dartmonkey

Video Game mechanics to retire

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Yeah, the DLC is really good. The annoying thing though is that they are two parts of the same story (just like how Bioshock Infinite has divided Burial at Sea into two parts), so you will need to pick up both and play them in order. So that's the bad news, but the good news is that it is really great additional content for Dishonored with some nice mechanical twists!

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The morality system I described were definitely drawn from actual games - the first is the one Fallen London uses, and I believe Ultima IV uses something similar as well. The second is from Dragon Age, and I did think it was a pretty elegant solution.

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I don't know if I can agree that Dishonored's morality system is "dumb" - I agree it would have been cool if it were more fleshed out, with maybe some more branching. I hope they go that way in the inevitable sequel. But I actually like that it simultaneously never limits you or shunts you down a certain path, while actually applying some judgement to your actions, thus avoiding the Uncharted-style tonal dissonance. So many games are full of that dissonance, even games I really love like the new Tomb Raider, that it's really nice when a game manages to include violence while neither ignoring nor reveling in it.

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Dishonored's morality system is definitely dumb! It's based on the idea that you killing a few dudes completely ruins all of society now and forever, and also that you killing a few dudes in the name of saving the world makes you a terrible person. Like, it's all based on how many people you kill in each mission. That is its entire morality system! It just makes no sense. There's no real logical connection between your actions and what happens at the end.

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Dishonored's morality system is definitely dumb! It's based on the idea that you killing a few dudes completely ruins all of society now and forever, and also that you killing a few dudes in the name of saving the world makes you a terrible person. Like, it's all based on how many people you kill in each mission. That is its entire morality system! It just makes no sense. There's no real logical connection between your actions and what happens at the end.

Surely it is espousing a particular ideological viewpoint that our actions can have unintended and unforeseen consequences? You may disagree with that viewpoint, and it probably is illogical, but I don't think that makes it dumb or make little sense. Although it is essentially the same binary view of morality used in most games of this type, which I guess is a bit dumb...

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Dishonored's morality system is definitely dumb! It's based on the idea that you killing a few dudes completely ruins all of society now and forever, and also that you killing a few dudes in the name of saving the world makes you a terrible person. Like, it's all based on how many people you kill in each mission. That is its entire morality system! It just makes no sense. There's no real logical connection between your actions and what happens at the end.

 

The bizarre thing about the morality in it is that the kinds of non-lethal punishments you deliver to your targets are far more cruel and inhuman than just killing them would be.  You deliver a woman into sex slavery.  You brand a man in the face.  You arrange the tongues to be cut out of two other men and condemn them to a short life of brutal, hard, slave labor. 

 

"Good" Corvo is a monster.  "Evil" Corvo is just a man who gets the job done. 

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I wrote a blog about this a few months ago. Here are a couple game mechanics/game tropes I'd like to see die:


The Unlock Wave
You’re traveling with an AI companion through a dangerous enemy-infested territory and you come across a locked door. Your companion has the skill/tech to unlock said door, but it’s going to take at least five minutes to open it. While you wait for the unlock, waves of enemies will pour from every dark corner and it’s up to you to stop them from blasting your companion. Amazingly, your companion will usually finish the laborious task of unlocking the door at the exact same moment the last enemy dies.

 

Solution: Binary Domain and the Killzone game on Vita put a less obvious spin on this by making the door open before the enemies were all dead. When the door finally popped, your companions would yell for you to get in, as enemies continued to flood the screen. It felt more like a narrow escape--firing my machine gun through the slowly closing slit of the elevator doors in Binary Domain for example--rather than a contrived fight zone.

 

Runner up to this one is the turret sequence (feels like shooters are just a string of tropes now right?). If there's a turret blocking your way, and you have to fight to clear it out. Chances are you'll have to man it to shoot the guys that come after you (bonus if your companion is unlocking a door while you do it), or you'll have to shoot it while someone drives the military vehicle the turret is attached to. Bleh.

