Mechanics in games that had the exact opposite results of their intended design

[OldBoyGamer]

Wow. Did people really avoid combat in BotW because they were worried about losing weapons?

iirc I did that at the very start of the game then realised weapons dropped all over the place anyway. by about half way I was having to drop weapons because I was earning them at such a rate I couldn't keep them all.

 

[halfjoey]

??? Did you play it? High tier weapons aren't specially durable except for some of the lynel stuff. And i thought the idea of the game was to use all the tools?

However, running out of good weapons and having to rely on skel-arms, branches, bombs and stasis was one of the most boring things in the game. And it doesn't help that enemy variety was small and encounters were quite similar. So different from something like Horizon, were you have your arsenal but every creature is so different that you have to adjust how to play whenever you go against them.

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Thats so strange because I never had that problem. A few hours into the game I wouldn't use the stick or skel-arms again for combat unless it was to avoid breaking my better weapons. I'm particularly good at the game either.
I would typically save what I considered my good stuff for tougher encounters and use my low to medium tier items for normal fights.

I did have issue with weapon break when it came to completing a shrine or two because I'm horrible at aiming stasis momentum.

I didn't even know you could increase your weapon slots until I had already defeated the 4th guardian and I was like 60 hours into the game.

 

[Asbsand]

Mass Effect Andromeda's dialogue design was meant to get rid of the "good vs evil" approach but all it did in the end was give you 4 ways to say the same thing with a different tone.

A Paragon Shepard will say "I'm saving the galaxy, to bring peace."

A renegade Shepard will say "I'll fight until everyone's dead, to save the galaxy."

Those are different creeds.

A Logical Ryder will say "We're finding a weakness against the Kett."

An emotional Ryder will say "We're gonna save the Angara!"

A Professional Ryder will say "We're gonna find a way to beat the Kett."

A Snarky Ryder will say "The Kett? They can kiss my ass!"

He wants the same thing. The outcome would never change and that is how they wrote Ryder. Ever since Mass Effect 3 they started downgrading the protagonist-to-player connection to the point where we are more occasionally editing the tone of the character than we are determining what and how they want things to be done. Shepard was mostly my character, but the writers reeled him over to their side in the third game by reducing most of the usual options, often not even giving any. In ME Andromeda they just wrote a character and let us push the continue button in different flavors.

 

[new londo ruins]

Did they patch this in later? I don't think I ever engaged with the online stuff outside the tutorials and my only bottleneck was fuel (plus the insane timers).

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I'm not sure, I only played the game for the first time recently. As far as I know, though, S+ and S++ staff have always only been available through online play (though iirc you get one S++ for each unit after finishing mission 31).

Maybe my criticism of it isn't entirely fair, because you can definitely develop all the offline items without engaging in the online, but when the option of online is there it's hard to justify not doing it, especially since the game is already so time consuming to make progress in.

 

[jem]

EDIT: Also... youre literally doing what youre accusing that other poster of doing by limiting the topic to your frame of "micro gameplay", sprinting affects both.

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I never said sprint doesn't affect both.

I'm saying the intention behind sprint was not to increase the the pace of a match but rather to make the game feel faster.


Also, if we're going to broaden the scope of the discussion then we should probably go beyond the small scale arena style combat.

If you were to remove sprint from Warzone for example then it would certainly slow the game pace down.

You could elaborate why you feel it's flawed beyond just saying it is, but the video literally just showed how the bolded isnt true...

You cover the same amount of ground in the same amount of time without an animation eating your potential movement options.

Your hypothetical is a false equivalency, because the speed/scale isnt halved in Halo 2 vs. Halo 5. The video demonstrates that.

So when there's no mechanical component to sprint making the game "faster", youre arguing that the aesthetic of it just makes the game "feel" faster for... reasons, I guess.

And the point is that not only does it not make it faster, but this "feel" actually makes the game pace slower overall in the grand scheme of things, but youre also ignoring that while saying that the poster has a "limited view" or whatever.

If its purpose was to "make the game feel faster", I have no reason to see how that's true. 343i Halo doesnt feel faster to me anecdotally, but we can see that there are concrete reasons for that without just personal tastes being taken into account.

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It's flawed because it's making the assumption that the singular reason for Truth being a larger map is due to sprint. It ignores the fact that Truth is not in fact a straight up remake of Midship but rather a reimaginging. There are a whole host of reasons why that distance may have increased. It's also flawed for all of the reason I have been explaining in this thread.

When it comes to perception of speed the "ground you cover" is a function of the player's size, not of the fraction of a given level you cross.

