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40oz

Modern Gameplay Handicaps

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In this thread we list things that most games have that many older games did not in order to keep their players from hating their games.

1. Regenerating Health
2. Autosaves
3. Infinite Lives
4. AI that fights on your side
5. Tutorials

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Here are some top offenders in my opinion:

1) Tutorial levels
Why even produce a game manual if you're just going to teach everything to the player in-game? What's worse, developers want to adopt the "everyone gets a star" mentality and give you an achievement for completing the tutorial. More on that later.

2) One-hit melee
I believe this is another one of the "innovations" of the Halo series. Melee weapons in FPSs used to be a last resort, or even a show of superior skills. Now, the reward for being able to get within 5 feet of your opponent is an instant (and in some cases, guaranteed) kill.

3) Achievements
These work great if they're not directly related to the completion of the game (e.g. doing 5 flips on a motorcycle in GTA, killing a million zombies in L4D). But some devs want to reward you for completing levels and finding items that are integral to the story. Like the great Chris Rock, I don't expect credit for shit that I'm SUPPOSED to do.

I have no opinion on friendly AI. It seems to me that it's a tool for immersion, feeling as if you're part of a team instead of the clicheed "one man vs. the world" setting.

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Bucket said:

1) Tutorial levels

In this case I totally disagree with you, because the people of today live in a world full of visual media and therefore (especially the younger persons) dislike to read. Also: the tutorial levels of the games I played were great: Call Of Duty 1, Half Life 1 and Silent Hunter 4.

I thought about the topic of this thread and I really cannot find a handicap modern games have in general. In the past there existed just much more great games than today...

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I find it surprising to say tutorials are a modern gameplay handicap in a Doom forum, seeing as that's what E1M1 is.

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Phml said:

I find it surprising to say tutorials are a modern gameplay handicap in a Doom forum, seeing as that's what E1M1 is.


Why is it? Because you say it is?

Deeforce said:

In this case I totally disagree with you, because the people of today live in a world full of visual media and therefore (especially the younger persons) dislike to read.


Oh I see, so I have to sit through an inane tutorial levels that could fit on one page of a manual becuase stupid kids these days have the attention span of a fruit fly..I guess that makes it right.

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Wow, modern games suck. My brother and I were discussing this recently, as we are looking to get a new playstation 3 game.

One thing that irks me is when a game doesn't come with a manual. Like soul caliber 4 did for me. Autosaves aren't that bad, but totally unnecessary and can cause save problems sometimes, especially due to shitty implementation. In all games, you have "infinite lives". It's just a matter of where you start out. And regenerating health? That sounds like something that should be a powerup, not a constant effect. Seriously, it's sounding like developers are trying to make games harder and harder, then adding in all sorts of benefits to the player to make it easier and easier. Counterporductive.

E1M1 is just an easy ass level.

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Phml said:

seeing as that's what E1M1 is

Naaahhh, I think 40oz and Bucket meant something like this where a speaker and a displayed text explains how to use the keyboard for the game and not a level were no one explains anything, but of course E1M1 is the intro level and therefore it's great for practicing and learning the movements...

Use3D said:

Oh I see, so I have to sit through an inane tutorial levels that could fit on one page of a manual becuase stupid kids these days have the attention span of a fruit fly..I guess that makes it right.

Good games have good tutorial levels, bad games have bad tutorial levels... why bother yourself when the tutorial levels are good?

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I disagree with you that any tutorial level is good. Also any tutorial level that you HAVE to pass before playing the actual game is instant fail.

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40oz said:

1. Regenerating Health
2. Autosaves
3. Infinite Lives
4. AI that fights on your side
5. Tutorials


Almost all of these were moot in the arcade game era, even on home computer conversions.