 

Dear Diary
I don’t know about you, but if I was stuck on a derelict spaceship or caught in an undersea utopia gone wrong, the last thing I would do is write a diary or record an audio log. I’d be more concerned with getting the heck out of there. Same goes for writing a message in my own blood on the wall. I feel like, if you're suffering from a traumatic wound, you'd want to keep as much blood IN you as possible. 

 

Solution: I don't really have one. They were still novel with the original Bioshock, but by the time Infinite came around, I was less than enthused about their contrived inclusion. Especially since the quality of them was so varied--some were just there for neat lore-building, others were pretty essential to understanding character motivations. Like the OP's Search & Loot, it just feels weird scouring a world for little knick knacks and audio diaries when there are more urgent matters at hand. 

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Dear Diary

I don’t know about you, but if I was stuck on a derelict spaceship or caught in an undersea utopia gone wrong, the last thing I would do is write a diary or record an audio log. I’d be more concerned with getting the heck out of there. Same goes for writing a message in my own blood on the wall. I feel like, if you're suffering from a traumatic wound, you'd want to keep as much blood IN you as possible. 

 

Solution: I don't really have one. They were still novel with the original Bioshock, but by the time Infinite came around, I was less than enthused about their contrived inclusion. Especially since the quality of them was so varied--some were just there for neat lore-building, others were pretty essential to understanding character motivations. Like the OP's Search & Loot, it just feels weird scouring a world for little knick knacks and audio diaries when there are more urgent matters at hand. 

It definitely wasn't still novel when BioShock came out, it's a narrative device that's as old as story-driven games, and I think it could be "fixed" simply by showing a little more care with the logic.

People keeping personal logs, especially in regimented scientific/military endeavors like you see in the System Shock games, is entirely plausible and not the problem. The issue is when those characters evidently feel the need to record their thoughts during frantic, life-threatening situations. (Without a clear purpose or goal, i should say. It gets a pass if they're perhaps trying to convey some important last piece of information to a specific party, but it should never be the equivalent of trying to tweet about your lunch during a mugging.)

Situations where people would reasonably not be thinking about recording their thoughts are where environmental story-telling needs to take over. Stumbling into a room to see the shell casings on the ground, the characters you know slumped over in a corner, things like that could be even more effective than a recording of the event. A bit of "show, don't tell" perhaps.

That kind of environmental story-telling might have been hard to do with any real nuance prior to the last decade, but we're well past the the point where that's an excuse.

Edit: Also, in response to the initial impetus for this thread, i actually really love search & loot systems. (Speaking mainly outside of the context of RPG's, because that's a whole different thing to consider, i think.) I love feeling like i'm desperately scrounging for survival supplies in a horrible situation, and i'd totally concede that kind of looting can feel massively out of place in games like Deus Ex and Infinite. I think that's mostly the issue, actually. I think that kind of environmental looting can be applied to create a tone, and when it's applied just for the hell of it, it can start to feel weird and out of place. (Why are JC Denton and Adam Jensen robbing all these poor random NPC's blind?)

Then you see that kind of supply scrounging in a game like Stalker or System Shock, and it's perfect, it makes complete sense. You're scrambling, you're desperate, you're looking for anything you can use.

 

I don't know if I can agree that Dishonored's morality system is "dumb" - I agree it would have been cool if it were more fleshed out, with maybe some more branching. I hope they go that way in the inevitable sequel. But I actually like that it simultaneously never limits you or shunts you down a certain path, while actually applying some judgement to your actions, thus avoiding the Uncharted-style tonal dissonance. So many games are full of that dissonance, even games I really love like the new Tomb Raider, that it's really nice when a game manages to include violence while neither ignoring nor reveling in it.

It totally limits you and shunts you down a path. What ending do you want? Do you want the good ending or the bad ending? Will you kill nobody, or will you kill everybody? Will you use all those sweet combat magics, guns, explosives, or will you just kind of pretend they're not there?

That game is so full of weird, self-defeating design choices brought on by its morality system.

