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 agree in that regard. It’s more story tension rather than action or shootouts. The downtime doesn’t feel like downtime to me but instead character-building. In the next parts of the game immediately something happens to that character. So they build the character up just to get you invested so when something happens it feels like it went to shit but it’s a constant rushed pace. I didn’t engage in the hunting or fishing more than what the story required as much as I am into the robbery and stuff that mainly comes from the missions but the missions bring this character drama that while really good, is too much at times.
Absolutely how I felt. It’s heavy on the randomness and I’ve never beat it despite doing very well on some runs. I think the important thing about FTL is that it’s about the journey. The ending is always depressing.
In some cases, yes, they are trying to keep the wheel running and make the player less likely to quit by using psychology. Valve is very famous for deploying psychology in their games. Specifically DOTA and CSGO. But a lot of the time the design intent is innocent. In Super Meat Boy the intent was clearly and well stated that they didn’t want the player to blame the game and to keep them trying again as quickly as possible. If you are going to make a tough platformer then it’s clearly a good design choice to allow players to keep trying as fast as possible. With Alien Isolation, again the design intent is innocent as they are just looking to add tension and give the player some sense of relief from that tension. Most media follows a flow of tension then drops to relief a bit, then tension. If you keep the reader/player/viewer/etc tense all the time then they become dull to it. Frankly, it’s why I haven’t gone back into Red Dead 2 for about a week. The game has just mounted tension over and over again without a break to just be a cowboy. Always something to do and something to prepare for.
In some ways, yes, limited inventories are to prevent the player from making the wrong choice but it is also a point to ask the player do you take X or Y, and having a choice between those two options makes the player choose a playstyle. Of course, you can absolutely still do this without a limited inventory. Deus Ex does it right at the start of the game where Paul runs up to you and gives you 3 weapon options and straight up asks how are you going to play this game. That said it’s supposed to be a reminder, a constant active choice, on what the player is picking for their playstyle. That said…
Honestly, you’ve kind of swayed me more into wanting unlimited inventories. You are right, limited inventories seem to be a design crutch used by a lot of games that don’t think of their whole ramification and more important the actions needed during other gameplay to justify a limited inventory. I will say I do think certain games make a lot of sense to have limited inventories but I would really like to see designers move away from limited inventories to allow more player freedom. I could see taking Doom 2016’s style of driving players toward getting more resources while keeping inventories unlimited (and not putting you in a gameplay-breaking cutscene).
Unlimited inventories certainly work really well for the latest Hitman series which kind of shows that it could have worked for Deus Ex. In fact, in the first half of the Deus Ex, you work for UNATCO and could just let players collect a bunch of crap and then have them turn it into the evidence locker or whatnot. The design choice to simply limit your inventory can be seen as almost lazy nowadays because it means no one is thinking of what happens if you don’t have a limited inventory. It’s certainly given me a lot to think about on how I’d build or design a game without the inventory limitations.
That’s fair, you can certainly like the multiple saves and more user control. Personally, I feel like it boils down to what type of game I am playing. If I am playing a large RPG then yes, auto-save multiple times and let me have a ton of user control. if I am playing a roguelike in which a run will be over in 15 minutes, I don’t mind not having any control over my saves because I don’t care about an individual run most of the time. If I do, I spend the extra 5 minutes and finish up the run. For something like Just Cause or RDR2, I feel like their general save system is fine enough and gives a good cinematic feeling which outweighs any time I spend getting back to whatever I was trying to do. Which is typically just a few steps away from what I found.
That said I’m probably diving too deep into this stuff. I develop games for a living so I am constantly thinking about the best system for the game. I don’t think every game would be better if it had a multiple-save slot auto-save system. I can understand why it’s not in scope or would hurt the experience. If Alien Isolation had just saved where ever you are, that game wouldn’t have been as intense as it was. It’d ruin the game.
It’s fine to like the system, it works well for a lot of games but maybe it’s not a one-size fits all solution?
Eh, that’s honestly not a great solution. It’s a bandaid workaround. Getting better detection on when to auto-save or auto-saving at known good times is a lot better. The multiple auto-save solution is a good fallback but not the definitive answer. You could also just make the player invincible for 1-2 seconds after a save load and then also cast their position to the navmesh to make sure you save them in a place that they aren’t going to immediately fall to their death or out of the map. A lot of open-world games now just restart your character entirely leaning up against a building in the world or camping or whatever. Making it feel like the player character has their own agency and actions while you just play them for a while.
