Outdated Vs. Deliberate Design Choices

[aozgolo]

As a fan of retro style RPGs I often see a lot of criticisms aimed at certain design choices in modern games that imply that the game looks or plays "outdated" instead of having a deliberate design choice or aesthetic.

One of the classic examples is Turn-based Battle Systems, which is my preference, for many feels like a relic of the past that was only ever used due to design limitations, nevermind that some of the most challenging, strategic and in-depth combat systems ever seen in games have been turn-based.

A more recent example I see is jabs at the fixed angle camera isometric views of games like Wasteland 2, Divinity: Original Sin, and Pillars of Eternity. A common argument being despite these games having great high resolution art, that the perspective makes it feel limited. There's also the criticism that the games feel more like a RTS with their focus more heavily on mouse usage for movement and issuing commands.

While I fully understand everyone has their preferences, and a feature one person may enjoy another person may hate, I wonder if the distinction between outdated game mechanics and intentionally retro ones isn't distinguished well enough.

I'm sure if someone were to today make an adventure game today that used a 100% text parser engine to play it would be considered outdated by pretty much everyone, though this seems to be a matter of lack of broad appeal, if someone were to indeed create a text parser engine that successfully passed the Turing Test (ability to convincingly simulate human behavior and form) and built a game engine around it, the same criticisms of it being outdated would still be made.

So I wonder, is it truly possible for any game design mechanic or aesthetic choice to be TRULY outdated? Is there anything that simply lacks any sort of retro appeal to be considered re-creating? What are your thoughts on the whole Outdated Vs. Deliberate Design situation.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

The difference between intentionally retro and outdated is a simple one. Do you import the problems. Outdated things tend to be outdated for a reason. Like text parsers. Everyone hated parser engines because they never worked. Text worked and still dose, but parser engines were frustrating guessing games.

 

[SoreWristed]

The difference between intentionally retro and outdated is a simple one. Do you import the problems. Outdated things tend to be outdated for a reason. Like text parsers. Everyone hated parser engines because they never worked. Text worked and still dose, but parser engines were frustrating guessing games.

I agree, but I feel the problem needs to be very narrowly defined before you can state that an entire genre can be defined as outdated.

Text parser games are, as you say, easily turned into a guessing game when you have to try every single variable of 'put gem in eye' before you finally find out that the working phrase would have been 'place crystal into eye socket'. So yes, that is a problem. Especially on games that attempted to increase the pressure and momentum of the situation by not pausing when entering commands.

But if a game was based on an engine, that creatively interpret your inputs of 'put' being the same as 'place', this entire problem would be solved. I know you can raise the argument that my example is too simple and was solved by simply adding more synonyms to the engine, I can counter with the argument that older text-parser adventure also had the problem that only one solution to the problem. An engine creative and smart enough would also make it possible to deconstruct the problem into basic concepts. An example would be 'an enemy is coming' and you need to survive this encounter. An older style game would feature one (maybe two, depending on the age of the game in question) solution to this problem, probably along the lines of 'put bucket on door'. Our hypothetical engine would be able to provide a large array of solutions that can turn out for the positive. This could vary from 'use sword on guard' to 'hide in toilet' and even to 'summon cthulu'.

A game built around this engine, would only be called outdated by people who have only seen the placement of the game into the category of a text-adventure.

What game do I have in mind to make this argument? Scribblenauts ofcourse. The game is basically a text adventure, in the general idea early text adventure games were going for, that the game was controlled by the creativity of the player, using text..
I've yet to read the review that calls the concept of scribblenauts outdated.

On topic : If the game has the same problems as the older games it is referring to, you could go two ways. Do you call the inherent problems in said games as part of the nostalgia, or do you call it lazyness? I'm personally of the mind that this subject is highly subjective and highly depends on the experience of the player. A 12 year old child could call the game unplayable, while a 30 year old player could call it a refreshing throwback.
To my mind, a game of such kind should at least attempt to solve the problems inherent in the system they use. But what you call a problem is also subjective. An example of this would be the single life many older games had, due to programming knowledge restrictions. I don't like playing such games, but that idea is the entire premise of some games such as Super Meat Boy or I wanna Be The Guy.