Briefly:

  1. Single collision deaths in most games/health pickups. The only arcade game that had anything close to regenerating health (Cadash's Priestess character) was very cheesy because of that.
  2. You'd be lucky to have checkpoints and lives left. Or plenty of credits.
  3. Ditto.
  4. Strictly speaking, there were a few elements here and there: special bonuses, "helpers", weapon pods etc. but they were non-intrusive and often, not all that effective. Sometimes you could just exploit the AI in order to cause collateral damage, but that's another thing. No Daikatana-like sidekicks, that's for sure.
  5. Well, even arcade games had a basic tutorial, at least some of them. And sometimes you actually needed it, if it was a new game :-p

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40oz said:

In this thread we list things that most games have that many older games did not in order to keep their players from hating their games.


Hand-holding
Bypassing of game-related thought
Days/weeks/months of playability

(could also apply to Doom wads, given how many are linear with all the stuff you need being handed to you on a plate)

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Quoting:

40oz said:

1. Regenerating Health

Yeah, it sucks. I haven't played any game with autoregen, but I can guess how it feels. I believe it only works in railshooters, where you're forced to meet enemies. That adds a positive tactical aspect to the game. But otherwise, if you can hide, I understand that it merely means you'll have to wait a lot for the life meter to grow back... not to mention that it's unrealistic unless you're Zerg or a troll.

2. Autosaves

I think voluntary game-saving like in Doom (3) is lamer.

3. Infinite Lives

Doom introduced this, hahaha!

4. AI that fights on your side

I hate this too, unless the AI is very good, or very bad that it dies -- and never to be in the middle, never standing in my way, NEVER daring to talk to me and give me orders (Quake 4).

5. Tutorials

Just what's your problem with these? Some games can be really complicated, and a tutorial there works just fine, even better if it's separate from the main gamethread! For example, Baldur's Gate 2. I swear I couldn't play the game properly before going through that tutorial. BUT: tutorials that you have to pass, and are boring at the same time, smell of bad design, and serious developers even today would consider doing something better.

Adding:

6. Regenerating mana.

Diablo 2 has it, Diablo 1 not. It's less intrusive than regenerating health, but does encourage you to do wait tactics.

7. Thief-safe item dropping.

Now that's just gay. I think Diablo 3 will make monsters drop separate visible items for each player, "in order to encourage cooperative play". What the fuck, can't we have any more fun hoarding other's objects (are they really so dumb and numb to let us take them from their reach?).

8. Bad AI

Actually, it has almost always been bad. But during all these years, nobody bothered to perfect it, probably because of the mainstream opinion that too good monster AI turns them into bots, so it's unfitting for single-player.

9. Story shoved in

Some games try too hard this, such as casual mobile games (eg block breakers), which needlessly begin with a character talking to you in a cutscene (usually static, but still pretentious). Heh.


It's remarcable that Doom 3 (2004 game) has none of the flaws that 40oz listed, except for Autosave -- which as I said is already better than voluntarily saving and feeling so powerful this way.

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Shitty manuals, like the ones with Valve games. When there is a manual with good length, even they'll be sometimes ruined. (Partial/missing information, all in cursive)

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40oz said:

1. Regenerating Health

2. Autosaves

3. Infinite Lives

4. AI that fights on your side

5. Tutorials


1 Agreed. I haven't played a game where this worked in a way I found satisfying.

2 I'm fine with them. In fact, I usually like 'em

3 Fine with that too

4 Given that the "I" part of "AI" is so lame, I have yet to find any that feel intelligent enough to be believable. As such, you find yourself wandering around with an annoying handicap that just gets in the way (or worse, you have to keep alive) and which the game would be far better off without. They don't add immersion because they are so blatantly dumb that they rip you out of any believability that they are supposed to have.

5 See 1 below

Bucket said:

1) Tutorial levels

2) One-hit melee

3) Achievements


1 Change that to unskippable Tutorial Levels and I'm with you. Nothing wrong with a tut, but a compulsory, long, slow, dull one that you have to play through even on a replay is horrible.

2 A default 1 hit melee, agreed (eg if the Doom punch was a 1 hit kill weapon it would be crap) but powered up backstabs or whatever (berserk punch) can be good.

3 Pointless for me. Required to give replay value or just some interest value to otherwise dull games to get the kiddies coming back. I'd happily see them removed from the face of the planet - even better if they were replaced with interesting games.

