Game mechanics that need to die

[CriticalGaming]

Dunno, before I inevitably get bored with Skyrim and stop playing, a lot of the stuff I do seems to revolve around crafting, with dungeon crawling and monster hunting being a means to that end. And using the console to lower my level because crafting mucks up my character optimisation or whatever.

I think it is worth pointing out that I think Crafting is fine in a game that focuses crafting. Minecraft, Dragon Quest Builders, games like that are great and the crafting is usually pretty well done.

It's the other games that feel like crafting is a needed thing. Cyberpunk 2077 didn't need crafting. Fallout 4 didn't need crafting. Final Fantasy games don't need crafting. Yet crafting is there for no fucking reason. Devs need to stop that madness.

 

[Elvis Starburst]

Fishing being added to games that seriously don't need them. Looking at you Ys 8 and FF15

 

[meiam]

Fishing being added to games that seriously don't need them. Looking at you Ys 8 and FF15

Try warframe, that game is full of pointless mini game, worse you have to do them for daily. Sigh, I wish the dev would just focus on their strong core gameplay.

 

[Eacaraxe]

So you were forced to pick and choose when to engage with the game and when it was best to simply run around and do nothing?

That's putting the game in a no-win position and I distinctly suspect you know it. Finding ways around monsters via alternate routes that usually involve climbing, using the game's rudimentary stealth mechanics, and exploring and using map knowledge to avoid encounters that are time- and resource-prohibitive, are not engaging with the game, now?

I suppose that puts basically the entire Metal Gear, or supposing you don't like lengthy cutscenes the Splinter Cell, series on particularly precarious ground, doesn't it.

I mean, Skyrim's come up here. Remember when everyone was pissed about Todd Howard making this huge fracking deal about climbing mountains in a mountainous province of Tamriel and the exploration/traversal options that could open up, and it turned out not only could you not do it but the game didn't re-introduce levitation while also "nerfing" athletics and acrobatics from even Oblivion? I mean, in retrospect that must be one hell of a paradox for so many players to bemoan ways to "not engage with the game", right?

Let's not get started with Last of Us, Thief, Amnesia, Silent Hill, or certain select installations of the Resident Evil series and "not engaging with the game". If that's the metric we're using, Alien Isolation certainly ranks right up there with Gone Home in terms of being one of the worst walking simulators ever made, right? Right?

It's an open world in which the player can do anything, but doesn't actually encourage the player to do anything.

I mean other than that you just described basically any sandbox game ever designed, sure.

Otherwise you can take on the big four dungeons and Ganon.

Let's put a pin in that last one for a sec. Because really, we should ask ourselves precisely what we must to in BotW to accomplish only those activities.

This doesn't include the environmental effects that require tedious prep to deal with.

Surely you don't mean tedious prep like climbing to one of a few dozen handful key locations near Hyrule castle, and gliding straight to the tower to skip basically the entire castle? Or just swimming up the waterfalls and dipping straight into Ganon's location?

Not that anyone would ever find those locations, what with environments discouraging exploration and all. Not that there's any incentive to do it in the first place. Right? Right?

But none of that's "engaging with the game", right? Is the only way to engage in the game to walk straight through Hyrule Castle's front doors, sword a-swingin'? But I mean, all the prep to make that work is just so tedious and so disincentivized.

Just everything hinders the player's fun imo that I don't know why the game ended up being so appealing. Maybe just blind devotion to Zelda games.

Right, so any way to do anything in BotW you don't like is "not engaging with the game", any way to do anything in BotW to which you have no objection is "tedious" and has "no reward", and anyone with a viewpoint different from yours is blindly devoted. You're pretty much just looking for reasons to shit on the game, here.

...Crafting annoys me for the sheer, stupid grindiness of going and finding shit and fiddling around with anvils and gunsmith tables, and then if you're unlucky also have to unlock various forms of magic / tech powerups into them too. Yeah, you might be able to turn that crap into high level kit. But aside from that, it's a colossal load of arse. I would prefer to just have a supersmith quest mission to get a few things and he'll turn me out something awesome.

It gets even worse (Bethesda) with the nerfing of unique, legendary items. You go off and kill the Great Demon Lord Kabazagh to recover the legendary, fabled Mighty Swword of Dobbah! that was wielded by the kingdom's founder two thousand years ago and blessed by the gods themselves. You check out the Swword's stats and... seriously guys? I could make these. I could go back home grab some ore from my chest and some other doodads and turn out 20 of them by the end of the month...

Well, that's rather the razor-thin tightrope game designers have to walk in a nutshell, isn't it.

