Shuddup, guns jamming in Far Cry 2 and in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was among the best parts of either game.
Weapon Degradation and Gun Jamming. Impossible to do well, never should be put into your game. Right? Wrong.I disagree that gun jamming in general is a bad mechanic. It's been implemented so few times in major games. There are some where it makes little sense, I felt FC2 was one of them, but it can be used to good effect where it's more appropriate, particularly survival-horror. I think its best appearance is in System Shock 2, from which Prey derives many features and design choices. Even if it's only ever failures-to-fire, it achieves the objective of sowing mistrust between the player and his equipment, unless the player takes steps to mitigate weapon degradation. It leads to moments of panic when you hear "a click instead of a bang" and you scramble for an alternative or try to run away. It fuels the tension, the player given the knowledge that the mileage they get out their weapons isn't just tied to ammo and accuracy, and that extending that mileage means diverting precious resource that might be better used elsewhere.
It turns out it's actually just been implemented badly this whole time.
Prey Mooncrash introduces said mechanics, but instead of having your gun randomly be removed from your inventory or randomly fail to fire when you needed it to, it would fire and THEN jam, making letting your gun get to 0 condition just turn it into a single-shot that you need to re-iinvest in or replace.
Which is pretty good, it turns out. It's fair, bc there's no randomness to it (every shot at 0 condition jams) you see it coming and know once it's there, but also the gun remains lifesaving and works when you use it, while also still /feeling/ like a broken gun that needs to be replaced.
So, the common line about how the Prey reboot didn't innovate on anything can go away bc its DLC innovated on gaming's worst mechanic and proved it can be done well.
Minigames are bad. But often optional and ignorable.THIS^ You keep what you kill! This, war weariness and forced peace treaties is why I just can't get into Stellaris. I came to fight space battles, blow s*** up and take over the universe! Not sit on my paws and kiss political a**
Minigames that are gates to actual content are awful.
'Warscore' is one of my (incredibly sujective) pet hates. And the reason I bounced off Stellaris (and every other paradox mapgame) hard.
If I'm playing an empire game and end up in a war, the rules are as follows:Being forced to specify what you want to take beforehand, and then give back the rest is utterly baffling to me in a game.
- Take what I can
- Give nothing back
It's one of those fun > "realism" things.
Minigames are bad. But often optional and ignorable.THIS^ You keep what you kill! This, war weariness and forced peace treaties is why I just can't get into Stellaris. I came to fight space battles, blow s*** up and take over the universe! Not sit on my paws and kiss political a**
Minigames that are gates to actual content are awful.
'Warscore' is one of my (incredibly sujective) pet hates. And the reason I bounced off Stellaris (and every other paradox mapgame) hard.
If I'm playing an empire game and end up in a war, the rules are as follows:Being forced to specify what you want to take beforehand, and then give back the rest is utterly baffling to me in a game.
- Take what I can
- Give nothing back
It's one of those fun > "realism" things.
The best system I've ever seen is in Fallout New Vegas where gear only jams/fails to protect you below a clearly defined threshold, as in your gun will never jam if you keep it above 75% condition.At the same time Fallout New Vegas made it where, unless you had a certain skill, you need that EXACT gun to repair stuff. OR find an expensive as hell repair person that most of the time couldn't even repair the stuff beyond that 75% threshold...
Not to mention that the repair skill affects how good the repairs are, not whether you can do them at all, meaning that at 100 skill you will repair an item with way fewer resources that at 25. Not to mention certain perks that can make repairs ludicrously easy.
This system makes item condition transparent and always manageable, by far the best I know of.
What it actually does is obscure the outcome. You may have played perfectly, and still lost. The game has now sent you off on a wild goose chase, thinking about where you must have messed up, when in fact your play wasn't the problem; dice rolls were.
Because of that wild goose chase, the game seems more complex than it is. The game provides unreliable feedback, and only after playing many, many games will it become clear which feedback you should ignore. Essentially, random games delay learning - the essential fun part of games - by injecting false signals into the engine.