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Enjay said:

1 [Regenerating Health] Agreed. I haven't played a game where this worked in a way I found satisfying.

You could name Crysis 1, although I think it was an average game after all, because of the same environment all the time and mainly because of the difficulty that became too high on later levels :-P, but still not bad I think!

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Enjay said:

3 Pointless for me. Required to give replay value or just some interest value to otherwise dull games to get the kiddies coming back. I'd happily see them removed from the face of the planet - even better if they were replaced with interesting games.

Wolfenstein 3d is notorious for this, and all those contest-prize achievements were proven to be ineffective on the computer gaming medium.

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printz said:

It's remarcable that Doom 3 (2004 game) has none of the flaws that 40oz listed, except for Autosave -- which as I said is already better than voluntarily saving and feeling so powerful this way.




It's even more remarkable that despite not having any of the flaws listed here it had many others that made the game an utter failure.

Which only shows that no feature is bad by itself. It's all in the execution if the result sucks.

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Graf Zahl said:

[Doom 3...] utter failure

No, I think it is a good game, because you have the old enemies, great weapons and gore. That the game was monotonous still doesn't justify expressions such as "utter failure". Doom 3 is still Doom, because of the great enemies (my favorite one is the cacodemon [in Classic Doom and in Doom 3 :-P]!), but of course it could have been better and it should had been better.

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Why is it? Because you say it is?

I disagree with you that any tutorial level is good.


Of course, if you disregard good tutorial levels by claiming they aren't tutorials you can say no tutorial level are any good. Funny how that works.

I suppose you don't see the irony in criticizing modern gameplay handicaps while at the same time naming features as scapegoats either.

Naaahhh, I think 40oz and Bucket meant something like this where a speaker and a displayed text explains how to use the keyboard for the game and not a level were no one explains anything, but of course E1M1 is the intro level and therefore it's great for practicing and learning the movements...


That despite not having any displayed text or voiceover in E1M1 it still managed to get the job done is a testament of how good id (Romero ?) was. "Practicing and learning the movements" isn't quite what I had in mind... The level practically explained the whole game in just a few minutes. The starting point showing you height variation and light levels, the window showing a blue armor, the switch opening a secret, the slime damaging but not being too threatening, the first zombieman, the first imp on a far away ledge to show projectiles. You guys missed all that ? If you played other FPS before you even knew about Doom, I could understand it didn't make an impression or seem like new things, but at the time it was new and it was a very cleverly designed level to help players learn the way the game worked.

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40oz said:

4. AI that fights on your side

Enjay said:

4 Given that the "I" part of "AI" is so lame, I have yet to find any that feel intelligent enough to be believable. As such, you find yourself wandering around with an annoying handicap that just gets in the way (or worse, you have to keep alive) and which the game would be far better off without. They don't add immersion because they are so blatantly dumb that they rip you out of any believability that they are supposed to have.

Ah... as you all normally like to say: these statements are retarded! Just look at Call Of Duty 1, a very good game where you need the allies, because the content there is world war 2. It makes fun in Half Life 2 to play with the allies as well and don't forget about The Ultimate Torment & Torture Havoc episode.

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TheDarkArchon quoted:
Deeforce said: these statements are retarded!

TheDarkArchon also said and quoted:
Yet Deeforce goes on to say:
It makes fun in Half Life 2 to play with the allies

Hm... Half Life 2 was game of the year for a reason... I think if you don't like Half Life 2, then you don't like video games or first person shooters in general. Of course there was steam, but the game itself was perfectly made. Do you really like playing Classic Doom?

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Deeforce said:

Just look at Call Of Duty 1, a very good game where you need the allies, because the content there is world war 2.

One if the things that detracted from CoD1 for me was the required reliance and association with the AI. I got what the devs were trying to do - show me that I was part of a team, not a single man winning the war. However, I still found the AI too dumb and I often struck out on my own to do a mission leaving the AIs behind. Of course, sooner or later the game would punish me for doing so by requiring all my team to be together or something. I haven't played it (or wanted to) for years. For me it was, specifically, the AI that spoiled the game and, as a result, I don't agree that it was a very good game and would even hesitate to call it good.