Make crafted items not powerful enough and developers just added an entire mechanic players won't engage with. Make them as powerful or more powerful than loot, and loot loses its purpose since players will just craft their way to victory. Make crafting too easy and players just do that and engage in minimal looped gameplay; make crafting too hard and it becomes an exercise in tedium.

Classic WoW is pretty much the pitch-perfect example of how not to nail balance on player crafting. Ton of crafting options, nobody wanted crafted gear other than leveling gear because the five-man dungeon shit was always better than the best crafted gear. The only professions that were actually useful at 60 were engineering (for a handful of PvP goodies) and alchemy (for grinding out progression consumables), and mining and herbalism to support engineering and alchemy.

A handful of tailoring, leatherworking, and smithing options were moderately appealing for certain pre-raid gear -- because MC needed fire resistance and AQ needed nature resistance -- but world drop green resist gear was better than the crafted options. There was never even an option for crafted shadow resist gear for Naxx, to the best of my recall. There was all of one crafted piece of gear with consistent demand that was universally useful, and that was Arcanite Reaper, without a doubt the biggest pain in the ass to craft in the entire game's seventeen-year history. And it was a stopgap until getting Blackblade, Treant's Bane, or TUF.

TBC had BoP crafted gear that was supposed to be comparable to tiered loot, but in practice it failed because the mats were stupidly hard to get and often required getting those tiers on farm status to begin wtih.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

Actually, yes. Crafting.

I've come to dislike crafting. I don't mind the odd bit of potion mixing, occasional item repair and adding scopes onto weapons and stuff. But it's turned into a whole complex subgame that's worth precious little.

Again I hold to this view are you a fighter, a mage, a thief, an alchemist, or a blacksmith? Pick a fucking job and stick with it. If you want to play at medieval smith simulator, make horsehoes (magical, if you prefer) and stop hitting dragons.

Someone needs to make a game out of this. Some kind of weird alchemy/resource gathering/horse racing game where you craft magical horse gear for races.

 

[CriticalGaming]

That's putting the game in a no-win position and I distinctly suspect you know it. Finding ways around monsters via alternate routes that usually involve climbing, using the game's rudimentary stealth mechanics, and exploring and using map knowledge to avoid encounters that are time- and resource-prohibitive, are not engaging with the game, now?

It doesn't because in BOTW it would easily be fixed by removing the weapon degradation and slightly improve loot in random bandit camps.

Stealth mechanics in other games are designed (usually) around having a stealthy option, but that often isn't the only option. You can run and gun in those games and often you have too. You might stealth through and kill a few bad guys, but eventually you'll fuck up and have to fight the rest outright. Either way the player is engaging with the encounter in front of them. Whereas in BOTW you aren't, you are simply avoiding the encounter completely and essentially it becomes a better solution to not do an activity than it is to enjoy that activity.

I mean other than that you just described basically any sandbox game ever designed, sure.

How so? Sandbox games offer loads of things to do and don't punish players for doing those things. So I don't get your implication here.

Let's not get started with Last of Us, Thief, Amnesia, Silent Hill, or certain select installations of the Resident Evil series and "not engaging with the game".

What do you mean by this? You mean using the environment to stealth your way around encounters? That's still engaging the player because it rewards the player's use of the game world to avoid encounters. Stealth is the mechanic and is the engagement of the encounter in front of them. And either way the game doesn't punish the player for either option. You'll not lose out on resources for taking on enemies, you wont be weaker for defeating them, and you aren't punished for skipping them either if you can manage to plan and plot your way around things. It becomes a puzzle versus and action encounter.

Let's put a pin in that last one for a sec. Because really, we should ask ourselves precisely what we must to in BotW to accomplish only those activities.

Speedrunners have shown time and time again that you need to do basically nothing to do those things. It requires skill sure, but it can be done.

Additionally to argue what a normal player must do, it's simply do just enough to stock yourself up and the skip as much as possible on the way to the bosses so that you'll have the tools needed to defeat them. No matter what you do in BOTW at some point you have to actively decide to stop doing the content available in order to reach the goal.

Surely you don't mean tedious prep like climbing to one of a few dozen handful key locations near Hyrule castle, and gliding straight to the tower to skip basically the entire castle? Or just swimming up the waterfalls and dipping straight into Ganon's location?

Not that anyone would ever find those locations, what with environments discouraging exploration and all. Not that there's any incentive to do it in the first place. Right? Right?

But none of that's "engaging with the game", right? Is the only way to engage in the game to walk straight through Hyrule Castle's front doors, sword a-swingin'? But I mean, all the prep to make that work is just so tedious and so disincentivized.

