JRPGs could lose a good 60% of useable items and I wouldn't even notice.
Game mechanics that need to die
- Thread starter immortalfrieza
- Start date
Please no, that would mean either having to control like 8 characters in combat or limiting the cast to just 4 character.
Come to think of it, I'd like a turn based rpg that let you control more than 4 characters at once. That would be a nice twist.
Final Fantasy X is the only game that came close iirc, because you could swap any character in and out on the fly, but it was always only 3 at a time.
Out of 108 (well 70 ish playable), I'll take my artificial limit on number of character in party ty.
You can try last remnant which let you use up to 40 in sub team of up to 5, it almost work, almost.
I think I tired that way back in the day when it launched and I bounced off it pretty hard. Thanks for the lookout though.
Far Cry 2 had a shotgun that visibly degraded with every shot. And enemy-dropped weapons were always worse off than those the player unlocked from an arms dealer (some guns would break after a couple dozen shots), so those guns the game forced you to "try out" fell apart well before you could get any feel for them, and the end effect was needing to schlepp* back to a safehouse to replace your weapons after every other gunfight. (The degradation system for non-melee weapons in System Shock 2 was also annoying, but that was themed more towards horror and forcing up-close confrontations, and so was a bit more excusable.)
Any game that wants to get players to use a variety of weapons should make that entire variety of weapons viable and enjoyable to use. Degradation is just the cheap and uncreative way to force it.
( * Spellcheck recognizes this word. I'm kind of impressed.)
Sorry to go against you on this, but Difficulty Modes themselves should die. I have NEVER seen Difficulty Modes done well, never ever. It never does what it should do, which is keep the enemies statistically the same but make the enemies smarter, better able to anticipate what players are doing to do, and more effectively able to react to what the player does do. Instead it just results in the enemies getting their health and defense beefed up, the player's attacks getting weaker, the player's defense and health getting lower, or reading controller inputs in fighting games, or all of them. Trying to beat the player through attrition is not fun, creating a genuine challenge is.
Yeah, especially when the rest of the party has the ability to revive each other from death but somehow can't do it for the PC. That just highlights how ridiculous it is.
I can't speak for everyone else, but for me with Persona games I just stuck with the first party members that filled the slots and did just fine for the most part (occasionally a party member would be really really useless against a boss so I would switch them out but otherwise...) until really late in the game, and by then the protagonist is powerful enough and has enough varieties of Persona available they can just carry the party anyway.
It's especially annoying when the player has no means of locating said collectables outside of searching blindly and hoping they run into it. Particularly when you get to the last few and are stuck walking over every last inch of the map praying that you locate them and you can stop. NO thank you, and that means I'm not thanking you developers.
I would consider that a definite plus. By limiting the characters to only the cap of the number of possible party members in combat at once each character gets much more opportunity for development instead of just getting a bit from one of them every so often and it means the developers can balance the enemies specifically to a party they know you will have, instead of having to balance the enemies so that any party makeup you can have will for the most part be able to win. Another issue with having the number of party members exceed the amount you can bring into combat with you is that it tends to make party members fairly generic in combat from each other so the devs don't have to worry about balance. FF15 made great use of both of these advantages to having a set party.
Suikoden is pretty terrible at party members in general. Only a select few get development past their recruitment and they are the ones you have to recruit anyway. The rest end up being just... there and not doing or commenting on anything that is going on while traveling with you. Later games had them have a bit more characterization by talking to them at the bases every so often though. Crono Cross is another game that had the same issue, a crapton of party members but only their recruitment and their Lv 7 Tech skill turned out to provide any development and characters would literally say the exact same thing in any scene except maybe changing their accents.
But what do you do when someone wants to experience a game's world without too much of a challenge? Or someone has a handicap where they can't compete against enemy AI on the established singular difficulty but still want to play the game?
