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[Urist McScoopbeard]

So in dead rising 2, why do I have to personally give my daughter medicine every 24 hours or so?  Couldn't I just give it to the woman that I have watching her and have her do it?

IMO, both Dead Rising 1 & 2 would be considered the best zombie games if there wasn't these bullshit timers on your fun. It's incredibly fun to go around killing zombies in crazy ways and meeting the zany characters than it is to get involved in the government conspiracy coverup overly serious bullshit storylines.

[Parsely]

So in dead rising 2, why do I have to personally give my daughter medicine every 24 hours or so?  Couldn't I just give it to the woman that I have watching her and have her do it?

From a realistic standpoint: Because you're her dad and you (and your daughter) trust you to give her the medicine properly. If zombrex isn't administered properly, she will die. Asking this woman to watch your daughter so you can get medicine to keep her alive is one thing, but would you put your daughter's life directly in the hands of someone else if you had a choice?

From a storytelling standpoint: Because you need to be reminded of the protagonist's motivation (protecting his daughter) and that's a great way of doing it using gameplay.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

It's the goddamn time limit that's a pain. Even though it's literally way more time than you need to get it, it just makes it feel so rushed when all you wanna do is screw around and kill zombies. Why so stressful man?

[Parsely]

IMO, both Dead Rising 1 & 2 would be considered the best zombie games if there wasn't these bullshit timers on your fun. It's incredibly fun to go around killing zombies in crazy ways and meeting the zany characters than it is to get involved in the government conspiracy coverup overly serious bullshit storylines.

To a certain extent I agree with you, but without a timer these games would be stupidly easy. This is a problem because gamers undervalue their time: without changing anything else in Dead Rising, if you let the player have infinite time, then most people will take the safest option and grind PP, the best food, weapons, and skill books and rob themselves of any challenge. If you took away the time limit people would just complain that Dead Rising games are mindless zombie mashing games with no challenge to present. This is the same problem RPGs try to fix using level scaling.

Dead Rising 3 gives you the most generous time limit of all and as a result it's the most bland and boring game in the series.

[milo christiansen]

Time limits in video games are evil and should be removed.

If your game only has challenge because of a time limit, you need to rethink things a bit.

[Parsely]

What's inherently wrong with a time limit? Dead Rising is even one of the few games where the story strongly justifies it and the gameplay also ties into it strongly. The time limit is what gives every choice you make in that game value.

Also IIRC the time limit doesn't actually prevent you from just messing around in Dead Rising, you just won't progress the story.

So I think the time limit is really important, but I wouldn't have minded some inspiration from Majora's Mask where you could do things to influence the timer and certain things (PP, items, money) would carry over if you failed a main story event and wanted to wind back the clock 12 hours.

[Nahere]

Time limits in video games are evil and should be removed.

If your game only has challenge because of a time limit, you need to rethink things a bit.

Does that include soft time limits like food clocks in roguelikes? Is nethack evil because you can't stick around on on floor grinding without running out of food? Is FTL evil because the advancing rebel fleet forces you to keep moving? Because those are both time limits, just less obvious ones.

[Urist McScoopbeard]

Time limits SUCK. Any sort of meter that forces you to act other than how you normally might proceed in a game is just bad design. Very rarely do time limits actually matter, and sometimes are just for show, but it's always just there--either on screen or in the back of your head. In a more linear game there's really no reason to have a time limit than to fuck with the player, he or she is already processing how you want them to progress. In a more open/open world game time limits just keep you from exploring whatever you find interesting. If you can't make me care about a quest or mission, what makes you think slapping a timer on it will make me WANT to do it? Now I just have to do it to get back to the part of the game I enjoy and it feels like work rather than fun.

EDIT: This goes for survival games that have food and drink meters too... goddamn I HATE having to manage farming and eating in MC when I'm trying to build something. Takes out all of the fun of it and is the most blatantly artificial difficulty you can put into a game.

From a storytelling standpoint: Because you need to be reminded of the protagonist's motivation (protecting his daughter) and that's a great way of doing it using gameplay.

Just caught this. WHAT!? It's literally the OPPOSITE of using gameplay to make you care about the story. It's artificial. Arbitrary.

[Parsely]

Time limits SUCK. Any sort of meter that forces you to act other than how you normally might proceed in a game is just bad design. Very rarely do time limits actually matter, and sometimes are just for show, but it's always just there--either on screen or in the back of your head. In a more linear game there's really no reason to have a time limit than to fuck with the player, he or she is already processing how you want them to progress. In a more open/open world game time limits just keep you from exploring whatever you find interesting. If you can't make me care about a quest or mission, what makes you think slapping a timer on it will make me WANT to do it? Now I just have to do it to get back to the part of the game I enjoy and it feels like work rather than fun.

EDIT: This goes for survival games that have food and drink meters too... goddamn I HATE having to manage farming and eating in MC when I'm trying to build something. Takes out all of the fun of it and is the most blatantly artificial difficulty you can put into a game.

From a storytelling standpoint: Because you need to be reminded of the protagonist's motivation (protecting his daughter) and that's a great way of doing it using gameplay.

