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Author Topic: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now  (Read 21468 times)

Neonivek

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I have been playing games since about the 90s but have gone back and even played them as far back as the 80s. So when I started getting into videogames enough to buy my own, rather then having them gifted to me, I was pretty excited. Games boasted of features that seemed to greatly enhance gameplay and make my eyes go wide with wonder.

Sure these features often had a few kinks here and there, and maybe they weren't implemented well... but with such a great idea SOMEONE must be doing it right... right?

Except no, it turns out that pretty much everyone runs that feature the same way. Or everyone uses it as a deceptive feature (or at least enough that you can no longer trust it).

---

Here are a few from me

#1 Crafting: This has certainly been the feature I've been the most excited for in earlier videogames and even Starwars Galaxies boasted about how their crafting allows unique weapons that will be shipped across the galaxy. What do you usually get? Crafting is pretty much grinding busywork, I've almost never seen games that really let you be creative in crafting or even feel like you are actually crafting something.

#2 100s of hours of gameplay: WHOA!?! A game that has 100s of hours of fun? Where have you been all my life?... How do they actually play? 100s of hours of boring grinding and maybe 10 hours of actual fun. Don't get me wrong a lot of these games are fun, but not from this feature.

#3 Player Created Content: Goodness did Spore and Littlebigplanet make my eyes go wide and filled with stars at this concept. Thinking that I'd see such great creativity by the community! Unfortunately what I usually ended up with was unbalanced garbage or just rip offs. I guess it hurts that Littlebigplanet to me had such tight gameplay. It just became a system of wadding through the garbage until I found decent ones.
-Note: This isn't about a game having the ability to have player created content. This is when a game has random PCC put into your game, or where going online is selected randomly unless you know what it is you are looking for.
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Darkmere

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #1 on: June 19, 2014, 11:56:38 pm »

Pffft Chyeah I can think of a few.

Be part of a living world! -- Uh huh. Credit where it's due... Space Rangers 2 got this EXACTLY right. No one else did. Honorable mention goes to STALKER: Clear Sky where the "faction combat" system was better geared faction -> kills off weaker faction, destroys their base for a day until someone pushes a cosmic reset button and the war plays out again. The roving bands of wildlife were okay, but most of the other stalkers were just so damn stupid they'd die in a week and the world was empty.

Randomly generated worlds mean no two games are the same!: Well... yeah technically I guess. These are a little better lately (a little), but when I hear this I can't escape thinking about Diablo 2's "road through squares" or "long snaking river in a bland jungle" areas. I'll take a semi-constant world that's actually interesting over randomly generated bitmaps with easy-to-connect puzzle shapes any day.

Fiendishly difficult AI!: It cheats. A lot.

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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

GavJ

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #2 on: June 20, 2014, 12:28:06 am »

Quote
#2 100s of hours of gameplay: WHOA!?! A game that has 100s of hours of fun? Where have you been all my life?... How do they actually play? 100s of hours of boring grinding and maybe 10 hours of actual fun. Don't get me wrong a lot of these games are fun, but not from this feature.
Yeah, this is usually cited for games that have huge replay value. Less so for games that just grind (well, their manufacturers might claim it, but not reviewers).

Civilization, for instance, actually has literally hundreds of hours logged on my Steam account, and is still a ton of fun, a decade later (mostly have played civ 2 and 3, despite being fully aware other vaguely fun versions being available newer)

Dwarf fortress being another example...

Also many games get crafting partially right. Minecraft does a pretty good job --- NOT the part of the game they CALL "crafting," but rather the redstone and pistons, etc. system. The various mods like redpower that extend these do far better still. The key to crafting being tons of fun is giving lots of small components that can interact in ways far beyond anything the designers originally intended or thought of.



Magic the Gathering is also a game that does crafting really well - deck crafting that is. Not part of the listed rules, but still half of actually playign the game, and it essentially creates an excellent, crafty, components-in-infinite-meaningful-combos situation.
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Cthulhu

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #3 on: June 20, 2014, 12:52:19 am »

The word "retro" makes me want to throw up.  Retro graphics, retro 4bit indie pixelfuck garbage.  I can't draw or afford an artist so I'll just do shitty pixel art and call it retro.

Going along with crafting, multiplayer survival games.  Survival games in general.  It has to do something pretty intense (The Forest, for example) to make me care.