By comparison, MoHAA was from roughly the same time and was, IMO, a far, far superior game. It is one that I still play. It did use AI allies but, on the whole, they added flavour to the game without getting in the way or being an essential handicap. Basically, they didn't over-reach what the AI could do by only giving the AI actors roles that were appropriate to the level of "intelligence" that they had. Primarily it was a solo shooter against the backdrop of WWII and much better than CoD as a result.

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Deeforce said:

Hm... Half Life 2 was game of the year for a reason...

Yes, hype.

Deeforce said:

I think if you don't like Half Life 2, then you don't like video games or first person shooters in general.

I love video games and especially FPSs. Half-Life2 was merely OK IMO and it got pretty damned tedious in places. It had a lot of aspects that I didn't like. I think that the thing that influenced my relatively positive view of it was that I played it after Doom3 and, by comparison, it was much better simply because Doom3 was such a disappointment.

Personally, I think that if you think that HL2 deserves all the accolades that it got, then you are the one who doesn't really like FPS games because, IMO, HL2 pretty neatly misses the point of what a FPS is all about. :P


Deeforce said:

Of course there was steam, but the game itself was perfectly made. Do you really like playing Classic Doom?

Sidestepping the Steam thing (Doomworld breathes a collective sigh of relief) HL2 most definitely was not perfectly made. It had flaws aplenty and some things that really detracted from it IMO. I really don't see how you can draw any parallels between a person liking (or not liking) HL2 and them liking Classic Doom. Remind me again, how many physics puzzles or speed boats are there in "Knee Deep in the Dead"? ;)

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Bucket said:

What's worse, developers want to adopt the "everyone gets a star" mentality and give you an achievement for completing the tutorial. More on that later.

I think it's actually a cunning ploy on their part to force the stupid kids to go through the tutorial (by the lure of this "achievement") so that they do learn how to play that game instead of clogging the official forums with pointless "how do i jmp????" threads.

On the other hand:

Deeforce said:

In this case I totally disagree with you, because the people of today live in a world full of visual media and therefore (especially the younger persons) dislike to read.

This makes me wish that there were no tutorials at all, just manuals. Without pictures. READ, GODDAMMIT! Learn to love to read, it will make you less stupid! (And you need it.)

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Deeforce said:

*stuff about HL2*


Half-Life 2's allies were most certainly not it's strong point. The only reason people don't wish death for them was because they were non-essential and, in Alyx' case in particular, took ridiculous amounts of damage.

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Deeforce said:

Do you really like playing Classic Doom?


What the hell? Do you know what site you're on?

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Enjay said:

Yes, hype.

The same thing you could say about Classic Doom being just hype... It makes no sense :-P.

Enjay said:

then you are the one who doesn't really like FPS games

I think then we should create the old term retro game Doom and not FPS game Doom, because Half Life 2 officially uses a mouse, so it is more first person than Classic Doom... [just kidding] but well: I like both games :-P! ... and here we have it: old great FPS Classic Doom and new great FPS Half Life 2... I think you all just cannot enjoy newer games, because they are just not like Classic Doom (2,5D) and it will never be released officially again, but we all have the mods, yay!

@TheDarkArchon: You like old FPS, but not new FPS.

Also: the true reason why you all don't like modern FPS like Half Life 2 is, because it isn't 2,5D anymore, but the time isn't over, because you all have the wads that come out and go here. Also: now you can add High resolution HD graphics technology to the list in this thread :-P!

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Deeforce said:

Hm... Half Life 2 was game of the year for a reason... I think if you don't like Half Life 2, then you don't like video games or first person shooters in general


Wow this is completely wrong.

Phml said:

If you played other FPS before you even knew about Doom, I could understand it didn't make an impression or seem like new things, but at the time it was new and it was a very cleverly designed level to help players learn the way the game worked.


Well I appreciate your vague attempt to 'tutorialize' e1m1, take almost any of the maps from e1 and put them in it's place and you've achieved the same effect. Perhaps better so, since those maps have keys, something your self-proclaimed tutorial map missed.

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