Just caught this. WHAT!? It's literally the OPPOSITE of using gameplay to make you care about the story. It's artificial. Arbitrary.

Compared to most time limits in games it's fairly organic and justified by the story. The 72 hour time limit in DR1 is the time until the military will arrive. The rest of the events all occur within that overarching time limit based on a schedule. It represents the other survivors pursuing their goals independently of your progress, unlike in a game like Skyrim where the main plot will wait an eternity regardless of any urgency the plot implies.

I'm not going to tell you that time limits are always fun, because sometimes they're not, but I don't think it's asking a lot to have you concede that time limits are not inherently bad design, you just don't think the experience a time limit can offer is ever fun (which is fair).

E: Fair enough I guess. I think those character and metanarrative justifications for why Chuck is only allowed by the game to give Katey her medicine are pretty strong. It sure wouldn't have hurt for there to be a scene where Stacey offers to give Katey the Zombrex (after all she did have a sister who used the drug) and Chuck or Katey refuse. Not exactly plot hole material though.

[milo christiansen]

Time limits are put in place by game designers that need the player to move forward, but couldn't think of a good way to encourage them to do so without forcing them.

In short, they are a refuge of laziness. Worse, any player who likes to take things slowly, or who does not deal with time pressure well, will end up disliking the game, sometimes without ever quite realizing why.

[hector13]

Skyrim is one of those games I always felt there was pressure to do things quickly, while there never actually was anything stopping me from ignoring the problem for in-game months. This was just from conversations in the game.

Enforced time limits on a grand scale are no fun, man.

[AzyWng]

Time limits are put in place by game designers that need the player to move forward, but couldn't think of a good way to encourage them to do so without forcing them.

In short, they are a refuge of laziness. Worse, any player who likes to take things slowly, or who does not deal with time pressure well, will end up disliking the game, sometimes without ever quite realizing why.

Going back to someone's earlier post on Nethack and other roguelikes with a hunger mechanic - are those games suddenly terrible?

What about racing games, where players must go faster (and thus achieve a better time) than other racers?

Is the Super Mario Bros series awful because of the timers? I certainly don't recall the timer ever giving me too much trouble.

What would be a good alternative to a timer?

[milo christiansen]

Going back to someone's earlier post on Nethack and other roguelikes with a hunger mechanic - are those games suddenly terrible?

If there is a strict limit on food availability? Yes. I don't like most rogue-likes for a variety of reasons, but tack on some kind of time pressure and suddenly they are 10x worse.

What about racing games, where players must go faster (and thus achieve a better time) than other racers?

Racing games don't really fit here. Trying to go faster != being forced to play under a time limit.

Is the Super Mario Bros series awful because of the timers? I certainly don't recall the timer ever giving me too much trouble.

If the timer never gave you any trouble, why have it? Seriously, why have a time limit if it is generous enough to not be an issue?

Keeping track of time for score reasons may be fitting for some games, but there is no need for a limit.

What would be a good alternative to a timer?

Consider Warzone 2100. It has a persistent campaign, and all the levels have a time limit. Generally these limits are pretty generous, and they really exist to forcibly keep you moving. This is a crude and obnoxious way to keep the player from "breaking the game" by farming an easy map for unlimited resources and building a gigantic supply of power and units.

In this case a simple power and unit transfer cap would be all that is needed. Fluff it with something about the transport only being able to hold so much or something similar and it wouldn't even seem weird.

Look at STALKER. In the first game some of the missions had a time limit. I always found this hugely annoying, I could never just play, I always had a little worry that I wouldn't make it in time. There is a reason the third game is my favorite by far.

Look at any Bethesda RPG ever. No time limits, but dialog certainly encourages you to hurry anyway. If you have a reason not to hurry then you don't have to. You never have to worry that if you don't travel quickly enough something bad will happen. If you want to check out something on a hill nearby just go do it, no worries. Sure, a generous timer would allow the same thing, but then you have this vague "time anxiety" leaning over everything you do. Yuck.

[AzyWng]

Just a brief problem I have with the “Sense of urgency” alternative - that sense of urgency established has to be really, really good, or it’s just going to feel fake. Hell, if the player does something like spend in-game months when there’s a quest that plays as though it takes place over the course of a single day...

That dialogue about how you have to hurry won’t really have its intended effect.

[scriver]

Well, to me, this:

Compared to most time limits in games it's fairly organic and justified by the story. The 72 hour time limit in DR1 is the time until the military will arrive. The rest of the events all occur within that overarching time limit based on a schedule. It represents the other survivors pursuing their goals independently of your progress

...Sounds like the complete opposite of

Time limits are put in place by game designers that need the player to move forward, but couldn't think of a good way to encourage them to do so without forcing them.

In short, they are a refuge of laziness.

If it's anything that is refuge in laziness in my opinion, it's the Bethesda way. There's no faster way to make your game have no suspense than to remove every sense of urgency, and that is exactly what the "dawdle picking butterfly wings for five months" Bethesda way of doing does to me.