A little to the side of the topic, but getting excited about games in general has soured for me.  I used to get so excited about upcoming games, I'd watch the trailers and dream about playing, but nowadays I feel like I'm saturated with it.  If I'm reading about a game and I see the word "kickstarter" I immediately forget that the game exists.  If it comes out and it's good, great.  Until then I'm no longer mentally capable of giving a shit.
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MoLAoS

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #4 on: June 20, 2014, 12:52:51 am »

Well, what else do you expect from crafting? How would you design it to avoid some sort of skilling up? You know what takes a lot of grinding? Art. Actual blacksmithing. Computer programming. Music. Anything crafty or artsy is grindy as shit irl.

How are you going to simulate crafting in games? Crafting is something that very few people do in real life because its hard to do and not fun. You have to have that drive to push through the massive tedium while making nothing but shit for years. I think you love the IDEA of crafting, to paraphrase my japanese teacher, but you don't actually enjoy creativity.

Do you imagine that's its possible to strip out the tedium of experimentation?

Perhaps you could explain what you thought crafting would be like, so it would be possible to figure out if what you imagined could be replicated or if its just an impossible fantasy. Not mechanics, but the abstract experience of crafting that you see in your mind.
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miauw62

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #5 on: June 20, 2014, 01:04:40 am »

Tools breaking. I considered this to be one of the most amazing features of minecraft back in the day :v
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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #6 on: June 20, 2014, 01:06:30 am »

Tools breaking. I considered this to be one of the most amazing features of minecraft back in the day :v

And yet it adds nothing but annoyance even then, right? Axe breaks... carry another or make a new one. So you've gone through or are going through the same crafting process over and over again for... some.... reason I guess?
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And then, they will be weaponized. Like everything in this game, from kittens to babies, everything is a potential device of murder.
So if baseless speculation is all we have, we might as well treat it like fact.

GavJ

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #7 on: June 20, 2014, 01:16:29 am »


Quote
Perhaps you could explain what you thought crafting would be like, so it would be possible to figure out if what you imagined could be replicated or if its just an impossible fantasy. Not mechanics, but the abstract experience of crafting that you see in your mind.
Dunno about his preferences, but personally, I expect it to allow you to actually make meaningful unique things. YES, this may be after tons of tedious practicing to get good at it. That's fine. But this is necessary for a crafting system. Not purely following proscribed recipes. That's "manufacturing"

Some games allow real crafting, most don't, in the sense defined above IMO
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

Cthulhu

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #8 on: June 20, 2014, 01:18:44 am »

I think it's possible to do interesting things with crafting.  In The Witcher there's an alchemist who suggests the best way to learn new formulae for alchemy is to discover them yourself by experimenting with the formulae you already have.  I haven't done much with it since I don't really have the materials to sit down and experiment, but I think a seriously experimental crafting method would be interesting.

Not like mashing things together randomly, but something you could experiment empirically and derive conclusions with actual practical implications.

Like, you mix X and Y together to create a potion that lets you see in the dark.  You can mix X and Z to create a poison that blinds the enemy.  You make a note that X seems to involve vision, and using other ingredients with proven or postulated effects, you can create a new potion with a predictable effect.

That kind of thing.
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WillowLuman

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #9 on: June 20, 2014, 01:19:20 am »

Well, what else do you expect from crafting? How would you design it to avoid some sort of skilling up? You know what takes a lot of grinding? Art. Actual blacksmithing. Computer programming. Music. Anything crafty or artsy is grindy as shit irl.

How are you going to simulate crafting in games? Crafting is something that very few people do in real life because its hard to do and not fun. You have to have that drive to push through the massive tedium while making nothing but shit for years. I think you love the IDEA of crafting, to paraphrase my japanese teacher, but you don't actually enjoy creativity.

Do you imagine that's its possible to strip out the tedium of experimentation?

Perhaps you could explain what you thought crafting would be like, so it would be possible to figure out if what you imagined could be replicated or if its just an impossible fantasy. Not mechanics, but the abstract experience of crafting that you see in your mind.
But in a GAME, the way it's done is kind of a copout, ESPECIALLY when arbitrary character skills are involved. It's not about creativity in games like in real crafting, you're usually making a pre-determined item from a pre-determined recipe, as if you were working on an assembly line. You're not actually practicing a skill involved in assembling stuff, at best you're raising a number representing your character's skill in doing that stuff. The problem is it's not about YOUR skill in the art, but a digital construct's.

The actual building of games like Minecraft is where it approaches real creative skill. The stuff you build and set up is crap at first, but improves as you practice, until you become more competent at expressing yourself through the medium.

