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[bloop_bleep]

I don't think knowing your audience well enough to know that a large portion of players will take a certain path if given the opportunity is particularly patronizing. If letting a player play a certain way completely ruins the tone of a game then I admire devs who stick to their vision and don't change mechanics to cater to every opinionated gamer. Sometimes you have to challenge people to play a game differently. Maybe some players will be completely turned off because they don't like the mechanics, and that's fine, not every game needs to appeal to every gamer. Otherwise we'd have even more ultra generic games.

edit: I just realized the thread had progressed further than I thought it had and in my laziness I missed some posts. Sorry for just parroting what other people have already said.

There's a difference between choosing not to add more gameplay mechanics in order to accommodate for more play styles and specifically going out of your way to remove play styles from the game because "they're completely wrong and whoever uses them is a heretic!" (and harming important gameplay features while doing so.) You're making it seem like that if grinding was allowed in the game, all the players can't help but be FORCED into grinding against their will, like they're addicts or something. That's not how playing a game works. You get to choose which method from the available ones you want to use; if you don't find one method fun, you can always just switch to another. It is entirely unacceptable for the devs to police the players on their play methods if doing so harms the enjoyment of the game. Restrictions should only be created to add more depth and fun.

Yeah, some people HATED the fact that when they touched a goomba or koopa trooper in Super Mario Bros while they had firepower, they lost the fire power! What if their preferred game experience was that once you have fire power you never lose it?

Did you know in Super Mario Bros, you could kill the various bowsers by shooting him with the fireballs? And that each different bowser turned into a different thing when you killed it that way.  It was fun to find out what each bowser turned into. But sometimes when I played I'd get hit and lose my fire power before I got to shoot bowser! So I had to play the whole damn game again just to find out what bowser in level 5-4 turns into!

My point being, although the restriction in my power was annoying at the time, if that restriction didn't exist it wouldn't have improved the game for me, I would never have been interested enough to bother in the first place!

It also had level timers, which didn't really do much except sort of mercy kill you if you got stuck, and give you extra points at the end.  I don't think the game would really have suffered from losing the level timer, but I also don't think it made much difference.  The only exceptions I guess were the two maze castles, where you could run out of time before solving the level, but it's debatable whether those were really good things.

Now, maybe you don't like Super Mario Bros. It's a valid opinion, it's a very specific type of game, and if you're the type who likes to take their time and strategically plan your moves, maybe it was a terrible game for you.  But if you are going to tell me Super Mario Brothers was an objectively bad game, or that it had objectively bad design, I'm going to tell you to go look up the meaning of the word objectively.

Now, some might argue it would have been an objectively superior game if it let you play how you wanted.  So when a goomba walked into you, or you mistimed a jump and landed in a hole, perhaps even losing your last life, maybe some people think it would have been better for the game to give you the option "You have hit a goomba. Die?" "You have run out of time. Die?" "You have run out of lives. Game over?"  But I firmly believe that would have made the game worse, I know I would have selected "NO!" to all those options every time, and I would have gotten quite bored of Super Mario Brothers quite quickly.

Now, there's certainly valid discussion to be had in the case of any individual game feature whether that feature makes the game worse or better.  If you know what the developers intended, you can even make somewhat objective judgments whether individual features helped or hindered the game matching the developers intent. IE the devs of Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup have stated they don't want the game to have "no-brainer" decisions that aren't really decisions, they don't want a tedious series of actions to be the most optimal choice in any situation. Essentially, they never want the player to choose between "Fun way to play" or "Best way to play to win".  They want those both to be the same thing.  They've implemented tons and tons of changes, each individual change can be compared to that simple goal, and one can make reasonably objective judgements on whether the impact of each change accomplishes that goal or not.

I completely disagree that that change would make the game much worse; in fact, it would probably make it better. Basically the only problem with it would be the annoyance of having to select an option every time you would normally die, but that can be rectified by having the player select the options before they play the game. And keep in mind that you don't HAVE to choose "no" every single time; if it's more fun for you to die whenever you normally should, then you can do that. There's nothing stopping you. Why do you think there's configurable difficulty levels in many games? Because different people like to play in different ways, and this is some of the easier ways to accommodate for that. If you find the lowest difficulty level to be way too easy, it's much easier to switch to a higher one than to complain about the lowest difficulty level even existing.