And I feel that turnbased combat, as we all loved in games like Mother, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, is not truly outdated. Look at Pokemon for instance. I think it was more focused on skill of the mind, than skill or speed with the controls.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

The difference between intentionally retro and outdated is a simple one. Do you import the problems.

Basically this.

For example: I HATE random encounters, like almost everyone. It's disruptive, annoying, and generally is a detriment to the game. Plus, it's essentially impossible to build anticipation and tension based on purely random encounters because they happen at RANDOM. However, they CAN be done well enough that these complaints all vanish.

Take the Etrian Odyssey series. Firstly, the game is a pure dungeon crawler, meaning that the slow loss of resources and the slow grind through the giant dungeon is the whole point, so they feel perfectly acceptable. Second, they give you a little notification sensor that goes from blue to yellow to red, with red meaning "encounter imminent", which creates that feeling of tension as that gem turns red and you start anticipating the next fight and wondering what'll happen.

Also, people who say that turn-based RPG combat is worthless really grind my gears.

Turn based combat can serve a VERY good purpose. Namely, Combat Puzzles.

Example from my own game: Oh look, a mage being covered by a skeleton, and the mage can drain life from his minions to heal any damage you somehow do through the "cover". Well, why not inflict Damage over Time on the guy so that he keeps draining his own minions, use a counterattack stance to turn the minion attacks on themselves, and keep the mage silenced so he can't re-summon his minions (even though this means your best damage dealer, who is the only one with silence, is too occupies to do his guaranteed-critical-hit combo). Eventually, you'll have shredded his minions, including the skeleton, so he won't be covered anymore, and now he's just another squishy mage. Or, you can just brute force the fight and use the ability that removes the "cover" effect, and just try to kill the boss ASAP before the minions do. Boom, combat puzzle with multiple strategies. One that would be too complex to pull off, or would be totally ignored most of the time if the game was action-based.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I'd have to say certain things are outdated.

Random battles are almost entirely outdated; they were a mechanic that came about due to hardware limitations long ago. Firstly random battles hinder exploration as if I feel like going over to check out some spot on the map, not only do I have to clear all the enemies to the way there (which I understand) but then just to get back to where I was I have fight enemies again where I already cleared the area (not OK). Secondly, it makes the world feel empty of life with nothing on the map. It's like the Calm Lands in FFX are teeming with monsters and such but my backyard of grass has more life to it than the Calm Lands.

I guess another thing that's outdated is lock-on system in shooters and brawlers/hack and slashers. Not that a lock-on system has no place but neither type of game should be dependent on a lock-on mechanic. Way back on PS1, manually aiming was so difficult in something like Syphon Filter, it needed a lock-on system. With good aiming controls and sensitivities, you can headshot enemies easily with a controller. Prior to last-gen, 3rd-person shooters were really shitty, something like The Order would've been considered a breakthrough but now it's just an average TPS. Even since I think Prince of Persia SOT where you can just start attacking the enemy you pressed the left stick towards, there's no need for melee combat games to be dependent on lock-on systems (not that they can't have them). I'm guessing Prince of Persia might not have been the first to use such a system but it's the first I remember.

One of the classic examples is Turn-based Battle Systems, which is my preference, for many feels like a relic of the past that was only ever used due to design limitations, nevermind that some of the most challenging, strategic and in-depth combat systems ever seen in games have been turn-based.