You yourself said the following:

make the levels bigger to accomodate for the speed change

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The levels are larger - you are crossing a greater distance relative to the size of the avatar when sprinting - ie: you are covering more ground.

Thus, it feels like you're moving faster - because you literally are.

My example was not intended as an equivalency - it's a hypothetical demonstration.

Let me rephrase and it might make more sense:

Take a level in Halo 3 - shrink it to half its original size whilst keeping the size of the player the same (alternatively, imagine that every player is now twice the original size). Then halve the player's speed.

It will take exactly the same amount of time to cross that level in normal Halo 3 vs hypothetical shrunken Halo 3.

However, in hypothetical shrunken Halo 3 your movement will feel slower - that's because you'll be covering less distance relative to the size of your avatar.


The inverse is sprint - maps are now larger relative to the size of the player, however, you cross those maps in the same or less time - you are covering more distance so it feels faster. It's not just aesthetics - that is a mechanical difference resulting in an increase in the perceived speed.

 

[Alastor3]

In Zero Time Dilemma, the 9 main characters are separated into groups of three early on in the game, and they remain separated for most of the game. The idea, I suppose, was that the separate teams could lead to deeper character development.

In fact, what happens is that the different teams end up confined to a few relationship dynamics, so you get the same 3 people talking to each other in pretty much predictable ways the entire way through the game. It stinted character development, it obstructed the existence of interesting conversations or scenes and characters developing in interesting ways, and by the end of it all the whole thing felt disjointed and inconsequential.

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It's the only one i have not played and im still reluctant to play it

 

[Red UFO]

Epic definitely thought Fortnite BR would be people building forts taking potshots at each other and playing defensively, but the building mechanic ended up being used as this bizarre, very fast paced mobility and verticality tool.

 

[Alastor3]

Flamethrowers in most games.

They have no stopping power and kills enemies slower than if you had just shot them with any other gun.

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Not in Remnant from the Ashes, flamethrower is OP

 

[Prolepro]

I never said sprint doesn't affect both.

I'm saying the intention behind sprint was not to increase the the pace of a match but rather to make the game feel faster.


Also, if we're going to broaden the scope of the discussion then we should probably go beyond the small scale arena style combat.

If you were to remove sprint from Warzone for example then it would certainly slow the game pace down.

It's flawed because it's making the assumption that the singular reason for Truth being a larger map is due to sprint. It ignores the fact that Truth is not in fact a straight up remake of Midship but rather a reimaginging. There are a whole host of reasons why that distance may have increased. It's also flawed for all of the reason I have been explaining in this thread.

When it comes to perception of speed the "ground you cover" is a function of the player's size, not of the fraction of a given level you cross.

You yourself said the following:

The levels are larger - you are crossing a greater distance relative to the size of the avatar when sprinting - ie: you are covering more ground.

Thus, it feels like you're moving faster - because you literally are.

My example was not intended as an equivalency - it's a hypothetical demonstration.

Let me rephrase and it might make more sense:

Take a level in Halo 3 - shrink it to half its original size whilst keeping the size of the player the same (alternatively, imagine that every player is now twice the original size). Then halve the player's speed.

It will take exactly the same amount of time to cross that level in normal Halo 3 vs hypothetical shrunken Halo 3.

However, in hypothetical shrunken Halo 3 your movement will feel slower - that's because you'll be covering less distance relative to the size of your avatar.


The inverse is sprint - maps are now larger relative to the size of the player, however, you cross those maps in the same or less time - you are covering more distance so it feels faster. It's not just aesthetics - that is a mechanical difference resulting in an increase in the perceived speed.

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Yes, you would feel slower if you were moving slower, but you arent moving slower. Your hypothetical doesnt work. You wouldnt feel slower because youre covering the same amount of distance relatively.

So sprinting demonstrates why your hypothetical doesnt apply and why nu Halo doesnt feel faster because you have to be sprinting in order to make that relativity between scale/size true.

Your example only works if the new base movement speed was at sprinting speed, and if sprinting wasnt even a mechanic.

And you also said the reasons for the size change yourself. Nothing about the video is invalidated by assuming those things because arent mutually exclusive to the video's point. The map is larger but the time to traverse it is the same between the two.

Which then again begs the question, why is it even there? To make the game feel faster? Because it doesnt, macro, micro etc.

 

[Holundrian]

Everything they did to inferno champion backs in diablo 3 at launch.
Turned out the effort to farm those was so high and the loot so garbage people were just farming talking to an npc for a blue weapon with high dmg roll instead

 

[SamuelBeckwit]

'In a 50 hour RPG, you need to use your underlevelled, underequipped, reserve party members. But for a boss fight' (good intention: sense of unity, of all reserves being part of the team)
If it's the final boss, and the game has given no indication they plan to do this, by having no requirement to level up and buy equipment for annoying reserves through an early section showing it, I'll likely just quit and watch the ending on YouTube. This brings me into...