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The bizarre thing about the morality in it is that the kinds of non-lethal punishments you deliver to your targets are far more cruel and inhuman than just killing them would be.  You deliver a woman into sex slavery.  You brand a man in the face.  You arrange the tongues to be cut out of two other men and condemn them to a short life of brutal, hard, slave labor. 

 

"Good" Corvo is a monster.  "Evil" Corvo is just a man who gets the job done. 

 

Games definitely need to become more sophisticated when taking into account the morality of player actions. I think maybe the ideal solution is for the game to not act as judge at all, but to only present truthful consequences. If you want me to feel bad about what I just did, a meter isn't going to do it. Take things away from me. Show me the orphaned child. Dishonored may be taking a step in this direction but it presents false consequences.

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In a setting like Bioshock, I agree that audio recordings are weird because you're carrying around a big, bulky recording device and speaking into it while crazy genetic mutations are murdering each other around you.  But in a modern or slightly future setting, I think these would actually make sense.  Look at the popularity of "found footage".  Everyone has a phone with a camera.  Things like Google Glass exist.  These are completely valid excuses for logs of everything because people are already making them.  Whether or not it makes the narrative better I can't say, but I think you can justify it without breaking immersion in the right context.  I also prefer a more subtle type of storytelling, but if the audio log came from someone's voicemail that happened to be recorded during an event, I can believe it.

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How come nobody in games ever does the thing where a protagonist finds relevant footage on a security camera? That seems more reasonable than audio diaries?

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How come nobody in games ever does the thing where a protagonist finds relevant footage on a security camera? That seems more reasonable than audio diaries?

 

Tuesday is Kitty Hat Day.

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It totally limits you and shunts you down a path. What ending do you want? Do you want the good ending or the bad ending? Will you kill nobody, or will you kill everybody? Will you use all those sweet combat magics, guns, explosives, or will you just kind of pretend they're not there?

That game is so full of weird, self-defeating design choices brought on by its morality system.

Aren't we all getting confused here? Dishonored's isn't a morality system, it's a chaos system. The more chaos you create in the world, the more screwed up that world becomes. Which does make sense. And to get a low chaos playthrough, it's not like you can't kill anyone - it just requires you to, on the whole, take a more non-violent approach.

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It totally limits you and shunts you down a path. What ending do you want? Do you want the good ending or the bad ending? Will you kill nobody, or will you kill everybody? Will you use all those sweet combat magics, guns, explosives, or will you just kind of pretend they're not there?

 

Plus it doesn't really help that the game itself presents the matter basically exactly that way. I mean, it tells you how many guys you dropped and your overall chaos rating after each mission. This seems especially problematic considering that I as the protagonist should be concerned with getting the job done and not much else.

 

I think there also might be a difference in morality as interpreted by individual actors and as interpreted by the game itself and thus the developers or some non-fictional entity. The former, as Dragon Age seems to do it, is fine. The latter most certainly is not, since it pushes a set of morals on a character that I am supposed to embody. To stay with Dishonored a little bit longer

 

(Knife of Dunwall Poilers comming up)

even if in principle I want to move as nonlethaly through the game as possible, once a squad of enemies stumbles into my territory after defying orders to stay put and their knowledge of that location means not only my own but the life of all my little assassinelets I am supposed to care for is at stake, they flat out have to eat it, I'm sorry. What am I as Daud supposed to do in that situation? Capture them nonlethally and then what? They certainly can't leave and be trusted to keep their mouth shut and I'm not sure if finding and moving a dozen assassins to a new hideout is viable even if it wasn't for the added fun of our current hideout being compromised from the getgo.

 

Of course this isn't an entirely correct assessment, since "morality" here isn't exactly about judgement of my or the protagonist's morals in an absolute way, but rather how the fictional society as a whole is going to perceive and/or react to them. So I guess at least on paper there isn't even an intended moral judgement going on in the first place for all I know.

 

Then again I'm not the one who set up the binary post-mission scoring card tied to body count and nothing else.

 

Aren't we all getting confused here? Dishonored's isn't a morality system, it's a chaos system. The more chaos you create in the world, the more screwed up that world becomes. Which does make sense. And to get a low chaos playthrough, it's not like you can't kill anyone - it just requires you to, on the whole, take a more non-violent approach.