The problem is turn-based combat is used quite often when it shouldn't be. The combat needs to be strategic enough to merit it being turn-based. A lot of JRPGs (like FF) used turned-based combat where you had the heroes on one side and the enemies on the other just trading blows. That's not strategic combat. All of the best turn-based games from say chess to XCOM all have something in common, POSITIONING. Character positioning should be of utmost importance in a turn-based combat system. Games like that old FFs were nothing but going through menus and inputting the same shit over and over again, it was more a computer program than a game. The one great thing FFXII showed was that with a few if-then-else statements (gambits), the game would play itself. If you put the gambits in any prior FF game, those games would also play themselves. Only needing a few if-then-else statements to program the game to play itself means it's not strategic at all, you can't program XCOM to play itself with a few if-then-else statements for example.

 

[Dizchu]

I think lives systems are outdated. Very outdated.

I'm not sure how many games still use them, but if they do... shame on them. Having lives just artificially lengthens the game by forcing the player to replay areas they can already do without any problems. It was a necessity with arcade machines which kinda carried over into consoles, but even then it was unnecessary.

The only place I think they still belong is in roguelikes (like The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky) which randomise the levels every time you encounter a game over anyway, so you don't have to tediously play the same thing over and over again.

 

[Bad Jim]

I think lives systems are outdated. Very outdated.

I'm not sure how many games still use them, but if they do... shame on them. Having lives just artificially lengthens the game by forcing the player to replay areas they can already do without any problems. It was a necessity with arcade machines which kinda carried over into consoles, but even then it was unnecessary.

The only place I think they still belong is in roguelikes (like The Binding of Isaac and Spelunky) which randomise the levels every time you encounter a game over anyway, so you don't have to tediously play the same thing over and over again.

I'm not sure. Shmups tend to be lives based, but you can usually continue whenever you run out so you aren't forced to replay stuff. But the point of the game is learning to play well, not simply getting to the end. Beating the game on one credit is usually quite an achievement, and from there you progress to high scores. I guess you could make a shmup the way most modern games are, where you get one life but can reload from checkpoints when you die, but I don't think that would be an improvement.

Where it gets silly is the New Super Mario Bros games, where they throw lives at you and give you levels where you can easily farm extra lives. Having to restart is merely a theoretical possibility and the system is really pointless.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Design choices are always deliberate, I'm not sure where people got the idea stuff just sneaks in there by mistake.
Is it outdated, the moment someone thinks of a new idea it is so that always applies.

The only important part is, does certain design suit the game type? And by extent do your suggestions for improvement come from a completely different the game type, because then you are looking at the wrong game, staring at a concrete wall and complaining it's not a banana... try looking for a banana instead.
Wasteland, Divinity, Pillars are party based strategy RPGs. Turn based combat, top-down camera, mouse control, issue command interface scheme... that shit is there because they are strategy games, if you are looking for first person hack and slash this shit is clearly not it. Everything in them is designed around strategy RPG, if you wanted that to not be the case then look for another game.
You can certainly make improvements (and Divinity made a whole lot) but they will still be strategy games.

 

[Daniel Janhagen]

I think lives systems are outdated. Very outdated.

I'm not sure how many games still use them, but if they do... shame on them. Having lives just artificially lengthens the game by forcing the player to replay areas they can already do without any problems. It was a necessity with arcade machines which kinda carried over into consoles, but even then it was unnecessary.

And see, I love this mechanic. It turns a game into a great "levelling up" experience, like this:

1. I can't beat the game. I lose all my lives on the second stage.
2. I can't beat the game. I make it to near the end, but I lose too many lives relative to my gain (from score or whatever), so I run out.
3. I beat the game! It was close, and I needed some luck to get past some tricky parts on the last stage, but luckily I did well enough on the early stages to be able to afford a few deaths.
4. I can regularly beat the game, but not every time.
5. I can beat the game without losing any lives.

I also really like the variant with optional continues (for when you lose all your lives), where you can continue from where you died, but you lose your score. I wish fewer people (and designers) felt like you, because to me it's one of the greatest ways for pure action games to work.
It doesn't work for every game, definitely not. Would not want to start over in games that have a lot of story, cutscenes, loading times, open world et cetera, or games where tedium and doing nothing for extended periods is a feature. It also doesn't work if the game is too long. You need to be able to complete it in one fairly short sitting.