That said, I don't begrudge the developers for not including that feature, as that requires possible a lot of effort that they simply made the economic decision not to do. However, if the developers make the conscious effort to remove play styles, and harm gameplay while doing so, then that's a very bad thing that they simply shouldn't do, because it harms everyone's fun. Take the example of the timer, and let's consider the cases of the grinder and the non-grinder separately.

First take the non-grinder. Before they were perfectly happy with their original play style, doing missions and slowly leveling up their skills that way, but all of a sudden a timer comes along! Now they are under high pressure, and frequently lose their saves due to the time constraint. They get frustrated because of this. Do you really think they are going to keep playing this game?

Now take the grinder. This person, for whatever reason, wants to grind his skill levels for at least some of the game, because that makes the game more fun for them. (If they didn't find it fun, they could very easily switch to the other mentioned play style.) Perhaps they find the beginning part of the game to be way too hard for them, so they grind their way through that and then play normally. But now, they're on a timer! Then suddenly they can't grind at all anymore, so they have to painstakingly work through the first part of the game, only to die later and have to start over again. They also get frustrated. Will they continue playing the game?

It is entirely not okay for a developer to do this. If anything, they should add gameplay methods, not remove them (although they don't necessarily have to do the former.) This is in fact one of the things I like about Dwarf Fortress -- it allows you to play almost however you like. It doesn't try to stop players from savescumming, from editing the game files to make adamantine from stone boulders, from using utilities like DFHack to create items or units or set all skills to legendary, or pretty much anything else. You can play how you want to. If you want to create an enormous statue of Armok slamming his almighty hammer into the ground, and don't want to bother with invasions, you can turn off invasions. Nothing stopping you. What's important to note here, is that Dwarf Fortress allows a lot of this by default. That is, Toady chose not to remove these features, rather than choosing to add them. Choosing not to add play methods is okay; choosing to remove them is not.

[scriver]

My question is why would the game devs want to stop people from grinding and doing other tedious things? Why would they use something that can negatively affect other elements of gameplay just to force people to play a certain way? If people want to spend hours slowly leveling up their skills, that's perfectly okay. If people want to do it the usual way, with leveling up just by doing normal things, that's also okay. This is in fact one of my own gaming pet peeves -- devs deciding to compromise important elements of gameplay just to make sure no one plays the game the ""wrong"" way. Who the hell cares how other people play?

They make the game. They literally have to decide how to play the game. If they don't, there is no game.

Problem is, if they're cramping down on or damaging other gameplay that isn't even related to grinding (as in the case of the timer), solely for the purpose of preventing grinding, then that's probably a pretty bad design decision for very little actual gain. If the players feel that tediously grinding your skills is not a fun or fulfilling way to play the game, and if they want an "experience", then there's absolutely nothing stopping them from playing it without grinding. This idea that the devs somehow have to completely prohibit certain gameplay methods because apparently the players lack the willpower to choose how they want to play is simply patronizing.

If you remove the timer from a game and make the rest of the characters and game world not advance until you want them to, you can't play the game as if you were under time pressure. Because the time pressure don't exist.

[Damiac]

I am telling you, 8 year old me would have selected the not die option every time, forced my way through, and gotten bored of the game much faster.  And I suspect the game (and the nintendo system itself) wouldn't have done nearly so well if that had been the version of Super Mario Brothers that came with it.  And it would have been a completely extremely trivial change, programming time certainly isn't an issue

Another example is roguelikes. For example, DCSS has wizard mode you can activate (it nullifies score, though score is meaningless in game anyway).  It literally asks you if you want to die when you get to 0 health.  There's a reason that's not the default mode of the game though, because it's a boring game with no stakes if you play it that way. 

There's another consideration as well, which is maintaining a decent and even challenge level.  That gets harder and harder the more leeway the player has. So, for example, in Morrowind you can choose to sit in balmora casting crappy 1 mana spells, jumping around like an idiot, and buying training until you're completely maxed out, and then the main quest will have no challenge, and really probably won't be much fun.
Yet I can't imagine how you could change that without ruining the game.  Morrowind is fun to break, and there's just so much silly stuff you can do it's still fun even without a challenge.

Contrast that with DCSS. In DCSS there are various pressures moving you onward (mostly food, a soft timer) and also there's just not much available to grind on early in the game.  So generally you keep moving on, and the challenge level is fairly well maintained.  If you could sit on D1 and kill boa constrictors until you were max level then the best way to win would be to do just that.  Suddenly the player has complete control of the challenge level of the game, meaning to do the "best", for example long streaks of wins, you need to do something that is the opposite of fun.  If you want to play the game the fun way, you can't compete with the tedious grinding way. You end up choosing between playing well and having fun.

