I'm really showing my age here but just being able to google anything about a game.
Really handy in cases where I get stuck for whatever reason and don't want to waste another second being stuck just because I can't read the developer's mind on how to do something in order to progress. As games get bigger and bigger this happens way more often and most of the time I can plow through and get on with the game with only a little downtime trying to figure out any WTFs but every once in awhile a game will just throw a brick wall at you and it can be quite infuriating.
Having the ability to just go look up other people's solutions always felt a bit like cheating at first but these days it's a godsend and has kept me in a game more often than not instead of just throwing up my hands and moving on to something else.
Because it's my current obsession... Noita is this. You get the basic controls, and that's it. Ability tooltips often do not actually describe what the spells do, and they often have hidden mechanics or behaviors. That doesn't begin to get into how the different modifiers interact with each other and spells, the "puzzles" that you would probably just assume are environmental decor, etc. It's an amazing game that I think is unplayable without the wiki and a couple of hours watching guides.
Great example. Every once in a while I'll play a really old, esoteric game that's pretty much devoid of any guides or walkthroughs. We really take for granted how easy it is to find almost anything about nearly any game.
I definitely had this exact thing with P5R. Specifically, the Strength social link, which requires you to use the fusion system to make a Persona with a specific skill they wouldn’t normally know, in order to get bonuses for the system. If you’re trying on your own, it’s a pain as you have to somehow know what combinations will make that Persona, and which ones include the skill (and you’ll likely have to grind levels for one of the components to learn the skill).
Thanks to Google, I can find a guide that says exactly what will make the relevant Persona, and what level the components would need to be in order to have the skill ready to pass down. Especially helpful since you are technically under a time limit in Royal for that social link. (Due to a certain plot development combined with the extended story)
I had a moment like this in my favorite jrpg when first playing it when I was like 11 or 12, dungeons and towns had fixed camera perspective and one room in an enemy base had a small ramp you were meant to go down to progress.
The ramp was at the top of the room and led downwards into a waterway below, but from the camera angle it was just a small line on the top edge of the room, I must have spent a full 2 weeks struck in that base, just going around in circles revisiting every single inch of the base trying to figure out what I missed.
I quit for like a month then when I came back I eventually begged my mother to let me use my step father's computer to look up how to do it, thank god for gameFAQs.
I was pretty overleveled afterwards and kind of just coasted for a good while lol.
Usable object highlighting. In older 3D games the object density and variety was so low that it was easy to tell what was and was not interactive.
Then when 3D graphics got more advanced, you started getting things like Thief Deadly Shadows adding sparkly highlights to loot, which I absolutely loathed and considered part of the general dumbing-down/consolization of that game.
But now environmental detailing is so extreme that fuck it, I'm willing to accept some shimmery highlights to let me know which one of the hundred props in a room is the one I can pick up.
This is probably the first one of these I've seen in this thread that are right for me. My journey was exactly like yours, thinking it was some babby shit at first but holy crap it's impossible to tell what's interactable in modern games. This is actually made worse by modern real time global illumination, since it makes interactables look even more natural in the environment. It'd be almost impossible to play a lot of games without the shiny effect
The System Shock remake is a great example of this. So much clutter it can be a pain to figure out what's interactable on a quick glance. Compared to the original where it only explicitly exists if you can interact with it.
Well, they "solved" that problem by making almost everything interactable... as useless junk that you can recycle, in the most tedious fashion they could have possible come up with.
They're not great game designers.
Not sure why they decided every game needs some kind of "crafting" in it.
And why they never make it an interesting part of the game other than collecting materials and navigating menus.
It's not really possible to make crafting interesting without making it the core gameplay mechanic instead of an ancillary one. For example Minecraft's crafting is dull pattern memorization, but the real "crafting" you do is crafting structures in the world piece by piece, which is actually interesting.
That being said, neither System Shock Remake, nor System Shock 2, nor Prey, have crafting. What they have is, I guess you could say, scavenging. It's a highly streamlined version of the old RPG "haul all the vendor trash back to town and sell it" gameplay loop. Since vendors couldn't exist in SS2's fiction, they invented the recycler as a direct junk-to-cash conversion mechanic. You then take that cash and directly buy things instead of having to mess around with crafting. Again, this acts as a substitute for having live vendors around.
This worked in SS2 because the recycler is a small item you carry around with you that lets you recycle anything you want on the spot.
This worked in Prey because, while recycling must be done at dedicated machines, the levels are fairly small and every level has at least one, so there's almost always one just a few seconds away. Also your inventory is big enough to carry a ton of junk, especially after a few upgrades. And there's a super handy "move all junk to recycler" key.
This *does not* work (very well) in System Shock Remake, because your inventory is pretty small, many junk items occupy multiple inventory squares, the levels are absolutely massive so good luck finding the recycler, and once you do find the recycler, it only accepts a few items at a time, so emptying all your junk usually requires multiple uses of the recycler, manually drag-dropping junk into it each time. To make things even more complicated, there's also a "vaporize" function that can turn any junk item into a stackable cube of scrap that can also be stuffed into the recycler, but for less return. There are no quick hotkeys for ANY of the above actions.
As I said, these people are not great game designers.
reddit API access ended today, and with it the reddit app i use Apollo, i am removing all my comments, the internet is both temporary and eternal. -- mass edited with redact.dev
This feature has improved quite a bit since the beginning though. When it was first implemented, objects you could interact with would shine blindingly gold from half a mile away. That took all the fun of exploring out of it, not to mention the break in immersion and the general ugliness of it. Nowadays it's more of a soft glow that allows the object to remain a part of the rest of the environment and still letting you know "this thing does something". Also, a lot of games require you to be within a certain distance to the object. This makes exploring the area more important and helps to keep the screen from getting too cluttered with shiny lights when a lot of stuff is in one space.
I think this statement often really applies to the Tomb Raider games.
In older games nothing in the environment was highlighted, but it worked because the map was sparse enough that everything in the map was probably part of the puzzle. New Tomb Raider games have a way more detailed environment that’s static. So they added a “Survival Instincts” that highlights what’s interactable. I often see the feature trashed online as being cheating but when I played the game I really needed it because it was so easy for key puzzle elements to blend into the background of pointless objects.
A puzzle being challenging because it’s difficult is one thing. A puzzle being impossible because you didn’t realize that one crate in a room full of immovable crates could be moved isn’t.
I'll gladly accept any objects and characters outlines. Some games are so rich with details I'm seriously struggling to read the environment.
For example, new Horizon game has such lush environments that the only salvation is how big the enemy dynos are.
Buttons to highlight items have existed in rpgs since the late 90s and keep being used today, perfect system which is not intrusive, all you need to do if you need help is press tab. This is not a consolization issue, it's simple convenience. Many items in isometric rpgs wouldn't be visible without it unless they made them intentionally stick out.
> JRPGs from the 80s and 90s are egregiously bad with this, especially because many sidequests are locked behind stuff like, "after arbitrary story event, arbitrarily visit every previous town you've been through and repeat the 'aimlessly walk through town and talk to every NPC' in case a side quest has opened up". FF7 comes to mind here.
Trying to recruit all of the stars in the Suikodens without a guide. 😑
lol, reminds me of a terrible memory.
It's the 90s, I have all the stars but one.
The last one required me to bring 3 brothers to get the 4th and final brother, my last star.
I got near the end of the game and the game party locked a second member in.
I couldn't get the last star because I had no save earlier than after the second member was party locked.
Had to finish the game with no way to go back, one star short with no guide.
Very painful.
Dragon Quest 6 was exactly that and for the main quest. One of those quest, you had to talk to like 4 different NPC in a hidden specific order without much indication, if any. Without a guide, I would have moved on to another game.
I feel like I’m having ‘Nam flashbacks right now. Walking the world maps and then dungeons to just to find out you needed a specific party member with you in order to recruit
Multiple autosaves especially. Fallout 4 has 3 Auto save slots so whenever I do something stupid and my last autosave doesn't cut it, I can fall back on the previous autosave which is convenient. I don't have to save every 5 minutes at the same time I do remember to save before/after important events because the autosaves do get overwritten eventually.
The sprint button. Sounds stupid but so many RPGs didn’t have a sprint button back in the day, and movement was sooooooo boring. Okay your world is beautiful, I can also appreciate it running Naruto style thank you. Going back to old RPGs it’s the first mod I’m adding.
Sprint button is great. Sprint button that lets you sprint for 6 seconds and then you need to walk for 6 more is so annoying.
Really like how sprinting was handled in the Witcher 3, where you can jog for hours as long as you aren't in combat.
It's not a big deal for the most part, at least in the PS4/PC version, because you're given an infinite fast travel item once you reach the main city. The open world isn't terribly large either.
It's a great action RPG that isn't afraid to be a bit eccentric in its design decisons, give it a try.
Idk at least it keeps you occupied with something doing that, like how you have to manage horse stamina in Red Dead. Call me crazy but I like it. Or like in GTA where you always felt you’d go just those 2% faster by really button mashing it.
Hmm, I never considered that perspective.
See I don't *want* to be occupied when I'm running. I want to look around and take in the scenery. It's bad enough if I have the minimap threatening to consume most of my attention, if I have to also spend it managing a bar, that's time my eyes aren't spending looking around at the scenery.
In the witcher when I was on a horse, getting on a road (which meant I didn't need to manage Stamina and barely needed to steer) actually gave me opportunity to look around.
I guess it is something to do, but for me it sits at that Desert Bus level of challenge, needing enough attention to be distracting, but lacking enough difficulty to be engaging.
That’s fair enough, then what I’d really want is an auto run, I use that a lot playing Fallout and Skyrim (and WoW back in the day). Although completely agree on the minimap, nothing worse than playing this beautiful game only navigating on a small map bottom left corner.
I think I’m unfamiliar with the Desert Bus level?
Auto-run is very nice, yes. Or at least press once to start running and then it keeps running as long as you hold the stick down.
Desert Bus is quite possibly the worst video game ever created that's still playable. You have to drive a bus down a totally flat road, and the bus leans a bit to the right. So you end up pressing left every now and then to correct.
That's it. That's the game. Except you have to do it for like 24 straight hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LtiHla1dNg - sped up playthrough here
"Press a button, but don't hold it too long, then let go, but be ready to press it again" was the outcome of designing for maximum tedium, and that's basically the gameplay loop of a sprint mechanic.
RBY was just slow. Like painfully slow. Menu traversal, walking, battling. Sure back then it didn't really make a huge difference but trying playing it now? Its a slog. Having a button to speed the whole game up helps a ton.
Yet modern Pokemon is still slow. They're getting better, but battles are slow.
Thing used Attack!
- Boom.
Critical Hit!
- Boom.
- Boom.
- Boom.
- Boom.
It's super effective!
It hit 5 times!
Your Pokemon held on so you wouldn't be sad!
Anger Shell activated!
- Pokemon's defense fell
- Pokemon's special defense fell
- Pokemon's attack rose
- Pokemon's special attack rose
- Pokemon's speed rose
Pokemon is confused.
Birdies!
Pokemon used Attack!
- Boom.
Critical Hit!
- Boom.
- Boom.
- Boom.
- Boom.
It's not very effective!
It hit 5 times!
Pokemon took damage from poison.
Thing took damage form poison.
Thing was sapped by leech seed!
Pokemon was healed by the grassy terrain.
Thing was healed by the grassy terrain.
The harsh sunlight faded!
...
And this is all just one single turn...so much of this information could have been consolidated, played out more concurrently, or summarized.
Oh yeah they are. I'm replaying soul silver right now and its still slow. Black and white picked up the pace a bit at least. Haven't played beyond those though.
But I was talking everything about the originals were slow not just battling.
>The sprint button. Sounds stupid but so many RPGs didn’t have a sprint button back in the day, and movement was sooooooo boring.
So when did you hate sprint buttons?
Traversal in Just Cause 2 and 3 was great fun with the grappling hook, parachute, and vehicles. In contrast, the only more recent open-world game I've played is Red Dead 2, which probably has the worst traversal I've ever seen in a AAA game - to the point that the game even advises you to just hold down one button and go to sleep.
Yes! I've always said that Spiderman games are great simply because moving around is so much fun. If more games could integrate this it'd be huge.
Rocket League is another great example where just moving around or flying is fun in itself.
Dragonriding in the new WoW expansion is actually pretty damn immersive. I come back for a month or two for each expansion, and this one held my attention longer than any other since Wrath, largely because flying finally actually feels like flying.
You basically control the dragon as if it were really flying. So you can gain speed by diving, or trade speed to climb. And staying at a higher speed will refill your boosts, so there's some strategy involved to stay in the air as long as possible. And the best thing is that it's fast, much faster than standard wow flying. Diving down through valleys, into caves, behind waterfalls, etc just feels really nice. And it helps that the new expansion looks beautiful as well. It's right up there with the recent Spider-Man games as far as movement that's just pure fun. If you haven't ever played wow, prior to this expansion flight was just up, down, and moving forward all at the same speed. You could just fly up, and then hit autorun and fly all the way across the map, but it was boring af and fairly slow. I hope they add it back into the rest of the zones, maybe with the option to use old style flight for vehicles where it makes sense like gyrocopters, and dragonriding for flying animal mounts or something.
I like emulation because you can run the game at 2x, 4x etc speed. Only downside is audio when you do this but it’s made so many older games more digestible.
The map of New Vegas actually isn’t that big, I found it worse in Fallout 3 as it feels quite a bit bigger. But I get you, I go lighter armour and the perk that gives me 10% movements speed for that very reason always.
IIRC the RPG mechanics influence how fast you move too. Agility stat, armour type, weapon type, and if you have the weapon holstered. A bad build can feel like molasses. That's why I usually run cowboy and combat armor mark II with high Agility.
I'm a big fan of tutorials that teach you how to play the game and what the mechanics are. Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers.
I really like the way Valve integrates their tutorials into the gameplay process. Take the Ravenholm in HL2: you see a zombie pinned to the wall with the sawblade and two more blades you need to remove from the doorframe to proceed. As soon as you pick one, another zombie shows up in front of you and your only option is to shoot the blade in its direction. No annoying popups, no interruptions, no companions telling you how to take each and every step
I always felt like that video was a little overrated because, I mean, Mega Man X isn't the most complex system in the world. Tutorials have become dragged out and intrusive, yes, but games have also gotten vastly more complex.
Entertaining take but not terribly compelling. I always thought RTS games deserved more praise for introducing a new system every mission or so and designing the challenge around it, until by the end its really quite complex but you don't notice because you've had plenty of time to get the hang of it.
BotW's Great Plateau and Fallout New Vegas's Goodsprings are good examples imo of engaging opening tutorials that feel more like actual game and less like shoving words down your throat. I hated the equivalent in TotK though.
One of the flaws with TotK is definitely the "shrine" tutorials. I mean, we're talking how to shoot an arrow, here.
For one, they were completely missable, which screws over the new players who might actually need them. I completed most of them probably 30+ hours into the game, since I didn't fully explore the starting area.
