Some design choice you question

Siyano_v1legacy

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I am not sure how I could named this post.
So, anyway.
After playing the latest Kirby, a question went to mind, why do we even use a life count and an collect the star to get 1 up anymore in game like this or mario?
After few stage in Kirby you already at 25 life because they gave you so much stars and life.
Eventually I tried to lose all life, and gameover, does nothing, I just went and started a new save to test this (its was very hard to die haha), I'm not talking about why the game is easy, im just questioning why we still use this design choice if its as almost no purpose.

On the other hand, I hate when a game use the "save" system such as in final fantasy, where if you die you have to restart from there, i prefer how pokemon does it for example.
that if for some reason I forgot to save for 30 minutes or so, well you have to "replay" the 30 minute pars, its irritate so much.
 

laggyteabag

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I recently played through Max Payne 3 for the first time.

The game was solid enough, but I have to say, the constant screen flickering got old super quick, and if I had a penny for every time that the game took control from the player, to play a cutscene - big or small - I probably would have refunded myself the price of the game.

Im not going to go full on B-Cell when it comes to story in games, and whilst I had a good time with it, I just wish that it wasn't quite so aggressive when it came to telling the player that story.

If Half Life 2 is a prime example of story through gameplay, Max Payne 3 is the complete antitheses to that idea.

Another one that really gets on my nerves is when NPCs travel at different speeds to the player character. This isn't so much of an issue on console, because at least then, the analogue stick allows you a greater choice of movement speeds than "Full speed ahead" and "Literally standing still" (though it is still annoying), but on PC, it is just an infuriating nightmare.

When you are following a character, and they are running maybe 10% slower than you are, or if you are doing an escort quest, and they are just gently strolling along.

Speaking of escort quests: They are just the worst in WoW. I am pretty sure that they have improved them greatly, but they used to just saunter along, and then sprint up to whatever mob you have attacked, and then sprint back to where they were before they entered combat, just so they could continue their slow wander towards the end of their path.

Dumb.
 

Squilookle

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I will never understand why some games change your FOV when you sprint or boost. People's eyes don't work that way. Stop it.
 

Drathnoxis

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I would guess that the reason Mario still uses a live system is so they have something somewhat rare to hide throughout the levels. They can hide 1-UP mushrooms around the level so that the explorative player will feel like they are being rewarded, without having to make extra content for collectables or unlockables. They aren't actually worth anything, but they can still give the player a little rush of excitement for finding them. It's basically a placebo.

For my own I'm going to cheat and just quote a massive post on The Consuming Shadow I just made, because it roughly fits the topic.

I wish Yahtzee would have put some more development into Consuming Shadow. It was about 70% of the way to being an amazing game, but fell short in a lot of ways.

The star sign was really clever and I thought it was a great way of randomizing stat buffs for extra fun. A problem with it was that it let you spend all your points in the same spot, so you can find the best spot and just make all your stars on top of each other. Something like that should push you toward making choices. At the very least you shouldn't be able to put 2 stars within a certain distance of each other.

The game is just janky. The animations are pure jank. Interacting with anything in the car just feels bad with a mouse, especially the equipment briefcase. Melee feels completely awful despite still being the best option. The way ammo works is ridiculous. You get six bullets per ammo type, monsters take like 3 or more shots to kill, and finding ammo when you are already full just wastes it. It's dumb, You could find nothing but normal ammo for 5 screens and waste like 20 bullets, then fight 2 monsters and be out right away. It should at least leave it in the container, and maybe mark it on the map. You lose sanity from running away from monsters, monsters respawn randomly, and fighting guarantees you will lose health or ammo and health. The way the mechanics come together kind of make it feel like you are being punished just for playing. I guess you are supposed to be making decisions about whether to explore more or not, but finding clues in dungeons is mandatory so there isn't actually a lot of choice. The way these mechanics work just doesn't even approach being elegant.

Lockpicking is useless, you find so few lockpicks and there's always a key, there's just no point to it. Dungeons just don't have enough content. You will quickly see all they have to offer, and the procedural generation isn't really adding that much. They have the bad combat and that's about it. They aren't really fun or interesting, and that's a big problem because so much of the game takes place in them.

Requiring you to permanently lose a birth star to unlock the challenge modes is nothing short of mind boggling. You need to irrevocably lose your progress so you can do a challenge that doesn't unlock any additional content, boost xp gain, or otherwise give any sort of reward. It's just harder, and you need to shoot yourself in the foot to even attempt it. I don't get it. He should have drawn more inspiration from Binding of Isaac on how to do additional challenges.

