sulfurousacid

I'll be here when it all gets weird

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Pauline-Ragny
@Pauline-Ragny

It's incredibly depressing to me how fast some players will dismiss something because of the language used. On one level I understand it, there are game design concepts that have been overused in the past decades to the point where they didn't really have a purpose and were included because everyone else did it. Unfortunately it leads gamers to associate specific names or concepts with a notion of "objectively bad" game design. Some examples of language affecting people's opinion:


Resident Evil 4 Remake has an unnecessary crafting system now.

This is complaint is baffling to me. In a sense, the Resident Evil series has always had crafting since the first game. Only the word crafting was not used. Back on the PS1 we were combining items. Combine a green herb and a red herb to get a full heal. Combine a green herb and a blue herb to heal poison.

Now I completely understand why the word crafting sends up red flags. There's been lots of games that have these huge complex crafting systems that require you to gather tons of different materials from various sources and locations. Sometimes you have to do a minigame with randomized outcomes! It can feel very tedious depending on how it's done. To be clear, I don't actually think there's anything inherently wrong with that. Some games are entirely designed around the concept and some people enjoy doing repetitive tasks. It can be a relaxing experience. But when you see a system labelled as crafting in a game that's supposed to be fast paced and exciting, it's easy to get annoyed. That's really not what is in RE4 remake.

RE4 remake added couple new ressource items that weren't in the original: gun powder and metal scraps. You combine the gun powder with the metal scraps to get ammo. Different amounts of gun powder correspond to different ammo types. RE4 remake, just like the original, has a system that determines what items drop from enemies. Each item type has different drop rates weighted by things like how powerful the gun is but also how much of it you currently have and if you're struggling or breezing through the section. But even with this system there's always the occasional moment where you could really use some shotgun shells right now and the game won't give you any. So they added gunpowder as a flexible ammo ressource. It's a currency for bullets. It also makes the inventory slightly more involved because you have to manage these extra items that take up room. When you have too many of them, you're somewhat forced to make the strategic choice of what ammo to craft for later and there's no way in hell you're eating that fish taking half the space in your case just to free up some space.

None of this is fundamentally different than the item combining we were doing in Umbrella's wacky haunted house back in 1996. In fact, the original Resident Evil 3 had 3 different types of gunpowders you could combine in different ways to make different ammo types. I genuinely think it's really clever design and it's a shame some players dismissed it outright because the game labels it crafting.

Weapon durability in Zelda is terrible and feels bad

I've already written a post about weapon durability and I don't really want to rehash it. The gist of it is that if you dissect the mechanic at its core, it's simply a way to limit how much you can use weapons in the same way guns are limited by how much ammo you have for them. The whole game is designed around weapons breaking. If you take that away, a ton of design work has to be thrown out the window and started over.

Weirdly I never hear people complain about guns running out of ammo being bad game design despite the purpose of the mechanic being literally the same. It's a resource you have to manage.

Did you know FFXIV used to punish you for playing too much by giving you less exp after a while?

This one is so revealing of how language affects the way people feel about game mechanics.

First I have to explain Rested Exp. Numbers used here are arbitrary because I'm just trying to explain the concept without going too deep in the details. In FFXIV, when you log out of the game with your character in a safe town, you accumulate a 50% bonus to your exp gain over time. That bonus gets spent as you do tasks that reward experience. For example if you do a quest that gives you 1000 exp you'll get 1500 instead while the bonus is active. The chat log shows a +50% with the amount to emphasize it.

Back in the very early days of FFXIV however, you would get 100% exp until the rested exp ran out and then get 50% for everything until you logged out. People complained about this! It's like they're punishing us for playing the game!

Here's the trick though, the time it took to level up did not change, only the language of the mechanic. Now the game rewards you for playing in shorter regular sessions instead of punishing you for playing in very long sessions. The mechanic functions exactly the same way but people no longer complain about it because of the language used. The purpose of that mechanic is and always was to incentivize you to play at a specific pace.

(The pace at which you level up has been sped up many times since, independently of the rested exp system, to compensate for how many expansions have been released and allow new players to reach end game in a reasonable amount of time.)

You cannot cling to absolute statements when criticizing media.

Angry reviewers who shout that "weapon durability is always bad" or "crafting is boring" are, quite frankly, profoundly incurious. It shows a deep unwillingness to understand how game design works and why artistic decisions are made. Language is malleable. Context and intent matter! If you are not willing to engage with the context around these artistic decisions, if you cling to absolute statements, if you instantly stop analyzing a game mechanic solely because you labeled the idea as "bad" in your head without engaging with why it's used within its context, then I'm sorry but you might just be a shitty critic.


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in reply to @Pauline-Ragny's post:

I was pretty sure the FFXIV rested EXP thing was actually a thing WoW had done years ago. Be pretty weird if they repeated it given how much of a WoW fangame FFXIV was...