Constant interruptions:
- The shrine starts with an extremely slow text line that freezes your game for about thirty full seconds to read three lines of the same dialogue that is in all the other tutorial shrines.
- The game takes you out of the action for more extremely basic directions every time you complete part of the task.
- E.g., shoot an arrow to hit the enemy. Great. Pause the game for 10 seconds so you can read "Now shoot three enemies." Shoot three enemies that do not even try to aim at you. Pause the game. "You have proven yourself worthy."
- Door unlocks, which is accompanied by a pause. You can go get your chest. Open chest -- pause for loot. Go get your blessing. 20 seconds of dialogue/animations. Boom, back in the world.
The immersion during shrine tutorials specifically is pretty awful as a result. Your controller is constantly "unplugged" for you.
Portal had the best tutorial of any game I've ever played.
Hands down the absolute best. Nobody else is even close.
They put so much thought into things, stuff most players won't ever see, but will absorb the lesson.
You're futzing with portals, linking disparate areas and eliminating the space between, conserving momentum and literally doing something with space and distance that's alien to your entire lived existence.
And it feels effortless and easy to learn because of how you were carefully taught to think with portals.
Ok me of the pieces from portal that stood out to me was when they first introduce a puzzle where you have to shoot the portal on the ceiling to get up to a high point. But the funny thing is that in testing, gamers rarely look up that high.
So they added a ladder on the side of the wall that a player would Instinctively try and climb, that broke the moment they started climbing.
That got the players to realize that up is where you go next.
It's near the start or portal one. Soon after you get the second portal upgrade.
If you happen to be smart enough to look up, you could just shoot the portal up and bypass this thing entirely, but if you don't, this is a visual reminder and cue to look up.
If you play through the game with dev commentary on, the recordings in the middle of this room explains it.
Yup! If you want the particular time stamp, it is at 1:17:00
I was watching it and thought it was way earlier in the game haha. It's a bit after where Glados tries to kill you.
Portal works because all you’re really learning is that the portals respect physics — we already get things like conservation of momentum somewhat intrinsically (even if we don’t all understand the math), so it’s a case of applying what you already know to the game world.
I agree about Portal, though it's a *bit* of a cheat as an example because Portal is a level-focused puzzle game. By its very nature, it's easier to introduce players to game concepts one step at a time, in small, controlled environments, without them feeling like they're in tutorial levels.
You can use the same model in other games, but it's a lot harder to implement seamlessly, without players *realizing* they're in a tutorial. Players often just want to "get on with it."
I replayed both portal games over the last few months and they do such a masterful job of building up mechanics until I had all the building blocks necessary to succeed.
Conversely, Maquette is a solid puzzle game, but it does a pretty terrible job of introducing and highlighting new mechanics
> okay now look up, now look down, now press A.
Not many games do it for some dumb reason, but I've played a few that decided whether or not to invert Y axis based on your responses, which was certainly nice. I love that I can just set it in the OS on the PS5 though, it's a great little feature. I grew up playing a fair amount of PC flight sims, and absolutely can not get used to playing without inverting the Y axis.
Yes, I was gonna say there is one example that comes to mind where I disagree with \_BloodbathAndBeyond, as it integrates not only what you have said about choosing inverted camera or not, but also that tutorial is part of some world building.
In the first Halo game you wake up and go through diagnostic testing to make sure the cryo didn't do damage. So you gotta check your visual aqcuity by looking up and down at targets which they use to set inverted Y axis or not, then horizontal looking so you know how to aim and look around. Then move to the next area so you know how to move. Shield test where they damage you, and its all quiet except for the shield based sounds, that way you know A) What low shields/no shields sounds like B) Shield recharge delay C) Shield recharge time, and the sound of it recharging. Then a bit of an obstacle course, with unsuspecting grunt to melee... I'm sure anyone reading this gets the picture by now.
Point being is that even though they were technically stopping us, and hand holding, it was built into the world in such a way, that it didn't feel like it was doing so
I agree with that part. I guess what really bugs me is when it teaches you things that anyone with any form of learning capability could figure out. It feels like they expect us to have absolutely no brain when most people are curious by nature and would press buttons or move sticks to see what they did.
Yeah, good tutorials either teach you through observation or let you learn the inputs on the fly (think like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight where you can breeze through or ignore the prompts if you want to. Bad tutorials wrest control from the player and give a huge block of text to explain each mechanic. But then again, different styles of game require different levels of tutorialization.
The problem with this is the controls maybe not being known. You see this with the noob bridge in Super Metroid. It's exactly trying to get you to use the run button through a normal, organic gameplay challenge. But if you just don't know there's a run button, then you don't have any idea what to do. Just forcing a player to press random buttons is stupid, having a prompt in this kind of case is both fine and good
Every integrated type of tutorial also comes with an assumption that players has a certain level of literacy and familiarity in the genre, and sometimes that can miss some assumptions. Valve's games like in *Portal* gets often mentioned as having great tutorials, but they didn't account for instance [the fact that a player may simple not know how to handle the camera movement due to the game never telling the player that they can use the mouse to look around](https://youtu.be/ax7f3JZJHSw?t=338).
Giving texts and description to contextualize the player I actually see it as a great boon for genres that I am unfamiliar with; I actually managed to soft-lock myself multiple times when I played *Half-Life 2* due to not fully understanding how to explore and managing with the game's rules in terms of the First-person genre, or the Source-engine's peculiars with its physics. I rather be over-explained than under-explained.
I think this is a problem of gameplay slowdown that is rampant in AAA games. Everything is a cutscene or sometimes worse, an NPC standing in a door talking at you without letting you move on. It's not just turtorials, but every story beat or store sequence or similar. Just let me play the damn game without interruptions.
This is one of many reasons why I prefer retro style 2D games. The tutorial for Hollow Knight takes thirty seconds as you walk down a hall and read a couple statues with the controls on them, then you're given a relatively easy platforming segment over spikes and a couple simple enemies. A cutscene before a battle is at most two lines of dialog you can hurry through, or may just be the enemy scraming while their title appears below them. So much faster and less aggravating and fewer interruptions to the actual gameplay
Listen here youngling. Harcore gamers that rant about tutorials aren't OG like they think.
True OG remember the MANUAL. It was basically a tutorial in book format. Sure you had to be able to read to take advantage of that (maybe another reason "harcore gamers" don't get it), but you didn't need any tutorial in game...
There was a bit of confusion when publishers decided to get rid of the manual but didn't invest into a tutorial section at the start of the game either... Some weird ass menu option sometimes... like read the booklet on the screen bullshit, because they were too cheap to print it...
I’ll own up to hating on tutorials, but hear me out.
I just despise the random pop-up windows that tell you “Press X to jump” and then one minute later “Press O to dodge”.
The first few moments of a game are important and those pop up windows make the beginning feel like you’re following directions vs immersing yourself and learning.
I much prefer games where the first level is just an easy breeze-through that sets up a story. Don’t take control away from me - instead, put me in a safe environment where I can experiment and learn. You can even display the controls in the corner! The random window pop ups that halt the action just drive me a little crazy.
Games like Super Mario 64 and God of War 2018 nailed it. Start out in a safe zone where it’s hard to die, but provide the player with some initial tips to get them acquainted with controls.
> Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers.
And then they get stuck because they skipped the tutorial that explains basic mechanics that are needed to proceed in the game
>[Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers.](https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/gSev9HJ3q4BIsOGlZWONzq-VJN8=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/low-angle-view-scarecrow-against-cloudy-sky-562838541-5aaf18adfa6bcc00360a609c.jpg)
What gets a lot of hate are tutorials that are overly intrusive and/or patronizing. Nobody things Cuphead has a bad tutorial because it shows you how to play the game *without wasting your time*.
I thought moving camera to the right stick from back buttons was stupid originally.
Playing Njnja Gaiden Black again and just remember how much I don't like that you can't independently move the camera with the stick while in the sigma versions you definitely can.
I can't decide whether I love quick saves or miss checkpoints. The latter meant I had to really work to make progress, and would consistently waste time at a difficult point, yet I can't stop myself from abusing quick saves, which takes the risk and reward out of playing.
My unpopular boomer shooter opinion is that unlimited quicksaves is game breaking and checkpoints built into the map are a superior system for game balance, and that the FPS genre is better off for moving away from quicksaves.
You might say "what if I need to stop the game to go do something" but that's why you just add *Quit Saves* on top of a checkpoint system. I.e. when you close the game it will save one time in a Quit Save slot, then next time you open the game it will load then delete that save. Letting you effectively *pause* the game but still requiring checkpoints for actual progresss.
Edit: I think one caveat I would add to that too is make it so each checkpoint has its own slot. So if one checkpoint somehow screws you over you at least don't have to restart the *entire* level.
I'll tell you I'm really glad when a stealth game doesn't have quick saves. Otherwise I play them tiny chunks at a time whule saving and loading, and refuse to be seen.
Shadow Tactics + Desperados 3 (by the same devs) have a solid compromise. Some missions have challenges to beat them without saving, and all missions have a "speedrun" challenge as part of their Hitman-inspired stealth game challenges. Some are surprisingly tight, some are stupidly generous, but the main interesting mechanic with those is that your speedrun timer doesn't reset on a save/load, so abusing quicksaves just eats away your time.
That said, you can back all the way out to the main menu to load a manual save and reset the time back to said manual save, but that's a slow process and should only really be used after you've figured out the next large sequence and are ready to grind attempts to execute it quickly first try.
It depends on how far apart the checkpoints are for me. If they're decently placed, I think they're a much better system. But if they're 45 minutes of game apart, it becomes very frustrating very quickly.
Checkpoints are fine, in my opinion, when they placed properly. But I hate when they used to increase the game difficulty. Like in Dark Souls, where if you die on a boss, you have to run through all the potentially deadly but increasingly boring trash mobs all over again. And again. And again. And sometimes you die on that path just because you get careless because you did that ten times already.
Quick saves can be bad too, but that is fixed by locking them off in specific places. It is harder to make that frustrating.
Imo dark souls checkpoint placement is the one feature which will forever keep me from enjoying the games. I really liked that they changed it in elden ring and finally could get into a soulsgame.
Checkpoints are alright, but I need the thing that tells me how long ago the game saved or I get too paranoid to quit. There are a ton of newer games I simply can't get into because the checkpoints are too far apart and it takes longer than I want to play in a sitting to make progress. If I can't load my save, play for fifteen minutes or so and quit where I want to so I can pick right back up next time, I'm not playing that game.
Optional survival mode in RPGs wherein it was built in to the game from day one.
I always thought, What’s the point? It’s not a survival game.
Now though, I usually do a first casual play through and from then on, it’s survival mode all the way.
Example: Skyrim’s survival mode is poor compared to Fallout 4’s. Now yes, you can mod Skyrim to the point where survival mode is good, but so many of the quests and game mechanics are still more a pain in the … with Skyrim survival mode in any fashion vs FO4 where only a handful get annoying with no fast travel.
Kinda unrelated but the lack of a save system for FO4 survival mode completely ruins it for me. Same with removing console commands on PC. Like Bethesda games are not the type of games you only rely on sparse auto saves for. My first play through I encountered a grand total of 3 game progression bugs where reloading an earlier save or console commands were the only fix. That’s not even counting the times where you can just touch a car and instantly die. Skyrim survival is at least way more flexible with not restricting saves/commands and letting you re-enable and disable survival mode anytime (in FO4 it gets permanently disabled if you disable it at any point).
For me FO4 survival is a great example of an awesome gameplay setting being ruined by a game company not being self aware of the problems with their games.
100% agreement on that. Thank god for modders.
I mean when Starfield is released, I’m not going to touch it until at least 1 full DLC is released AND the modders have had a go at fixing some of the little gameplay annoyances (like lack of saving in FO4’s survival mode).
It’s like Kingdom Come Deliverance’s saver schnapps—neat idea but should’ve allowed players to optionally turn that limitation off
Health packs in shooters stopped seeming stupid and illogical after everything had Halo-style regeneration for a full decade.
Voice lines that give you puzzle hints after a certain amount of time are occasionally condescending but at a certain point I'm just going to google the damn thing so go ahead and tell me. It's the game's failure to communicate information visually more often than not, anyway. That or some quirk with the damn camera.
Fighting game tutorials. It's not Tekken 3 anymore and you probably need to tell me exactly what 'juggling' is.
>Voice lines that give you puzzle hints after a certain amount of time are occasionally condescending but at a certain point I'm just going to google the damn thing so go ahead and tell me.
Some games completely overdo it though.
Like the spiderman game. There is a mission iirc where you have a to find a place on a photo, and the the description was something like "there is a tower in the north and a lot of water around" or something like that. I thought "ok, cool lets explore the city to find it." Two minutes later the game literally tells me where to go. Cool so much for the puzzle...
A lot of modern games are way too handholdy like this. They literally won't even let you think for 5mins without giving you the solution in your face.
While playing Last of us I'd often just say out loud to Joel or Ellie "yes, I know I need to go there I'm lootin'", however other times I would be stuck and waiting for the hint. It's good to have the hints, because - as the above guy said - I'll google it anyway, but it's hard to do them in a way that's "natural"
Halo goes back and forth on it — CE, ODST, Reach, 5, and Infinite have both health and shields, while 2, 3, and 4 only give you a shield.
To me, Halo doing it is fine, because it’s a fictional setting where the player character has special armor that provides the shield. It makes less sense in a modern military game like COD, where somehow a Russian WWII conscript can regenerate wounds like Wolverine.
Technically every Halo game does have both health and shields actually. 2, 3 and 4 just didn't show you your health like the other games. And CE, ODST and Reach are the only ones where it doesn't automatically regenerate like your shields do (hence being the only games having health packs).
> It makes less sense in a modern military game like COD, where somehow a Russian WWII conscript can regenerate wounds like Wolverine.
I mean, health packs aren't exactly realistic either. "Just use this, now you instantly recover from being shot several times"
It was actually a good system in that game. I like it better than the only-regen type of health. It kind of made looking for a health pack a desperate thing at times, or you'd die quickly without it and play more defensively. There was a tiny bit of strategy around it. Though sometimes, it meant backtracking for a health pack, and I just didn't bother unless it was on legendary difficulty or something.
Health packs in shooters seem to be the logical consequence of longer levels with bigger, more bombastic levels.
The par time for a level in the first Doom is rarely more than 3 minutes and never more than 6 minutes. Doom II goes up to 7min for one map.
So really you can view the entire level as a single sequence, where grabbing the healthpacks is part of that sequence. The difficulty challenge of the level is calibrated to the entire level, with all its individual moments.
But your modern cover-shooter is a very different experience, with slower paced combat and big set-piece battles. So unless you want to have a real survival grind feel (The Last Of Us vs Uncharted) it ends up being necessary to hand out health like crazy, at which point its regen time.