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Ah... the reason I never beat Dark Cloud. An entire dungeon section devoted to Ungaga, a character that I never used from the moment he joined the party.

 

[jem]

Yes, you would feel slower if you were moving slower, but you arent moving slower. Your hypothetical doesnt work. You wouldnt feel slower because youre covering the same amount of distance relatively.

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Relatively you're not covering the same amount of distance though!

I don't understand how you're missing this point so badly.

When it comes to the perception of speed, it's the distance you travel relative to the size of the player* which is important. You are covering less distance relative to the size of the player - therefore you are moving slower.



* Sort of, it's more that the size of the player has a significant impact on the perception of distance.



Here is a visual demonstration of what I'm talking about:


In the first gif I'm running 128 metres at 100% move speed. In the second gif I'm running 64 metres at 50% move speed. It takes the same amount of time to cover the distance for each gif but the movement feels (or in this case looks) much slower in the second than the first.

 

[shuno]

Weapon durability in BotW. Instead of using a lotta weapons I most of the time avoided fights half into the game, since there was the possibility I had to trade a good weapon for some wooden stick.

 

[Rune Walsh]

I spent a lot of time in Final Fantasy Tactics smacking my own people and charging to build TP. One army of ninjas wrecks that game.

 

[Tavernade]

In BOTW I just spread out my usage of my best weapons and strategically kept a couple of 'decent' ones around so I could mix and match without risking anything. I'd horde the best weapons whenever I saw them so I'd have duplicates too...

 

[mazpratim]

The FP system in Dark Souls 3, it's supposed to make magic more balanced like melee builds but ends up going too far and making them inferior to melee due to having less estus, spells costing too much fp and doing about the same damage as a regular r1 attack on a melee build and needing to waste 3 or 4 of your ring slots just to do decent damage. It also makes people use the same spell over and over again sure to being more cost efficient rather than mixing up which spells you use

 

[mazpratim]

.

 

[modernist]

Halo reach bloom mechanic and shot pacing

 

[Wil Grieve]

Rain had a similar effect.

It was supposed to make me consider alternatives to just climbing up something, but because it wasn't permanent outside of a few set areas, I usally just found myself waiting it out.

For more abstract mechanics, voice chat usually does a great job getting me to not interact with anyone else in the game, and microtransactions usually do a great job at getting me to spend less money.

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Oh man, agreed. I usually turn off voice chat first thing if I am playing an online game. I think literally the only exception to this was Left 4 Dead.

 

[Crushed]

Someone mentioned ME: Andromeda's dialogue as a means to get away from the trilogy's good vs evil type of dialogue, but people forget that Paragon and Renegade themselves were meant to be more morally gray and moving away from the Light Side/Dark Side binary of KOTOR - P\R not being a sliding scale back and forth but two separate meters that you built up independently. There's also an inkling that Paragon and Renegade aren't meant to be wholly "nice/jerk" but "lawful/chaotic." I want to say that some pre-ME1 preview and promo material hinted at that idea a bit more, and there are decisions in ME1 where you can make a P\R choice and then justify it with the opposite alignment (ie, doing something kind for cynical reasons, doing something ruthless to protect people). So, a system meant to allow for more natural and organic roleplaying.

Of course, ME fans know exactly how this idea ended up: barring glitches there's only so many morality points in each game, and building up your P\R meters unlocks special dialogue options that basically "win" conversations for you and get you even more morality points. As a result, actually roleplaying is dis-incentivized and you're implicitly punished for not simply sticking with your favored morality for the whole game(s).

It's triply worse because

A) the "magic colored text" options usually are just Shepard saying something simple in a very forceful way, and the idea that they couldn't think to say these without making a number of similar moral decisions before makes little sense, and
B) the Renegade path is almost entirely based on the concept of the ends justifying the means, and that kindness and selflessness are naive and will bite you in the ass; the obvious presence of a nice blue win option on the dialogue wheel to mirror your mean red win option makes that clearly untrue, and you're engaging in a morality play of Ruthless Pragmatism vs Selfless Altruism where both paths result in nearly the same material rewards, so what exactly is more Pragmatic about picking Renegade? (See also: BioShock 1 and how saving the Little Sisters only delays a greater net sum of ADAM rewards to later in the game).

 

[LilScooby77]

Gears of war cover system led to wall bouncing. What a great outcome lol.

 

[MoonlitBow]

Did they patch this in later? I don't think I ever engaged with the online stuff outside the tutorials and my only bottleneck was fuel (plus the insane timers).