None of that targets my point. There are obviously some merits to exploration in the game, but if you could fight everything without worrying about your weapons turning to shit, you COULD walk in the front door sword A-swinging. But by the time you get to the castle the player has probably already learned the lesson that fighting stuff is a waste of time and effort so going around to avoid as much as possible is likely the better choice.

Right, so any way to do anything in BotW you don't like is "not engaging with the game", any way to do anything in BotW to which you have no objection is "tedious" and has "no reward", and anyone with a viewpoint different from yours is blindly devoted. You're pretty much just looking for reasons to shit on the game, here.

First of all, if you like BOTW then great. It is obvious that a lot of people love it. I'm sure there is a level of devotion that blinds people to the obvious problems the game has though. Blind devotion happens to everyone, like me and Final Fantasy 7. I know there are things about FF7 that suck ass, and I don't care.

I am not looking for reasons to shit on the game. Everything I've said in this thread (and others), has been said by other people as well. I'm not digging into shit that other people haven't also seen just to personally nit pick the game.

 

[BrawlMan]

While it's on my mind, RPG elements in most games. They do nothing but add tedious grind to the overall experience. Beat em ups have been doing this to a degree too. Thankfully, a lot of them are going to back to a more arcade approach. I wish the same for the new Ninja Turtles. Scott Pilgrim, Double Dragon Neon, Phantom Breaker, they all suffer from the same thing and adding elements that didn't add much to the overall gameplay. The only ones that do RPG elements right are Guardian Heroes and the Kunio-Kun/River City games. And I'm not even that big on the latter. Guardian Heroes does it the best, because your stats reset on every new playthrough. It keeps it fresh and interesting.

 

[Agema]

Well, that's rather the razor-thin tightrope game designers have to walk in a nutshell, isn't it.

Make crafted items not powerful enough and developers just added an entire mechanic players won't engage with. Make them as powerful or more powerful than loot, and loot loses its purpose since players will just craft their way to victory. Make crafting too easy and players just do that and engage in minimal looped gameplay; make crafting too hard and it becomes an exercise in tedium.

Or, just scrap crafting.

An obvious potential solution is to make crafting generic - so you can make really good stuff, but it's limited to basic advantages and powers. Legendary items can be more powerful but with niches / limtiations, or otherwise have powers you can't make with crafting. So you get a dragonslayer axe loot unique that's ace for killing dragons but otherwise a mediocre magic weapon against anything else. Or imagine you have a typical damage type setup (physical, cold, fire, lightning, holy, death), but you can't craft all those types. Is that loot Holy Sword better or worse than your crafted Fire Sword? They've both got pros and cons and overall, no difference, but the Holy Sword is something you can't make.

Fundamentally I think loot should always be more powerful than crafting. You want to tell me the last 10,000 years of amazing smiths, all the artisanship of the dwarves, elves, and deity-blessed weaponry etc. couldn't make anything better than your PC Blork the Barbarian after a couple of years experience hitting ogres? Screw that.

 

[Dreiko]

I played Ace Attorney and Danganronpa (horrible horrible game) and neither are RPGs and they're visual novels.

Both of those are adventure games. A visual novel is something like Steins;Gate.

 

[Agema]

Someone needs to make a game out of this. Some kind of weird alchemy/resource gathering/horse racing game where you craft magical horse gear for races.

I'm willing to bet you that if you look hard enough through Steam, there IS something just like this. It might not be very good, though.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Or, just scrap crafting.

An obvious potential solution is to make crafting generic - so you can make really good stuff, but it's limited to basic advantages and powers. Legendary items can be more powerful but with niches / limtiations, or otherwise have powers you can't make with crafting. So you get a dragonslayer axe loot unique that's ace for killing dragons but otherwise a mediocre magic weapon against anything else. Or imagine you have a typical damage type setup (physical, cold, fire, lightning, holy, death), but you can't craft all those types. Is that loot Holy Sword better or worse than your crafted Fire Sword? They've both got pros and cons and overall, no difference, but the Holy Sword is something you can't make.

Fundamentally I think loot should always be more powerful than crafting. You want to tell me the last 10,000 years of amazing smiths, all the artisanship of the dwarves, elves, and deity-blessed weaponry etc. couldn't make anything better than your PC Blork the Barbarian after a couple of years experience hitting ogres? Screw that.

I hate to go back to Morrowind again, but I really think Bethesda got it right there. Breaking the game through alchemy aside, custom spells and enchanted items could be extremely powerful because you could build to order...but at the cost of having lower enchantment thresholds and higher costs than their quest reward or store-bought counterparts. You could have gear with exactly the modifiers you want, but in terms of raw numbers they'd never compete with artifacts, and the same applies for custom spells versus default spells. And, you always had to make compromises here or there due to it.

