Game mechanics that need to die
- Thread starter immortalfrieza
- Start date
It's without it's vital components and feels like a neutered version of what SK and Neptunia stood for which is problematic Japanese games that did nothing good for the genre by promoting the worst stereotypes about weebs.
The fact that most alt right takes on twitter come from a Senran Kagura/Neptunia does not help their case
That's a lot of crap and you know it. They sure as hell don't represent the entire fandom of either games. That's just you projecting. Again. You must have also forgot about this part:
Marvelous says Senran Kagura has many female players, talks about the series' sexual nature
GamesIndustry spoke with Marvelous marketing manager Michael Fisher to talk all things Senran Kagura. One topic discussed is the audience playing the series, which might be somewhat surprising. Fisher said that quite a few female players are giving Senran Kagura a shot – around 30 to 40 percent...
nintendoeverything.com
That is the gender equivalent of saying I have a friend from a visible minority. To assure the industry that they aren't sexist or promoting problematic issues even though people like Pendantic Romantic remark on how problematic the Neptunia fanbase is. The niche fandom do it all time after cultivating a negative about their genre but few companies in Japan actually address it.That's a lot of crap and you know it. They sure as hell don't represent the entire fandom of either games. That's just you projecting. Again. You must have also forgot about this part:
Marvelous says Senran Kagura has many female players, talks about the series' sexual nature
GamesIndustry spoke with Marvelous marketing manager Michael Fisher to talk all things Senran Kagura. One topic discussed is the audience playing the series, which might be somewhat surprising. Fisher said that quite a few female players are giving Senran Kagura a shot – around 30 to 40 percent...
No, it's not. I'm not saying those female players make up the majority of the fan base, but they do make up a good amount. If anything, it's alt-right assholes that are the vocal minority. And if they are part of the fan base, then the good and decent people/fans know to stay away, get rid of them, or say we are not associated with that group. They are not us and they don't represent all of us. It's that simple. If those alt-right assholes have their panties in a bunch; let them. It just shows the world how truly pathetic they are.
Nah this is one of the games in the long line of neptunia x something Arpgs which were never too explicit to begin with, there's one with zombies, one against the Sega hard girls, one where they're in a fantasy MMO setting. Anyways there's tons of these games and they never had a multi-featured dressing room like senran kagura does, and this is one of those in a ninja girl setting it seems like. Also we legit don't know what features it'll have yet to that end, they definitely didn't seem to have censored Asuka's combat model anyhow lol. Even her panties have the same pattern of stripes.
I think it would be good to be able to move past the need for life bars. Save for specific abilities to scan enemy health, pretty much every genre now should be able to use usual cues for enemies’ health pools. Because when you have health bars, a bad side effect of them is they wind up commanding your attention far too much when it should be focused on the condition of enemies themselves.
They are a superior alternative to "I've been wailing on this guy for ages, is he even taking damage?!"
True, but my point is we should be at a point where damage cues are a normal and completely doable thing. If after all the technological advancements in gaming the only way to even tell if you’re doing damage to something is by looking at a health bar draining, then that’s not a good sign. It’s like the equivalent of EA’s sports genre.
Yeah, health meters are not disappearing anytime soon. Especially if it's brawlers, hack and slash games, action-rpgs, or single player action games. I like health meters; they're fun to look at. Especially if there's a unique display or UI. This is ironic, because back during 7th generation, Yahtzee complained about the lack of health meters in first person or third person shooter games. When everybody was jumping on the Gears and COD trend of ditching them. Plus, there is a thing called physical damage. That can be used in addition to health meters. Bayonetta uses them just fine.
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I get that they have their place, and I agree they can be useful. My issue is when developers simply use them as a crutch for lazy game design. Like
@Drathnoxis posted earlier half-jokingly asking "I've been wailing on this guy for ages, is he even taking damage?!" there's really no excuse for that lack of feedback anymore, no matter the genre. Even if it's a pixel swap or slight animation change to indicate "hey, those attacks of yours...they're doing something!" for any of the genres you mentioned above, it's better than nothing.
That's less of the game mechanic's problem, and more of a lazy and/or incompetent developer's design problem. I get it, but it's one of those things that impossible to get rid of. If you get rid of health meters, you risk running in to the exact same problem wondering if you're doing any damage to the guy. They may be damage sponge enemy, or not taking damage, because they're in a specific state that is obviously visually displayed or telegraphed. I don't know what games you've been playing, but most of the ones I've been playing have some type of feedback to let you know you're doing some type of damage.
Most of them do, but it varies on the genre, and if the game is 2D, 2.5 D, or 3D.
Super Mario Galaxy doesn't use health meters but the bosses tend to work on a physical damage level and they change their attacks(and get harder) with each sucessful hit. Then again, normally bosses in those games go down in 3 hits but they're only vulnerable to said hits during certain times so it's more like puzzle bosses then anything else.
So maybe not the best example to use but I felt I'd toss it out there.
Still counts as a health meter of some sort. In most 2D and 3D platformers, that's their bread and butter. On top of physical damage, there a color change of them turning orange/red/pink/purple to let you know they're near death or at the final phase. Konami did this more times than they care to admit.