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I believe they did. I remember even higher upgrades being introduced as part of an update. Unpatched MGS5 I am pretty sure you could get most of the upgrades without ever touching online and you already didn't need the highest upgrades to complete the game. There also wasn't the online storage feature that was designed to punish players that were only playing offline to avoid forced online interactions (you got to use all of your resources instead of a large chunk only accessible when you're online).

Other than gamebreaking bug fixes, MGS5 arguably being a better game unpatched is something that could maybe be considered an unintended design.

 

[Zocano]

Of course, ME fans know exactly how this idea ended up: barring glitches there's only so many morality points in each game, and building up your P\R meters unlocks special dialogue options that basically "win" conversations for you and get you even more morality points. As a result, actually roleplaying is dis-incentivized and you're implicitly punished for not simply sticking with your favored morality for the whole game(s).

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This is such a huge issue in designing RPG dialogue and has been pervasive in nearly all RPGs, even the ones hailed as the best ever made.

Designing dialogue to not be about ""winning"" the conversation is a wholely difficult mountain to scale but I feel it's a trap even the best fall into. I don't think Mass Effect is a good RPG on that end, it sure is a fun one and excels in its own ways, but the dialogue system has long been critiqued for its binary nature (and especially how it breaks down to the "I win" blue/red options).

As much as I enjoy Obsidian's RPGs, the core ones everyone speaks to (KotoR2 and New Vegas) themselves suffer from basically the same issue. I get on paper, on the design sheet, of why it is that way and what its goal is, but cranking persuade to max is itself a weird issue that is often not designed well around. I think in some cases they succeed in making the hard persuade option not just be the "correct" way to navigate a conversation, but the one that comes to mind the most is the Legate Lanius conversation at the very end of New Vegas. I don't feel like I success navigated a difficult conversation, I feel like I just had enough stats to let me "win", which is in essence the same issue as the renegade/paragon options of Mass Effect.

Like I said, on paper I understand its purpose: to reflect the aptitude of the character you have chosen to create and what they are specifically capable of, but it has the downside of itself making conversations feel rote and uninteresting because you're not navigating a discussion but simply waiting for the "I win" button to show up.

It has been a bit since I've played it but I distinctly remember Alpha Protocol succeeding in getting away from this issue. Dialogue and conversations were incredibly volatile and it was exceptionally easy to change the course of the conversation by decisions made during and even long before said dialogue which helps to get away from the "I win" options that often plague the genre.

 

[Prolepro]

Relatively you're not covering the same amount of distance though!

I don't understand how you're missing this point so badly.

When it comes to the perception of speed, it's the distance you travel relative to the size of the player* which is important. You are covering less distance relative to the size of the player - therefore you are moving slower.



* Sort of, it's more that the size of the player has a significant impact on the perception of distance.



Here is a visual demonstration of what I'm talking about:


In the first gif I'm running 128 metres at 100% move speed. In the second gif I'm running 64 metres at 50% move speed. It takes the same amount of time to cover the distance for each gif but the movement feels (or in this case looks) much slower in the second than the first.

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...

Yes. You are. That's how relativity works.

if you move 1 mile an hour and the map is 1 mile it will take you an hour to move across it
if you move 2 miles an hour and the map is 2 miles, guess how long it takes... an hour

Youre completely confusing sense of scale with your point about sprint and it's tiring.

Yes you are technically moving faster at 2 miles an hour, but the rate is the exact same. The Earth spins at 1000 miles an hour but we dont feel it because of our size relative to the Earth...

This is literally the most basic fact of how physics works.

Your gifs prove exactly what is being talked about because the scale DIDNT change. It was the same map, it didnt shrink to adjust to the speed.

If I was shrunk down 1000 times and made a full sprint, I wouldnt feel any change in my own "sense" of speed. I would be covering less distance. But we see in the video like I posted that literally shows how that isnt the problem because youre reaching the same points in the map RELATIVE to the map's size.

They HAVE to make the maps bigger to accomodate for sprint to ADHERE to this sense of relative scale. If you took the base speed in Halo 2 and put it in Halo 5 it would feel slower!

And EVEN despite ALLLLL of that, your hypothetical is still wrong and proves the point how 343 Halo is slower because sprint speed is not base speed. You literally said "if you didnt have sprint in Warzone, yes it would be slower"... because YES you would be moving at the same speed but in a larger area.

Like, how are you not getting this??

 

[Lork]

??? Did you play it? High tier weapons aren't specially durable except for some of the lynel stuff. And i thought the idea of the game was to use all the tools?