And despite all that, I finished the game 5 times and probably spent 30-40 hours playing it. I found all the journal pages too, but didn't bother with the files because they were pretty dull. The mood is excellent, and I really love the concept of just being part of an underground group of investigators scattered across the country in loose contact working to stop something that would get you called a tinfoil hat wearing crackpot by anyone who knew. It's very X-files in that way, like the Lone Gunmen. We aren't part of a powerful organization, we don't have the government backing us up, we're just one of a handful of people who noticed something and had enough understanding of the arcane to recognize it for what it was and find a path to stop it. The car does so much for the mood. Just everything hastily thrown in the passenger seat, we're living out of our car in our mad dash to stop the unknowable horrors from beyond the veil.

The little logic puzzle where you have to deduce the identity of the invading god from various clues is pretty fun. It's cool how there's even some clues that aren't spelled out for you, like the runes on the walls that give hints as well.

The concept is fantastic, but the implementation leaves something to be desired. The game needs polish, needs content, and needs redesigning in spots. But it could be absolutely amazing if it was done right. I wish he'd make a sequel with a small team. He needs a programmer, and an artist, in addition to the guy who did the music.
 

sXeth

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Toggle sprints. Granted, on KB/M you'd need them, but why they're still hanging around on games with joystick controls that already have the functionality of Move-Move Faster-Move Really Fast built in.

Speaking of movement speed, the forced 'slow walk" segment. Often used to try and instill some kind of drama, or stop the player from outrunning an NPC spouting exposition. I actually don't know how this one even came about. It's more elegant to just have a cutscene if you want to have this sort of thing then arbitrarily shove player input into it that has no purpose.
 

Souplex

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I will never understand why dodging can give invincibility frames in the souls series. Dodging should be a simple matter of "Did you get out of the way of the attack". People who roll can live without it if they just git gud.
 

Ironman126

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Souplex said:
I will never understand why dodging can give invincibility frames in the souls series. Dodging should be a simple matter of "Did you get out of the way of the attack". People who roll can live without it if they just git gud.
I tend to view the invincibility frames as a workaround necessitated by the buggy dogshit that was/is the Souls engine. This is the engine that has trouble telling if you're behind an unaware enemy, how is it supposed to know if you're out of the way of a big fuckoff demon ax?

After a while, players got used to the "feature" and it stuck.
 

fix-the-spade

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Weapon and item degredation!

Admittedly some games have done it well. In STALKER for instance a weapon will fire several thousand rounds before reliability starts to become an issue, then remain usable but increasingly unreliable until it is eventually broken and has to be repaired. It also applies weapon condition logically, that rifle you dragged from under an adandoned car in the garbage zone will be a wreck, but the one you took from a freshly killed mercenary will be nearly new.

Other games just don't get it, Breathe of the Wild was almost ruined for me by the constant need to find new weapons as the ones you pick up break over and over and over. Far Cry 2 is another that holds a special place for it's use of Explodium Alloy in all the rifle barrels.

It's immersion breaking and extremely annoying to have weapons that are unreliable to such a ridiculous degree. It's artifical difficulty and whenever it gets into games in that unrealistic state I have to assume that there is an extremely dogmatic designer somewhere who would not compromise on his (or her) idea, at all. Or nobody did any playtesting.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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What is that shit at the end of Rayman Legends? The music levels are genius, but merely throwing an intrusive screen filter to make life difficult for you while you're obligated to replay them is the epitomy of lazy half-arsed cuntiness. I'd accept an extra few enemies, spiked walls or whatever to at least show they cared about making them extra challenging, but not legitimately hindering your sight all the way through and calling it a day.
 

Lufia Erim

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The option to skip puzzles. I mean not only are puzzle piss easy nowadays, but why even put a puzzle if you are going to give the option to skip them? you know damn well that people are just going to gamefaqs it anyways. At least leave them the shame of having to manually look it up.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Seth Carter said:
Speaking of movement speed, the forced 'slow walk" segment. Often used to try and instill some kind of drama, or stop the player from outrunning an NPC spouting exposition. I actually don't know how this one even came about. It's more elegant to just have a cutscene if you want to have this sort of thing then arbitrarily shove player input into it that has no purpose.
Those tend to be transitions between areas and are used to hide loading screens. If they used a cutscene instead then they'd have to load the cutscene and you'd get a loading screen anyway.
 

Siyano_v1legacy

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I hate having to toggle RMB for ADS in shooters on PC. ADS shouldn?t be used for more than a supplementary aiming function, so the extra click to return to hip fire is just annoying.