Shows Damage - TV Tropes
Rather than just give an enemy - or occasionally your character - a generic Life Meter, or show the exact number of hit points, some games will show the characters taking damage on-screen. Sometimes this makes sense and looks good, other times, …
tvtropes.org
I'll never forgive my first encounter with the Warden in Halo 5... I'll never forgive Halo 5 in general, but that fight specifically. Not only was I fending off frenetic waves of mobs while taking pot shots at the Warden when I could, but there was no indication that my shots were landing. Definition of insanity, I just kept doing the same thing (and running out of ammo every 30 seconds) expecting to see him die. It ultimately worked, but never had I ever experienced such an extremely unrewarding effort.
The excuse is the same one for nearly everything in this thread in some fashion: Laziness. Actually physically showing damage on the model or even changing color for every enemy takes a lot more work for them than to just slapping a health bar onto things. That, and tradition. Even games that actually have physical damage indicators tend to still have health bars anyway because it's such a common and widespread thing. I can shoot a guy in the leg and he hobbles around as a result, but chances are he'll still have a health bar showing how much I still have to shoot him regardless. Health bars are so customary to video games that they'll do it even when it's not needed.
^This; health bars act as a frame of reference. Let's be honest, in reality, a single gunshot or stab wound would put most of us out of any appreciable commission, and since not every game wants to be Dark Souls-level of difficult with one-shots being "I win" or "game over," enemies (and players) have to be able to withstand multiple attacks. Without a frame of reference that says "this is how much damage a given character can take, and this is how much damage you've inflicted," it'd put the player in the conundrum of having to suss out a risk/reward system that doesn't indicate whether the risk is worth the reward, and resource management becomes a gamble versus a test of skill. If I chop an enemies arm off as an indicator I've done significant damage... what does that tell me about how much more I need to deliver?
IIRC, Condemned didn't have any sort of health indicators; you just had to wail on enemies until they stopped moving. What made it difficult (not oppressively so) was the fact that the game had a prominent weapon degradation system where a crowbar could only cave in so many skulls before becoming useless and another weapon needed to be found. In reality, I think a crow bar could take thousands of souls off the census when utilized as a weapon, but in that game, you had to use it sparingly lest it "break." Or bullets; you could find guns, but with realistically limited ammo: do you waste it on a couple normal mobs or wait for a "boss" who's likely to absorb it all without your knowing how much you gained by NOT using it sooner.
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On a related note, I'd really love to see more games actually have damage given/taken actively impede the character taking damage. So if you chop off an arm(or lose your arm) the character is now going to start getting notably weaker from blood lose and loses the ability to do 2 handed attacks or attacks reserved for that arm. Chop off a leg, and the the character, you know, probably loses the ability to move around much. BOTW allowed you to chop off the limbs of the guardians, rendering them immobile but still dangerous but that didn't seem to affect many enemies and a lot of games the enemies will be totally fine at 1 HP before dropping dead at 0 HP.
Whereas I can think of an old Military sim game called Steel Panthers were you could render vehicles immobile with lucky/critical hits or damage them enough they may not be dead but they weren't going to do much damage. Squads that lost enough people or took enough fire would basically refuse to advance due to being suppressed or demoralized which gave you quite the incentive not only to NOT put your forces in unnecessary danger but you could also halt an enemy advance at times by hitting them hard enough they began to retreat or refused to move at all. It also means that while driving tanks through buildings looks really cool in movies, it's a really bad idea here because then the tanks get stuck in the rubble and can't move.
And I do appreciate how the New God of War game allows you to essentially knock enemies out of the fight for a bit so even if they aren't dead yet, they can't do much so you can either take them down or shift your attention to someone else for a minute.
I also remember my "Veteran" run of Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, a game that [I think] started the prevalence of the whole "screen going red" in lieu of a health bar trend. On the infamous "All Ghillied Up" level, I was really struggling with the final bit, trying to get to the chopper for evac. I must have tried it a couple dozen times, and on my successful attempt, I think I took more bullets running towards the chopper than I had in all the previous attempts combined. I remember thinking: "I really should have been killed; that screen was completely red, but I think the game was taking mercy on me." I'd really have liked to have seen the "numbers" on that one; I had no frame of reference insofar as how much damage the incoming fire was doing to me, but by their own rules, I didn't die, so, 1,000 gamerscore later I joined the elite groups that actually were able to complete the Veteran run.
That is something I am glad that has mostly died down, aside from the COD series. So many shooters in 7th gen that copied Gears and COD did the whole "blotch your entire screen red" so you can't see anything. It's annoying, distracting, and fake difficulty. It's even worse when a game has an actual health meter, and chooses to still have screen red on the borders of your screen, but puts a stupid filter or frame around it. As much as I love Platinum a good amount of their games are guilty of this. Bayonetta being the most noteworthy. I already know my health is low developers, just make my health bar red and let it be the end of it. No need for the extra mile. DMC, not even the failed reboot, chose not to do such annoying trend.