However, running out of good weapons and having to rely on skel-arms, branches, bombs and stasis was one of the most boring things in the game. And it doesn't help that enemy variety was small and encounters were quite similar. So different from something like Horizon, were you have your arsenal but every creature is so different that you have to adjust how to play whenever you go against them.

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What on earth were you doing with your weapons such that being reduced to stalfos arms and branches was even a possibility outside of the first 10 minutes of the game?

 

[NHarmonic.]

What on earth were you doing with your weapons such that being reduced to stalfos arms and branches was even a possibility outside of the first 10 minutes of the game?

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I don't know, probably playing the game. Remember this is the game about physics and experimentation?

 

[lvl 99 Pixel]

Wow. Did people really avoid combat in BotW because they were worried about losing weapons?

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People avoided combat because it wasn't worthwhile for a variety of reasons, including just not being fun to beat up the same enemies 40 hrs into the game.
Using your cooler looking unique weapons to trade them for a spiky bokoblin club or whatever isn't really an incentive.

 

[Lork]

Were you experimenting with the physics by repeatedly hurling all of your weapons into the ground? Using the tablet and taking advantage of the systems usually tends to result in less damage to your weapons, not more. Regardless, the game is balanced such that you can just ignore all that stuff and use your weapons in every encounter without ever even coming close to running out of them.

 

[Zocano]

Worrying about "running out of good weapons" was never the issue. Like you said, there's plenty of them to find, especially when you realize the game literally respawns set ones in the same spot every blood moon.

The loop just simply isn't fun. It's a loop only lengthened by how much you want to experiment with the systems because the base systems on there own aren't particularly fun nor are most of the enemies particularly engaging to fight. It's a loop that wears out its welcome long *long* before you've dealt with all the guardians. The game simply doesn't push you to experiment or try different options most of the time in combat and therefore combat becomes boring. There's a reason the shrines and guardians are the highlights and not the base traversal of the world. The latter blends together and is mired in repetitiveness, the former are isolated moments that *specifically* ask you to use your tools in different ways.

 

[SuperFakerBros]

The corpse run mechanic in the Souls games. I'm sure it's to make you more careful with how you play and what not but, for me, it just makes me not want to play the game at all, knowing that I'll have to painfully make my way back while not dying so I don't lose my cash / exp. Having to re-do shit is the absolute worst and these games epitomize that more than nearly any other I've played

I don't know, probably playing the game. Remember this is the game about physics and experimentation?

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Sounds like you were doing so poorly or deliberately throwing all of your weapons away if you were continuously running out of weapons, even later on, not sure what physics and experimentation has to do with that

Weapon durability in BotW. Instead of using a lotta weapons I most of the time avoided fights half into the game, since there was the possibility I had to trade a good weapon for some wooden stick.

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That really isn't gonna happen unless you only use weak weapons. You get stronger and stronger weapons the more strong weapons you use

 

[Ryouji Gunblade]

Weapon durability didn't just prevent me from going into battle, but from using elemental stuff for puzzles too. I would've loved to hang on to useful things and rotate but I only used them when absolutely necessary. Except bows. Always had too many bows.

 

[RedHotHero]

By that same token, whenever I played Double Dragon II on NES as a kid, I would always start a two player game with "friendly fire" turned on. For whatever reason, you gained a life for every life lost by the second player, so you could double up your lives after a few minutes of grinding.

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The cool thing about this- doing 2p (supreme warrior?) with team damage was great. If you had one bar of health and your partner killed you, they'd get a life, you'd die and come back with full health. They kill you, get their life back, both players have full life and no lives have been lost.

 

[shuno]

That really isn't gonna happen unless you only use weak weapons. You get stronger and stronger weapons the more strong weapons you use

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No. Later into the game you have a lot of good weapons, like Lightning-Spears, Master Sword and Co. and still half of the fights you encounter only provide you with some Boko-Club crap. The most reasonable thing was to not fight at all. Overall one of the most flawed systems I can remember in recent years.

 

[jem]

...

Yes. You are. That's how relativity works.

if you move 1 mile an hour and the map is 1 mile it will take you an hour to move across it
if you move 2 miles an hour and the map is 2 miles, guess how long it takes... an hour

Youre completely confusing sense of scale with your point about sprint and it's tiring.

Yes you are technically moving faster at 2 miles an hour, but the rate is the exact same. The Earth spins at 1000 miles an hour but we dont feel it because of our size relative to the Earth...

This is literally the most basic fact of how physics works.

Your gifs prove exactly what is being talked about because the scale DIDNT change. It was the same map, it didnt shrink to adjust to the speed.