So I guess my feelings are... complicated on the issue, but I believe very much that the player has to be constrained for there even to be a game (Otherwise I might as well just imagine whatever I want).  I can't say I've much appreciated most games with a direct timer, like pikmin, majora's mask, etc, but I know some people do, and the timer is central to those games, the challenge is at least partially devised from the timer.

A good example of constraints on the player making for a more interesting experience would be Alpha Protocol.  You get a certain amount of experience on each mission, and you can use that to improve your character however you want.  But you can't go back and get more, there's no option to grind.  So the challenge can be pretty well configured for a level 4 character at that point in the game, because the devs know they only gave you 4 levels worth of XP.  And if you could go back and grind up XP to max out every skill, it would hurt the replayability of the game, not to mention completely neuter any challenge if the player is willing to do a boring thing.

Finally, some people like to feel like they're being challenged by the game itself, and it feels good to win when you do everything you can to win, and it's still challenging.  It doesn't feel nearly as good when you know there's a thing you can do to win very easily, but it's not fun, or you could tie one hand behind your back to maintain a good challenge level, but then you know you're not doing everything you can to win.  This is a problem with Morrowind for me, as well as any number of games with boring but effective options.

[Telgin]

Somewhat tangential to the discussion, but for what it's worth, I never viewed Majora's Mask's timer as much of an actual time limit so much as a way to pack more content into the same world, since different events happened on different days and sometimes only if you did certain things to trigger them before then.  I can't recall ever actually running out of time in a dungeon, although I'm sure it's happened for some people.

Of course, it wouldn't be that hard to argue that this isn't a great design choice either since it adds some tedium for some tasks, and makes you repeat things, but it never bothered me much.

I do wonder if that's nostalgia coloring my view of it though.  I've had almost no patience for the tedium of other games from the era that I don't have nostalgia for, like Donkey Kong 64.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

I think that when it comes to certain restrictions on playing it's really about how natural and integrated it all is. As humans, we just kind of know if you get bonked enough with a rock, you gone die. But when a lose condition doesn't tie into the core mechanics, I.E. what you're doing in the game, it feels weird. It's not JUST timers, although those are particularly egregious, but things like random events, or cheating AI. It may not make you stop playing right away, but it's always just there in the back of your mind.

[Fniff]

So, what would be a case where a timer feels natural?

[Urist McScoopbeard]

So, what would be a case where a timer feels natural?

Timers never really... though Majora's Mask does a pretty good job of it. If I recall there are some missions in COD4 and MW2 that at least SAY they have time limits, though I'm not actually sure they exist--they're not too bad.

[Telgin]

What about Deus Ex: Human Revolution's first real mission?  You're told not to screw around because some terrorists have taken employees hostage, and if you take too long screwing around, you'll be informed that the hostages are dead.  Which they will be when you get to them.

It's not a big ticking timer on your HUD, but it's still technically a timer.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Ya, that's pretty diegetic.

[MrRoboto75]

The first scout mission in Chromehounds had you capturing all the radio towers on the map (really all the scout missions had this objective), but in this one the CO gives you a time limit to do so.  The time limit is completely superfluous.  As in, you have to go far out of your way to fail the mission via time out.  You'd have to deliberately design a mech with the slowest movement and then underpower it to go even slower for the time limit to attempt to be an issue.  Its not like there's much terrain or enemies in the way anyway.

[Parsely]

Wow, Chromehounds. That game was really intriguing to me in a lot of ways. I really want to go back and play it again. That's one of the few games that would make me want to spring for an Xbox 360.

[Funk]

I dind get on with chrome hounds on Xbox360 it's a little buggy and onlines not there anymore,
I found front mission evolved to be a better game, just due to haveing a story (ok it's a Cliche Storm force 9).
A better mix of weapons and getting some out of mech action.

Try M.A.V. (Modular Assault Vehicle) it basicaly chromehounds 2

[AzyWng]

In a thread this big, this issue has probably been brought up at least once prior, but here's another pet peeve of mine:

Painful, Pointless, and Painfully Pointless Pacifism

So, some violent games present the option to go the less violent route - usually knocking your opponents unconscious rather than causing considerably more permanent incapacitation.