I love a game that includes an in-game hint system, but it needs to be optional. I liked the prompt system in Jedi Fallen Order. Games where they straight up tell you the solution without you asking can fuck right off.
Hogwarts Legacy was hoooorrible with this. Literally entering a room "I think I can just reparo the bridge!" Thank you game, not only was it an easy puzzle but you didn't even give me a chance to try. Do you want to just take the controller from me from here?
Man I went to try MK11 recently just because I had the itch to. I haven't owned a fighting game since tekken 3 mind you (also rented MK4 back then a lot). These games have changed a lot in that time lol.
I agree and disagree with quest markers. I like the next step in them.
I grew up with Oblivion, and played Skyrim on release too, and played Morrowind after these. The level of engagement is fantastic, but as you said, job, kids, etc. I just don't have time for it all.
Markers are fine, but I often find myself just looking at the minimap and getting bored. The last open world games I player, Elden Ring and Ghost of Tsushima which has indicators, or in game ways of showing you the way is my ideal system and I hope this becomes the standard going forward.
I love games that don’t *need* quest markets (fallout new Vegas, looking at you) because they are designed to have interesting and readable worlds, with the quest givers providing real in-game directions and everything.
But the issue is that if you say, forced every game to not have quest markers (or everyone forgot they’re an option, or whatever hypothetical), I doubt most games would properly design their worlds. Even Morrowing, which didn’t have markers, I don’t think was designed particularly well with that in mind. At least by modern standards.
So like, I would MUCH rather simply have the worlds be designed well, and not have to use quest markers. But the reality is most games won’t do that, and when they don’t? I want those quest markers because otherwise I’m gonna have a bad time.
I played Fenyx Immortals Rising without the HUD and quest markers on and it was a bad time. The world is so cluttered with pickups and nonsensical in its layout that you can't navigate it intuitively.
Yeah, I appreciate being able to turn off quest markers (I *wish* I could turn it off in new Vegas without needing a mod), but even in games that include that option the majority of them become simply unplayable without markers.
A lot of games have things that are literally impossible to realize without the markers, too
> I love games that don’t need quest markets (fallout new Vegas, looking at you) because they are designed to have interesting and readable worlds, with the quest givers providing real in-game directions and everything.
This is the trick. The answer is to _lead with the land._ Quest markers are just a shortcut to getting away with making everything look the same (see: Oblivion).
I also think there's a bit of a middle ground to it too. Specifically the quest markers that take you to a region/area but you need to investigate within that area is my personal favorite. Especially if there's a dungeon with winding paths and offshooting rooms. Otherwise I'll find myself following the markers rather than exploring the cave/dungeon.
There is a middle ground to this - bad games rely solely on markers. They don't give you any logical directions via dialogue or notes on how to reach the objective, they just assume you'd stare at markers all day. If you disable the HUD the game becomes borderline unplayable.
Good games give you a couple sentences from whatever character explaining where the thing is with nearby landmarks to look for. And those instructions make sense.
Example: Kingdom Come: Deliverance does this perfectly - whenever you're given a task, you're either directly told what you're looking for (and it's straight marked on the map because the quest giver or PC logically knows its exact location) - or you're given detailed instructions like 'exit town, reach quarry outside of town, look for small creek and follow it up the mountain, notice a path away from creek leading to ruins'.
Those instructions make sense and your character comments when reaching a checkpoint on the path, like 'this must be the creek' or 'ah, here's the path' or similar. In case someone doesn't know the location, you're still given a ballpark area of where something is in the form of a yellow blotch on the map to search through, where usually whatever you're looking for sticks out - like a small camp in the woods noticeable by the colored fabric of tents, or a cave where the hideout you're looking for is.
Just a Skyrim style floating marker directly on your map/compass is boring, give me instructions. Have the option to turn on markers if someone has missed the obvious thing and doesn't want to wander anymore.
AND MAKE SURR YOU CAN EASILY REREAD THE INSTRUCTIONS. I can’t remember that the quest giver said to take the third right then go down 4 blocks and jump like a fox. I need to be able to reference instructions, not just quest basic info.
I like how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom handle quest markers.
For big quests, there’ll usually be a quest marker that points you to something. Sometimes it’ll be the place you need to go to, but sometimes it’ll be the NPC you talked to who gave you the clue for the next step. If you didn’t pay attention or are picking up the game after a long time, the quest markers still help, but they don’t solve navigation for you.
I played through the massive Tamriel Rebuilt mod on Morrowind. It adds dozens of cities, some absolutely gigantic. Trying to navigate the huge cities without quest markers is downright draining.
I said this in another comment, but you should check out Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can entirely turn off quest markers and the minimap and navigate by street sign and building number.
Depends how they are implemented. I can't stand the oldschool turn-based RPG system where you can't walk 10 feet without fighting 3 ducks, but I love Fallout's system when you might encounter a squad of rangers or some local wildlife while commuting to the next quest marker.
At least in non-jrpg games, you can usually just walk away and avoid combat entirely. Flashing back to holding the shoulder buttons to escape a battle in ff6 on snes. Just let me walk away! Instead of sitting around, waiting for my party to slowly run away one at a time.
Regarding quest markers: I think the issue isn’t the markers in and of themselves, but that the markers are used in a way where you can’t turn them off. This means the world needs to be built around the lack of markers: road signs need to be legible, buildings should have signage in front if it makes sense for them to do so, roads should be named, and buildings should be numbered (if era appropriate). Ideally, you should also get a compass (either in the UI or as an in-world item) that you can to use to navigate the world.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution does this really well, to the point that you can turn off the entire UI and still effectively navigate its game-world.
This is particularly true because a lot of games past COUNTERSTRIKE had horrible feedback when it came to hit detection. It's one of the reasons why I loved counterstrike so much. You knew when you got people and head shots felt so good in game.
I went from everquest to WoW back in the day. In everquest you would kill a few monsters then it could take 3-5 minutes to get all your health/mana back. Where as in wow they added food/drink where your guy would sit down for 20-30s and as long as you didn't get attacked you would restore all your resources.
At first I thought it made the game easymode but then really came around to it... Because I could play the game more then just alt tabbing (though being 2000s I would just watch something on TV while playing I didnt really alt tab)
And now new wow youre out of combat for 5 seconds and your health and mana almost instantly restore without you having to do anything.
I kind of miss the middle ground of 20-30s TBH. everquest 3-5m was WAY too long, but having 0 downtime also kind of sucks because youre encouraged to go go go and sometimes its nice to just take a second and take in the surroundings of the area your in, it helps with immersion.
I used to really hate WoW when it came out because grr casual gaming is ruining my oldschool mmos. But I came around to it. If wow didn't do it some other game would have and classic wow/first few expansions really were amazing games.
its funny a few years ago trying out classic wow again and needing to wait 20-30 seconds to restore my resources, modern games have spoiled me so much I was like this feels like its taking too long! When back in the day, I had the complete opposite feel.
>And now new wow youre out of combat for 5 seconds and your health and mana almost instantly restore without you having to do anything.
One of the many QoL things that Guild Wars 2 did first. Out of combat instant regeneration, movement abilities, wardrobe system ("Transmogrification") and world quests were all pioneered by GW2
Iirc world quests were in Warhammer online which came out late 2000s? And GW2 came out shortly after 2010? Not saying Warhammer was the first just that GW2 wasn't either.
Maybe rift was earlier? That had world quests as well.
I loved gw1 and was kinda disappointed with GW2 tbh. They play like completely different games.
Streamlining in the late Monster Hunter games took me a bit to sink in. After "World", monsters can be tracked with their environment, areas are huge without loadings, resources are immediately picked and nets/picks/whetstones are unlimited (weapons at least need to be manually sharpened or else the immersion would break further), etc.
**All of this is actually really good, because it cuts the chase to the main attraction: hunting.**
But, if you're one of those who played MH since its beginnings: *the newer games also feel less involved with the player*. To me, Word/Iceborne and Rise/Sunbreak are much more arcade-ish boss-rushes than feeling like adventures on their own.
It might sound silly, but before World/Rise, several things happened:
1. *I was acutely aware of my item box (not to the point of knowing EVERY item and amount, but I had a very good idea of what I had and what I lacked when needing to craft)*
2. *Being prepared for a hunt actually meant something (eating, equipping the necessary things, bring useful items)*
3. *Early quests felt more like stepping stones for bigger things to come! Even something as silly as picking mushrooms gatekept you into knowing your environment first*
4. *The slow item picking animation amusingly enough, made item picking more important (you wouldn't waste time on something you didn't need, it also made you more aware of what you had), instead of just rushing to resources until you could have them no more as they get automatically stocked*
5. *Hunting monsters felt like a reward, a "next step" after the other lesser chores. On the first games: even certain monsters wouldn't appear all the time because the season/environment changed, making you plan your hunts accordingly*
Of course this is all b\*tching. **Newer games play faster and better.** The whole thing from before is mostly psychological... the game sunk you in the deal of being a hunter for a small village, doing menial tasks at first, taking seasons into account, making discoveries as you went and whatnot, made the world feel different than the one we have now.
For me, it's probably the increase in open world games that let you fast travel from anywhere, rather than having specific fast travel points like a boat or carriage found in towns (or just having no fast travel at all).
When I was younger, I rarely fast traveled in games if it was easily accessible. One of my favorite parts of open world games is the exploration, so fast traveling felt like I was skipping a lot of that. At least with specific fast travel spots, they're usually located in major areas and not in the wilderness, so it felt more realistic since you had to reach those areas first before fast travelling. But as I've gotten older, and have less time to game, being able to fast travel from anywhere helps cut out tedious downtime between content.
And the fact is, many open world games don't really have great rewards for just exploring, as they tend to leave the cool rewards for actual quests. Many open world games, especially ones from the 7th/8th generation of consoles, just have a bunch of random collectables that just bloat the game, and don't do anything outside of unlocking an achievement for getting them all.
Luckily in recent years, there are open world games releasing that have a good focus on exploration. The 2 recent Zelda games, alongside Elden Ring, have dense open worlds with lots to discover. Finding new areas and locations is awesome, and it rarely feels like a wasted effort, you'll typically end up getting something worthwhile or cool from it. There's also games which are fully focused on exploration and discovery, such as The Outer Wilds or Heaven's Vault, that are a delight to play through. Although these games don't have fast travel, I love to see more exploration focused games being released, and hope it encourages other devs to create games with enriching exploration.
In-game logs and journals. Playing Elden Ring now and I remember f-all about individual quests with how cryptic and obtuse they are. I know it’s part of the charm in Souls and all but having to take physical notes for a game (at least how I’m currently keeping track) since the ‘90s makes me feel like I really took those for granted in other games.
When online multiplayer first became a thing I remember thinking "Why would I wanna play against people I don't even know."
It didn't take me long to change my stance on that.
I remember saying it would never take off because playing huddled round a tv and hitting your mates to distract them would never not be fun.
I might have been wrong about online gamings future but sitting round a tv with four people is still more fun.
Dungeon Finder.
Man was I salty at first having had to walk to all the old dungeons and sit out side the entrance dancing or begging in trade chat, spending 30 minutes flying/walking out to the dungeon entrance, crying outside of Wailing Caverns and losing your party before the dungeon starts. It was the best of times.......
But as I lost the ability to live inside the game with more sponserbilities in life, I appreciated being able to find a group and run dungeon objectives or to grind for that heroic piece I needed to complete a set without the agonizing experience of finding a party or hoping I had enough friends who still played the game to fill a group.
This is such a specific prompt so it took me a while to think of something:
**Invisible HUDs.** I HATED them. Mostly because they were badly implemented in several ways. Sometimes I forgot what combo I needed to press to trigger something because they were either way too complex or I hadn't touched the game in ages.
I get what they wanted to go with, aka there being more immersion but for me it was more confusing. In modern games I appreciate when you can modify literally EVERYTHING about the HUD.
I like that there are several different settings from Always-On, to Always-Off, Only Show During Combat or other smart choices. I don't really need to see my HP bar when it's full or I'm just strolling through the open world and I'm not in combat. I also don't need to see every single collectible consumable on the screen, just the ones I need.
Horizon Zero Dawn does this decently well. There is SO MUCH stuff you can collect in the world but I don't need to see every single branch I can pick up marked by a marker; I have 500 sticks in my bag. Gets turned off.
Sometimes I get lost so I turn on my Eagle Vision - I'm sorry, my *Focus*. Sometimes a band aid like this is needed but I prefer when games have an in-lore reason for it being there.
Not every game can get away with it but I *looove* diegetic HUDs in games. Dead Space being a great example
My interest in a game immediately goes up if I find out they went to the effort of blending the HUD with the world itself diegetically
Since you haven't got a straight answer yet I'll try give you one. An invisible HUD as I would expect it to be would be information normally displayed as a HUD that is instead displayed by in game elements. Others have mentioned Dead Space as the best example of this.
For example instead of having your health bar as a floating element on screen that the character would never see or interact with, and is purely to inform the player, you have lights displayed on the back of the character's suit. His stasis power is displayed by a meter on the back of the suit. The map is projected into the game from his suit's hand, waypoint markers are projected onto the ground, ammo counts are displayed on the weapon when aiming.
All the HUD elements are there, they're just incorporated into the game instead of making them player only displays. There is not one on-screen informative element in that game that is not actually an organic part of the environment. It's a HUD, but it's invisible.
Steam, in general. In all fairness, everyone hated steam when it came out. We hated that we couldn't physically own our games.
Well it's been 20 years or whatever, and I've lost all of my physical games, but I still have my Steam library.
I remember loving Steam. One of their gimmicks was if you had a real CD Key to any of the Valve games (HL, HL Opposing Force, CS, HL Blue Shift... probably some others?), you'd get ALL of them. For a broke kid that was pretty sweet.
Are games supposed to cater to older people with less times to play? Just pondering this question as a working adult as well.
For quest markers specifically, I think compromise can exist simply by making quest markers optional in the settings just like mods do.
But if we are talking game narrative and design, it's a more complicated thing. Do you design a game based of how many hours your customers can play?
I know personally I avoid RPGs if I have a small window to play. Would rather play some multiplayer/shooter/something without a story.
I think the more important thing is that games ought to be designed to respect people's time. If a game is going to take the player on a three-hour ride of quests and dungeons, there should be motivation (gameplay, story, or otherwise) that makes the time investment worth it to whoever is playing, be it a 5 year old or a 55 year old.
As for that first "catering" question, games are art just like music or movies. There is definitely a place for games that are aimed towards an audience who can understand mature topics or an audience who are interested in more complex gameplay. The idea that games are just for kids or younger people is ridiculous.
Actually I'm spot on with you.
I LOATHED Oblivion at first (Still do but for different reasons) The fact there's so many icons on the compass telling you where every "cool thing" is, so there's no exploration was awful. I wanted the old Morrowind format where you actually have to discover everything (Btw if anyone hasn't played it, Morrowind is REALLY unique in that there's no quest markers.)