Like for me Bloodborne is a perfect setting and lore, and exploring is so rewarding and visually interesting, but the bosses are an absolute slog, and not a fun one. I only found a handful of the DLC bosses fun, and none of the main game ones enjoyable at all. Just to replay the game and explore again on a new character, or the inevitable PC release I'd love to be able to turn down the boss difficulty and not just curb stomp them, but get through them in 2-3 lives instead of live 10. I know some people can do From software games without getting hit, but that comes from hundreds of hours of replaying and I'd rather not do that and get through the bosses and continue on with the story.
But some people do want that, some people want to play hard games until their fingers bleed and they can get through it all in one go, and I think the gaming industry can and should be able to cater to both our needs without denying either of us.
NPCs dying in RPGs where you have a resurrection spell. NO NO NO NO NO.
If anyone in your party has a resurrection spell, no-one should die without your say so, short of disintegration (or maybe old age).
If anyone in your party has a resurrection spell, no-one should die without your say so, short of disintegration (or maybe old age).
The one, and only, time I will defend weapon degradation is the GBA game Summon Night: Swordcraft Story. It did a lot to mitigate the annoying parts of weapon degradation, but it also turns the concept on it's head: human opponents not only had weapons that could be broken, which not only counts as a win, but you collected the blueprints of weapons you break. Since the main character is also a blacksmith, they could then craft copies of those weapons to use for themself.
I can't stress how much this changes the play-style of the game. You lay into some opponents more when they block, ease up when they stop blocking, balance your health and weapon durability, prioritize weapon modifying over direct damage spells, all to lower their weapon durability. My only disappointment with the system was that the game didn't recognize the time I entered a tournament, broke an opponent's weapon in our match, only to use that weapon in the next round of the tournament.
As for my own hated mechanic: stun locking, especially in single player games. Stun locking is just time I'm spending not playing the game.
I can't stress how much this changes the play-style of the game. You lay into some opponents more when they block, ease up when they stop blocking, balance your health and weapon durability, prioritize weapon modifying over direct damage spells, all to lower their weapon durability. My only disappointment with the system was that the game didn't recognize the time I entered a tournament, broke an opponent's weapon in our match, only to use that weapon in the next round of the tournament.
As for my own hated mechanic: stun locking, especially in single player games. Stun locking is just time I'm spending not playing the game.
This reminds me when I was playing Borderlands 2 with my sister, and then a cutscene happens and the Handsome Jack shoots and kills Roland and its all "NOOO! Not the hot black guy, the one girl really liked him!" and I was like "Wait...they literally established in lore, not just game mechanics, that cloning is real and people come back to life instantly for only a few hundred credits, and there is a New-U station in the exact room Roland dies in when the gameplay restarts. So like...the fuck? How is death a thing at all?"
They pulled that shit again in Borderlands 3 killing one of the characters from Borderlands 2, again in a room with a New-U station and established that these people have died hundreds of times.
I mean without cannon death then the game has no stakes and no consequences. I'm pretty sure it's usually waved away that your party members aren't dead in combat just knocked out so the revives only give them energy back not actually legit reviving (unless the whole party wipes).
It's a required suspension of disbelief because otherwise all the events taking place in the game mean nothing, because anything bad can just be undone with magic.
I can agree that limiting number of character can have advantages, but it also has massive issues, mainly that you need a really solid core cast for it to work. Like P5 would have for only party member Ann, Mokona and Ryuji, two of which I literally cannot stand and was chomping at the bits to replace. I also don't know that I'd say FF15 developed its character well at all, especially at release without the tons of DLC. Actually now that I think about it, the more time I spent with the FF15 character the less I liked them, so less development of them would have been a big plus in my book (who could have predicted at the start of the game that Gladiolus was a huge whinny *****).
The Last of Us Remastered did that to me, sort of. I spent the vast majority of the game heavily utilizing Joel’s size and strength to deal with enemies at close range instead of using projectiles. Then comes the section where you play as the kid and I have to learn an entirely different playstyle to finish the game. I actually had to lower the difficulty to pass her section.
It's bullshit plot convenience. Like when characters are dying and I'm thinking "I've got a medkit / healing potion / heal spell / nanite health syringe I literally just need to go voom and he's fine. Why am I listening to this guy blub his last for 30 seconds in a cutscene when I can save his life in 5?"
