Having well placed saved points and QOL features is absolutely amazing. I'm not interested in spending 10-15m running back / repeating myself just because the save progression system is rubbish. A lot more developers are more respectful of your time in that regard so it's a great improvement
I feel save points themselves are becoming an increasingly archaic design choice. Just let us save anywhere, especially in a single player game. I think most people are just suspending games without expressly saving most of the time.
Having a character of one main class and a secondary class that could be switched at any time between any of the 9 classes.
8-slot skillbar with one heroic skill that could only come from your main class.
400+ total skills in the game.
Plenty of room for you to make your own homebrew builds, and some classic builds that were outside the box:
The assassin that used a staff (assacaster), the ranger that used necro skills to touch people to death (touch ranger), and the 55 monk, which had almost no hp but so much healing it was hard to kill.
It will always be my MMORPG because of the character design.
If "Secret World Legends" isn't already on your radar, it might be up your alley.
Haven't played GW1, but SWL has a moveset similar to what you described.
It's set in modern day, with the premise that all myths, conspiracy theories, urban legends etc are all true - and frequently need to be contained. There are three factions: STRONGLY recommend you choose Illuminati (best faction story line by a long shot).
The investigative missions will make you feel like a moron, but in a weirdly good way. SUPER satisfying to figure them out without looking up hints online.
Not a game I hear mentioned much, but man Secret World had so many great things going for it. The best quest design in a MMO* I have ever seen, and a really unique setting too. Shame it was managed so badly, in an alternate world where TSW took off and was still getting content updates, I would be thrilled.
Honestly, it depends on how aware you are of fantasy tropes. I found the DA games to be utterly boring and predictible point for point, and I'd be sitting there going "Oh, this is where X is going to happen..." and sure enough...
If you haven't played a lot of fantasy games or read a lot of fantasy fiction, they're probably fine... I found them annoying.
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.
I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I really love Dragon Age: Inquisition. It has huge flaws, yes. Chiefly having way too much generic filler sidequesting.
Do note that you’ll need the DLC to get the most important part of the story. (Thanks EA.)
To be fair, I am not the model series fan. I gave up on Origins in the 12 hours of identical dungeon corridors underneath the dwarf city. Never played DA2. Love KotOR, Jade Empire (still holds up surprisingly well!), and Mass Effect, though.
Starting with what I dislike: collectibles (or pickup upgrades). They spread these out over the levels and I find myself scouring the map to see if i didn’t miss anything. It ruins the pacing of the game. Some examples of my recent plays that do this are the Last of Us games and the Mass Effect trilogy. If the game is build around exploring your surroundings, it’s a different story of course.
What I really like in games is character building and i love it when a character improves depending on your playstyle. A very solid example is Skyrim’s leveling system. It just feels more organic.
I hate when folks ask for this and assholes say “people will just use this to save scum, don’t cheat.” As if working adults with children should be able to dedicate a whole hour totally uninterrupted.
Also, who cares? It’s your game; play it however you like. I mean, isn’t the whole reason why people play video games is to have fun? If save scumming is your idea of fun, I say scum away.
The problem being that a lot of people don’t actually know what it is that will make them happy. Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy. Being to save the game state at any point makes a lot of games much too easy to be any fun. And while you might argue “well just don’t save all the time,” people are also bad at creating their own handicaps to increase fun.
Yes, there are exceptions to every generalization (see: OSRS Ultimate Ironman) but by and large there’s a reason why the most popular kind of games are set up the way they are.
You ever play Monopoly Go? Straight-up not fun because it’s basically impossible to lose.
Winning is good, right? Yeah, but not if it’s too easy
That’s how you feel about it, though, not an objective thing everybody feels the same about. I absolutely cheat whenever I’m finding a game too difficult, and I assure you, I’m still enjoying the game. I don’t know what people get out of what I find to be the extremely infuriating act of repeatedly failing over and over until I finally get it right, but I have not ever felt the sense of accomplishment I’m told I should feel after finally beating something I struggled with. I feel angry and like I wasted a bunch of time when I could have been enjoying something more fun.
I’m just trying to have a good time, not compete with myself or prove that I can learn just the right way and right time to hit certain button combos or whatever.
The too-easy levels of notfun are very far away from the too-hard levels of notfun.
Different games are for different styles of fun and for different people. Heck, some games are more like walk-through stories than actual games. If the game is too hard for you to enjoy, then that game just isn’t for you, that’s all. Let other people have their difficult games and find a different one to enjoy. When I played Monopoly Go and found it boringly easy, I didn’t complain that they should make it harder so I could enjoy it, I just recognized that I wasn’t the kind of player they were targeting and found something else to play.