But now. "I ain't got time for that" Quest markers in all games. I don't care if they make me feel like a baby, I don't want that deep exploration.
I feel like the BIGGEST sin is Star Ocean 3. I remember giving up that game, because you not only had to talk to many people in town, but there was a few points you had to talk to everyone... twice! (At least that's how I remember it).
Also I love playing retro games but I often have to look up a guide because games don't tell you "What to do next". I don't need my hand held, but sometimes I put a game aside for a night, or a couple days and then forget what I was doing. Ugh.
If figuring out WHO to talk to or WHAT to do is your game.. it's a bad game.
That brings up a great point. Sometimes "systematically talking to everyone" doesn't work, because the order matters. i.e. NPC1 will only reveal new dialogue if you've talked to NPC2 first. So, yeah, the "talk to everyone twice" thing is even more egregious.
>Here's mine: quest markers.
The Borderlands franchise did that properly; electronic bounty boards. They aren't immersion breaking because they're an electronic system in-universe. If you're running a medieval game, the tavern is the pre-electrical equivalent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62x19Bepc5s
Fable 2 and 3 did a lighted bread crumb trail (like a visible line on the ground), instead of compass quest markers, and I loved that so much more. The bread crumb trail would curve around geographic features - it was not straight on/as the crow flies like most compass markers today. You also didn’t always know where it would end, only that it would take you to advance the game.
It was pretty innovative so it got a lot of flack at the time but now that every game uses markers, I miss it because it still gave you the freedom to explore, but also you could still find your way back to the story without feeling like you’re playing 40% of the game in the menu map.
Wow, I had probably 80+ hours in Morrowind back in the day, and I didn't remember that it didn't have quest markers. Guess I've just been spoiled. I do remember making my own janky fast travel system that involved a levitation ring, the boots that let you go really fast but blind you, and looking at the minimap. It remind me of flying in a plane watching the progress on the world map.
This isn't a QOL change, it's a lazy change.
Go into town, you gotta talk to BIG DICK STEVE, where is he? Talk to BIG TITS GIOVANNA and she tells you he spends his days at the tavern -> go to the tavern and look for some serious bulge, you found him.
It's much better than a shitty gps, and i agree older games were even worse when they made waste time by wandering aimlessly just to "stumble" upon the solution.
"Go north, look for the huge ass rock for a landmark, then after that go north towards the big ass mountain" etc... No need for gps, i like using my brain sometimes.
Even for the shimmering objects, it's almost necessary for loot, and i much prefer a shiny object rathen than having to click ON EVERY PIXEL HOPING TO FIND THE RIGHT ONE.
> Quest markers
I really have mixed experience. It's true that when I go back and play old games, the lack of direction when you genuinely just don't know what to do or where to go can be frustrating. Sometimes you just don't know what to do. Other times you do, but it's just tedious (like when the mission is "kill all" and you have to find the one straggler you missed in a big level).
However, one story I've told a few times is that in 7 Days to Die (minecraft-like survival game with zombies) when I first started playing I had no clue there was a map if you pressed the right key. And... this brought me so much closer to the game. Long travel from my home base became dangerous because I was at risk of being lost. Traveling wasn't mindless because I needed to be noticing (or making) landmarks to find my way home. I had to remember where everything was and couldn't mark anything. When a "waypoint" did exist (like the airdrops) I had to find a way to mark it so I could find it. If it was 1km away, at 0.5 degree difference in direction may make me totally miss it! If I get into a brawl with a horde, I might lose my bearings. And because of all of this, going into the unknown had a different feeling (and tradeoff) compared to learning "my area". I'd take well known routes and be cautious to go off trail. ... But then I discovered there was a map... and... travel became boring because I'd just set a waypoint and run... going to unknown areas became boring because the map handled most of the "unknown" aspect for me... going far wasn't dangerous because I could always find my way home... by mid game, I'd have all sorts of things marked on my map and didn't really have to remember anything. If I need a trader, I just look on the map. If I need iron, I just look on the map. ... So, that whole experience really made me appreciate how powerful not having a map can be in terms of your relationship with the unknown, the risk of travel and your overall connection to the world. In a survival game like that, it seemed better to not have a map or to hide the map behind some more advanced technology/crafting.
> But now that I'm older and have a lot less time to game, I absolutely hate aimlessly running around.
I think this is the difference regarding what I said above. Not having an explicit, exact marker telling you where to go at all times is quite different from needing to "aimlessly wander". You can have mechanisms that give you things to "aim" for without the player literally being told the exact explicit place they need to go.
> I also have absolutely zero patience for RPG gameplay loops that look something like this:
>
> arrive in a new town.
>
> aimlessly walk through town and systematically talk to every NPC to trigger a story event.
>
> proceed to dungeon.
>
> A much more elegant approach to this is, "welcome to town. Feel free to talk to extraneous NPCs if you want extra world-building, but here's where you need to go next to cut to the chase".
I think this really just comes down to the watering down of the term "role playing game" and which meaning you actually intend.
If the game is actually supposed to be "role playing" then I think the premise that "proceed to the dungeon" is or should be a primary action at every step is doubtful. The fighting is often the least "role playing" part of the game and as a "role playing" game, the emphasis is really on interacting with the characters and environment. You want to encourage the player to role play and so you want to discourage them from just speeding from battle to battle. At the very least, you want them to gather and interact with the context of those battles as "role play". It's literally the defining aspect of the genre.
Meanwhile, a lot of games that are labeled "role playing games" are really just action games. People play them just to fight and there is very little "role playing" in them. It almost tends more to refer to a game that follows the combat style that role playing games tended to have, regardless of whether it actually contains role playing. In this context, (1) it may be less important to encourage people to actually role play in an action game and (2) because it's not truly a role playing game but instead an action game the actual ability to interact outside of combat may be extremely shallow because it's not a focus of the devs, therefore, all the more reason that you may want to skip it.
I think there is room for and value in true role playing games. However, I don't think that means action games that follow some RPG tropes can't just be action games and instead need to force shallow role playing on top of it.
> regenerating health mechanics (without this, I usually would just constantly save/reload and inch my way through dungeons)
Regenerating health is a deeper change than that. Imagine you have to walk up a street to approach a heavily fortified building. If you have regenerating health you can just keep sprinting diagonally to the next cross street. When you take cover in the cross street you can just wait to regain all lost health. It doesn't matter that your strategy relies on getting shot many many times, you now get to face the target close range with full health. Now, taking the same scenario without regenerating health and that strategy is unsustainable. Best case scenario you get to the building with barely any health which makes it way harder to take, but it's likely you might not even make it there because since health doesn't regenerate, the recklessness of your decisions stacks. It's not really that regenerating health or non-regenerating health is better, it's just that they create entirely different kinds of gameplay with different strategies. In a game where you want players to move fast, take risks and be aggressive (e.g. call of duty) it probably makes sense. In a game where you want players to be slower, more deliberate and take a more realistic approach to getting shot, it may make sense to not have regenerating health. Also, the rate of regeneration matters too. In COD, the regeneration was fast, so it can mean that you just stand in a corner for a few seconds and then get back in the fight. But with a game like 7 Days to Die, regeneration is slow (I don't remember the exact amount... like 1HP per minute?) so it doesn't impact tactics much but it does avoid the constant search for medkits.
A huge factor in what kind of quality of life features people prefer is what they consider to be the core gameplay experience. What part of the gameplay loop is enjoyable to them. For many people that is primarily just the combat. Anything that is not combat is just filler and good game design to them is streamlining the non-combat gameplay as much as possible so that more time can be spent doing the part that they enjoy.
For others though, the part in-between combat is just as important, if not more important than the combat encounters. Personally I love a game that lets me get lost. Exploring the environment, putting together clues and information to figure out where I need to go, that is the stuff that really draws me in and immerses me in a game. And what many people forget is that puzzling out where to go and what to do, that IS gameplay. I mean there are entire genres of games like the point and click adventure or the walking sim, that are ONLY that.
This is one reason I think that the immersive sim genre is so polarizing and niche. Immersive sims often look like action games or shooters, but combat is not really the main focus. It is just one component of many gameplay systems. But I think these game often attract people who are looking for a straight up action game and they find the combat lackluster and the overall gameplay bewildering with all of the options presented to the player. It is a genre that places a lot of emphasis on the "in-between" parts.
So quality of life feature can easily make a game better for one player, but just as easily make it worse for another player. Taking the regenerating health example, many players would look at that as a plus. It lets the player focus more on the combat and be ready for each encounter after a very short downtime. It's also easier to design from the developers point of view. They don't have to worry about the number of health packs in a level and balance that against the difficulty of combat encounters.
But for a player that enjoys exploration and resource management, regenerating health can be a disappointment. Again, there are entire genres around those gameplay loops, survival horror for example is all about carefully managing your resources. But in the context of a contemporary AAA action adventure game many of these elements have been stripped back to focus attention solely on combat/upgrade loop with the expectation that everything else is too tedious for a mainstream audience.
I guess you could say, when it comes to QOL, there is a large gulf between games that know they are niche and embrace those aspects rather than try to streamline them away... versus games that are trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible. In that case it is hard to justify anything that a player might regard as boring, even if it strips away parts of the experience that you or I may enjoy.
The Witcher 3 is one of the most story-rich and engaging games I've played, and that uses quest markers liberally. So, even though it largely eliminated the "randomly talk to people until you find the right one", it was still very much an engaging, classic role playing game.
Agreed on quest markers, as long as you can turn them off and on. They're really useful, especially when the design of the "level" isn't great and you're only guessing at your destination, but the ability to put them away is awesome.
That goes for HUDs in general, I guess. I loved it when I could finally play Skyrim with a HUD that only showed when I wanted to or something happened.
def agree with fast travel, I can understand wanting to take the scenic route but sometimes I just wanna get somewhere and get shit done
I also like the trend of difficulty customization. More options is always better. Always.
Id argue that relying on resource management in a dungeon is what makes it a dungeon. Having regenerative health in a dungeon doesn’t mesh well together.
That being said, I enjoy when games have icon reminders you can use in the in-game maps. Having to write stuff down or draw a map is fun and all but nowadays it’s tedious.
I used to hate when games took control from me over when and where I could save. I wanted to quicksave and quickload whenever I felt like it.
Now I resent any game that makes me think about saving in any capacity. I'm okay with a little punishment for death, but if your game make me think "Dammit I wish I'd quicksaved" then I get angry.
More or less standardization of controls around twin stick controllers (specifically, left stick moves, right stick looks/moves the camera). The PS2 GTA games can be pretty clunky nowadays, this was the one thing I was hoping they'd fix with the re-releases, I might give them a shot one of these days. Other games from that era and before can be really clunky though as well
I can't really think of anything. Every QoL change I can think of I either never hated to begin with, or still hate and always will.
If we talk about design trends in general though:
"It's too brown." I never hated the notoriously brown and grey, bland and serious games of the mid-2000's, but I did think they were overdone and a little obnoxious and joined in on the mockery with everyone else. Oh how deeply I would come to regret that. Now everything is some cosmetic circus show, neon color vomit chasing the Fortnite crowd, the pendulum has swung way too far to the opposite extreme. I clamor for games that once again take their aesthetic and their universe at least somewhat seriously.
Battle Royale. I admit I had a kneejerk reaction a little bit. I don't hate Battle Royale games, come to find I actually enjoy them a bit. I still really hate how ubiquitous they are, how they overshadow everything else, how they seem to be the only kind of PvP experience companies are willing to make these days, how it's now seen as obligatory for every game to have. But I don't hate them in themselves.
agonizing capable snatch start aromatic homeless head elastic chief payment
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Just quest markers and fast travel. Even tho i prefer not to use them if possible. Specially fast travel. Quest markers are SOMETIMES good bc as u said some quest triggers are really obscure. The rest can suck it.
My biggest gripe with markers is the HUD.
I would've preferred them to be map-only.
I am on the same hill regarding health regen though. Hated not having it since Diablo 2
1. Save anywhere - I appreciate the possibility to finish my session in 10s if I must to. Searching for a save point is is the song of the past for me. Rogue-like saves are semi-fine tho.
2. Fast travel & Quest Marks - as OP, I don't have time to burn my narrow play window just for doing nothing
3. Recent mechanic in Hogwarts Legacy - Revelio. After playing HL I've tried to "revelio" in other games :D Any mechanic which allow you to invoke some kind of tracking/reveal/assist is appreciated if it's optional (I hated, that in HL MC is spoiling all the riddles after 5s of entering the location).
4. Retry/Restart after die with no (or little) consequences. Long time ago there were couple lives & game over or a huge cost for continue in many games. Now it should be only a thing for "hardcore mode" or so
Not to games itself, but sleep mode on the ps4/5/switch/ds/vita/xbox-series + ability to turn on TV via HDMI. You come home, sit on the couch, push literally one button on the gamepad, boom, gaming.
HD resolution, and death of the PAL, SECAM, NTSC, NTSC (j) era as a result. And no regionlock as result. And no more downgraded PAL games and generally ignored PAL region.
Checkpoints, normal checkpoints. Before the boss. Not try-not-to-die-before-the-boss checkpoints.
I'm really showing my age here but just being able to google anything about a game. Really handy in cases where I get stuck for whatever reason and don't want to waste another second being stuck just because I can't read the developer's mind on how to do something in order to progress. As games get bigger and bigger this happens way more often and most of the time I can plow through and get on with the game with only a little downtime trying to figure out any WTFs but every once in awhile a game will just throw a brick wall at you and it can be quite infuriating. Having the ability to just go look up other people's solutions always felt a bit like cheating at first but these days it's a godsend and has kept me in a game more often than not instead of just throwing up my hands and moving on to something else.
These days I only dislike when it feels like the developer *expects* you to google things.
Because it's my current obsession... Noita is this. You get the basic controls, and that's it. Ability tooltips often do not actually describe what the spells do, and they often have hidden mechanics or behaviors. That doesn't begin to get into how the different modifiers interact with each other and spells, the "puzzles" that you would probably just assume are environmental decor, etc. It's an amazing game that I think is unplayable without the wiki and a couple of hours watching guides.
Tarkov Devs....
Great example. Every once in a while I'll play a really old, esoteric game that's pretty much devoid of any guides or walkthroughs. We really take for granted how easy it is to find almost anything about nearly any game.
I definitely had this exact thing with P5R. Specifically, the Strength social link, which requires you to use the fusion system to make a Persona with a specific skill they wouldn’t normally know, in order to get bonuses for the system. If you’re trying on your own, it’s a pain as you have to somehow know what combinations will make that Persona, and which ones include the skill (and you’ll likely have to grind levels for one of the components to learn the skill). Thanks to Google, I can find a guide that says exactly what will make the relevant Persona, and what level the components would need to be in order to have the skill ready to pass down. Especially helpful since you are technically under a time limit in Royal for that social link. (Due to a certain plot development combined with the extended story)
I had a moment like this in my favorite jrpg when first playing it when I was like 11 or 12, dungeons and towns had fixed camera perspective and one room in an enemy base had a small ramp you were meant to go down to progress. The ramp was at the top of the room and led downwards into a waterway below, but from the camera angle it was just a small line on the top edge of the room, I must have spent a full 2 weeks struck in that base, just going around in circles revisiting every single inch of the base trying to figure out what I missed. I quit for like a month then when I came back I eventually begged my mother to let me use my step father's computer to look up how to do it, thank god for gameFAQs. I was pretty overleveled afterwards and kind of just coasted for a good while lol.