If I was shrunk down 1000 times and made a full sprint, I wouldnt feel any change in my own "sense" of speed. I would be covering less distance. But we see in the video like I posted that literally shows how that isnt the problem because youre reaching the same points in the map RELATIVE to the map's size.

They HAVE to make the maps bigger to accomodate for sprint to ADHERE to this sense of relative scale. If you took the base speed in Halo 2 and put it in Halo 5 it would feel slower!

And EVEN despite ALLLLL of that, your hypothetical is still wrong and proves the point how 343 Halo is slower because sprint speed is not base speed. You literally said "if you didnt have sprint in Warzone, yes it would be slower"... because YES you would be moving at the same speed but in a larger area.

Like, how are you not getting this??

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I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say here.

You seem arguing against a different point to mine. In one sentence you're basically agreeing with me and in the next you're talking rubbish.

I'm not sure how I can put this more simply than I already have but I'll try one more time.

The perception of speed, or more simply a player's "sense" of speed has nothing to do with the size of the map. It's a function of how far the player perceives to have moved in a given time.

As you have pointed out: Midship is smaller than Truth but it takes the same amount of time to cross at full speed in each respective game. Therefore, the player perceives that they have crossed a greater distance in Halo 5 over the same period of time. Thus, the sense of speed is greater.

The closest you could probably get to a measurably value of it is by seeing how far you can travel relative to the size of the player in a given time.

I'm not confusing sense of scale with my point at all. In fact that's effectively the exact point I'm making. The player's sense of speed is intrinsically linked to their sense of scale.




You also seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the concept of relativity. It has nothing to do with size. We don't feel the earth moving because we are also moving at 1000s of miles an hour - ie: we are not moving relative to earth. It has nothing to do with the fact that we're small compared to earth.

 

[Mechaplum]

The corpse run mechanic in the Souls games. I'm sure it's to make you more careful with how you play and what not but, for me, it just makes me not want to play the game at all, knowing that I'll have to painfully make my way back while not dying so I don't lose my cash / exp. Having to re-do shit is the absolute worst and these games epitomize that more than nearly any other I've played

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I don't think this is in the spirit of the thread. You just didn't like it, but it has the intended effect.

 

[SuperFakerBros]

No. Later into the game you have a lot of good weapons, like Lightning-Spears, Master Sword and Co. and still half of the fights you encounter only provide you with some Boko-Club crap. The most reasonable thing was to not fight at all. Overall one of the most flawed systems I can remember in recent years.

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Again, that's only if you rarely use and break your stronger weapons. Most of my encounters in the late game had me finding elemental and high attack weapons to the point where I needed to go back to the Great Plateau or near it to find Boko Clubs or other weak weapons. Even then, wasting your weapons by just mashing them isn't exactly efficient either. Using the environment, sneaking up on them, etc. are also important and, other times, you can just make the enemy drop their weapons and take them without needing to beat them

Also, fighting is still necessary to upgrade equipment, sell loot to buy armor, get drops for quests, etc.

I don't think this is in the spirit of the thread. You just didn't like it, but it has the intended effect.

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People don't like the weapon degradation mechanic in BotW and it also has the intended effect. Not really doing anything different

 

[Narroo]

Weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild. Encourage me to use more weapons? Nope! I've got an inventory full of good stuff and will run from every mob until I encounter something "worthy" of using these great weapons on.

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Precisely. With no good storage system, and the way the game is balanced, fighting most enemies is a bad idea from a practical point of view. They consume your resources with usually very little payoff. And while picking and choosing your battles is a good idea, the game clearly over-estimates how often you'd want to fight.

Now, if the game had proper collectables like heart-pieces that needed to be fought for, then we might get somewhere.

 

[Prolepro]

I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say here.

You seem arguing against a different point to mine. In one sentence you're basically agreeing with me and in the next you're talking rubbish.

I'm not sure how I can put this more simply than I already have but I'll try one more time.

The perception of speed, or more simply a player's "sense" of speed has nothing to do with the size of the map. It's a function of how far the player perceives to have moved in a given time.

As you have pointed out: Midship is smaller than Truth but it takes the same amount of time to cross at full speed in each respective game. Therefore, the player perceives that they have crossed a greater distance in Halo 5 over the same period of time. Thus, the sense of speed is greater.

The closest you could probably get to a measurably value of it is by seeing how far you can travel relative to the size of the player in a given time



I'm not confusing sense of scale with my point at all. In fact that's effectively the exact point I'm making. The player's sense of speed is intrinsically linked to their sense of scale.

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So it doesnt have anything to do with scale until it does? Okay. And yes, they would perceive that if the speed vs. scale was relative to each other, and theyre not. That's the whole point, you have to be moving faster to cover the same amount of effective distance.