With certain notable exceptions. Like for instance, custom summon spells were almost always more useful than vendor-purchased ones for no other reason than you could set the summon duration to a more efficient level. Sixty-second summons were totally unnecessary, and just made the spells harder to cast and cost more.

 

[Phoenixmgs]

Both of those are adventure games. A visual novel is something like Steins;Gate.

Huh? They are both on this list of visual novels:

The best visual novels that'll capture your imagination

Looking to get lost in a good text-based adventure? Our list of the best visual novels is here to help

www.gamesradar.com

Also, I found the following distinction between VNs and adventure games:
In Japanese terminology, a distinction is often made between visual novels proper, which consist predominantly of narration and have very few interactive elements, and adventure games, which may incorporate problem-solving and other types of gameplay.

How is a visual novel in any way an RPG without combat when they are supposed to have very few interactive elements (even less than Danganronpa or Ace Attorney)? RPGs are very interactive.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Translations certainly do change the experience.
The exact same can be said of a difficulty slide and players who don't want to go through the same difficulty experience others do.

But aside from translation (an absolute, like math or computer code) and game design (an artistic endeavor) being apples and oranges, that first statement still kinda proves the point of the latter, and the essential reasoning behind FROM’s design on the other hand.

Miyazaki himself has stated his reasoning on this several times over the years, but I think this was the most recent example:

"We don't want to include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment," Miyazaki said. "So we want everyone … to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player."

The creator continued: "We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there's different difficulties, that's going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It's been the same way for previous titles and it's very much the same with Sekiro."

 

[dreng3]

Miyazaki himself has stated his reasoning on this several times over the years, but I think this was the most recent example:

I think there is a very clear weakness in the explanation though and that is the fact that people don't perform the same even under similar conditions. I legtitimately couldn't beat a boss in Sekiro which prevented me from experiencing the remainder of the story, my hand to eye coordination simply didn't allow me to track and respond to the movements.

I'm not saying the Easy-Normal-Hard model of difficulty really works, but the idea that everyone should perform similarly and that good performance is the only thing that legitimizes the experience seems odd.

 

[Dreiko]

I think there is a very clear weakness in the explanation though and that is the fact that people don't perform the same even under similar conditions. I legtitimately couldn't beat a boss in Sekiro which prevented me from experiencing the remainder of the story, my hand to eye coordination simply didn't allow me to track and respond to the movements.

I'm not saying the Easy-Normal-Hard model of difficulty really works, but the idea that everyone should perform similarly and that good performance is the only thing that legitimizes the experience seems odd.

I genuinely don't think you couldn't beat it, I just think it'd take you longer (maybe much longer) than other people.

In Sekiro the parrying system works in such a way where if you parry too soon and then hold the input it transitions into a guarding action, as opposed to having a vulnerable opening that could be punished by the enemy. This trivializes the punishment for failing to parry most things, because at worst you just lose some posture. All you need to get in the habit of is timing your parries in the "too soon-to-correct" window as opposed to the "correct-to-too late" one which is how you actually get hit in any instance. This is not an issue of hand eye coordination but of strategy. Once you get a feel for it then you just learn to do it. Hell, you can even doubletap the parry, so you do a thing akin to tap-hold for a breath-tap again to get multiple safe shots at parrying, you're only vulnerable for the split second between letting go of holding the block button and pressing it again for the second parry.

Also, you can cancel your attacks with parrying mid-action, I find a lot of people don't know that that's even a thing. If you do an attack to bait the enemy to attack you with a faster hit that'd outspeed your attack and then cancel that attack into a parry you can get a lot of free parries vs most enemies.



Now, I think this thing I just did is what Miyazaki had in mind, now it's in your ballpark, you can choose to have fun discussing the intricacies of the game and the troubles you had in your path, or you can not, but for us fans of the game this is the sort of thing we enjoy having a chat about which is where he was going with that comment.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I think there is a very clear weakness in the explanation though and that is the fact that people don't perform the same even under similar conditions. I legtitimately couldn't beat a boss in Sekiro which prevented me from experiencing the remainder of the story, my hand to eye coordination simply didn't allow me to track and respond to the movements.

I'm not saying the Easy-Normal-Hard model of difficulty really works, but the idea that everyone should perform similarly and that good performance is the only thing that legitimizes the experience seems odd.

It's entirely about time and willingness rather than capability. I doubt you're at the age where your brain and body have degraded to the point you can't actually do this.

 

[Agema]

But aside from translation (an absolute, like math or computer code) and game design (an artistic endeavor) being apples and oranges, that first statement still kinda proves the point of the latter, and the essential reasoning behind FROM’s design on the other hand.

