dartmonkey

Video Game mechanics to retire

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This thread is for video game mechanics and tropes that have run their course and need decommissioning. State your subject, give some examples and reasoning for their retirement, but also suggest some possible replacements/alternatives.They can be large or small but your proposal should be mechanical rather than thematic or generic ('space marines' and 'all cover-based shooters' don't count).

 

I'll kick it off with

 

Search & Loot

I'm willing to admit that perhaps I bring this on myself. I'm one of those people who has to systematically scour every room for items before moving on, and in a Run'n'Gun cinematic FPS perhaps I'm just playing it wrong. But in strong narrative games like BioShock Infinite and The Last of Us I think I'm in the majority. We don't want to miss a single scrap of paper or audiotape. And that means searching every last inch to find pills, ammo, money, lockpicks, medallions, dogtags, badges, diaries, comics...

I'm getting to old for this shit. My experience of both the above examples was seriously dampened (and lengthened) by my compulsion to grind up against every surface hoovering doohickeys. And not just random collectibles but items necessary to uncover a deeper narrative. The Last of Us was so intricately detailed it took ages just to find the little triangle that may or may not materialise over a cupboard handle. But. I. Couldn't. Stop.

My solution is crap, but it's got to the point where I would find it preferable - at the threshold of every room have an option to 'Search Environment'. *box pops up* 'You found some tape, $14 and a March 1987 copy of Penthouse.' Or why couldn't I give Ellie instructions to just search everywhere we go? That doesn't break the 'illusion' and keeps it optional. I'm so tired of being a fucking Dyson for half the game.

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My solution is crap, but it's got to the point where I would find it preferable - at the threshold of every room have an option to 'Search Environment'. *box pops up* 'You found some tape, $14 and a March 1987 copy of Penthouse.' Or why couldn't I give Ellie instructions to just search everywhere we go? That doesn't break the 'illusion' and keeps it optional. I'm so tired of being a fucking Dyson for half the game.

 

But, then you only get half as much game and your game:$ ratio will plummet! You might as well stop giving games marks out of 10.

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I feel that no video game mechanic should be retired, but fine-tuned and reiterated. Like cinematography, there are no bad methods or styles of filming a scene, there is just bad cinematography by way of a shitty cinematographer and director. The fact that QTEs, the most reviled of game mechanics, are reviled is that they are badly implemented and don't add to the experience of playing a game. They are usually used to add some fake sense of interactivity when the game is taking nearly all control away from the player.

 

But look at Heavy Rain. I hate that fucking game for thousands of reasons (the writing, barf), but it implemented QTEs in a fascinating way that gave context and meaning to w/e you were doing. The act of nervously holding a knife up to do a certain something (won't spoil) isn't done by way of just tapping the A button,  but by way holding many buttons in succession to convey a sense of nervousness and apprehension. The fact that you end up holding like 6 buttons to just hold up a knife shows how much care they put to make these otherwise throwaway, unpopular set of mechanics feel very good and meaningful. Tropes we can live with eliminating completely or revamping them from scratch in all narrative forms, but in games we should make new mechanics while reiterating/fine-tune existing ones.

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I think Search and Loot would be way more entertaining if you had to spend a limited resource to even look. So you get to open either the cupboard or the barrel but you can't look at anything else. You would probably also have to build the game so that you didn't have to search through shit to find the resources you need to play, which would also be super.

 

The Holy Trinity of combat classes is a holdover from the days of MUDs, which had no concept of spatial movement. It should not have survived to be brought into Everquest. It definitely shouldn't have survived to the modern day MMORPG. It very definitely should not have escaped the MMO basement and started turning up in other games that should know better. It's not even a good design! The damage dealers get to have all the fun of attacking, but to make sure it's not piss-easy you have to make 'hurting a monster' an incredibly complicated affair, because it's everyone else's job to ensure they never get into danger, The healer spends all their time making HP meters going up, and it's basically impossible to make that compelling. You could make buffs part of that, but then unless you make it 'choosing the right buff for the right circumstance' you're back at square one, and the problem with 'choosing the right buff for the right circumstance' is that it means that buffing someone is sometimes the wrong thing to do and that makes things very awkward indeed. Meanwhile, the tanks are the only ones actually fighting a boss, except that a tank's class design is based entirely around a score that they have to keep higher than the damage dealers, so basically everything the boss can do boils down to that score.