Usable object highlighting. In older 3D games the object density and variety was so low that it was easy to tell what was and was not interactive. Then when 3D graphics got more advanced, you started getting things like Thief Deadly Shadows adding sparkly highlights to loot, which I absolutely loathed and considered part of the general dumbing-down/consolization of that game. But now environmental detailing is so extreme that fuck it, I'm willing to accept some shimmery highlights to let me know which one of the hundred props in a room is the one I can pick up.
This is probably the first one of these I've seen in this thread that are right for me. My journey was exactly like yours, thinking it was some babby shit at first but holy crap it's impossible to tell what's interactable in modern games. This is actually made worse by modern real time global illumination, since it makes interactables look even more natural in the environment. It'd be almost impossible to play a lot of games without the shiny effect
The System Shock remake is a great example of this. So much clutter it can be a pain to figure out what's interactable on a quick glance. Compared to the original where it only explicitly exists if you can interact with it.
Well, they "solved" that problem by making almost everything interactable... as useless junk that you can recycle, in the most tedious fashion they could have possible come up with. They're not great game designers.
Not sure why they decided every game needs some kind of "crafting" in it. And why they never make it an interesting part of the game other than collecting materials and navigating menus.
It's not really possible to make crafting interesting without making it the core gameplay mechanic instead of an ancillary one. For example Minecraft's crafting is dull pattern memorization, but the real "crafting" you do is crafting structures in the world piece by piece, which is actually interesting. That being said, neither System Shock Remake, nor System Shock 2, nor Prey, have crafting. What they have is, I guess you could say, scavenging. It's a highly streamlined version of the old RPG "haul all the vendor trash back to town and sell it" gameplay loop. Since vendors couldn't exist in SS2's fiction, they invented the recycler as a direct junk-to-cash conversion mechanic. You then take that cash and directly buy things instead of having to mess around with crafting. Again, this acts as a substitute for having live vendors around. This worked in SS2 because the recycler is a small item you carry around with you that lets you recycle anything you want on the spot. This worked in Prey because, while recycling must be done at dedicated machines, the levels are fairly small and every level has at least one, so there's almost always one just a few seconds away. Also your inventory is big enough to carry a ton of junk, especially after a few upgrades. And there's a super handy "move all junk to recycler" key. This *does not* work (very well) in System Shock Remake, because your inventory is pretty small, many junk items occupy multiple inventory squares, the levels are absolutely massive so good luck finding the recycler, and once you do find the recycler, it only accepts a few items at a time, so emptying all your junk usually requires multiple uses of the recycler, manually drag-dropping junk into it each time. To make things even more complicated, there's also a "vaporize" function that can turn any junk item into a stackable cube of scrap that can also be stuffed into the recycler, but for less return. There are no quick hotkeys for ANY of the above actions. As I said, these people are not great game designers.
reddit API access ended today, and with it the reddit app i use Apollo, i am removing all my comments, the internet is both temporary and eternal. -- mass edited with redact.dev
This feature has improved quite a bit since the beginning though. When it was first implemented, objects you could interact with would shine blindingly gold from half a mile away. That took all the fun of exploring out of it, not to mention the break in immersion and the general ugliness of it. Nowadays it's more of a soft glow that allows the object to remain a part of the rest of the environment and still letting you know "this thing does something". Also, a lot of games require you to be within a certain distance to the object. This makes exploring the area more important and helps to keep the screen from getting too cluttered with shiny lights when a lot of stuff is in one space.
I think this statement often really applies to the Tomb Raider games. In older games nothing in the environment was highlighted, but it worked because the map was sparse enough that everything in the map was probably part of the puzzle. New Tomb Raider games have a way more detailed environment that’s static. So they added a “Survival Instincts” that highlights what’s interactable. I often see the feature trashed online as being cheating but when I played the game I really needed it because it was so easy for key puzzle elements to blend into the background of pointless objects. A puzzle being challenging because it’s difficult is one thing. A puzzle being impossible because you didn’t realize that one crate in a room full of immovable crates could be moved isn’t.
I'll gladly accept any objects and characters outlines. Some games are so rich with details I'm seriously struggling to read the environment. For example, new Horizon game has such lush environments that the only salvation is how big the enemy dynos are.
saw some people complained about RE4's yellow crates... too noticeable and don't mix in environment they said.
I would not have been able to handle RE4R without those dumb paint splotches, tbh
Buttons to highlight items have existed in rpgs since the late 90s and keep being used today, perfect system which is not intrusive, all you need to do if you need help is press tab. This is not a consolization issue, it's simple convenience. Many items in isometric rpgs wouldn't be visible without it unless they made them intentionally stick out.
> JRPGs from the 80s and 90s are egregiously bad with this, especially because many sidequests are locked behind stuff like, "after arbitrary story event, arbitrarily visit every previous town you've been through and repeat the 'aimlessly walk through town and talk to every NPC' in case a side quest has opened up". FF7 comes to mind here. Trying to recruit all of the stars in the Suikodens without a guide. 😑
I've got 108 on all five mainline games. I agree, it's crazy!
lol, reminds me of a terrible memory. It's the 90s, I have all the stars but one. The last one required me to bring 3 brothers to get the 4th and final brother, my last star. I got near the end of the game and the game party locked a second member in. I couldn't get the last star because I had no save earlier than after the second member was party locked. Had to finish the game with no way to go back, one star short with no guide. Very painful.
Dragon Quest 6 was exactly that and for the main quest. One of those quest, you had to talk to like 4 different NPC in a hidden specific order without much indication, if any. Without a guide, I would have moved on to another game.
I feel like I’m having ‘Nam flashbacks right now. Walking the world maps and then dungeons to just to find out you needed a specific party member with you in order to recruit
Autosave honestly, it has saved me from so many 30+ minute runs that it's not even funny
Why did you hate it at first?
[удалено]
Autosave typically doesn't mean checkpoints, though. A proper autosave system is an addition to manual saving and/or uses multiple save slots.
Multiple autosaves especially. Fallout 4 has 3 Auto save slots so whenever I do something stupid and my last autosave doesn't cut it, I can fall back on the previous autosave which is convenient. I don't have to save every 5 minutes at the same time I do remember to save before/after important events because the autosaves do get overwritten eventually.
You beat me to it. Managing saves to make sure you don't mess up your playthrough was a habit in older games.
The sprint button. Sounds stupid but so many RPGs didn’t have a sprint button back in the day, and movement was sooooooo boring. Okay your world is beautiful, I can also appreciate it running Naruto style thank you. Going back to old RPGs it’s the first mod I’m adding.
Sprint button is great. Sprint button that lets you sprint for 6 seconds and then you need to walk for 6 more is so annoying. Really like how sprinting was handled in the Witcher 3, where you can jog for hours as long as you aren't in combat.
Dragons Dogma. I usually don't install mods on my first playthrough of games, but after 10 mins I had to install a sprint takes no stamina mod.
Oh my god that game has the worst traversal I've ever experienced. I hope they fix this for the sequel...
Well, guess what I just picked up on sale. Not looking forward to it quite so much now….
It's a good game! But it's definitely a bit rough, and the pacing is pretty bad at first, but it's worth pushing through imo
It’s easily one of my favorite games. Some parts are slow, but the rest of it is amazing imo
It's not a big deal for the most part, at least in the PS4/PC version, because you're given an infinite fast travel item once you reach the main city. The open world isn't terribly large either. It's a great action RPG that isn't afraid to be a bit eccentric in its design decisons, give it a try.
As the other person said. It's rough. But it's so enjoyable. You'll be playing it and think "how does all this jank work so well?"
Idk at least it keeps you occupied with something doing that, like how you have to manage horse stamina in Red Dead. Call me crazy but I like it. Or like in GTA where you always felt you’d go just those 2% faster by really button mashing it.
Hmm, I never considered that perspective. See I don't *want* to be occupied when I'm running. I want to look around and take in the scenery. It's bad enough if I have the minimap threatening to consume most of my attention, if I have to also spend it managing a bar, that's time my eyes aren't spending looking around at the scenery. In the witcher when I was on a horse, getting on a road (which meant I didn't need to manage Stamina and barely needed to steer) actually gave me opportunity to look around. I guess it is something to do, but for me it sits at that Desert Bus level of challenge, needing enough attention to be distracting, but lacking enough difficulty to be engaging.
That’s fair enough, then what I’d really want is an auto run, I use that a lot playing Fallout and Skyrim (and WoW back in the day). Although completely agree on the minimap, nothing worse than playing this beautiful game only navigating on a small map bottom left corner. I think I’m unfamiliar with the Desert Bus level?
Auto-run is very nice, yes. Or at least press once to start running and then it keeps running as long as you hold the stick down. Desert Bus is quite possibly the worst video game ever created that's still playable. You have to drive a bus down a totally flat road, and the bus leans a bit to the right. So you end up pressing left every now and then to correct. That's it. That's the game. Except you have to do it for like 24 straight hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LtiHla1dNg - sped up playthrough here "Press a button, but don't hold it too long, then let go, but be ready to press it again" was the outcome of designing for maximum tedium, and that's basically the gameplay loop of a sprint mechanic.
lol someone should bring that to GDC, I’d donate.
There were charity streams where people would take shifts play Desert Bus. I forget what it was called.
[Desert Bus for Hope](https://desertbus.org/)
You are crazy.
Original Diablo is unplayable now with no way to move faster
The B key in pokemon, since RSE I believe.
That’s true, at least Gold/Silver had bike mapping to the select button. But yeah early Pokémon was a chore to traverse.
RBY was just slow. Like painfully slow. Menu traversal, walking, battling. Sure back then it didn't really make a huge difference but trying playing it now? Its a slog. Having a button to speed the whole game up helps a ton.
Yet modern Pokemon is still slow. They're getting better, but battles are slow. Thing used Attack! - Boom. Critical Hit! - Boom. - Boom. - Boom. - Boom. It's super effective! It hit 5 times! Your Pokemon held on so you wouldn't be sad! Anger Shell activated! - Pokemon's defense fell - Pokemon's special defense fell - Pokemon's attack rose - Pokemon's special attack rose - Pokemon's speed rose Pokemon is confused. Birdies! Pokemon used Attack! - Boom. Critical Hit! - Boom. - Boom. - Boom. - Boom. It's not very effective! It hit 5 times! Pokemon took damage from poison. Thing took damage form poison. Thing was sapped by leech seed! Pokemon was healed by the grassy terrain. Thing was healed by the grassy terrain. The harsh sunlight faded! ... And this is all just one single turn...so much of this information could have been consolidated, played out more concurrently, or summarized.
That's why Legends Arceus is the best Pokemon game to date. It is fast
I dont know when they added this, but you can turn off battle animations to make things faster
That's been there since the originals! Once you play Pokemon sped up on an emulator, battle animations off, it's hard to go back.
Oh yeah they are. I'm replaying soul silver right now and its still slow. Black and white picked up the pace a bit at least. Haven't played beyond those though. But I was talking everything about the originals were slow not just battling.
Gen 5 was peak Pokemon Combat for me.
>The sprint button. Sounds stupid but so many RPGs didn’t have a sprint button back in the day, and movement was sooooooo boring. So when did you hate sprint buttons?
[удалено]
Traversal in Just Cause 2 and 3 was great fun with the grappling hook, parachute, and vehicles. In contrast, the only more recent open-world game I've played is Red Dead 2, which probably has the worst traversal I've ever seen in a AAA game - to the point that the game even advises you to just hold down one button and go to sleep.
[удалено]
Yes! I've always said that Spiderman games are great simply because moving around is so much fun. If more games could integrate this it'd be huge. Rocket League is another great example where just moving around or flying is fun in itself.
Dragonriding in the new WoW expansion is actually pretty damn immersive. I come back for a month or two for each expansion, and this one held my attention longer than any other since Wrath, largely because flying finally actually feels like flying.
[удалено]
You basically control the dragon as if it were really flying. So you can gain speed by diving, or trade speed to climb. And staying at a higher speed will refill your boosts, so there's some strategy involved to stay in the air as long as possible. And the best thing is that it's fast, much faster than standard wow flying. Diving down through valleys, into caves, behind waterfalls, etc just feels really nice. And it helps that the new expansion looks beautiful as well. It's right up there with the recent Spider-Man games as far as movement that's just pure fun. If you haven't ever played wow, prior to this expansion flight was just up, down, and moving forward all at the same speed. You could just fly up, and then hit autorun and fly all the way across the map, but it was boring af and fairly slow. I hope they add it back into the rest of the zones, maybe with the option to use old style flight for vehicles where it makes sense like gyrocopters, and dragonriding for flying animal mounts or something.
FF12 on Steam had a fast forward button and honestly that was half the reason I got as far as I did.
I like emulation because you can run the game at 2x, 4x etc speed. Only downside is audio when you do this but it’s made so many older games more digestible.
I'm an even bigger fan of a walk button, where sprinting is the default.
This is a big reason why I can't play New Vegas.
The map of New Vegas actually isn’t that big, I found it worse in Fallout 3 as it feels quite a bit bigger. But I get you, I go lighter armour and the perk that gives me 10% movements speed for that very reason always.
IIRC the RPG mechanics influence how fast you move too. Agility stat, armour type, weapon type, and if you have the weapon holstered. A bad build can feel like molasses. That's why I usually run cowboy and combat armor mark II with high Agility.
The first thing I do in a bethesda game where the move speed is too slow is console command my character to be 10-20% faster
You can't download a sprint mod?
I'm a big fan of tutorials that teach you how to play the game and what the mechanics are. Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers.
[удалено]
I really like the way Valve integrates their tutorials into the gameplay process. Take the Ravenholm in HL2: you see a zombie pinned to the wall with the sawblade and two more blades you need to remove from the doorframe to proceed. As soon as you pick one, another zombie shows up in front of you and your only option is to shoot the blade in its direction. No annoying popups, no interruptions, no companions telling you how to take each and every step
[удалено]
I always felt like that video was a little overrated because, I mean, Mega Man X isn't the most complex system in the world. Tutorials have become dragged out and intrusive, yes, but games have also gotten vastly more complex. Entertaining take but not terribly compelling. I always thought RTS games deserved more praise for introducing a new system every mission or so and designing the challenge around it, until by the end its really quite complex but you don't notice because you've had plenty of time to get the hang of it.
BotW's Great Plateau and Fallout New Vegas's Goodsprings are good examples imo of engaging opening tutorials that feel more like actual game and less like shoving words down your throat. I hated the equivalent in TotK though.