Miyazaki himself has stated his reasoning on this several times over the years, but I think this was the most recent example:

"We don't want to include a difficulty selection because we want to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment," Miyazaki said. "So we want everyone … to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player."

The creator continued: "We want everyone to feel that sense of accomplishment. We want everyone to feel elated and to join that discussion on the same level. We feel if there's different difficulties, that's going to segment and fragment the user base. People will have different experiences based on that [differing difficulty level]. This is something we take to heart when we design games. It's been the same way for previous titles and it's very much the same with Sekiro."

This all seems quite philosophically dubious

Inherently, the experience of any individual in an audience differs. No two people read the same book the same way, or watch a film and take the same experience, and so on. It's seems to me odd to a gamemaker to try to control that unnecessarily. If a player wants to play the game for a narrative rather than fine motor skill, why not let them? With a set difficulty level, a pr0 who breezes through in four hours and a noob who struggles through in forty have fundamentally different experiences. The "discussion" for some people might even be that they found it too difficult, gave up and de facto wasted the developer's efforts designing content and their own money.

It's not that I don't think there's any reason behind this design philosophy, I just think that as stated, it has some very significant flaws.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I think there is a very clear weakness in the explanation though and that is the fact that people don't perform the same even under similar conditions. I legtitimately couldn't beat a boss in Sekiro which prevented me from experiencing the remainder of the story, my hand to eye coordination simply didn't allow me to track and respond to the movements.

I'm not saying the Easy-Normal-Hard model of difficulty really works, but the idea that everyone should perform similarly and that good performance is the only thing that legitimizes the experience seems odd.

Understandable. However, his point of a “same level” isn’t about player ability, but rather being able to adapt and overcome the game’s invariable challenges in some way that circumvents any differences in skill, and be able to discuss each other’s experiences on that same playing field. The things Dreiko brought up wouldn’t exist if the game had multiple difficulties to choose from, because it would change those kinds of conversations to simply, “Oh, I played on Easy”.

This all seems quite philosophically dubious

Inherently, the experience of any individual in an audience differs. No two people read the same book the same way, or watch a film and take the same experience, and so on. It's seems to me odd to a gamemaker to try to control that unnecessarily. If a player wants to play the game for a narrative rather than fine motor skill, why not let them? With a set difficulty level, a pr0 who breezes through in four hours and a noob who struggles through in forty have fundamentally different experiences. The "discussion" for some people might even be that they found it too difficult, gave up and de facto wasted the developer's efforts designing content and their own money.

It's not that I don't think there's any reason behind this design philosophy, I just think that as stated, it has some very significant flaws.

This also ties into my above reply, in that facing and ultimately overcoming a given “fixed” challenge is a vital part of the designer’s intended experience. To disregard it is only doing them a disservice as developers, not to mention robbing the player of the personal satisfaction to be had from being able to “dig deeper” into what they might be capable of as a gamer. The best statement I’ve read to describe it would be, “The game didn’t get easier, you got better.”

As a small concession to all that talk about difficulty and it perhaps preventing some people from playing his games, Miyazaki has also stated,


‘This fact is really sad to me and I am thinking about how to make everyone complete the game while maintaining the current difficulty and carefully send all gamers the messages behind it.’

 

[Drathnoxis]

I can't really think of any game where weapon degradation really added anything. Especially since it tends to happen at a ludicrously fast rate or in ways that make no sense(That iron pipe broke because you bashed too many skulls with it..somehow). I know if there's an option to minimize or get rid of it I'd gladly take it.

I can literally one game where it was part of the plot(Balders Gate) and I don't remember if it made the game better or worse because the game was already hard as fuck.

It's been a number of years but I seem to remember The Last of Us using weapon degradation fairly well. You only got a couple uses out of each weapon so you had to use some strategy as to when to use it.

 

[SilentPony]

SNIP

If we're arguing that a game needs to be hard to be experienced the way the devs wanted it to be experienced, then we have to allow for "This game is too hard to enjoy" as a legit criticism of a game. No more Git Gud, no more "You're just a bad player, noob." None of that, because being hard is the experience the devs wanted to give, and therefore is fair game for criticism.
Just like any other aspect of the game, writing, story, characters, etc...being intended parts of the experience and open for criticism, if being hard and struggling through something is part of the experience, it can be judged.
People should have a right to say "Cuphead is too hard, I didn't get passed the 3rd boss, 0/10 waste of money don't buy" and that's a 100% valid complaint because the intended experience is to be hard and they experienced the game as intended and didn't like it.