 

Instead, you could just make normal enemies like everyone else does.

 

I'm also kind of over backtracking which is a shame because I love Super Metroid. But then no-one does it anywhere near as well as Super Metroid. Having to keep track of all the areas in which I will, one day, be able to do something is a pain in the ass. Super Metroid handles it well I think chiefly because after the second area it drops a boomgate and you literally can't get back, so you end up forgetting everywhere you were 'supposed' to go. By the time you get back, you have all these exciting abilities and you can use them all at once. Parcelling them out one at a time makes it much more tedious.

 

I'd also be happy to get rid of random drops forever, or, more specifically, needing to fight an indeterminate number of battles to get a thing to drop. We have the solution to this one already: let me turn the difficulty up to guarantee I get everything I need after one fight.

 

I'm also totally happy to never be in another arena fight again.

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I'd be happy if they'd just stop putting terrible minigames in Zelda games.

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I think Search and Loot would be way more entertaining if you had to spend a limited resource to even look. So you get to open either the cupboard or the barrel but you can't look at anything else. You would probably also have to build the game so that you didn't have to search through shit to find the resources you need to play, which would also be super.

This is a good solution. Demonstrative examples: the pharmacy in The Walking Dead, Super Mario games where you hit one of those timed coin-buttons, I know there are bonus-levels like this, but I can't think of them. Also, I've heard that Zombi-U does this by making it so that time doesn't stop when you are scavenging through inventories.

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I like search and loot in games that are about searching and looting. For example: State of Decay. That game has refined scavenging to an art form.

 

I was going to say Escort missions need to be got rid of, but then I played Knights Contract and Majin and the Forsaken Kingdom and changed my mind. Both those games understood the Ico method of what an escort mission should be.

 

So yeah, maybe I am just into the idea of not having mechanics and methods of play removed but if they come from the ugly category of badly implemented then the game needs to own that mechanic completely.

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I don't want to ban it, but I am less likely to buy a game if I have to press a button to walk. It's not the walking that drives me crazy, I do that in Banner Saga, but it's automatic. And it's not the traversal, SSX consists of nothing more than a fun way to get from one place to another and a fun place to do it. Pressing a button to walk is a trope that needs to be questioned. Some games that provide excellent alternatives:

SSX, Tony Hawk, Legend of Fae (which solves the problem the opposite way by making walking ridiculously deliberate), visual novels.

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The thing that gets me about Search and Loot is that it seems to actively work against other goals of a developer.  How many times you were moving through these incredible environments in TLoU and BI, ignoring how beautiful it was because you had your camera aimed at a 45 degree down angle so you didn't miss anything?  Although ultimately it bothered me a lot less in TLoU than BI as it felt more thematically appropriate.

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Not exactly the same, but Risk of Rain can be thought of in ways as a search and loot game. There isn't a hard time limit for clearing out a level, but if you dally to long the nasties upgrade and start spawning in larger numbers. Sure you might be more powerful when they come, but 5 minutes of searching might only yield you a small upgrade to a useless skill.

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For the record I enjoy healing in games, I've played a healer in every MMO I've played since EQ and I find it more enjoyable than any other class.

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I think any game that has a sliding tile puzzle should immediately have a star knocked off of its review score. Does that count?

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I don't think there are mechanics that need to be retired so much as there is a need for someone to act as an editor for a lot of big games.

None of the mechanics mentioned can't be used well in a game.

A lot of the "bad" mechanics mentioned above make their way into AAA games because of obligation. Others are left in when they don't work because nobody has the clout (or the guts) too can potentially hundreds of hours of other people's work, especially when they only did that work because the designers told them to do it in the first place. The sunken costs fallacy is only a fallacy if the success of a project (or at least the project leads) is not judged by how closely the development cycle matched a plan laid out months or years earlier (in the eyes of the money people anyways).