It’s also a compounding issue, that’s just one of the technical issues over many. In the end, it really depends on the type of game you are building. Every game is released incomplete, even the biggest masterpiece, the developers wanted to do something more. So you balance the technical issues between saving the real-time states or just saving off some simple data like you were at this mission in this area, with this inventory, with these player stats. Even that is a lot to keep track of and test. To then add stuff like AI states, active combat, randomization data, etc. I understand why a lot of roguelikes don’t save most of the active game data. After all, developing games is very hard and the save system is not a high priority to the general experience of the game.
Either the developers hit technical limitations of their save system and couldn’t reliably restart everything. I feel like RDR2 did this because most of their missions were very specific scripted sequences that needed to be kept on track from the start. A lot of roguelikes are unable to save during a run or within a node of that run. For example Peglin and Void Bastards. It’s much easier to say what node or position the player is at than all the AI states, combat, etc. Additionally, automatic saving has always been difficult. Everyone knows the whole “the game auto-saved and now I die instantly over and over again” bug that happens in any game. The way to negate this is to use checkpoints with areas where you know the player isn’t going to get attacked. Another way is to try to detect when you are in combat or not but this can lead to the game never saving. Overall it’s much easier to just save a state that you know the player will be okay to start back up in.
Or the designers felt like it added something to the game like in Alien Isolation. Save points allow you to exit and designers are trying to focus on keeping players playing. So save points are also an exit point. When you allow the player to save, you allow the player to exit without feeling like they must continue going. Designers use this to try to keep their games more engaging. Super Meat Boy removed a few exit points from typical platformers in order to make the game faster. A lot of games try to be so easy to keep playing that they make it hard to stop. In some ways, this can be seen as a dark pattern in game design. Typically though, designers aren’t trying to be nefarious but instead trying to keep the game engaging.
I don’t know if I would call FTL a process optimization game. One thing I feel like it’s missing is feedback if your process is being optimized or if you just got lucky. With Rimworld, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and Factorio all include metrics that allow you to judge if you’ve made your process better but because of FTLs randomness, it’s hard to determine if you played better or just had better rolls. That said I love FTL and it’s an amazing game.
I don’t agree wholeheartedly but I see your point and agree that some games benefit from unlimited inventory. How do you feel about inventory systems that are half-unlimited? E.g. You can pick up everything but it limits you on the max amount of ammo and items. Like Doom.
Realistically, if you have unlimited inventory is there any reason you wouldn’t take an item if it had no drawbacks? I mean without the choice being forced, it’s not really a choice. The player is just going to collect the thing 99% of the time. That’s just human nature. The limited inventory systems are supposed to make you question why you are picking up something. It works for the majority of players out there which is why a lot of games implement limited inventory systems. Games like Doom, and Half-Life. They don’t have a limited inventory system because the player should collect everything they can and it’s only limited by max values so they can make encounters that force you to collect things as you fight. This also forces a player choice on if they should switch weapons or run in for ammo. It gives player motivation in the moment and Doom 2016 used this brilliantly by remembering why ammo limitations exist in the first place.
I do feel like Deus Ex’s limited inventory system benefits it directly as while you get to choose a playstyle, you aren’t ever locked in by it. You can just drop your stealth stuff and start collecting weapons. The thing that locks you into a playstyle in Deus Ex is actually the skill system in which you can’t shoot a weapon accurately if you didn’t put points into it. The augmentation system does this as well. In many games with limited inventory, they are accompanied by a skill system that locks you into your previous choices. Even the Fallout series never went away from the whole giving you skill points and having you guess which playstyle you want. I’d say it’s less the inventory system limiting you from choices rather than your skills.
Skyrim is a tricky one because if you want to switch playstyles you need to then have a 90s-style montage where you learn a bunch of archery or spells, except there are no cuts in real life. The montage takes hours as you just do something over and over again to level up a skill that potentially should have just been raised up as you went. It trades time investment for switching playstyles. Skyrim also though, has a limited inventory system. Do you feel like Skyrim’s inventory system actually limits you? For me, I feel like Skyrim’s inventory is big enough to hold everything I could possibly want to take into an encounter and still have room for loot. The only limit is how much loot can I bring back.
Lastly, if the player is going to optimize the fun out of the game and play an OP playstyle the response should be “So what?” the argument against this is simple. They are going to play your game for 5 minutes, say it’s boring and easy, leave a negative Steam review, your game will fall into the mostly negative category, you’ll not make enough to pay back your publisher, you’ll have to close down your studio and live in a box on the side of the road. Like, realistically if the majority of players are going to optimize the fun out of a game then the game isn’t fun or entertaining for the majority of those who will play it. Alternatively though, just put in some cheats that give you unlimited inventory and let the rare players that absolutely hate limited inventory just cheat. That method works for a lot of games.