Some games do this in a matter that does not irritate me. Others, of course, do this in a manner that makes me feel worse about being alive. Still others have parts of their nonlethal systems that I enjoy, and other parts that I do not enjoy. I won't be taking the trouble to organize this rant for now, so if you feel like killing me, go ahead (but if you use the baton to perform a nonlethal takedown, I might be able to recover, and then edit my article into something coherent).

In Undertale, every single encounter is pretty much a puzzle. Either keep dodging attacks while performing your own until you've killed your opponent (the lethal route), or keep dodging attacks until you can figure out how to get your opponent to stop attacking you (the nonlethal route). Much of the game's combat is like this. It makes sense. It's simple enough (well, dodging what may very well turn into Touhou but with puzzle elements and a larger hitbox isn't easy, but the concept is).

In Deus Ex (the very first one, where everything looks terrible but in a way that still somehow strikes me as visually appealing in its own fashion), your starting equipment consists of (If I remember this correctly) a single medkit, a pistol, some 10mm ammo for the pistol, and a riot prod. The very first person you talk to (assuming you don't just rush straight past him) tells you to "stick with the prod" - and advocates the use of nonlethal force for much (I think actually all) of the game. There are other situations in-story that, in-universe (or if the player wants to roleplay as a good guy - Deus Ex is, after all, a roleplaying game), provide the player with a reason to follow the advice of using nonlethal force. Enemies have certain conversations with each other that, while simple enough, remind the player that those are people you're fighting. A certain conversation between a pair of parents reminds the player that even the enemies have family. The people who are known for killing everything are depicted as completely amoral. There's probably a number of other ways the game reminds the player of the nonlethal option, including gameplay. Going the nonlethal route isn't actually especially hard (unless you're trying to take down a Commando, but even then there's a trick that lets players put them on their backs/faces much more easily) - the stun prod, while being a melee weapon, will stun most of the enemies it doesn't knock out, and it can, if you aim for the back, knock out nearly every single enemy in the game in one charge. Enemies who are knocked unconscious will not scream and alert other enemies (as opposed to screaming the exact same way as the last thirty people did when you shot them in the back or brained them with a crowbar), and two weapons are, seemingly, specifically designed for use in tandem with the baton/stun prod (I'll tell you about them if you ask).

And no, it's not the gas grenades. I barely used those things throughout the course of my nonlethal playthrough, in fact.

Anyway, in both those games, I found that going the nonlethal route was fulfilling story-wise, and, gameplay-wise, kept me on my toes, even if it meant I was denied some of the cooler, more lethal options.

Metal Gear Solid V's nonlethal system... Well, there were certainly many ways to take down targets nonlethally. However, I would usually pick one of two options:

Shoot the target with a tranquilizer gun or other nonlethal silenced gun

Approach the target, perform a quick dive to knock them down, and then aim a gun at them to perform a hold-up.

There were lots of other ways to take down targets nonlethally, and I think the presence and existence of riot suit soldiers was an attempt to make me use those methods... But much of the time I'd forget to use them. The base building mechanic is a good incentive for nonlethally killing, but it doesn't make me feel even remotely morally justified.

What a shame.

And, lastly in my list, Alpha Protocol.

There are a few perks and bonuses you get for performing enough nonlethal takedowns, which is a nice bonus (and the kind of bonus that doesn't really appear in the other games I listed). A build that would be strictly nonlethal would, I imagine, likely involve speccing into Pistols, Stealth, and Unarmed.

There are missions where killing enemies will have repercussions - attracting unwanted attention, and the like.

Other than that, though, nonlethal play limits one to options that, to me, aren't all that fun. They usually consist of "crouch-walk and then punch someone" or "shoot someone with tranq darts until they fall over".

[Parsely]

I dind get on with chrome hounds on Xbox360 it's a little buggy

Try M.A.V. (Modular Assault Vehicle) it basicaly chromehounds 2

I personally never ran into obvious bugs with Chromehounds although you get so little feedback and guidance in missions that sometimes a genuine fail state could be indistinguishable from a bugged mission... But I did beat the game.

I dunno I was looking at MAV and it looks like it has performance issues, and it's not on Steam so I can't refund it. Have you played it and you're vouching for it?

[Egan_BW]

From what I remember Alpha Protocol didn't bother me too much in that regard. The game didn't seem to care an aweful lot wither a takedown was lethal or nonlethal, so I did the melee takedowns where I could and it made sense and went shotgun when it didn't.

(And fisticuffs. The martial arts skilltree in that tons of fun for me, and punching people may or may not be nonlethal? Eh.)