You also seem to have fundamentally misunderstood the concept of relativity. It has nothing to do with size. We don't feel the earth moving because we are also moving at 1000s of miles an hour - ie: we are not moving relative to earth. It has nothing to do with the fact that we're small compared to earth.

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I worded that incorrectly using 'size' instead of 'speed' specifically (even though size does absolutely pertain to perceived speed in relative terms), but my point was moving in relativity demonstrates how perceived speed doesnt change in constants. The whole point of sprinting is to make the game feel quicker but if the map is adjusted to accomodate for it then your speed feels the same in relation to the scale. So the fact that you HAVE to sprint to move as far as you were before literally defeats the whole purpose if you were once moving at just base speed. The maps are literally bigger and your options become limited so the game feels bulkier and more awkward, far from faster.

It doesnt get simpler than that.

 

[zMiiChy-]

Intentional or not, it's still a shitty system.
It's not fun. It's not difficult.
It's tedious and annoying.

The mechanic will likely vanish in the sequel, and for good reason.

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It's by far the most prevalent complaint about the game worldwide.
I would even go as far as to say that a significant portion of people who enjoyed the first game would pass on the sequel if the mechanic returned.
Most people enjoyed Botw despite weapon durability, some even going as far to mod it out on PC.

For your sake and for anyone else that appreciated the mechanic, I hope a toggle is included at the beginning of the game to have a mode balanced around breakable weapons, and another mode balanced around permanent weapons.

 

[SanderJK]

Two things that come to my mind regarding scaling:

The Last Remnant
The Last Remnant has enemies scale in stats based on the characters levels. In the original release this was overtuned.
If you did every sidequest, the main story would become almost impossibly difficult.

AC: Odessey
For some reason, AC:O has randomly generated quests on top of story quests, sidequests and location goals.

Many of these are of the format:
Kill 10 spartans; Gain 2000xp and 100gold

These are negative value quests because the game has absolute level scaling. Enemies are always your level-2 (unless you don't outlevel the area, which is unlikely).
When you level, you become weaker, because your main source of power is your weapon damage. Those stay the old level.
You can pay to upgrade your gear, but it costs gold and crafting mats, and more gold than you gained from those random quests.

 

[Deleted member 41520]

But because the scaling is so fucked, the best way to play that game was to pick your least used skills as key skills and only level up when you got the max benefits of it. So a Mage's key skills would be stuff like Hand-to-Hand and big weapons, while a Warrior's key skills would be stuff like Illusion magic

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How does this work? I never got too deep into the game

 

[Miniature Kaiju]

FF8's Junction/Magic system, coupled with enemies level scaling meant the optimal way to play the game was to never use any Magic, get into combat just to draw as much Magic as possible without killing the enemies to avoid leveling up.

Once you stocked up on the best possible Magic and maxed your Junctions, you just went through the game avoiding and running from any encounter that wasn't mandatory, and completely stomped those that were.

 

[DrArchon]

How does this work? I never got too deep into the game

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From what I remember (it's been a while), you pick a bunch of key action skills (stuff like Two-Handed Weapons, Heavy Armor, Alchemy, Restoration Magic, etc.) and when you level them up enough, you get to properly level up your character. When you level up your character, you get to pick bonus points for your core skills (stuff like Stength, Intelligence, Luck, etc.)

The amount of points you can give your core skills on each level up is proportional to how many levels of associated actions skills you got before the level up. So, if you got a bunch of levels in Swords and Heavy Armor, you could get +5 to Strength instead of +1 or +2. Because of this, the optimal way to play the game is to level up as little as possible and to control when you level up to always get the biggest bonuses that you could. That's why all of your key action skills would be stuff that you could 100% control when you got points in them (like most non-combat magics, speechcraft, enchanting, etc.) and not stuff that you could accidentally level up by just playing the game normally (like skills tied to weapons and armor).

Also, the enemy scaling was ludicrously aggressive and directly tied to your character level, not any other stats. So if you didn't understand the system and leveled up too quickly, not only would you not get many bonus points for your core skills, all of the enemies would rocket up in power and make all the fights incredibly tough.

 

[Tuco Benedicto Pacifico]

Oh, this is an easy one.
Randomized loot, in most games.

It's supposed to give you "infinite variety" and keep you hooked to the game's itemization system, but it systematically has the exact opposite effect on me, making me completely uninterested in the items you can get and fairly bored with having to constantly compare dozens of almost identical shit that often varies by some marginal stat point.
Not to mention when the system is random enough to generate a large amount of items virtually without any value whatsoever.