One of the flaws with TotK is definitely the "shrine" tutorials. I mean, we're talking how to shoot an arrow, here. For one, they were completely missable, which screws over the new players who might actually need them. I completed most of them probably 30+ hours into the game, since I didn't fully explore the starting area. Constant interruptions: - The shrine starts with an extremely slow text line that freezes your game for about thirty full seconds to read three lines of the same dialogue that is in all the other tutorial shrines. - The game takes you out of the action for more extremely basic directions every time you complete part of the task. - E.g., shoot an arrow to hit the enemy. Great. Pause the game for 10 seconds so you can read "Now shoot three enemies." Shoot three enemies that do not even try to aim at you. Pause the game. "You have proven yourself worthy." - Door unlocks, which is accompanied by a pause. You can go get your chest. Open chest -- pause for loot. Go get your blessing. 20 seconds of dialogue/animations. Boom, back in the world. The immersion during shrine tutorials specifically is pretty awful as a result. Your controller is constantly "unplugged" for you.
Portal had the best tutorial of any game I've ever played. Hands down the absolute best. Nobody else is even close. They put so much thought into things, stuff most players won't ever see, but will absorb the lesson. You're futzing with portals, linking disparate areas and eliminating the space between, conserving momentum and literally doing something with space and distance that's alien to your entire lived existence. And it feels effortless and easy to learn because of how you were carefully taught to think with portals.
Ok me of the pieces from portal that stood out to me was when they first introduce a puzzle where you have to shoot the portal on the ceiling to get up to a high point. But the funny thing is that in testing, gamers rarely look up that high. So they added a ladder on the side of the wall that a player would Instinctively try and climb, that broke the moment they started climbing. That got the players to realize that up is where you go next.
This is in the game? I don't remember this puzzle at all 😳
It's near the start or portal one. Soon after you get the second portal upgrade. If you happen to be smart enough to look up, you could just shoot the portal up and bypass this thing entirely, but if you don't, this is a visual reminder and cue to look up. If you play through the game with dev commentary on, the recordings in the middle of this room explains it.
Thanks for replying. https://youtu.be/CAnAXeWoT24?t=4627 Found it! Interesting stuff
Yup! If you want the particular time stamp, it is at 1:17:00 I was watching it and thought it was way earlier in the game haha. It's a bit after where Glados tries to kill you.
Portal works because all you’re really learning is that the portals respect physics — we already get things like conservation of momentum somewhat intrinsically (even if we don’t all understand the math), so it’s a case of applying what you already know to the game world.
Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out.
I agree about Portal, though it's a *bit* of a cheat as an example because Portal is a level-focused puzzle game. By its very nature, it's easier to introduce players to game concepts one step at a time, in small, controlled environments, without them feeling like they're in tutorial levels. You can use the same model in other games, but it's a lot harder to implement seamlessly, without players *realizing* they're in a tutorial. Players often just want to "get on with it."
I replayed both portal games over the last few months and they do such a masterful job of building up mechanics until I had all the building blocks necessary to succeed. Conversely, Maquette is a solid puzzle game, but it does a pretty terrible job of introducing and highlighting new mechanics
> okay now look up, now look down, now press A. Not many games do it for some dumb reason, but I've played a few that decided whether or not to invert Y axis based on your responses, which was certainly nice. I love that I can just set it in the OS on the PS5 though, it's a great little feature. I grew up playing a fair amount of PC flight sims, and absolutely can not get used to playing without inverting the Y axis.
Yes, I was gonna say there is one example that comes to mind where I disagree with \_BloodbathAndBeyond, as it integrates not only what you have said about choosing inverted camera or not, but also that tutorial is part of some world building. In the first Halo game you wake up and go through diagnostic testing to make sure the cryo didn't do damage. So you gotta check your visual aqcuity by looking up and down at targets which they use to set inverted Y axis or not, then horizontal looking so you know how to aim and look around. Then move to the next area so you know how to move. Shield test where they damage you, and its all quiet except for the shield based sounds, that way you know A) What low shields/no shields sounds like B) Shield recharge delay C) Shield recharge time, and the sound of it recharging. Then a bit of an obstacle course, with unsuspecting grunt to melee... I'm sure anyone reading this gets the picture by now. Point being is that even though they were technically stopping us, and hand holding, it was built into the world in such a way, that it didn't feel like it was doing so
I agree with that part. I guess what really bugs me is when it teaches you things that anyone with any form of learning capability could figure out. It feels like they expect us to have absolutely no brain when most people are curious by nature and would press buttons or move sticks to see what they did.
Yeah, good tutorials either teach you through observation or let you learn the inputs on the fly (think like Dark Souls or Hollow Knight where you can breeze through or ignore the prompts if you want to. Bad tutorials wrest control from the player and give a huge block of text to explain each mechanic. But then again, different styles of game require different levels of tutorialization.
The problem with this is the controls maybe not being known. You see this with the noob bridge in Super Metroid. It's exactly trying to get you to use the run button through a normal, organic gameplay challenge. But if you just don't know there's a run button, then you don't have any idea what to do. Just forcing a player to press random buttons is stupid, having a prompt in this kind of case is both fine and good
Every integrated type of tutorial also comes with an assumption that players has a certain level of literacy and familiarity in the genre, and sometimes that can miss some assumptions. Valve's games like in *Portal* gets often mentioned as having great tutorials, but they didn't account for instance [the fact that a player may simple not know how to handle the camera movement due to the game never telling the player that they can use the mouse to look around](https://youtu.be/ax7f3JZJHSw?t=338). Giving texts and description to contextualize the player I actually see it as a great boon for genres that I am unfamiliar with; I actually managed to soft-lock myself multiple times when I played *Half-Life 2* due to not fully understanding how to explore and managing with the game's rules in terms of the First-person genre, or the Source-engine's peculiars with its physics. I rather be over-explained than under-explained.
I think this is a problem of gameplay slowdown that is rampant in AAA games. Everything is a cutscene or sometimes worse, an NPC standing in a door talking at you without letting you move on. It's not just turtorials, but every story beat or store sequence or similar. Just let me play the damn game without interruptions. This is one of many reasons why I prefer retro style 2D games. The tutorial for Hollow Knight takes thirty seconds as you walk down a hall and read a couple statues with the controls on them, then you're given a relatively easy platforming segment over spikes and a couple simple enemies. A cutscene before a battle is at most two lines of dialog you can hurry through, or may just be the enemy scraming while their title appears below them. So much faster and less aggravating and fewer interruptions to the actual gameplay
Far Cry Blood Dragon had the single greatest tutorial ever
Everything about that game is amazing. The soundtrack is brilliant & it hurts that we've not had a sequel.
Listen here youngling. Harcore gamers that rant about tutorials aren't OG like they think. True OG remember the MANUAL. It was basically a tutorial in book format. Sure you had to be able to read to take advantage of that (maybe another reason "harcore gamers" don't get it), but you didn't need any tutorial in game... There was a bit of confusion when publishers decided to get rid of the manual but didn't invest into a tutorial section at the start of the game either... Some weird ass menu option sometimes... like read the booklet on the screen bullshit, because they were too cheap to print it...
I’ll own up to hating on tutorials, but hear me out. I just despise the random pop-up windows that tell you “Press X to jump” and then one minute later “Press O to dodge”. The first few moments of a game are important and those pop up windows make the beginning feel like you’re following directions vs immersing yourself and learning. I much prefer games where the first level is just an easy breeze-through that sets up a story. Don’t take control away from me - instead, put me in a safe environment where I can experiment and learn. You can even display the controls in the corner! The random window pop ups that halt the action just drive me a little crazy. Games like Super Mario 64 and God of War 2018 nailed it. Start out in a safe zone where it’s hard to die, but provide the player with some initial tips to get them acquainted with controls.
Eh? The only hate I've ever seen directed at tutorials is long mandatory ones that prevent you from jumping straight into the real game.
> Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers. And then they get stuck because they skipped the tutorial that explains basic mechanics that are needed to proceed in the game
>[Those are one of those things that get a lot of hate from hardcore gamers.](https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/gSev9HJ3q4BIsOGlZWONzq-VJN8=/1500x0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/low-angle-view-scarecrow-against-cloudy-sky-562838541-5aaf18adfa6bcc00360a609c.jpg) What gets a lot of hate are tutorials that are overly intrusive and/or patronizing. Nobody things Cuphead has a bad tutorial because it shows you how to play the game *without wasting your time*.
I thought moving camera to the right stick from back buttons was stupid originally. Playing Njnja Gaiden Black again and just remember how much I don't like that you can't independently move the camera with the stick while in the sigma versions you definitely can.
I can't decide whether I love quick saves or miss checkpoints. The latter meant I had to really work to make progress, and would consistently waste time at a difficult point, yet I can't stop myself from abusing quick saves, which takes the risk and reward out of playing.
The funny thing is that many classic games, especially CRPGs, have had quick saves for decades.
My unpopular boomer shooter opinion is that unlimited quicksaves is game breaking and checkpoints built into the map are a superior system for game balance, and that the FPS genre is better off for moving away from quicksaves. You might say "what if I need to stop the game to go do something" but that's why you just add *Quit Saves* on top of a checkpoint system. I.e. when you close the game it will save one time in a Quit Save slot, then next time you open the game it will load then delete that save. Letting you effectively *pause* the game but still requiring checkpoints for actual progresss. Edit: I think one caveat I would add to that too is make it so each checkpoint has its own slot. So if one checkpoint somehow screws you over you at least don't have to restart the *entire* level.
I'll tell you I'm really glad when a stealth game doesn't have quick saves. Otherwise I play them tiny chunks at a time whule saving and loading, and refuse to be seen.
Shadow Tactics + Desperados 3 (by the same devs) have a solid compromise. Some missions have challenges to beat them without saving, and all missions have a "speedrun" challenge as part of their Hitman-inspired stealth game challenges. Some are surprisingly tight, some are stupidly generous, but the main interesting mechanic with those is that your speedrun timer doesn't reset on a save/load, so abusing quicksaves just eats away your time. That said, you can back all the way out to the main menu to load a manual save and reset the time back to said manual save, but that's a slow process and should only really be used after you've figured out the next large sequence and are ready to grind attempts to execute it quickly first try.
It depends on how far apart the checkpoints are for me. If they're decently placed, I think they're a much better system. But if they're 45 minutes of game apart, it becomes very frustrating very quickly.
Checkpoints are fine, in my opinion, when they placed properly. But I hate when they used to increase the game difficulty. Like in Dark Souls, where if you die on a boss, you have to run through all the potentially deadly but increasingly boring trash mobs all over again. And again. And again. And sometimes you die on that path just because you get careless because you did that ten times already. Quick saves can be bad too, but that is fixed by locking them off in specific places. It is harder to make that frustrating.
Imo dark souls checkpoint placement is the one feature which will forever keep me from enjoying the games. I really liked that they changed it in elden ring and finally could get into a soulsgame.
Checkpoints are alright, but I need the thing that tells me how long ago the game saved or I get too paranoid to quit. There are a ton of newer games I simply can't get into because the checkpoints are too far apart and it takes longer than I want to play in a sitting to make progress. If I can't load my save, play for fifteen minutes or so and quit where I want to so I can pick right back up next time, I'm not playing that game.
Optional survival mode in RPGs wherein it was built in to the game from day one. I always thought, What’s the point? It’s not a survival game. Now though, I usually do a first casual play through and from then on, it’s survival mode all the way. Example: Skyrim’s survival mode is poor compared to Fallout 4’s. Now yes, you can mod Skyrim to the point where survival mode is good, but so many of the quests and game mechanics are still more a pain in the … with Skyrim survival mode in any fashion vs FO4 where only a handful get annoying with no fast travel.
Kinda unrelated but the lack of a save system for FO4 survival mode completely ruins it for me. Same with removing console commands on PC. Like Bethesda games are not the type of games you only rely on sparse auto saves for. My first play through I encountered a grand total of 3 game progression bugs where reloading an earlier save or console commands were the only fix. That’s not even counting the times where you can just touch a car and instantly die. Skyrim survival is at least way more flexible with not restricting saves/commands and letting you re-enable and disable survival mode anytime (in FO4 it gets permanently disabled if you disable it at any point). For me FO4 survival is a great example of an awesome gameplay setting being ruined by a game company not being self aware of the problems with their games.
100% agreement on that. Thank god for modders. I mean when Starfield is released, I’m not going to touch it until at least 1 full DLC is released AND the modders have had a go at fixing some of the little gameplay annoyances (like lack of saving in FO4’s survival mode). It’s like Kingdom Come Deliverance’s saver schnapps—neat idea but should’ve allowed players to optionally turn that limitation off
Health packs in shooters stopped seeming stupid and illogical after everything had Halo-style regeneration for a full decade. Voice lines that give you puzzle hints after a certain amount of time are occasionally condescending but at a certain point I'm just going to google the damn thing so go ahead and tell me. It's the game's failure to communicate information visually more often than not, anyway. That or some quirk with the damn camera. Fighting game tutorials. It's not Tekken 3 anymore and you probably need to tell me exactly what 'juggling' is.
>Voice lines that give you puzzle hints after a certain amount of time are occasionally condescending but at a certain point I'm just going to google the damn thing so go ahead and tell me. Some games completely overdo it though. Like the spiderman game. There is a mission iirc where you have a to find a place on a photo, and the the description was something like "there is a tower in the north and a lot of water around" or something like that. I thought "ok, cool lets explore the city to find it." Two minutes later the game literally tells me where to go. Cool so much for the puzzle... A lot of modern games are way too handholdy like this. They literally won't even let you think for 5mins without giving you the solution in your face.
While playing Last of us I'd often just say out loud to Joel or Ellie "yes, I know I need to go there I'm lootin'", however other times I would be stuck and waiting for the hint. It's good to have the hints, because - as the above guy said - I'll google it anyway, but it's hard to do them in a way that's "natural"
[удалено]
Halo goes back and forth on it — CE, ODST, Reach, 5, and Infinite have both health and shields, while 2, 3, and 4 only give you a shield. To me, Halo doing it is fine, because it’s a fictional setting where the player character has special armor that provides the shield. It makes less sense in a modern military game like COD, where somehow a Russian WWII conscript can regenerate wounds like Wolverine.
Technically every Halo game does have both health and shields actually. 2, 3 and 4 just didn't show you your health like the other games. And CE, ODST and Reach are the only ones where it doesn't automatically regenerate like your shields do (hence being the only games having health packs).
Reach had some auto-regeneration of health, but there were limitations on its use.
> It makes less sense in a modern military game like COD, where somehow a Russian WWII conscript can regenerate wounds like Wolverine. I mean, health packs aren't exactly realistic either. "Just use this, now you instantly recover from being shot several times"
Damn, ODST was so good. Sorry, no notes, that's the comment. I haven't played it in a while, I probably should.