 

That's true, but I think there's an argument to be had about whether that might just be slapping a different name on the same thing. In essence the game is still telling you that it tracks how often you kill a guy and that it models the outcome of the game's plot on that number and that number alone - it's really hard to accept this system as just a development of the society you live in rather than a judgement of your personal actions when the former is completely dependant on the latter considering all the things that should actually contribute to it. Especially since that society is not only dependant on the success of your mission, but

(minor storyspoiler)

your mission pretty much always succeeding anyways, if you beat the game. As in Emily becomming the regent 100% of the time, thanks to you.

Which I'd imagine should shape the world far more than the number of "unimportant" dudes you off. It is very likely that I misunderstand the game's story, but in the end it seemed to me like the most likely outcome for the masked vigilante you are playing, somewhat regardless of how you're doing it, would be to become some sort of folk tale at best.

 

 

And to throw in a contender of my own: padding out your game by forcing players to play the exact thing again. And again. And again. Or as one offender lovingly calls it: campaign system.

I am not sure how worthy this is of even harping on, since to my knowledge it's an mmo thing and by god that genre has enough going on to fill an entire thread of these to begin with, but this one basically presents a piece of content in form of a map with a few quests that let you accumulate a certain ammount of ressources. To progress with whatever the hell it is you are actually trying to achieve you need a specific number of ressources that can only be achieved by playing through that map more than once. More like several dozen times, really. To pad it out even further, the content is gated by a cooldown timer usually in the form of "do this once a day, then go spend some money in our cash shops or whatever".

 

While whining about bad mechanics in mmos is the Citizen Kane of trying to teach cows tapdancing, this one is so incredibly bold I'd admire it if I wasn't forced to quit a game in disgust whenever it rears its head. Alternatives? If your playerbase gets bored of your content faster than you can release it, stop trying and give it systems that let it create their own content instead like the abilty to play actual roles in roleplaying games instead of casting every single player in a substandard singleplayer game where the height of player interaction is chatblocking goldfarmers.

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That game is so full of weird, self-defeating design choices brought on by its morality system.

 

Couldn't agree more. I was so disappointed with Dishonored, especially because the writer of one of my favorite books worked on it. Games, as you alluded to, are still working on that "show, don't tell" thing. Dishonored builds a really cool world, but delivers so much of its plot and background to you through straight info dumps, blasted right at your mute character's face. Those info dumps, plus the fact that my primary means of interaction (wrecking dudes with awesome magical powers) was discouraged if I wanted to be a "good" assassin, combined to really bum me out. I eventually ended up treating it as a puzzle game--ignoring all story and moral consequence in favor of using the cool powers in inventive ways. 

 

On topic, I agree that the recorded stuff works in military and scientific settings. Diary entries or hacked emails (like in Deus Ex) are also okay. Back in 2009 I was a newspaper reporter. I carried this little digital recorder at all times. It was useful for recording interviews (with consent) and making quick audio notes (usually in the car) whenever a story idea or source possibility popped in my head. I think because my occupation pushed me into that habit, I have a hard time swallowing the idea that every other Jim and Jane NOT reporting the news would do it. Especially important people--as in Infinite's case--recording some of their most important and well-guarded secrets. 

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I dunno, there are for sure some good points here, but I still like all Dishonored's systems, and I definitely wouldn't agree that the chaos system detracts from the game in any way. I guess it's not really even trying to serve the same purpose as something like Infamous - and it CERTAINLY isn't trying to be Mass Effect or Dragon Age. Like I said, if another Dishonored included something more along those lines, I think it might be even better. But I like that it allowed you to play different ways - if anything, the nonlethal option was LESS well-supported - and that it actualy ackowledged your choice, AND that it commited to judging your actions, if only because so few games are willing to do that. Yeah, at the end of the day it's judging you mostly on fatalities, since that's all the game can do. I think more variety of choice could be better, really, I think more gameplay options is always better. Dishonored is already so good in that regard though that I have trouble criticizing it for that.

