I hate the time limit to the edit button…
“If you didn’t exist, locked door, videogames as we know them would be radically different.”
Perhaps, Alec, if the locked door didnt exist, you wouldnt be playing the game.
I have to agree with many of the indictments of developers in this prose. Locked doors are sometimes incredibly annoying and seem to laugh in your face. I especially like that you mention the fact that it is resistant to all weapons and attempts to violate it. I can also imagine that without at least some locked doors, I might never have been as avid a gamer as I am. I think I’ll call it a wash and hope that developers just use fewer and fewer locked doors in the future.
why do some people try and rationalize something like this thats meant to be funny by explaining why and how necessary a locked door is in a game. can’t they just enjoy the joke for what it is, or add to it.
I think best commentary on this topic is in near one of satcomms in Fallout3, there’s a door, which after opening reveal only a wall with “FUCK YOU” on it. Pretty much article above in a pill.
I hate that the door just magically becomes unlocked after you complete the most random tasks ever…Go kill everyone in the room and BOOM the door is no longer locked because the lock was linked to all of their hearts and once they die the door opens…I HATE THOSE DOORS!!!
Without locked doors the entire Zelda franchise as we know it would not exist.
in other good news, silent hill for the wii will not contain ANY locked doors as stated in nintendo power’s new issue.
It may be just me, but I loved bumping into every single door of the Silent Hills and checking them so that I can get that nice hatch on the map!:)
What about the doors in real life that are locked???
Has anyone else walked into a door that turns out to be locked????
Large amounts of win detected
Not that this isn’t a dead horse…but…
The “Locked Door” problem is a consequence of our expectations. Free-form 3d rooms populated with audible, mobile NPCs take more manpower to make than 2.5d, grid-based rooms with text-spitting NPCs.
I think there’s a lot of hope out there for procedural generation techniques, and not just in Fallout 3’s “random crap in every box” sort of way. I can see, with hardware getting somewhat stronger, random, yet plausible interior generation in 3d environments, wherein designers could just mark entrances and add an outline of the interior to the overall city map and have the engine populate minor buildings on-demand based on a seed established at character creation. After all, in a realistic world, 95% of the visible people and places would just be bystanders of one sort or another. Plus, it would make massive NPC response and retaliation tenable when action begins in the streets. Should the player lob a grenade down a residential street, the buildings could start behaving appropriately, with some getting their doors and windows barricaded from the inside, some sprouting gun barrels from their windows, and others emitting NPCs into the streets to fight (or flee). Add in a repopulation algorithm, some conditional appearance modifiers for occupied, empty, and long-deserted buildings, and it’s the start of a really organic-feeling system. It’d be the end of both non-functional doors and low-population “hub towns.”
*shrug*
Or, just nuke Megaton and forget about the locked door. Your call, really.
Anyone here remember Deus Ex? Almost all locked doors in that could be forced open using lockpicks, multitools, or explosives (even, in some cases, normal weapons). Locked doors were only rarely used to force linearity in the plot, mostly they created multiple methods of completing each level dependant on the amount of resources and skills the player had rather than the whim of the designers. That was good game design.
Anyone here remember Deus Ex?
Never heard of it.
well I had to make sure….
indeed
SO SO SO very true…
i think having all the doors open would break the imersion,i mean if you go around a city,trying every random door, 9/10 times,it’s locked,altho,alot of survivle horror games and older fps’s take it to far,with doors that the lock is busted on,yet you can’t just shotgun the hell out of it,like normal people,or the door is just painted on,and you can’t interact with it all
In response to what a few of you have said:
A game is not finite, however many games are designed to be finite. In fact, one of my lines on my Bucket List reads “Design and code Complex Game Generator, or CGG”.
The concept of basically programming ‘randomness’ using a constantly-changing measurement (like time) into a generator which thinks like a game designer, creating content which fits for that world.
Any rebuttals to say what I one day wish to do, I have one thing to say to you: Nothing’s impossible, apart from the impossible. So prove that this is impossible by helping me and then laugh when I fail.
BTW, wouldn’t it be awesome to have the computer create content on-the-fly? xD
And an amazing free poem you have there. Locked Door Syndrome affects all of the Gamer race at one point or another in our lives.
Opinion, AWAY!
~Me
P.S –
You just lost the game.
You are now blinking and breathing manually.
You are still reading this.
Go play a game. You’re boring me.
I told you to stop reading me. This is just getting creepy…
Well, if you’re gonna continue doing this, I’ll have to bring out my secret weapon….
YOU HAZ SWINE FLU LOL!
AMEN!
@Crystalmyst Since when are games not finite? Look to most sports, also known as games. They all have a finite duration to them. True some are more flexible in it, but they all end.
Great story or greatest story?
I don’t believe this door exists. Probably Photoshopped.
ha ha ha ha
great idea man