Everything is so RNG heavy, you can actually spawn in dungeons that are unbeatable. There just isn't a way to get to the exit door. It doesn't matter how good you are at the game.
Minigames are bad. But often optional and ignorable.THIS^ You keep what you kill! This, war weariness and forced peace treaties is why I just can't get into Stellaris. I came to fight space battles, blow s*** up and take over the universe! Not sit on my paws and kiss political a**
Minigames that are gates to actual content are awful.
'Warscore' is one of my (incredibly sujective) pet hates. And the reason I bounced off Stellaris (and every other paradox mapgame) hard.
If I'm playing an empire game and end up in a war, the rules are as follows:Being forced to specify what you want to take beforehand, and then give back the rest is utterly baffling to me in a game.
- Take what I can
- Give nothing back
It's one of those fun > "realism" things.
It makes sense in settings where there is an overarching legal framework within which all rulers operate; i.e. 'rules of war'.
The 'game' then becomes focused on the politics & intrigue behind acquiring the necessary claims & CBs to enact the wars you desire.
That's why ck2 is such a great game, and one of the reasons why Stellaris is such a dismal failure.
It's also why everyone will eventually outgrow Civ & Total War games.
If only Stellaris had been set in the Dune universe.....
Two points I'd like to address here. One, when did Stellaris become a dismal failure? It's still growing and thriving as far as I"m aware.Paradox has actually lost quite a few character through out the years due to updates that completely changed the way the game was played and or locked away a much needed QoL feature in one of their MANY DLCs. (Or so I've heard) The worst one I can think of is the 2.0 update that removed the unique ways of traveling space and just made everyone use hyperlanes instead.
Two, you can make empires that ignore standard diplomacy and instead just go "yes I'd like to take everything you've ever owned, kthxbye". I get that it's not perfect to your vision, but I feel like it's a reasonable substitute at least.
The worst one I can think of is the 2.0 update that removed the unique ways of traveling space and just made everyone use hyperlanes instead.
Oddly enough, another game did the different drive systems and worked out quite well: Sword of the Stars. Humans had the hyperlanes but they were also the fastest mode of transport and they were still able to "slow boat" if they needed toThe worst one I can think of is the 2.0 update that removed the unique ways of traveling space and just made everyone use hyperlanes instead.
Oh man, I've got the total opposite take here. (No idea about the rest of Stellaris mechanics lately, haven't played it in quite some time, though I think overall it's got issues with scale and feeling generic. I do recall having the thought that the tile-building part of the game didn't matter because placement had essentially no meaning, so removing those was probably a good move) -- right, but going hyperlanes fixed the problem of the map's geography having little meaning!
If anything is accessible at any time (normal warp drive), then there are no map chokepoints. Nothing matters except timing and raw distance. If it's the same deal but you need to build warp stations, then you get the same problem plus more micromanagement. And if you're the poor fool who selected hyperlanes, you have to follow rules that everyone else breaks and therefore get to play whackamole with enemy fleets who go anywhere - or get shut out by chokepoints. Making everyone follow the same rules means there's interesting geometry to the map, and systems then have meaning based on where they are in addition to what they are.
Now that said, I don't think the combat mechanics quite hold up, but it was a good move! (Perhaps alternately they could have put a ton of design work into making the travel methods interesting w/re to some notion of map geometry and terrain, and interact together interestingly, but that'd be exponentially more work. So: still a good move to make the cut, I feel.)
Weapon Degradation and Gun Jamming. Impossible to do well, never should be put into your game. Right? Wrong.
It turns out it's actually just been implemented badly this whole time.
Escort missions, in almost any kind of game that features them, always seem to be very hit or miss in their implementation.Bonus points: No mid mission checkpoints, the NPC moves slower than your run but faster than your walk speeds and has an aggressive/ reckless personality
The ones I detest are the heavily scripted ones where enemies spawn out of thin air, but only when the escorted entity reaches a particular point, on their unalterable path. You can't sweep the area ahead, you have to do close escort.