Besides, the contest for biggest cliche in successful games is a toss up between "the game wasn't fun until a week before it shipped" and "we had no idea if anyone would even like it". It's often impossible to see the whole elephant for what it is until the last moment and it is rare to work under someone you can trust to have the freedom and vision to make hard, expensive calls correctly. 99% of cuts are budgetary, not editorial.

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Regenerating health

 

If you are a futuristic marine with a regenerating shield, that is one thing. But if you are a soldier fighting in World War 2, you should not be able to take a bullet in the chest and then sit behind a rock for a few seconds before popping back up and taking another bullet in the chest. But I suppose going back to having magical band-aids that heal all imaginable gunshot wounds isn't much better. Maybe what I really want is for games to stop being about an entire enemy force solely going after the player because they know the player is the only one with elvish healing powers.

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Regenerating health

 

I briefly spent some time playing Serious Sam 3 this weekend.  I had completely forgotten how much faster paced a shooter is when there is no cover and no regenerating shields/health.  I had more fun in an hour of playing it than I have had with a shooter in a long time.

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Regenerating health

 

If you are a futuristic marine with a regenerating shield, that is one thing. But if you are a soldier fighting in World War 2, you should not be able to take a bullet in the chest and then sit behind a rock for a few seconds before popping back up and taking another bullet in the chest. But I suppose going back to having magical band-aids that heal all imaginable gunshot wounds isn't much better. Maybe what I really want is for games to stop being about an entire enemy force solely going after the player because they know the player is the only one with elvish healing powers.

This may be less of a mechanic to retire and more of a "use better judgment when executing" thing.

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Somewhat related to regenerating health, what about down but not out?  I could never wrap my head around the idea of reviving someone by tapping them on the shoulder.  Something like an injection or device to revive makes a bit more sense, except it then begs the question why can't the downed person use it on themselves.

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Card games as a side thing to do but then they force you to play and win as one of the missions.

 

Farcry 3 just made me play a hand of poker and I was happy that I knew how to play, because they sit you down and bring up a whole new poker-specific UI.  What about those that don't know the rules of poker?

 

I tend to loathe side-mechanics in general.  Who put this game inside my game???

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Something like an injection or device to revive makes a bit more sense, except it then begs the question why can't the downed person use it on themselves.

 

Same reason we can't reach down and pick up our own feet to make ourselves levitate: because it would make the universe implode.

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I tend to loathe side-mechanics in general.  Who put this game inside my game???

 

And I tend to love them.  Like the Pipes hacking-game in the original Bioshock?  Awesome.  Card games in Final Fantasy?  Hell yeah!  I even enjoyed them in Mass Effect. 

 

Like a lot of the things in this thread, it really does seem to come down to implementation more than anything. 

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And I tend to love them.  Like the Pipes hacking-game in the original Bioshock?  Awesome.  Card games in Final Fantasy?  Hell yeah!  I even enjoyed them in Mass Effect. 

 

I'll second this. There have been many a game where I ended up getting more into one of the side activities than the main game itself. 60+ hours of Blitzball in FFX is an embarrassing example of this.

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Explicit tutorials messages. At least try to make the tutorial part of the game.

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And I tend to love them.  Like the Pipes hacking-game in the original Bioshock?  Awesome. 

 

This is dangerous thinking.  I love Pipe Dream, but the Bioshock implementation was intentionally sabotaged and poorly implemented, with many hacks unsolvable from the start even with maximum upgrades.

 

The designers probably justified this behavior by pointing to the no-win possibilities of System Shock 2's hacking, but that involved 3-second scratch-off lottery mechanics, not 2+ minutes of a full-fledged game that they lobotomized.

 

Sorry!  When I first saw it I loved it, too, but then I ran into all of the above issues.

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I really don't remember having much of a problem failing hacks in B1, though it's been years since I played it and there may be some rose colored tinting going on. 

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