That said I also agree a lot of games just do what their inspirations do without questioning why they were put there or what they add to the game. I could see a lot of games that could potentially play differently without a limited inventory system. I know I played a lot of Fallout and Skyrim just cheating myself a bigger inventory. I honestly don’t love inventory management at all. A lot of the early to mid-90s games didn’t have limited inventory and in some regards, it made them better. I see a strong reason for it but I also see how limited inventory systems simply make a game more engaging. Heat Signature is an interesting one that is limited on the number of inventory slots. It really makes the player choose how they will approach a mission with the information provided which tells you almost everything you’ll encounter. A limited inventory in that game also keeps you looking around for new items that you can teleport right into your hand. So you are constantly able to adjust on the fly and improvise.
I’m a game developer and honestly, you are kind of right. It makes the game more fun to be able to haul around things infinitely. A lot of game developers put in cheats specifically so they can either just spawn what they need or carry everything or both. That said, it also ruins the game incredibly well after 2 minutes of you dicking around and having fun with every item without issue.
Overall the basic issue is twofold. One, if you let the player carry everything, then some players are going to look and dig through levels to find everything. Two, Some players won’t do this so you need to stock your levels with enough obvious items to keep the players who don’t explore stocked enough to keep playing. If you do that then the items the exploration players are looking for are just either overpowering them or not giving them any benefits like collectibles. There is a middle ground to this and make exploration reward items different playstyles. Like in Deus Ex, a lot of exploration bonus items are stealth based. Meaning if you want to do a stealth playthrough you’ll be exploring a lot and thus you’ll find less ammo which is on guards or in the middle of guarded areas and you’ll find more hack tools and lockpicks.
So problem solved right? But wait… Deus Ex’s inventory is… exactly like REs. Why? Because the issue above was the basic issue of why to even include inventory. Now we bring in what it adds to the game. Player choice and agency. As the player, you get to pick your own path. In any game with an inventory, you are going to get to pick which things you keep and which you don’t. This means you have to actively make choices according to your playstyle. In Deus Ex the question boils down to, do you take the big fuck off GEP gun or do you keep your inventory lean for lockpicks, pistols, SMGs, shotguns, and assault rifles so you can use whatever ammo you come across. In the first Deus Ex, ammo is very scarce. Thus having room for ammo and the tools to use it is very important. a GEP gun only really works on 4-6 enemies and the ammo is huge as well as the gun. Taking up around a third of the inventory, maybe more, depending on if you get inventory upgrades. This is an active playstyle choice.
Some games are simply built around inventory management, likewise, some games are built around unlimited inventory. The latest Hitman (2016-2021) series allows unlimited inventory and you can certainly build around it. The issue with Hitman is that you lose all of your inventory every time the mission ends then you can only bring select things into a mission to keep your inventory slim. It still rewards the player for exploration because now you know another path through the mission which potentially gets you another item or in a place you didn’t know you could get without the right outfit. Because the missions are replayable the information you gain in one playthrough helps the next. Knowledge of that item existing in that location is enough of a reward.
@Pseu mentioned that survival games need inventory management. I pose they don’t. Crashlands is a survival game without inventory management and doesn’t even have an inventory screen for better or worse. Inventory management, as far as I am aware, isn’t a requirement of any genre. If it is then someone out there is going to try to make a game to remove it. There are also games that are solely inventory management like Save Room - Organization Puzzle. There are types of people who like inventory management and those who don’t.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk! I hope this was helpful and interesting.
I’m not saying that they can’t criticize. I’m saying it’s still a studio that I would say knows what it’s doing more so than a studio that is going to lay off a bunch of people just because the project they were working on ended. You’ve been in the industry for 15 years, how many times have you been laid off at the end of a project at a well-formed studio? In my experience, it rarely happens. If you have a good team you don’t break it up willingly.
That’s all I said. It doesn’t make business sense to do so and CDPR and any well-put-together studio knows this. Any business knows this. To say that “Well, it’s CDPR thus they are going to make stupid mistakes that a novice indie team would make” is silly and not seated in reality.
If that’s the case, it’s not the norm. Most studios do not lay people off every release. They get them working on another project immediately. Typically a project starts up as the game is wrapping up for release then people switch gradually.