Games where a lives system would be bad: Hitman, Uncharted, Dragon Age, any Telltale-ish game, Pid, New Super Mario Bros. (NSMB does have lives, but really only cosmetically, as you have unlimited continues and no penalty other than to your pride for using them)
Games where it does work/would work great: Völgarr the Viking, Thunder Force IV, Blazing Lasers (or any fast-paced scrolling shooter), Golden Axe, Streets of Rage.

edit:

Stuff

Bah, you said my stuff, and more efficiently. Managed to miss your post, scrolling down.

 

[AT God]

Depends entirely on the player, I find some old design choices okay but others as really detrimental. As a lot of people have mentioned, I personally like random encounters in games with traditional RPG experience based systems because it acts as a difficulty setting. If you are bad at the game, you can always grind and get your skills up to overcome boss fights and challenges. If the game has a level cap beyond the enemies (like Pokemon, no foes are level 100 in the normal story), it allows even the worst players to beat the games.

That said, one mechanic that some games keep for the sake of being retro is when a game is a shoot-em-up side scroller where you cannot change the direction of your shots. I honestly think anyone who makes a side-scroller with Megaman style shooting controls is just being lazy. If you are making a game to be a NES-style game, you have no excuse not to give players angled shots because Contra did it perfectly. I played a NES-like game that came out recently (Jet Gunner) and it kept the stupid 1 direction shot. I see why the did it because they designed many of the enemies around your inability to shoot up or down but it just felt lazy, there are ways to make enemies interesting and difficult without crippling the player. What was really annoying was there was no narrative reason for the limited shooting, your character is using a gun, there is no reason he can't aim up or down. The game has a jet pack that allows you to somewhat circumvent this limitation but it still makes the game way to stupidly hard. (also the game kills you if you fall below the screen during vertical scrolling, so if you jump up off the top of the screen, if there isn't a platform to land on, you die when you hit the bottom of the screen).

Also I hate limited lives, personally I would prefer quick saves in every game but if you are going to do check points you should get infinite tries from a checkpoint.

 

[Dizchu]

to me it's one of the greatest ways for pure action games to work.
It doesn't work for every game, definitely not. Would not want to start over in games that have a lot of story, cutscenes, loading times, open world et cetera, or games where tedium and doing nothing for extended periods is a feature. It also doesn't work if the game is too long. You need to be able to complete it in one fairly short sitting.

Yeah I don't mind it in Super Mario World or old NES/Megadrive games, but in games that have the occasional cheap death it's a nightmare. I'm not expecting anyone to defend Sonic '06 but the fact that it has a lives system turns an already broken game into a complete atrocity.

Also I am sooo glad that first-person shooters ditched lives as early as they did. It really doesn't belong outside of arcade-style games that rely solely on skill or roguelikes, as I mentioned. I personally believe that finishing a run without dying too many times should be an optional bonus challenge rather than an imposed restriction. The latest Rayman games have a good amount of challenge but they're also forgiving, and that's just the kind of challenge I want.

I guess my approach differs from many gamers. I like knowing that I failed because I wasn't good enough, not because I slipped up once or twice, if that makes sense? I play guitar and I enjoy playing challenging songs, but if I make a mistake near the end, I'm not going to restart the song. I might repeat certain passages to get them nailed down, especially when recording. But if I am performing, I should recover from a mistake rather than redo the whole thing (which is usually not an option).

I dunno, I'm probably in the minority on this one.

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

The difference between intentionally retro and outdated is a simple one. Do you import the problems. Outdated things tend to be outdated for a reason. Like text parsers. Everyone hated parser engines because they never worked. Text worked and still dose, but parser engines were frustrating guessing games.

I agree, but I feel the problem needs to be very narrowly defined before you can state that an entire genre can be defined as outdated.