Souplex said:
I will never understand why dodging can give invincibility frames in the souls series. Dodging should be a simple matter of "Did you get out of the way of the attack". People who roll can live without it if they just git gud.
I?m pretty sure iframes have been around long before Souls games, but agree they are an unnecessary design crutch. I can deal with it if the game itself is good, but prefer a more logical approach to combat.

I also can?t wait for technology to more fully support realistic and dynamic damage models to NPCs and environments. It?s getting old relying solely on life bars for enemy feedback.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Souplex said:
I will never understand why dodging can give invincibility frames in the souls series. Dodging should be a simple matter of "Did you get out of the way of the attack". People who roll can live without it if they just git gud.
The invincibility frames represent dodging the enemy attack by moving your body (ducking under an enemy blade, etc). The problem is that in order to have these dodges look realistic they'd have to animate a different dodge for pretty much every attack for every enemy type in the game. That's a shitload of extra animation, literally hundreds of extra hours of work that they'd have to pay for, so instead you get i-frames which take no animation.

If you only had the roll with no i-frames they'd have to make their bosses and enemies much slower since you'd have to roll backward away from an attack, and then spend time running back in to get a hit in. This means that enemies would have to attack less frequently to allow you an opportunity to hit them, or if they left the enemies exactly the same then pretty much everyone would have to play with a shield build.

I-frames aren't really an elegant compromise, but I can totally understand why they're there.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Casual Shinji said:
Not being able to aim your gun in Bloodborne. Just why?!
Prevent cheesing from range.
 

Casual Shinji

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Dirty Hipsters said:
Casual Shinji said:
Not being able to aim your gun in Bloodborne. Just why?!
Prevent cheesing from range.
With the amount of damage that thing does, you couldn't even cheese an actual cheese. So that's no excuse.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Casual Shinji said:
Dirty Hipsters said:
Casual Shinji said:
Not being able to aim your gun in Bloodborne. Just why?!
Prevent cheesing from range.
With the amount of damage that thing does, you couldn't even cheese an actual cheese. So that's no excuse.
In Dark Souls it's incredibly easy to break encounters by just using the bow, pulling enemies one by one, and fighting them one at a time.

In Bloodborne they gave you rocks to throw to do the same thing, but the rocks have extremely limited range. If they gave you free aim of the gun people would use that to pull enemies from much farther way, making it easier to break encounters and cheese from range.

The damage the gun does has nothing to do with it.
 

Hawki

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Laggyteabag said:
I recently played through Max Payne 3 for the first time.

The game was solid enough, but I have to say, the constant screen flickering got old super quick, and if I had a penny for every time that the game took control from the player, to play a cutscene - big or small - I probably would have refunded myself the price of the game.

Im not going to go full on B-Cell when it comes to story in games, and whilst I had a good time with it, I just wish that it wasn't quite so aggressive when it came to telling the player that story.

If Half Life 2 is a prime example of story through gameplay, Max Payne 3 is the complete antitheses to that idea.
Can't comment on Max Payne, but Half-Life 2 I'd say is far more questionable in regards to storytelling.

You want to remain silent about aspects of the worldbuilding, let the player figure out stuff? Fine. You want to present Gordon as a silent protagonist with the personality of a brick? Fine - silent protagonists are questionable in general, but I can bear them. You want to sell that Gordon is so silent that he never asks anyone about anything (did the twenty years of stasis make him forget the English language?), and that Alyx is infatuated with him (with her father's approval no less), despite never showing any element of personality, thereby implying that Alyx is only attracted to Gordon because of superficial reasons (I doubt that was the developers' intent, but Alyx's reasons for being attacted to Gordon can only be inferred - maybe because he's good at killing?). Eh, now we're getting into iffy territory. You want to cite "immersion" by not having cutscenes, only by still having cutscenes that you can't skip where Gordon can just do whatever, standing mutely while slightly more interesting characters yammer on? As in, keep the cutscenes from other games, only just remove the ability to skip them?

Yeah...

Frankly, I'll take the Metal Gear (and I assume Max Payne) approach, where we have actual characters with actual personalities. Or if you're going to do the Half-Life 2 approach...well, it's been done elsewhere, and done better. Another World is too obscure for its own good IMO, but there's at least a reason why Lester can't ask Buddy anything (the language barrier). Jack is silent from BioShock, but there's at least a concievable reason why he remains silent (under Fontaine's control, lack of actual emotional experience). Half-Life 2 is just awkward when it comes to its character interactions, the only exception being Breen (since the lack of response does give the sense of him being all powerful...which might explain why he's easily the best character in the game).

TBH, I think silent protagonists in general are a questionable design decision, and Half-Life 2 is simply one of the more egregious examples, but that's just me.