These are subjective statements though and different people want different things. And difficulty variation can broaden the audience while not really changing the game. Sometimes I love a fight. Sometimes I want a story. Sometimes I want to couch coop with my youngest kid and he struggles with some games that he otherwise loves (looking at you Cuphead) that an easier mode would totally fix. And he absolutely loves Sonic, but the originals would be unplayable for him if not for modern saving and non permadeath. Or emulation with save states and cheat codes.
Why are you trying to convince people that if a game is too difficult or long periods between saving doesn’t work for them then it is their fault and not that of the game design. That’s a weird stance to take. If someone designed a car that was generally very nice but with the gear shift next to the passenger seat door, would you say that is just a car for people with super long arms or would you say that was a poor design choice that is going to massively limit an otherwise nice car?
This is more like you complaining that some cars don’t come with automatic transmission options. Sorry buddy, some of us like sports cars and having an automatic transmission option would devalue the very concept of what that particular car is.
I still haven’t beaten Super Mario Brothers. I’ve gotten very close, but I choked on the final Bowser multiple times. I’m not mad at Nintendo for that. I’m not even mad at myself for that. I had loads of fun playing Super Mario Brothers and being able to save would lower the value of the game.
I don’t understand why you’re insistent that all games need to cater to your desired difficulty level. Some games are made for you, some games are made for other people. Chasing the widest audience possible is how you end up with bland art, be it games, movies, social media platforms, or any other thing people enjoy.
Look, you said it yourself. Different people want different things, and what some people want is fundamentally incompatible with what you want. So, you get a different set of games than they get.
This seems to act like games and their default difficulty options are commandments carved in stone when they’re not. If I find a game to difficulty to enjoy and then find it enjoyable by cheating, that’s what I’m gonna do.
I know what will make me happy and it’s not being forced to sit for a full hour through a rogue like just because of whiny goobers complaining to the devs so they don’t implement save and quit.
Lazy UI porting between PC and console. It goes both ways - radial menus showing up in a PC game or a joystick-controlled-cursor in a console game. M+KB vs controller are not comparable input methods, so trying to manage the UI with one that was built for the other is always a massive pain in the ass.
Inventory restrictions in games that throw a LOT of shit your way. Looking at you, Bethesda. Fortunately there's usually a mod of some kind to make items weigh like 0.01 lbs, or kick your slots up to 9999 or something. Sometimes realism adds to the experience... inventory management isn't one of those times.
Sluggish controls. I want to actually enjoy the Dark Souls games SO BAD - they look beautiful, I fuckin love that dark fantasy setting... but moving and combat feel like I'm driving a school bus with boxing gloves on my hands and diving flippers on my feet. I get that the cumbersome controls are a huge part of what makes it difficult, and that the difficulty is what a lot of players are after, but personally that's not a flavor of difficulty I'll ever be able to enjoy.
Love:
Good QOL features, especially involving the topics above. Like 'Hot Deposit' certain items to all designated storages in range, or AoE loot when a bunch of foes die in a pile. The quick loot style menu from Fallout 4 is another great example. Love that stuff!
Lore. Good story writing, believable/relatable characters, ESPECIALLY the antagonists. Hitting the sweet spot there is a quick ticket to my all time favorites.
Environmental challenges, with fun ways to overcome them. When I was new to Ark, one of the biggest challenges in my first play through was getting into the super cold zones and not freezing to death. My cold weather gear didn't cut it... the solution I came up with was to tame a paracer (kind of an elephant looking dino) and build a platform on its back: and made like 6 camp fires on the platform. So the I was, trudging through an insanely cold environment on a flaming elephant, cozy as can be. As a veteran player now, there are SO much more efficient methods to solving that problem, but the experience gave a unique sense of accomplishment, which is the kind of thing that got me hooked on that game.
Escorts matching the move speed of the player. 'nuff said.
Hot take, but I actually love well implemented radial menus on PC. When games bother to reset your cursor to the centre of the circle you can just quickly flick the mouse in a certain direction to make your selection, which is faster than most other mouse menus and a lot more comfortable than trying to reach for the 9 key.
I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.
I love New Game + mechanics. I think it’s a travesty more games don’t have them.
I hate excessive collectathons or overly repetitious cutscenes or dialogue. I love TotK, but the end-of-shrine bit got old real fast; I found myself missing pre-BotW heart container hunts where they could just be in a chest somewhere. I also feel exhausted just thinking about all the Koroks; I like trying to 100% save games, and the Koroks start to feel like work after a couple hundred in total.