Text parser games are, as you say, easily turned into a guessing game when you have to try every single variable of 'put gem in eye' before you finally find out that the working phrase would have been 'place crystal into eye socket'. So yes, that is a problem. Especially on games that attempted to increase the pressure and momentum of the situation by not pausing when entering commands.

But if a game was based on an engine, that creatively interpret your inputs of 'put' being the same as 'place', this entire problem would be solved. I know you can raise the argument that my example is too simple and was solved by simply adding more synonyms to the engine, I can counter with the argument that older text-parser adventure also had the problem that only one solution to the problem. An engine creative and smart enough would also make it possible to deconstruct the problem into basic concepts. An example would be 'an enemy is coming' and you need to survive this encounter. An older style game would feature one (maybe two, depending on the age of the game in question) solution to this problem, probably along the lines of 'put bucket on door'. Our hypothetical engine would be able to provide a large array of solutions that can turn out for the positive. This could vary from 'use sword on guard' to 'hide in toilet' and even to 'summon cthulu'.

A game built around this engine, would only be called outdated by people who have only seen the placement of the game into the category of a text-adventure.

What game do I have in mind to make this argument? Scribblenauts ofcourse. The game is basically a text adventure, in the general idea early text adventure games were going for, that the game was controlled by the creativity of the player, using text..
I've yet to read the review that calls the concept of scribblenauts outdated.

On topic : If the game has the same problems as the older games it is referring to, you could go two ways. Do you call the inherent problems in said games as part of the nostalgia, or do you call it lazyness? I'm personally of the mind that this subject is highly subjective and highly depends on the experience of the player. A 12 year old child could call the game unplayable, while a 30 year old player could call it a refreshing throwback.
To my mind, a game of such kind should at least attempt to solve the problems inherent in the system they use. But what you call a problem is also subjective. An example of this would be the single life many older games had, due to programming knowledge restrictions. I don't like playing such games, but that idea is the entire premise of some games such as Super Meat Boy or I wanna Be The Guy.

And I feel that turnbased combat, as we all loved in games like Mother, Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger, is not truly outdated. Look at Pokemon for instance. I think it was more focused on skill of the mind, than skill or speed with the controls.

Fixing a phraser might be possible, but I don't know if that will fix the issue. You might run head long into gold old adventure game logic. You know where just cycle through your inventory rubbing everything on everything else till you find the magic combo that fixes the puzzle. (Often an intentionally logical combo.) Then again the new adventure games are are getting avoid this, for the most part, by basically not including it.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I once read someone on The Escapist forums saying that because western and eastern RPGs are derived from tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons, that they are both RPGs. Of course, Eastern RPGs are not RPGs, not in the least. There's little to no versatility, everything is a different form of attack or buff, the levelling and stats are there, but not the versatility those stats were required for in the first place.

JRPGs are basically adventure games with a combat system thrown in. You have pretty much no role-playing to do as the characters do and say what they are scripted to do and say. Does say The Longest Journey suddenly become an RPG if April had to fight enemies every few steps and leveled up?

 

[thoughtwrangler]

There are lots of design choices that are outdated. But outdated concepts *can* be mined for new twists.

Since quotes still aren't working, I'm going to agree with aegix drakan regarding the Etrian Odyssey series, and that was the first thing I thought of too when it came to the modernizing of several mechanics that had been done much worse in the past.

Turn-based battle systems *can* be fun, if they're designed as an organic part of the game, and not just because "it's an RPG. If it has anything else it's not an RPG." Which is pure Male Bovine Fecal Matter.

But the problem arises when the baggage of a system or concept is brought on as well. When developers can't be bothered to remove the baby from the fetid, stinking bathwater it's in. I'd say about 95% of RPG's with variants of turn-based battle systems don't use them to any great degree. They almost never amount to anything strategically and the combat could just as well be real-time button-mashing without any loss of strategy or immersion.