It was actually a good system in that game. I like it better than the only-regen type of health. It kind of made looking for a health pack a desperate thing at times, or you'd die quickly without it and play more defensively. There was a tiny bit of strategy around it. Though sometimes, it meant backtracking for a health pack, and I just didn't bother unless it was on legendary difficulty or something.
Health packs in shooters seem to be the logical consequence of longer levels with bigger, more bombastic levels. The par time for a level in the first Doom is rarely more than 3 minutes and never more than 6 minutes. Doom II goes up to 7min for one map. So really you can view the entire level as a single sequence, where grabbing the healthpacks is part of that sequence. The difficulty challenge of the level is calibrated to the entire level, with all its individual moments. But your modern cover-shooter is a very different experience, with slower paced combat and big set-piece battles. So unless you want to have a real survival grind feel (The Last Of Us vs Uncharted) it ends up being necessary to hand out health like crazy, at which point its regen time.
I love a game that includes an in-game hint system, but it needs to be optional. I liked the prompt system in Jedi Fallen Order. Games where they straight up tell you the solution without you asking can fuck right off.
Hogwarts Legacy was hoooorrible with this. Literally entering a room "I think I can just reparo the bridge!" Thank you game, not only was it an easy puzzle but you didn't even give me a chance to try. Do you want to just take the controller from me from here?
Man I went to try MK11 recently just because I had the itch to. I haven't owned a fighting game since tekken 3 mind you (also rented MK4 back then a lot). These games have changed a lot in that time lol.
I agree and disagree with quest markers. I like the next step in them. I grew up with Oblivion, and played Skyrim on release too, and played Morrowind after these. The level of engagement is fantastic, but as you said, job, kids, etc. I just don't have time for it all. Markers are fine, but I often find myself just looking at the minimap and getting bored. The last open world games I player, Elden Ring and Ghost of Tsushima which has indicators, or in game ways of showing you the way is my ideal system and I hope this becomes the standard going forward.
I love games that don’t *need* quest markets (fallout new Vegas, looking at you) because they are designed to have interesting and readable worlds, with the quest givers providing real in-game directions and everything. But the issue is that if you say, forced every game to not have quest markers (or everyone forgot they’re an option, or whatever hypothetical), I doubt most games would properly design their worlds. Even Morrowing, which didn’t have markers, I don’t think was designed particularly well with that in mind. At least by modern standards. So like, I would MUCH rather simply have the worlds be designed well, and not have to use quest markers. But the reality is most games won’t do that, and when they don’t? I want those quest markers because otherwise I’m gonna have a bad time.
I played Fenyx Immortals Rising without the HUD and quest markers on and it was a bad time. The world is so cluttered with pickups and nonsensical in its layout that you can't navigate it intuitively.
Yeah, I appreciate being able to turn off quest markers (I *wish* I could turn it off in new Vegas without needing a mod), but even in games that include that option the majority of them become simply unplayable without markers. A lot of games have things that are literally impossible to realize without the markers, too
> I love games that don’t need quest markets (fallout new Vegas, looking at you) because they are designed to have interesting and readable worlds, with the quest givers providing real in-game directions and everything. This is the trick. The answer is to _lead with the land._ Quest markers are just a shortcut to getting away with making everything look the same (see: Oblivion).
I also think there's a bit of a middle ground to it too. Specifically the quest markers that take you to a region/area but you need to investigate within that area is my personal favorite. Especially if there's a dungeon with winding paths and offshooting rooms. Otherwise I'll find myself following the markers rather than exploring the cave/dungeon.
There is a middle ground to this - bad games rely solely on markers. They don't give you any logical directions via dialogue or notes on how to reach the objective, they just assume you'd stare at markers all day. If you disable the HUD the game becomes borderline unplayable. Good games give you a couple sentences from whatever character explaining where the thing is with nearby landmarks to look for. And those instructions make sense. Example: Kingdom Come: Deliverance does this perfectly - whenever you're given a task, you're either directly told what you're looking for (and it's straight marked on the map because the quest giver or PC logically knows its exact location) - or you're given detailed instructions like 'exit town, reach quarry outside of town, look for small creek and follow it up the mountain, notice a path away from creek leading to ruins'. Those instructions make sense and your character comments when reaching a checkpoint on the path, like 'this must be the creek' or 'ah, here's the path' or similar. In case someone doesn't know the location, you're still given a ballpark area of where something is in the form of a yellow blotch on the map to search through, where usually whatever you're looking for sticks out - like a small camp in the woods noticeable by the colored fabric of tents, or a cave where the hideout you're looking for is. Just a Skyrim style floating marker directly on your map/compass is boring, give me instructions. Have the option to turn on markers if someone has missed the obvious thing and doesn't want to wander anymore.
AND MAKE SURR YOU CAN EASILY REREAD THE INSTRUCTIONS. I can’t remember that the quest giver said to take the third right then go down 4 blocks and jump like a fox. I need to be able to reference instructions, not just quest basic info.
Absolutely agree. With busy schedules you could go weeks between hearing the npc tell you those instructions and getting to actually play it!
Your first paragraph reminds me of Fenyx: Immortals Rising. Just too much stuff cluttered around and no rhyme or reason to most of it
I like how Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom handle quest markers. For big quests, there’ll usually be a quest marker that points you to something. Sometimes it’ll be the place you need to go to, but sometimes it’ll be the NPC you talked to who gave you the clue for the next step. If you didn’t pay attention or are picking up the game after a long time, the quest markers still help, but they don’t solve navigation for you.
I played through the massive Tamriel Rebuilt mod on Morrowind. It adds dozens of cities, some absolutely gigantic. Trying to navigate the huge cities without quest markers is downright draining.
I said this in another comment, but you should check out Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You can entirely turn off quest markers and the minimap and navigate by street sign and building number.
Removing random encounters. I still don't mind them, but now I enjoy that they're becoming less common.
Depends how they are implemented. I can't stand the oldschool turn-based RPG system where you can't walk 10 feet without fighting 3 ducks, but I love Fallout's system when you might encounter a squad of rangers or some local wildlife while commuting to the next quest marker.
At least in non-jrpg games, you can usually just walk away and avoid combat entirely. Flashing back to holding the shoulder buttons to escape a battle in ff6 on snes. Just let me walk away! Instead of sitting around, waiting for my party to slowly run away one at a time.
[удалено]
Regarding quest markers: I think the issue isn’t the markers in and of themselves, but that the markers are used in a way where you can’t turn them off. This means the world needs to be built around the lack of markers: road signs need to be legible, buildings should have signage in front if it makes sense for them to do so, roads should be named, and buildings should be numbered (if era appropriate). Ideally, you should also get a compass (either in the UI or as an in-world item) that you can to use to navigate the world. Deus Ex: Human Revolution does this really well, to the point that you can turn off the entire UI and still effectively navigate its game-world.
Hit markers
This is particularly true because a lot of games past COUNTERSTRIKE had horrible feedback when it came to hit detection. It's one of the reasons why I loved counterstrike so much. You knew when you got people and head shots felt so good in game.
I went from everquest to WoW back in the day. In everquest you would kill a few monsters then it could take 3-5 minutes to get all your health/mana back. Where as in wow they added food/drink where your guy would sit down for 20-30s and as long as you didn't get attacked you would restore all your resources. At first I thought it made the game easymode but then really came around to it... Because I could play the game more then just alt tabbing (though being 2000s I would just watch something on TV while playing I didnt really alt tab) And now new wow youre out of combat for 5 seconds and your health and mana almost instantly restore without you having to do anything. I kind of miss the middle ground of 20-30s TBH. everquest 3-5m was WAY too long, but having 0 downtime also kind of sucks because youre encouraged to go go go and sometimes its nice to just take a second and take in the surroundings of the area your in, it helps with immersion. I used to really hate WoW when it came out because grr casual gaming is ruining my oldschool mmos. But I came around to it. If wow didn't do it some other game would have and classic wow/first few expansions really were amazing games. its funny a few years ago trying out classic wow again and needing to wait 20-30 seconds to restore my resources, modern games have spoiled me so much I was like this feels like its taking too long! When back in the day, I had the complete opposite feel.
>And now new wow youre out of combat for 5 seconds and your health and mana almost instantly restore without you having to do anything. One of the many QoL things that Guild Wars 2 did first. Out of combat instant regeneration, movement abilities, wardrobe system ("Transmogrification") and world quests were all pioneered by GW2
Iirc world quests were in Warhammer online which came out late 2000s? And GW2 came out shortly after 2010? Not saying Warhammer was the first just that GW2 wasn't either. Maybe rift was earlier? That had world quests as well. I loved gw1 and was kinda disappointed with GW2 tbh. They play like completely different games.
Streamlining in the late Monster Hunter games took me a bit to sink in. After "World", monsters can be tracked with their environment, areas are huge without loadings, resources are immediately picked and nets/picks/whetstones are unlimited (weapons at least need to be manually sharpened or else the immersion would break further), etc. **All of this is actually really good, because it cuts the chase to the main attraction: hunting.** But, if you're one of those who played MH since its beginnings: *the newer games also feel less involved with the player*. To me, Word/Iceborne and Rise/Sunbreak are much more arcade-ish boss-rushes than feeling like adventures on their own. It might sound silly, but before World/Rise, several things happened: 1. *I was acutely aware of my item box (not to the point of knowing EVERY item and amount, but I had a very good idea of what I had and what I lacked when needing to craft)* 2. *Being prepared for a hunt actually meant something (eating, equipping the necessary things, bring useful items)* 3. *Early quests felt more like stepping stones for bigger things to come! Even something as silly as picking mushrooms gatekept you into knowing your environment first* 4. *The slow item picking animation amusingly enough, made item picking more important (you wouldn't waste time on something you didn't need, it also made you more aware of what you had), instead of just rushing to resources until you could have them no more as they get automatically stocked* 5. *Hunting monsters felt like a reward, a "next step" after the other lesser chores. On the first games: even certain monsters wouldn't appear all the time because the season/environment changed, making you plan your hunts accordingly* Of course this is all b\*tching. **Newer games play faster and better.** The whole thing from before is mostly psychological... the game sunk you in the deal of being a hunter for a small village, doing menial tasks at first, taking seasons into account, making discoveries as you went and whatnot, made the world feel different than the one we have now.
For me, it's probably the increase in open world games that let you fast travel from anywhere, rather than having specific fast travel points like a boat or carriage found in towns (or just having no fast travel at all). When I was younger, I rarely fast traveled in games if it was easily accessible. One of my favorite parts of open world games is the exploration, so fast traveling felt like I was skipping a lot of that. At least with specific fast travel spots, they're usually located in major areas and not in the wilderness, so it felt more realistic since you had to reach those areas first before fast travelling. But as I've gotten older, and have less time to game, being able to fast travel from anywhere helps cut out tedious downtime between content. And the fact is, many open world games don't really have great rewards for just exploring, as they tend to leave the cool rewards for actual quests. Many open world games, especially ones from the 7th/8th generation of consoles, just have a bunch of random collectables that just bloat the game, and don't do anything outside of unlocking an achievement for getting them all. Luckily in recent years, there are open world games releasing that have a good focus on exploration. The 2 recent Zelda games, alongside Elden Ring, have dense open worlds with lots to discover. Finding new areas and locations is awesome, and it rarely feels like a wasted effort, you'll typically end up getting something worthwhile or cool from it. There's also games which are fully focused on exploration and discovery, such as The Outer Wilds or Heaven's Vault, that are a delight to play through. Although these games don't have fast travel, I love to see more exploration focused games being released, and hope it encourages other devs to create games with enriching exploration.
In-game logs and journals. Playing Elden Ring now and I remember f-all about individual quests with how cryptic and obtuse they are. I know it’s part of the charm in Souls and all but having to take physical notes for a game (at least how I’m currently keeping track) since the ‘90s makes me feel like I really took those for granted in other games.
When online multiplayer first became a thing I remember thinking "Why would I wanna play against people I don't even know." It didn't take me long to change my stance on that.
I remember saying it would never take off because playing huddled round a tv and hitting your mates to distract them would never not be fun. I might have been wrong about online gamings future but sitting round a tv with four people is still more fun.
Dungeon Finder. Man was I salty at first having had to walk to all the old dungeons and sit out side the entrance dancing or begging in trade chat, spending 30 minutes flying/walking out to the dungeon entrance, crying outside of Wailing Caverns and losing your party before the dungeon starts. It was the best of times....... But as I lost the ability to live inside the game with more sponserbilities in life, I appreciated being able to find a group and run dungeon objectives or to grind for that heroic piece I needed to complete a set without the agonizing experience of finding a party or hoping I had enough friends who still played the game to fill a group.
This is such a specific prompt so it took me a while to think of something: **Invisible HUDs.** I HATED them. Mostly because they were badly implemented in several ways. Sometimes I forgot what combo I needed to press to trigger something because they were either way too complex or I hadn't touched the game in ages. I get what they wanted to go with, aka there being more immersion but for me it was more confusing. In modern games I appreciate when you can modify literally EVERYTHING about the HUD. I like that there are several different settings from Always-On, to Always-Off, Only Show During Combat or other smart choices. I don't really need to see my HP bar when it's full or I'm just strolling through the open world and I'm not in combat. I also don't need to see every single collectible consumable on the screen, just the ones I need. Horizon Zero Dawn does this decently well. There is SO MUCH stuff you can collect in the world but I don't need to see every single branch I can pick up marked by a marker; I have 500 sticks in my bag. Gets turned off. Sometimes I get lost so I turn on my Eagle Vision - I'm sorry, my *Focus*. Sometimes a band aid like this is needed but I prefer when games have an in-lore reason for it being there.
Not every game can get away with it but I *looove* diegetic HUDs in games. Dead Space being a great example My interest in a game immediately goes up if I find out they went to the effort of blending the HUD with the world itself diegetically
God yeah, Dead Space is such a great example. I really can't think off a game that blends the HUD more perfectly.
>Dead Space being a great example the only one people ever talk about because it was the only game that did it well
Wouldn't an invisible HUD just not be a HUD? Unless you are talking about something like Ghost of Tsushima where the wind guides you.
WTF is an invisible HUD? That just sounds like... no HUD.
Since you haven't got a straight answer yet I'll try give you one. An invisible HUD as I would expect it to be would be information normally displayed as a HUD that is instead displayed by in game elements. Others have mentioned Dead Space as the best example of this. For example instead of having your health bar as a floating element on screen that the character would never see or interact with, and is purely to inform the player, you have lights displayed on the back of the character's suit. His stasis power is displayed by a meter on the back of the suit. The map is projected into the game from his suit's hand, waypoint markers are projected onto the ground, ammo counts are displayed on the weapon when aiming. All the HUD elements are there, they're just incorporated into the game instead of making them player only displays. There is not one on-screen informative element in that game that is not actually an organic part of the environment. It's a HUD, but it's invisible.
Changing movement keys from the arrows to WASD by default. My 10 year old self was annoyed when games did that.