It's daunting because the more RPGs and action games I played over the years, the more I realized how much a bad itemization/progression system can take away from the joy of exploring an environment and/or accomplishing things.
And I will ALWAYS prefer a system where the game's world offers a limited amount of unique, hand-placed items but each one can be a significant addition to your arsenal (at that specific point in time or in an absolute sense as a sidegrade(something suited to a specific build).

 

[fireflame]

Resistance Reduction in Grim Dawn. Developers tried to weaken it to make it less effective but this lead to people trying to invest more on RR. I don't know if this has been fixed with the latest expansion.
Oblivion level scaling is a given in my opinion. It does not bring any balance at all and only makes the experience more tedious. In fact if you play with no mod it might lead to you spending time cautiously planning what you are gonna do to optimize your stats. It also makes it a bad idea to get some items early in game because they adjust to the level you have when you pick them.

 

[sheaaaa]

I would even go as far as to say that a significant portion of people who enjoyed the first game would pass on the sequel if the mechanic returned.
Most people enjoyed Botw despite weapon durability, some even going as far to mod it out on PC.

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You're projecting hugely here. Don't flatter yourself and your niche opinion because there are plenty of people who knew what the mechanic was for, and appreciated what it was doing.

 

[Sapo84]

The FP system in Dark Souls 3, it's supposed to make magic more balanced like melee builds but ends up going too far and making them inferior to melee due to having less estus, spells costing too much fp and doing about the same damage as a regular r1 attack on a melee build and needing to waste 3 or 4 of your ring slots just to do decent damage. It also makes people use the same spell over and over again sure to being more cost efficient rather than mixing up which spells you use

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I'd say it reached the intended purpose aka stopping mage builds from being the souls easy-mode.
It's good having to use low-tier spell because their FP-efficient, leaving the strongest one to finish off the boss (also it was the same in DS1 and DS2, there's a limit of how many spells you could attune so you couldn't just souls spear everything into oblivion).

What it didn't work was having a ton of stuff boosting magic damage to have more build variety.
The result was that 90% of mages build are cookie cutter builds with the same rings, Scholar's Candlestick etc etc, since trying anything else would result in a magic damage not worth the effort of going mage. Super boring.

Another mechanic that failed spectacularly was Soul Memory in Dark Souls 2.
They decided that matchmaking by level needed correction since it allowed twinking since you could invade in the opening areas of the game with a low-level character with end-game equip.
The solution they came up with in Dark Souls 2 to have a better online experience was doing matchmaking by accumulated EXP (aka soul memory).
This didn't really prevent twinking (if you skip optional bosses and enemies you can still get strong without accumulating a ton of EXP) but instead ensured that people had trouble matching with friends. Fighting and losing a lot would also mean you would find less and less people to do co-op with.
Pretty much it solved nothing while creating a bunch of issues there were not present before.
Ironically they later inserted a ring that could prevent a character for getting EXP, pretty much admitting that the mechanic was a complete failure.

 

[Skulldead]

Two things that come to my mind regarding scaling:

The Last Remnant
The Last Remnant has enemies scale in stats based on the characters levels. In the original release this was overtuned.
If you did every sidequest, the main story would become almost impossibly difficult.

AC: Odessey
For some reason, AC:O has randomly generated quests on top of story quests, sidequests and location goals.

Many of these are of the format:
Kill 10 spartans; Gain 2000xp and 100gold

These are negative value quests because the game has absolute level scaling. Enemies are always your level-2 (unless you don't outlevel the area, which is unlikely).
When you level, you become weaker, because your main source of power is your weapon damage. Those stay the old level.
You can pay to upgrade your gear, but it costs gold and crafting mats, and more gold than you gained from those random quests.

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Any game with level scaling never end well, here two great exemple. Level scaling should be the "Mechanics in games that had the exact opposite results of their intended design "

 

[VaporSnake]

.There's a reason the shrines and guardians are the highlights and not the base traversal of the world.

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Uhh think you've got that backwards, I believe the majority of people who played Breath of the Wild would disagree here, the divine beasts were among the most common complaints from a lot of people (myself included) while the traversal and exploration of the world is amongst the most praised in any open world game. Shrines were indeed a joy, but the more scripted areas outside of shrines were completely unremarkable for a Zelda game

 

[Nairume]

Any game with level scaling never end well, here two great exemple. Level scaling should be the "Mechanics in games that had the exact opposite results of their intended design "

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I disagree with this as an absolute, even if most games with level scaling are bad about level scaling.

Metal Gear Solid 5 is an example of it actually working like it should, because you don't get any weaker/vulnerable from it. You just have to either move on to better equipment or change your strategies. You can also mitigate it by playing more strategically to limit how much the enemies scale to your tactics.