Random encounters have been pointed out, and rightly so. The whole "attack by enemies because RNG says so" is lazy. But forced level grinding itself is another idea that is used 95% of the time as a terrible, tacked-on element that has nothing to do with making a game good. Find a way to make it a fun part of the game, or make fewer battles. Then the turn-based battles you have will feel like actual combat and not a button-press drill.

 

[Maximum Bert]

If it is not broken I dont think a design mechanic can be outdated although it may not currently be in trend if it was fundamentally flawed i.e as was brought up at the start the old text parser engines then I would say it has more scope to be saying it is outdated although its possible for someone to make a new text parser game with all the faults of the originals as a design choice because I dunno it makes them feel fuzzy inside and indeed if they do that fair play to them I just wont play it and im sure many others wouldnt either.

Really things only get outdated when there are alternatives that are better in some crucial way or many ways and with a creative medium I dont think that can really happen. Back in the day there were a lot of limits placed on design choices and while there are still many limits they are nowhere near as restricting so odds are the way they design now is more down to choice than enforced limitations.

 

[hybridial]

Best example for this to me is Classic Resident Evil vs New Resident Evil.

Classic Resident Evil is fun, awesome, feels different and feels like it has it's own identity. Oh but because some people find it clunky it's considered dated and Capcom were made to turn the series into a shitty 3PS that does everything everything else does.

I don't think people appreciated why classic RE worked and why everything about it's "clunkiness" was intentional design.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

JRPGs are basically adventure games with a combat system thrown in. You have pretty much no role-playing to do as the characters do and say what they are scripted to do and say. Does say The Longest Journey suddenly become an RPG if April had to fight enemies every few steps and levelled up?

That's basically what I'm saying, the only reason "JRPG" is a genre is because it doesn't really fit into any other. Despite what I've just said I don't hate them for not being true RPGs, but the genre could stand to actually try to improve it's combat (as mentioned before, JRPGs take the stats and levelling, but don't really seem to understand why those stats are used). I wouldn't mind if, for example, Final Fantasy 7 was remade with a combat system more like Wasteland 2 (I'd say XCom since more people are familiar with it, but Wasteland 2 is a lot closer to what I picture since it has melee as a viable option, a world map, etc). As you said yourself, the biggest problem is a complete lack of positioning.

If you're going to have combat in the first place, you should make every effort you can to make the combat good (unless you're making it deliberately unfun, like Spec Ops: The Line, but then you better have a damn good story).

Yeah, I get what you're saying. I was more so posing the question in general because in reality JRPGs are usually just adventure games with a shit-load of combat, that doesn't make a game an RPG. I haven't played Wasteland but XCOM is literally just DnD's combat system but with guns and aliens; you have a move and an action or you can double move. I hate games where you can't beat an enemy just because stats. What opens up the combat isn't just dealing 1,000 damage instead of 100 but getting a new power/ability/skill/etc. that lets you do something new changing the dynamics that just doing more damage doing the same thing.

I think JRPGs have tons of potential but it's usually just wasted with shitty combat systems and stories that end up being far less interesting than initially thought. And, the characters are usually annoying as shit. Whereas WRPGs have a less focused story usually and you're usually exploring basically the same medieval fantasy world with the same races and classes.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Best example for this to me is Classic Resident Evil vs New Resident Evil.

Classic Resident Evil is fun, awesome, feels different and feels like it has it's own identity. Oh but because some people find it clunky it's considered dated and Capcom were made to turn the series into a shitty 3PS that does everything everything else does.

I don't think people appreciated why classic RE worked and why everything about it's "clunkiness" was intentional design.

I only find clunky controls to break immersion because when I can't do stuff I can do in real life, my immersion is broken. In fairness, RE kinda pioneered 3PSs as RE4 was a breakthrough for 3PSs. Do you remember how shitty 3PSs were before PS3/360 gen? You can easily make a game scary with smooth controls, humans are rather weak (I don't see the point in making us any weaker).