I strongly dislike ingame teleporting and pause menu quick travel. I’d much rather the game have more ways for me to get to where I’m going than simply materializing wherever I want to be.
Let the travel itself be part of the game instead of just a way to link the “real” parts of the game together. Make it fun and fast to move around, add unlockable shortcuts, add more in-universe traveling options. Let me get to where I’m going myself instead of doing it for me, and make it fun to do so.
Especially in open world games, not only is this the most true, but they’re the worst offenders. Literally what is the point of making an open world and then letting people skip it? You see everything once and that’s it. If you make an open world full of opportunities to wander and explore, and then players want to avoid it as much as possible via teleportation, you have failed as a designer.
Time is limited. I don’t want to spend 30 minutes traveling from one side of a map to the next if I’ve already done that 15 times. Just let me get there immediately so I can talk to this single person and get this item I will never use.
I’m honestly fine with traveling if it’s interesting. That’s what I disliked most about red dead 2 was even with the beautiful landscape and soundtrack and the random encounters, pretty much every one of your 50 trips to [insert nearby settlement] within a given chapter are going to be exactly the same, and you can’t go very fast because you’re on a horse.
I’m pretty sure Death Stranding didn’t have fast travel, and I think it worked quite well there. Part of the challenge is to learn the best route between the stations, so it’s well incorporated into the gameplay. There’s barely any enemies on your way either, and those that exist are easily avoidable.
Traveling in Death Stranding is the game though. Enemies are only one part of the challenge; there's also terrain and how much cargo you can carry on the way, even if you've taken that route before.
I found Death Stranding to be a game that, even though it has combat in it, it's a solid demonstration of how many different types of mechanics we could be building a game around besides combat, even with a story and high production value.
I would go as far as to say that the combat is the weakest part of the gameplay. I did not enjoy the boss battles and had to turn down the difficulty for them.
I guess the combat was the weakest part, but it composes such a small part of the game that it made plenty of sense. From that perspective, I found it weird that it had any boss battles at all.
Games that give you rapid and fun ways to travel have been ones that I've actually not found tedious to get from point a to point b. Methods I've like have been blink (teleporting short distances), grapple hook, super speed, flying, etc.
But, just old fashioned running or driving gets stale fast.
I am really conflicted on this, and I think there needs to be some balance or cost/reward. I mostly agree though.
An example I often use about this is in MMOs. WoW felt like a huge world, especially back in vanilla. You could fly end to end and never hit a loading screen, it felt awesome. If you gave me a map of Azeroth and asked me to label all the zones, I probably could. It’s moved a bit more to people teleporting place to place, but I still can fly end to end of a continent.
On the other hand, FFXIV is a series of maps with loading zones between all of them (a necessity because of the older console architecture, I understand) and teleports in every town. You never actually go end to end of Eorzea. If you gave me a map of Eorzea and asked me to label only the three majors cities on it, I doubt I could. It is definitely convenient to just be able to warp around place to place for a trivial amount of currency.
It takes a lot out of the feeling of “world” to just have a bunch of arbitrary areas, I admit. It’s a tough balancing act between player convenience and player immersion.
Yeah, FFXIV makes is super convenient to revisit a place once you've already been there via the aetheryte, meaning you're probably not going to visit it on foot more than a few times. This means you don't really make that connection between zones (or at least, I didn't) and thus don't really view it as an interconnected world (the loading areas between each zone doesn't really help).
I'm struggling to give proper credit to WoW because I'm not sure if its the staggering amount of time I played the game, the time of my life when I played the game (younger brain retaining knowledge better?), or the seamless transition between zones which lends it to sticking in my memory so hard as a 'real, interconnected world'... probably a combination of the three, if we're being honest.
I think MMOs need fast travel because sometimes you just want to meet your friends in X dungeon and all the scenic travel is just an obstacle to that. There shouldn't be barriers to the social aspect of these games. MMOs have more than enough padding already, if people want the immersive experience they can choose to do that on their own.
Or puzzles that are completely esoteric or unintuitive. Just replayed some of the Myst games, and it’s like “oh ok I was stuck on this for 30min because the lever was on the other side of the map and there was literally no indication that it was related”. That’s just artificially inflating your game’s difficulty, and it’s lazy puzzle making. Boooo
Do you have thoughts on the WadjetEye games? I’ve found a few of them quite engaging, particularly the later Blackwell games though I’ve heard good things of Unavowed.
Action sports games like Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, 1080, Wave Race, Steep, and more. I mentioned Steep because it’s the latest mainstream attempt but I feel like it never really found it’s footing.
The junction system in Final Fantasy VIII. The magic system is based on the amount of spells you have left in an inventory and you can also equip them to your character’s stats. If you don’t take the time to acquaint yourself with the system your stats will take a dive because you’re casting spells like in a more traditional game. The upside to this is if you hoard enough spells and equip them to the right stats you can be unstoppable since early game.
Hate: disproportionately excessive penalties for falls (usually found in platformers).
If you get shot in the face by an enemy, you lose your shield, lose a life, whatever. In a bad platformer, if you don’t time a difficult jump exactly right, you lose a life, lose everything in your inventory, get sent back to the very beginning of the level, get audited, and have to mow the developers lawn for an entire summer.
Platformers are “guilty until proven innocent” - I won’t play one until I know it won’t destroy my will to live.
I honestly can’t even remember the one that first set me off. It’s been a while. I just remember realizing that gravity was more punishing than any of the enemies, and thinking “oh, to hell with this.”
For platformers, maybe. But for certain genres – like battle royale – the risk of losing it all after one mistake is part of the thrill. It all depends on the game.
The tribes series, or z-axis games, where you are able to move up and down as well as the traditional x-y movement you see in virtually all games. Usually set as shooters, they are fast paced movement games that have a huge skill curve which is why they aren't made that often. Super fun when you get the hang of it though
See you found a solution but I’m still curious how you had this problem. There were very few enemies that I felt had a health pool wildly too large and it was usually as a result of the enemy upscaling feature rather than death March. Those two enemies begin the Djinn and a certain swordsman fight from the DLC.
I had to consistently play with upscaling on because the enemies were generally too squishy and I was killing them so fast the challenge of death March was wasn’t completely unnoticeable.
I wonder if it was your build or perhaps some other aspect of your gameplay that made this happen?
I see this weird Death March thing everywhere. I replayed through recently on the easiest setting (story and sword, I think its called?) and had a GREAT time.
If you ever feel the urge, I can’t recommend it enough. The first couple hours of playing are like an extended tutorial. The entirety of White Orchid is a learning zone, really.
As everyone says, once you reach the Bloody Baron quest, you see just how amazing the game and the writing can be!
bin.pol.social
Aktywne