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From: Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Gamplay "mechanics" you don't like?
Date: Sat, 21 Dec 2024 10:20:34 -0600
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On Thu, 19 Dec 2024 08:45:23 -0800, in comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action,
Justisaur wrote: 

>Or is it just game dev decisions?
>
>Mike S. mentioned a few things in another thread, and I thought it would 
>be an interesting topic. Or at least an opportunity to rant a lot.
>
>Grinding - I'm o.k. with a little bit, especially if I can kill two 
>birds with one stone, such as in ER where I test out weapons on 
>albernaics and get souls (money/xp) at the same time.  If I have to do 
>it a lot in one spot against the same thing over and over I don't like 
>it.  Of particular mention would be something like killing silver 
>knights in DS3 for the blue sentinel's for something like 20 hours. 
>Though that's probably a bad example as I did that grind by helping kill 
>invaders along the way instead, but many people complain about it, and 
>now there's not enough people playing to do that.  If it's offline 
>without chance of getting banned I'm fine with cheating that sort of 
>thing after I've proven I can do it regularly without loosing anything 
>but time.  BL 2 had really bad drop tables, and was similar, I ended up 
>cheating to change the % rarity drops there.  I'd rather not cheat and 
>just have the devs make it reasonable.
>
I generally enjoy grinding, but I have to be in the mood. Especially
grinding for drops. It's like playing the slots. If a game has bad drops,
then I stop grinding. BL2 had that funny talking shotgun and all was
forgiven.

>Backtracking - don't like it, especially if it's a lot, a little bit is 
>o.k.  I particularly don't like where like in some of the older games 
>you'd have to go find a key to an area and go back repeatedly.
>
See below for my tales of woe.

>Open World - if there's not interesting things to do you can stumble 
>upon, and it gets repetitive boring or like driving through endless 
>fields I hate this. I feel like Fallout 3 is the only one that did this 
>fairly well.  Possibly ER as there's not a lot repetative, but it's just 
>too big, really that's the only game I've ever felt was way too big 
>long, so it doesn't deserve it's own general complaint.
>
If handcrafted, I'm fine with this. It's just when it's procedurally
generated. Then it kinda sucks. Except in the original Elite, where they
had no choice due to disk space and it seemed uber cool at the time.

[snip]

>Easily broken quests - I'm looking at you Fromsoft.  The Selvius Quest 
>for the Magic Scorpion Charm I couldn't complete on either of my 
>attempts at a mage, and ER especially with it's length and no save 
>backups (and even if it did often times being broken so far back that 
>you wouldn't want to play over 20 hours again to fix it.)
>
Let's just call this one "bugs." It's not a game mechanic, _per se_, and
they are always unwelcome. If gamestopping, they are intolerable.

[snip]

- - -

My biggest pet peeve:

ESCORT QUESTS. Omg escort quests. Keep this dumb bastard alive. Then
he/she/they charge out into enemy fire, with the worst AI and pathfinding
ever, and it becomes a chore just to manage all the aggro they're
drawing, let alone protect them. Maybe keep a low profile and _follow_,
not lead dumbass. Maybe don't get stuck jogging against that rock like
you're running a no-log macro.

What's worse? _Hidden_ escort quests. That's where you have to keep
someone alive and you don't even know it's a thing.

Most recently for me, BG3 did this. If you want to play any of the
Jaheira/Minsc material, you have to keep Jaheira alive at the battle of
Moonrise Towers. Unfortunately, she immediately wild shapes and charges
into combat like she's on a suicide mission.*

First time I played it, she died. I couldn't even find her amongst the
corpses in fact. And for some unholy reason you *can't raise NPCs,* even
important ones. If she's part of your party? Sure. Go ahead and use that
reviv scroll. But she doesn't become available to the party until _after_
this battle.

I asked a friend if I just screwed myself out of content, he said "yes."
I had to backload an old save after several more hours of play. Once I
knew, "Hey it's an escort quest; keep Jaheira alive," it was not hard to
structure the battle in a way that did so. All they had to do was make
Jaheira not permadead in that case. Instead, escort quest.


The rest of the list...

Save checkpoints instead of "save wherever you like." Thank you consoles
who needed to save as a bunch of binary flags due to storage needs.

Respawn, or at least overzealous respawn, especially if there's a lot of
travel on the map. Far Cry 2, I'm looking at you.

Game extending crap. Example: backtrack over the entire map finding
hidden items that suddenly reveal themselves in the endgame. Not worth
the hours of rehash. Metroid: Prime, step up and be recognized.**

Any dialog mechanism that isn't a dialog tree of some kind. ES4:
Oblivion, wth is this? (On that note, silent protags. It doesn't break my
immersion to not hear my own voice. It's just weird.)***

Monster closets or wave spawns. I scout for a reason folks, it's not
novel or fun to have something just show up out of thin air. Don't
neutralize sound tactics with cheese.

-- 
Zag

This is csipg.rpg - reality is off topic. ...G. Quinn ('08)
`````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
* There are whole Reddit threads about her incredible recklessness. She
has no value for her own life, and for some reason, the devs decided to
put her in with _that_ as her strat. Google "suicide Jaheira."

** I actually quit playing M:P outright because the backtracking included
non-trivial Ghost Chozo respawns every time you reentered particular
central rooms. I am not very spatially aware and had to reenter these
nexus rooms all the time, disoriented and confused. While non-trivial,
they were surefire wins, so there was no point to it other than to mess
up the player. Like spinning someone three times before they get to pin
the tail on the donkey. I probably missed a battle with Ridley. Whatever.

*** As a bonus, BG2 allowed you to make custom voice files, and I voice
acted all my character's chatter dialog, which was super kewl.