As for games with item crafting that let you feel like you're actually making your own stuff instead of being an unskilled factory worker, the best I've seen have been Skyrim and NWN, with NWN being better. In Skyrim, if you have both Enchanting and Smithing, you can make your gear from scratch, name it, and fine-tune its various magical properties. In Neverwinter Nights, you can do all that (depending on the module), plus actually customize your gear's appearance.
« Last Edit: June 20, 2014, 01:39:29 am by HugoLuman »
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GavJ

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #10 on: June 20, 2014, 01:21:46 am »

Quote
Not like mashing things together randomly, but something you could experiment empirically and derive conclusions with actual practical implications.
This is a gray area in my opinion. If there are still a limited number of outcomes that have been vetted by the programmer, then it's not actually very crafty feeling, even if they're hidden from you at first and require experimenting.

Minecraft is definitely the quintessential crafty game. Again, not at all for its "crafting" system, but for everything else EXCEPT it's crafting system. Building and redstone and blah blah.
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Cauliflower Labs – Geologically realistic world generator devblog

Dwarf fortress in 50 words: You start with seven alcoholic, manic-depressive dwarves. You build a fortress in the wilderness where EVERYTHING tries to kill you, including your own dwarves. Usually, your chief imports are immigrants, beer, and optimism. Your chief exports are misery, limestone violins, forest fires, elf tallow soap, and carved kitten bone.

scrdest

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #11 on: June 20, 2014, 01:30:26 am »

Well, what else do you expect from crafting? How would you design it to avoid some sort of skilling up? You know what takes a lot of grinding? Art. Actual blacksmithing. Computer programming. Music. Anything crafty or artsy is grindy as shit irl.

How are you going to simulate crafting in games? Crafting is something that very few people do in real life because its hard to do and not fun. You have to have that drive to push through the massive tedium while making nothing but shit for years. I think you love the IDEA of crafting, to paraphrase my japanese teacher, but you don't actually enjoy creativity.

Do you imagine that's its possible to strip out the tedium of experimentation?

Perhaps you could explain what you thought crafting would be like, so it would be possible to figure out if what you imagined could be replicated or if its just an impossible fantasy. Not mechanics, but the abstract experience of crafting that you see in your mind.

The thing is, the tedium is very much NOT in the experimentation. To the contrary, the tedium is in gamey crafting being extremely... linear? and being so far removed from creativity, innovation and uniqueness that it might very well approach it from the opposite side. Like others mentioned, take Minecraft - the actual creativity begins ONCE you already have shit crafted and start doing Stuff with them.

You brought up music - funny, I'm actually pretty seriously into learning not only my instrument but also how music itself works - and guess what, the only actual tedium? Physical exercises, and from my experiences you can learn all the skills naturally by playing stuff that is only slightly above your level (as opposed to being way above it, or on par, because then you don't learn shit).
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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #12 on: June 20, 2014, 01:37:34 am »

.
« Last Edit: March 26, 2018, 03:12:36 pm by Vector »
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MoLAoS

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #13 on: June 20, 2014, 02:15:44 am »

Well, what else do you expect from crafting? How would you design it to avoid some sort of skilling up? You know what takes a lot of grinding? Art. Actual blacksmithing. Computer programming. Music. Anything crafty or artsy is grindy as shit irl.

How are you going to simulate crafting in games? Crafting is something that very few people do in real life because its hard to do and not fun. You have to have that drive to push through the massive tedium while making nothing but shit for years. I think you love the IDEA of crafting, to paraphrase my japanese teacher, but you don't actually enjoy creativity.

Do you imagine that's its possible to strip out the tedium of experimentation?

Perhaps you could explain what you thought crafting would be like, so it would be possible to figure out if what you imagined could be replicated or if its just an impossible fantasy. Not mechanics, but the abstract experience of crafting that you see in your mind.

The thing is, the tedium is very much NOT in the experimentation. To the contrary, the tedium is in gamey crafting being extremely... linear? and being so far removed from creativity, innovation and uniqueness that it might very well approach it from the opposite side. Like others mentioned, take Minecraft - the actual creativity begins ONCE you already have shit crafted and start doing Stuff with them.

You brought up music - funny, I'm actually pretty seriously into learning not only my instrument but also how music itself works - and guess what, the only actual tedium? Physical exercises, and from my experiences you can learn all the skills naturally by playing stuff that is only slightly above your level (as opposed to being way above it, or on par, because then you don't learn shit).

Art is a little different than craft, although I stand by my claim. You improve in craft by making the same shit over and over until you do it right, until your muscle memory can feel that its done right before you finish. This is completely impossible in video games. They can't model physical laws like that. Well, they can but that costs serious money to make a game that way.

People complain a lot about RPGs, which most MMOs are, being all about the character's skill and not yours. Like no shit guys, do you not understand the definition of RPG? Role playing, pretending to be something YOU aren't doing things YOU can't.