I mean, if you're playing D&D, no, that really is a resurrection spell. Dead for ten years? No probs! Boom, and they're back. I mean, in games you can have a party member felled and take a whole damn month to drag him to a temple (assuming players characters don't have the spell), and the NPC priest says "Amen presto" and there's your guy, back again as if nothing happened. It's not credible that they've been comatose for a month, and besides, that skull icon replacing their portrait is kind of telling you it's more serious than a bad headache.
There are ways to create canon death if it's needed that are much better than a character just dying in front of your eyes from conditions that your party has the means to prevent. Maybe the NPC asks to die and their soul refuses to come back. Maybe they're behind a forcefield that blocks your spells. Maybe they throw themselves into a volcano. I don't care. But there's no reason for any character to die bleeding out with a sword in their guts when your party has the ability and will to prevent it.
The problem is that Difficulty Modes have never provided an actual challenge or lack thereof. Like I said, at this time at least the higher Difficulty Mode is not more challenging because the AI is better, it's because the difficulty tries to beat the player through attrition. This is not fun for anyone, it's tedious and fake difficulty at it's finest.
Also, the "disabled and don't want a challenge" has always been a false comparison. If the player is either unable or unwilling to get through the same challenges that everybody else has to, they should drop that game and play something else more suited to them instead of demanding a "Difficulty Mode" when the fact is they're just trying to cheapen the accomplishments of anyone who can beat a game as is for their own selfish satisfaction.
I think the issue is that games do that, yet people don't even attempt to try these other weapons so they never realize they were fun to use as well.
Never played far cry but yeah that sounds pretty squarely in the "everything you have is constantly broken" camp of overdoing it. For me a balanced approach was something like in fallout 3 where you could repair stuff but it was never fully fixed until later in the game where your repair skill was maxed out or if you bought it brand new and decay happened at a pretty slow rate but it did eventually make you want to try different weapons.
A pretty solid core cast to work? Any game developer that can't write party members well with less characters to need to work with isn't going to write them any better with more either. Inversely, a developer who can write a lot of characters well is very likely to be able to write a few characters VERY well, and a developer who can't write a lot of characters well is unless they're completely awful at writing characters at all is likely to write a few characters well.
Reduce the workload for the developer and everything gets better, up to a point at least.
Didn't we have a thread like this months ago? Or is that yet another pandemic induced fever dream.
Anyway, optional stealth. Just either be stealth, or not. I think Uncharted 4 was when I began to fall out of favor with this mechanic (I was fine with it in Far Cry). Your first instinct of course was to stay in stealth, and as a person who enjoys stealth games, it always felt more like you fucked up rather than "Yay, time for shooting" when you were discovered. And frankly, the shootouts were far more enjoyable than the basic stealth mechanics they gave you. So doing things by stealth, giving you less enemies to fight in the long run, actually makes the game less fun, which is bizarre to me from a design standpoint.
Most recently for me in Spider-man PS4, there was literally no reason to stealth it up other than to fulfill optional mission objectives. And to add insult to injury, even if you do manage to take out everyone stealthily, they just force you into combat anyway. At this point, stealth really is starting to feel like an industry-mandated mechanic ala loot drops and crafting, something you throw in just because everyone else is doing it.
Anyway, optional stealth. Just either be stealth, or not. I think Uncharted 4 was when I began to fall out of favor with this mechanic (I was fine with it in Far Cry). Your first instinct of course was to stay in stealth, and as a person who enjoys stealth games, it always felt more like you fucked up rather than "Yay, time for shooting" when you were discovered. And frankly, the shootouts were far more enjoyable than the basic stealth mechanics they gave you. So doing things by stealth, giving you less enemies to fight in the long run, actually makes the game less fun, which is bizarre to me from a design standpoint.
Most recently for me in Spider-man PS4, there was literally no reason to stealth it up other than to fulfill optional mission objectives. And to add insult to injury, even if you do manage to take out everyone stealthily, they just force you into combat anyway. At this point, stealth really is starting to feel like an industry-mandated mechanic ala loot drops and crafting, something you throw in just because everyone else is doing it.