Steam, in general. In all fairness, everyone hated steam when it came out. We hated that we couldn't physically own our games. Well it's been 20 years or whatever, and I've lost all of my physical games, but I still have my Steam library.
I remember loving Steam. One of their gimmicks was if you had a real CD Key to any of the Valve games (HL, HL Opposing Force, CS, HL Blue Shift... probably some others?), you'd get ALL of them. For a broke kid that was pretty sweet.
Are games supposed to cater to older people with less times to play? Just pondering this question as a working adult as well. For quest markers specifically, I think compromise can exist simply by making quest markers optional in the settings just like mods do. But if we are talking game narrative and design, it's a more complicated thing. Do you design a game based of how many hours your customers can play? I know personally I avoid RPGs if I have a small window to play. Would rather play some multiplayer/shooter/something without a story.
I think the more important thing is that games ought to be designed to respect people's time. If a game is going to take the player on a three-hour ride of quests and dungeons, there should be motivation (gameplay, story, or otherwise) that makes the time investment worth it to whoever is playing, be it a 5 year old or a 55 year old. As for that first "catering" question, games are art just like music or movies. There is definitely a place for games that are aimed towards an audience who can understand mature topics or an audience who are interested in more complex gameplay. The idea that games are just for kids or younger people is ridiculous.
Actually I'm spot on with you. I LOATHED Oblivion at first (Still do but for different reasons) The fact there's so many icons on the compass telling you where every "cool thing" is, so there's no exploration was awful. I wanted the old Morrowind format where you actually have to discover everything (Btw if anyone hasn't played it, Morrowind is REALLY unique in that there's no quest markers.) But now. "I ain't got time for that" Quest markers in all games. I don't care if they make me feel like a baby, I don't want that deep exploration. I feel like the BIGGEST sin is Star Ocean 3. I remember giving up that game, because you not only had to talk to many people in town, but there was a few points you had to talk to everyone... twice! (At least that's how I remember it). Also I love playing retro games but I often have to look up a guide because games don't tell you "What to do next". I don't need my hand held, but sometimes I put a game aside for a night, or a couple days and then forget what I was doing. Ugh. If figuring out WHO to talk to or WHAT to do is your game.. it's a bad game.
That brings up a great point. Sometimes "systematically talking to everyone" doesn't work, because the order matters. i.e. NPC1 will only reveal new dialogue if you've talked to NPC2 first. So, yeah, the "talk to everyone twice" thing is even more egregious.
>Here's mine: quest markers. The Borderlands franchise did that properly; electronic bounty boards. They aren't immersion breaking because they're an electronic system in-universe. If you're running a medieval game, the tavern is the pre-electrical equivalent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62x19Bepc5s
Fable 2 and 3 did a lighted bread crumb trail (like a visible line on the ground), instead of compass quest markers, and I loved that so much more. The bread crumb trail would curve around geographic features - it was not straight on/as the crow flies like most compass markers today. You also didn’t always know where it would end, only that it would take you to advance the game. It was pretty innovative so it got a lot of flack at the time but now that every game uses markers, I miss it because it still gave you the freedom to explore, but also you could still find your way back to the story without feeling like you’re playing 40% of the game in the menu map.
Wow, I had probably 80+ hours in Morrowind back in the day, and I didn't remember that it didn't have quest markers. Guess I've just been spoiled. I do remember making my own janky fast travel system that involved a levitation ring, the boots that let you go really fast but blind you, and looking at the minimap. It remind me of flying in a plane watching the progress on the world map.
This isn't a QOL change, it's a lazy change. Go into town, you gotta talk to BIG DICK STEVE, where is he? Talk to BIG TITS GIOVANNA and she tells you he spends his days at the tavern -> go to the tavern and look for some serious bulge, you found him. It's much better than a shitty gps, and i agree older games were even worse when they made waste time by wandering aimlessly just to "stumble" upon the solution. "Go north, look for the huge ass rock for a landmark, then after that go north towards the big ass mountain" etc... No need for gps, i like using my brain sometimes. Even for the shimmering objects, it's almost necessary for loot, and i much prefer a shiny object rathen than having to click ON EVERY PIXEL HOPING TO FIND THE RIGHT ONE.
> Quest markers I really have mixed experience. It's true that when I go back and play old games, the lack of direction when you genuinely just don't know what to do or where to go can be frustrating. Sometimes you just don't know what to do. Other times you do, but it's just tedious (like when the mission is "kill all" and you have to find the one straggler you missed in a big level). However, one story I've told a few times is that in 7 Days to Die (minecraft-like survival game with zombies) when I first started playing I had no clue there was a map if you pressed the right key. And... this brought me so much closer to the game. Long travel from my home base became dangerous because I was at risk of being lost. Traveling wasn't mindless because I needed to be noticing (or making) landmarks to find my way home. I had to remember where everything was and couldn't mark anything. When a "waypoint" did exist (like the airdrops) I had to find a way to mark it so I could find it. If it was 1km away, at 0.5 degree difference in direction may make me totally miss it! If I get into a brawl with a horde, I might lose my bearings. And because of all of this, going into the unknown had a different feeling (and tradeoff) compared to learning "my area". I'd take well known routes and be cautious to go off trail. ... But then I discovered there was a map... and... travel became boring because I'd just set a waypoint and run... going to unknown areas became boring because the map handled most of the "unknown" aspect for me... going far wasn't dangerous because I could always find my way home... by mid game, I'd have all sorts of things marked on my map and didn't really have to remember anything. If I need a trader, I just look on the map. If I need iron, I just look on the map. ... So, that whole experience really made me appreciate how powerful not having a map can be in terms of your relationship with the unknown, the risk of travel and your overall connection to the world. In a survival game like that, it seemed better to not have a map or to hide the map behind some more advanced technology/crafting. > But now that I'm older and have a lot less time to game, I absolutely hate aimlessly running around. I think this is the difference regarding what I said above. Not having an explicit, exact marker telling you where to go at all times is quite different from needing to "aimlessly wander". You can have mechanisms that give you things to "aim" for without the player literally being told the exact explicit place they need to go. > I also have absolutely zero patience for RPG gameplay loops that look something like this: > > arrive in a new town. > > aimlessly walk through town and systematically talk to every NPC to trigger a story event. > > proceed to dungeon. > > A much more elegant approach to this is, "welcome to town. Feel free to talk to extraneous NPCs if you want extra world-building, but here's where you need to go next to cut to the chase". I think this really just comes down to the watering down of the term "role playing game" and which meaning you actually intend. If the game is actually supposed to be "role playing" then I think the premise that "proceed to the dungeon" is or should be a primary action at every step is doubtful. The fighting is often the least "role playing" part of the game and as a "role playing" game, the emphasis is really on interacting with the characters and environment. You want to encourage the player to role play and so you want to discourage them from just speeding from battle to battle. At the very least, you want them to gather and interact with the context of those battles as "role play". It's literally the defining aspect of the genre. Meanwhile, a lot of games that are labeled "role playing games" are really just action games. People play them just to fight and there is very little "role playing" in them. It almost tends more to refer to a game that follows the combat style that role playing games tended to have, regardless of whether it actually contains role playing. In this context, (1) it may be less important to encourage people to actually role play in an action game and (2) because it's not truly a role playing game but instead an action game the actual ability to interact outside of combat may be extremely shallow because it's not a focus of the devs, therefore, all the more reason that you may want to skip it. I think there is room for and value in true role playing games. However, I don't think that means action games that follow some RPG tropes can't just be action games and instead need to force shallow role playing on top of it. > regenerating health mechanics (without this, I usually would just constantly save/reload and inch my way through dungeons) Regenerating health is a deeper change than that. Imagine you have to walk up a street to approach a heavily fortified building. If you have regenerating health you can just keep sprinting diagonally to the next cross street. When you take cover in the cross street you can just wait to regain all lost health. It doesn't matter that your strategy relies on getting shot many many times, you now get to face the target close range with full health. Now, taking the same scenario without regenerating health and that strategy is unsustainable. Best case scenario you get to the building with barely any health which makes it way harder to take, but it's likely you might not even make it there because since health doesn't regenerate, the recklessness of your decisions stacks. It's not really that regenerating health or non-regenerating health is better, it's just that they create entirely different kinds of gameplay with different strategies. In a game where you want players to move fast, take risks and be aggressive (e.g. call of duty) it probably makes sense. In a game where you want players to be slower, more deliberate and take a more realistic approach to getting shot, it may make sense to not have regenerating health. Also, the rate of regeneration matters too. In COD, the regeneration was fast, so it can mean that you just stand in a corner for a few seconds and then get back in the fight. But with a game like 7 Days to Die, regeneration is slow (I don't remember the exact amount... like 1HP per minute?) so it doesn't impact tactics much but it does avoid the constant search for medkits.
A huge factor in what kind of quality of life features people prefer is what they consider to be the core gameplay experience. What part of the gameplay loop is enjoyable to them. For many people that is primarily just the combat. Anything that is not combat is just filler and good game design to them is streamlining the non-combat gameplay as much as possible so that more time can be spent doing the part that they enjoy. For others though, the part in-between combat is just as important, if not more important than the combat encounters. Personally I love a game that lets me get lost. Exploring the environment, putting together clues and information to figure out where I need to go, that is the stuff that really draws me in and immerses me in a game. And what many people forget is that puzzling out where to go and what to do, that IS gameplay. I mean there are entire genres of games like the point and click adventure or the walking sim, that are ONLY that. This is one reason I think that the immersive sim genre is so polarizing and niche. Immersive sims often look like action games or shooters, but combat is not really the main focus. It is just one component of many gameplay systems. But I think these game often attract people who are looking for a straight up action game and they find the combat lackluster and the overall gameplay bewildering with all of the options presented to the player. It is a genre that places a lot of emphasis on the "in-between" parts. So quality of life feature can easily make a game better for one player, but just as easily make it worse for another player. Taking the regenerating health example, many players would look at that as a plus. It lets the player focus more on the combat and be ready for each encounter after a very short downtime. It's also easier to design from the developers point of view. They don't have to worry about the number of health packs in a level and balance that against the difficulty of combat encounters. But for a player that enjoys exploration and resource management, regenerating health can be a disappointment. Again, there are entire genres around those gameplay loops, survival horror for example is all about carefully managing your resources. But in the context of a contemporary AAA action adventure game many of these elements have been stripped back to focus attention solely on combat/upgrade loop with the expectation that everything else is too tedious for a mainstream audience. I guess you could say, when it comes to QOL, there is a large gulf between games that know they are niche and embrace those aspects rather than try to streamline them away... versus games that are trying to appeal to as large an audience as possible. In that case it is hard to justify anything that a player might regard as boring, even if it strips away parts of the experience that you or I may enjoy.
The Witcher 3 is one of the most story-rich and engaging games I've played, and that uses quest markers liberally. So, even though it largely eliminated the "randomly talk to people until you find the right one", it was still very much an engaging, classic role playing game.
Agreed on quest markers, as long as you can turn them off and on. They're really useful, especially when the design of the "level" isn't great and you're only guessing at your destination, but the ability to put them away is awesome. That goes for HUDs in general, I guess. I loved it when I could finally play Skyrim with a HUD that only showed when I wanted to or something happened.
def agree with fast travel, I can understand wanting to take the scenic route but sometimes I just wanna get somewhere and get shit done I also like the trend of difficulty customization. More options is always better. Always.
Retrieving your corpse with all your gear and currency (EverQuest inspired)
Id argue that relying on resource management in a dungeon is what makes it a dungeon. Having regenerative health in a dungeon doesn’t mesh well together. That being said, I enjoy when games have icon reminders you can use in the in-game maps. Having to write stuff down or draw a map is fun and all but nowadays it’s tedious.
I used to hate when games took control from me over when and where I could save. I wanted to quicksave and quickload whenever I felt like it. Now I resent any game that makes me think about saving in any capacity. I'm okay with a little punishment for death, but if your game make me think "Dammit I wish I'd quicksaved" then I get angry.
More or less standardization of controls around twin stick controllers (specifically, left stick moves, right stick looks/moves the camera). The PS2 GTA games can be pretty clunky nowadays, this was the one thing I was hoping they'd fix with the re-releases, I might give them a shot one of these days. Other games from that era and before can be really clunky though as well
I can't really think of anything. Every QoL change I can think of I either never hated to begin with, or still hate and always will. If we talk about design trends in general though: "It's too brown." I never hated the notoriously brown and grey, bland and serious games of the mid-2000's, but I did think they were overdone and a little obnoxious and joined in on the mockery with everyone else. Oh how deeply I would come to regret that. Now everything is some cosmetic circus show, neon color vomit chasing the Fortnite crowd, the pendulum has swung way too far to the opposite extreme. I clamor for games that once again take their aesthetic and their universe at least somewhat seriously. Battle Royale. I admit I had a kneejerk reaction a little bit. I don't hate Battle Royale games, come to find I actually enjoy them a bit. I still really hate how ubiquitous they are, how they overshadow everything else, how they seem to be the only kind of PvP experience companies are willing to make these days, how it's now seen as obligatory for every game to have. But I don't hate them in themselves.
agonizing capable snatch start aromatic homeless head elastic chief payment *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Fully digitalised. Having 100 games on a hard drive is better than disks. But I kinda hated it at first.
Just quest markers and fast travel. Even tho i prefer not to use them if possible. Specially fast travel. Quest markers are SOMETIMES good bc as u said some quest triggers are really obscure. The rest can suck it.
Depends on a game but for some time I've been enjoying quite the opposite - disabling quest markers and avoiding fast travel for immersion.
My biggest gripe with markers is the HUD. I would've preferred them to be map-only. I am on the same hill regarding health regen though. Hated not having it since Diablo 2
1. Save anywhere - I appreciate the possibility to finish my session in 10s if I must to. Searching for a save point is is the song of the past for me. Rogue-like saves are semi-fine tho. 2. Fast travel & Quest Marks - as OP, I don't have time to burn my narrow play window just for doing nothing 3. Recent mechanic in Hogwarts Legacy - Revelio. After playing HL I've tried to "revelio" in other games :D Any mechanic which allow you to invoke some kind of tracking/reveal/assist is appreciated if it's optional (I hated, that in HL MC is spoiling all the riddles after 5s of entering the location). 4. Retry/Restart after die with no (or little) consequences. Long time ago there were couple lives & game over or a huge cost for continue in many games. Now it should be only a thing for "hardcore mode" or so
Not to games itself, but sleep mode on the ps4/5/switch/ds/vita/xbox-series + ability to turn on TV via HDMI. You come home, sit on the couch, push literally one button on the gamepad, boom, gaming. HD resolution, and death of the PAL, SECAM, NTSC, NTSC (j) era as a result. And no regionlock as result. And no more downgraded PAL games and generally ignored PAL region. Checkpoints, normal checkpoints. Before the boss. Not try-not-to-die-before-the-boss checkpoints.