 

Oh man, also, I thought of my least favorite thing ever in games - RPGs that make you choose your character progression over the whole game, like Dragon Quest IX, Etrian Odyssey, or Diablo II (to add a controversial option). Invariably the choices your making only reveal themselves over such a long period of time, and the systems are so opaque, that you either have to accept that the choices you're making are entirely arbitrary or follow a guide the whole time.

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I wonder what people would think of Dishonored's morality system if they had removed all of the Outsider's like Greek tragedy style commentary about your actions? I think that's the main thing that comes across as dumb and annoying. Like if you just got through levels and saw that there was a chaos meter or whatever that strikes me as fairly innocuous, and not something that would really bother anyone. The problem isn't the systems itself, but just that the game designers decide to lay it on thick.

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I wonder what people would think of Dishonored's morality system if they had removed all of the Outsider's like Greek tragedy style commentary about your actions? I think that's the main thing that comes across as dumb and annoying. Like if you just got through levels and saw that there was a chaos meter or whatever that strikes me as fairly innocuous, and not something that would really bother anyone. The problem isn't the systems itself, but just that the game designers decide to lay it on thick.

 

Nope, still hate it. Still would ruin my first playthrough because I know "Oh hey morality meter, good ending bad ending." Because that's what games do, and I get the good ending in games whenever that happens, because that's what I do.

 

Good and evil are just vague human created concepts anyway. Imagine how awful The Last of Us would have been if it had a morality meter. Better sneak through to get the "good" ending! When the entire point of the game's end is that morality is a gray area and maybe Joel does or does not do a good thing, but that he does it because of what's happened to him in the past and who he is as a person.

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I wonder what people would think of Dishonored's morality system if they had removed all of the Outsider's like Greek tragedy style commentary about your actions? I think that's the main thing that comes across as dumb and annoying. Like if you just got through levels and saw that there was a chaos meter or whatever that strikes me as fairly innocuous, and not something that would really bother anyone. The problem isn't the systems itself, but just that the game designers decide to lay it on thick.

 

As someone who intentionally played a high-chaos Corvo, denuding every level of NPCs, it would still be awful. Every character comments insistently on the brutality of your methods, usually after having told you before the mission that you should take whatever measures are necessary and sometimes after having described the mission they're sending you on as impossible. It wouldn't be so annoying if there were only a few "moral" characters like that, but the developers seemed to have been eager to show you just how responsive the game's world is to your actions. The worst is the prelude to the final mission:

Samuel, the boatman, blames you for the bloodletting that occurred among your allies after they poisoned you, even though he saved you from said poison, and then warms them of your coming with a gunshot after delivering you to their stronghold to kill them. What a hypocrite!

In a completely different game, it might have worked better, but when the protagonist is as empowered as Corvo is even in the beginning, it makes the game's judgments on his actions hollow at best and a scold at worst.

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One thing that I also hate in open-world games specifically is when the missions consists only of you doing some kind of low-level assistant jobs for some characters.

For exemple, in red dead redemption, you have to do a lot of annoying tasks for Mr. Dickens, but it doesn't make much sense to keep doing them, because you can see that he's no more than an unreliable crook.

These kind of missions just serve as a filler, adds pretty much nothing on the story most of the time, they usually feel so out of place because they are some kind of delay to the urgent problem that the main character is facing.

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This isn't really answering the question properly, but the mechanic I'd most like to see gone is the dialogue tree.

 

Clearly this isn't feasible, and there's lots of games being made right now that are better with dialogue trees than the alternative.

 

 

The fact is, however, that the dialogue tree is fundamentally flawed: you're giving the player the impression of being able to choose from the entire english language, before taking all those options away to give them 2-5 choices.

 

The weird thing is that giving the player the entire english language isn't the solution - it just leads to the player being paralysed by choice. There must be options between the two that actually solves the problem, but while the dialogue tree is as easy to implement and effective as it is, we won't see anything better come along. So in my dream fantasy world of elegant design, we'd banish dialogue trees so that we'd be forced to find a better option.

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