Escort missions, in almost any kind of game that features them, always seem to be very hit or miss in their implementation.Bonus points: No mid mission checkpoints, the NPC moves slower than your run but faster than your walk speeds and has an aggressive/ reckless personality
The ones I detest are the heavily scripted ones where enemies spawn out of thin air, but only when the escorted entity reaches a particular point, on their unalterable path. You can't sweep the area ahead, you have to do close escort.
this blog post (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20141015/227740/Randomness_and_Game_Design.php)Thanks for sharing, this was a good read.
I got to throw jumping and climbing in most games. *cough Elder scrolls*I'd add on to this and say BS levels of fall damage. I remember in some games, Far Cry for example, that sliding down a cliff would half the time be ok and half the time beat away half or more of your health, even without the "fall damage" animation... Forcing me to walk around because I don't want to get beat to hell by *** physics is just S***
Seriously. a rock is a barrier to advancement. I can jump in some and climb some places in others. A simple pile of wood or rocks can be a wall of total impassibility.
This then gets to world/level design. When you make things you can't get over. that IRL you totally could. Kinda breaks things...
But i have acrobatics at 100. so no big deal.
Pay2Win isn't evil, if it's a reasonable cost and the game is "free-to-play".
When it's like World of Tanks, where buying all the things costs literally tens of thousands of dollars... I kind of scratch my head and wonder what kind of dope they are smoking. Maybe their research indicates that there are only two types of players: the "freebies" who duck out instead of putting up some cash, and the "addicts" who'll come up with the money over and over, if only they're allowed to win more often than not. Probably that's what's driving those designs.
I avoid all F2P products like the plague, personally, unless I'm going to play them for one day for testing / review purposes.
*sees talk of randomness, swoops in*
I simply must share this blog post (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20141015/227740/Randomness_and_Game_Design.php) which breaks down types of randomness and categorizes how randomness can be used in games.
"The major point I'd like to make is that noise injected between a player's choice and the result (here referred to as output randomness) does not belong in a strategy game."
*sees talk of randomness, swoops in*
I simply must share this blog post (https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KeithBurgun/20141015/227740/Randomness_and_Game_Design.php) which breaks down types of randomness and categorizes how randomness can be used in games.Quote"The major point I'd like to make is that noise injected between a player's choice and the result (here referred to as output randomness) does not belong in a strategy game."
That's such a good clarification the article opens with. I remember the eternal debate over whether or not TF2 should have random crits (for those not in the know, it's a team-based FPS where one in ___ shots will insta-kill you with no damage fall-off), and this cuts to the quick of the issue so perfectly; the people who wanted crits removed wanted to be playing a strategy game where superior play always leads to victory (a strategy game) to the point that one player of high enough skill can completely close out a game by themselves against the entire enemy team without dying once, whereas the ppl who supported crits (read as: valve) realized that the game being a strategy game is inherently antithetical to the act of being a team game, and that allowing your team to randomly insta-kill an enemy once every minute or so meant that if one enemy is fighting every member of your team and winning nonstop that they will be the one who gets insta-killed and that that uber MLG pro gamer will therefor be incapable of carrying a game by themselves bc they'll be dead from random crits all game.
Riot Games' Alex Jaffe referred to this in 2019 (https://youtu.be/8uE6-vIi1rQ) as "a cursed design problem", where the problem is essentially unsolveable because it stems from two inherently conflicting promises made to the player ("a shooter where you need to rely on your team to succeed" vs "a competitive strategy game where player skill & character customization leads to victory"), and instead of "fixing" the problem by merely designing better you can only patch over the problem to some extent by making a choice to prioritize one over the other -- in this case valve decided being a team-based game was more important to TF2's identity to stand out against CoD & Co, and to this day I agree
Games that end once you reach your full potential then don't offer NG+
I think Alex should add paid lootboxes that grant the player uberships with powerful randomly generated hullmods, but over time those ships degrade and their guns jam (you can pay real money and wait for 48 IRL hours to pass in order to unjam them), and also in order to deploy them you need a CB and permission from the Luddic Church and also it will increase your fleet's war exhaustion.