There are a lot of things a game would need to be like real life in crafting. First you would require some sort of physical interaction. Even if you have a game with hidden recipes people set up stupid fudging wikis and spill all the deets, ruining the exploration aspect. This is the curse of knowledge. Its too easy to pass around digitally. So you need to force people to do something complex in the moment. Something dynamic. And then you hit the reason roleplay works like it does. Most people will never under any circumstances be able to do top tier stuff. No matter how hard they try. Success will depend on your inborn and enviromentally given traits and development. The whole point of abstract roleplay is that your physical real life limitations don't apply. Be they mental or body based limitations.

This ties into the story of video games as a whole. The video games of years past never broke into the mainstream for the most part. The video games the majority plays are nothing like the games I played or imagined as a child. Similarly, a video game that involves complex mental tasks like involving math or reading or memorization will never be popular. I would be incredible at such a game. But I would be the prince of nothing. I was a master of Tactics Arena Online and of Warring Factions but no one gave a shit. Unlike the approbation of friends when you rule at games that plebs actually enjoy like shooters. And its not about my vanity. Its about money. Games involving mentally complex tasks lack accessibility and thus a user base to make it worth developing them.

MMOs require serious bank to be made.

Aside from the difficulty of making a game that couldn't be fucked over by a wiki detailing how to win at life, we have the trouble of content. Hand crafted crafting of substantial depth would take shit tons of time and money. And procedural crafting would be incredibly unbalanced in a multiplayer game. And further it would require an entire sandbox world, you can't make story based games when the designer has no way to match your power level to the difficulty level of the content.

Look at even mildly sandbox games like EU4. The devs are constantly shitting on the sandbox because a few people, including me, can exploit the crap out of it. I've caused rule rewrites for entire text based games and I'm not even on the level of dedication that a DDRJake brings to the game of bending reality, or virtual reality/fantasy I guess, to his whim.

I spent a long time developing an MMO concept that could throw down against wikis and control min-maxing to an acceptable way, and for clarity, you can still min-max like a beast. I got some pretty good responses to it, too, even though it was explicitly just mental masturbation and not an actual product in development. And even though I spent years before and after the year I really got into it on my ideas for ideal MMOs I couldn't dodge the grind. Aside from perhaps my potion making system.

You would fight a dragon at high cost to get a sample and do experiments, combined with your knowledge of herbs, and magic, because magic was intimately woven into crafting in a way no current game does, to derive more and more effective poisons to make bringing down dragons much easier. For instance for one dragon you had to figure out a metal particle that would bond to their blood, sorta like how hemoglobin carries oxygen, and connect it with an anti magic material to break down their natural poison resistance and then apply poisons that could deal with their specific biology. It implemented a slightly simplified version of real life organic chemistry to create and describe reactions. And even with that, my crafting feature masterpiece, I still only managed to solve 70% of the issues I have with crafting in games, much less solving the issues other people had that didn't bug me.

I even had some working, but text based, systems written in C++. I couldn't imagine writing an actual GUI that could handle the dynamism of that emergent system though. Did I mention it generated the rules dynamically? And without a database or debugging tools of much note I actually didn't know myself what would kill the example dragon I caused to come into, again text based, existence.

And I'm sure with time some jerk who is even smarter than me could develop a pattern to predict things, give it out on a wiki, and cause my elegant magnum opus to crumble into dull tedium yet again, defeating the entire goal of the system. And in every game some altruistic shitlord will figure out and wiki your stuff for the masses.
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Mech#4

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Re: Game Features that used to excite you, but make you Groan now
« Reply #14 on: June 20, 2014, 02:29:00 am »

I think, with sandbox games, what I dislike now I've played a variety of them is the lapse in personal details that they can have. I find great enjoyment in discovering small, out of the way areas designed by someone for little purpose other than just being there. One fond memory I have of Morrowind is levitating inside large caves to find caches of chests hidden on small outcrops, possibly with a skeleton nearby which puts forward a mini story (Did this person levitate up there but didn't have a way to get back down again?).

It's important to know when to include something like an open world. "Two Worlds 2" has got an interesting design and nice engine, but the open world nature of the game isn't really to it's benefit because it lacks the density of small details resulting in not much reason to explore off the beaten path.

But, this is something which I think comes and goes. Companies latch onto a new concept, all games must have this or fail. Later on, after a number of games with the feature have not succeeded there's more branching out until the next "must have" feature appears. Like 3D and adventure games, or turned based and strategy at the moment, or vehicles and 1st person shooters 6-8 years ago.
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