I like when fps weapon recoil moves the player view with the recoil, particularly if the view resets back to where the player was aiming as the recoil cooldown ends. It’s satisfying and also gives the player an odd feeling of agency because the recoil mechanic lets them play “can I control the hose?”
I think Achievements are useful if they’re tracked separately by each save game. Minecraft does this, and I find it helpful when I return to a world save after a long time because I can use the achievements I unlocked to help remind me what I was doing and resume from there instead of looking at what clues may have been left behind.
That only works, though, if the achievements resemble game progress. Some games use achievements as entirely optional bonus challenges…
Fair, but from back when I played a ton on my 360, a large number of a games’ achievements were progression-based, sometimes entirely. That being said, tracking optional challenges within the save game itself can also be helpful in some instances.
For example, if there are challenges that require you to not use special weapons at all, and then you violate the challenge requirements, it could be grayed out to signify that the player locked themselves out of anything related to completing that challenge in that playthrough.
Resident Evil 4: Remake already does this to a degree, though my thought is that it would be most helpful in long rpgs, where it may not be clear after loading where you are in story or what you have and haven’t done if the save hadn’t been touched in months.
Oh yeah, I’m not arguing against your idea. It would need to be implemented per game anyways, so the devs can decide themselves, whether they want their achievements to be suitable or not.
Having said that, maybe what you really want is a similar idea, which I saw pitched a while ago: Dynamic recaps.
Basically, the game would detect that you haven’t started it in a while, so could offer a quick rundown of the controls. And if you’re loading a save from a few months ago, it could offer a quick summary of your most recent milestones in the story / game progression.
So, yeah, pretty much your idea, but it’s not re-using achievements for that…
Hate: Tapping, quick time events, looting animations, long loading screens especially when you’re expected to die often, game taking control away from the player or excessive input latency, long NPC expositions for fetch quests.
Love: addictive gameplay loops that are borderline checklists but fun (Far Cry, Days Gone hordes, Ghost of Tsushima camps etc.), environmental impact like in Death Stranding/reactive NPCs like in Bethesda RPGs.
QTE can be done well imho, for example in Yakuza series they are rare enough to not annoy you and not THAT important but if you can hit them when they appear, it makes your hit just more powerful
Does this include cloud streamed games? I for one am still waiting for a streaming exclusive game in the vein of Elden Ring or BotW. Bonus if it’s an MMO. Imagine how much more mysterious a world could be if no one is able to datamine the binary. The only way to discover things would be players actually discovering them.
Eh. I would say that they are still mysterious and interesting if you don’t look at the information on a website saying what’s in the game or not. So yeah, I don’t really like what cloud gaming is doing. If you want to keep the mystery of a universe, have some self-control.
I’m not saying “for each player, they are able to experience a sense of wonder in a game when played in isolation”, that’s old hat. I’m saying “for all players, everyone experiences a shared sense of wonder and discovery in an artificial world they live in together”.
I’ve never played Elden Ring, yet I couldn’t help but see the community make new discoveries together. The first couple of days every post was about Margit, then a few people found the fake wall that hides an entire zone, and a month later someone has reverse engineered the levels and found a wall that takes over 1000 hits to get rid of.
When the binary is entirely hidden from the users, and the only thing the users have have access to is a window peering into the world as you want them to see it, you get to create an entire set of physical laws that is hidden from the players. Players have to work together to conduct experiments, peer review each other, compete with each other, and become experts in very narrow fields of research within your simulation. Imagine spending months as a community raising in-game funding and developing the technology to sail/fly/launch to a New World for the first time, and when you finally arrive you know you are the first set of players to ever see it, specifically as a result of your efforts.
What you’re describing is a neat little one-off escape room experience. What I’m describing is an actual world. We currently cannot do this.
While this is a cool concept, I don’t think there is a single organization with the money needed to pull it off that wouldn’t also ruin the concept with monetization features. Maybe some kind of community made game could accomplish it, similar to what the Thrive devs are doing, but the amount of consistent resources needed would be a lot.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.
I hate games that don’t give any indication of when you’re supposed to do it. They’ll give you some tutorial on it and say “right before you’re hit” but good luck figuring out if you’re doing it too late or too early.
Don’t waste my time. That’s my biggest thing in games. Death Stranding was fun but holy shit. Everything had animations. Just sooooo many. It made even the most simple tasks take so long. Why do I need to see so much when I deliver a box? Why do I need to see Sam get in a truck? It irks me so much.
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