I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
I love hearing about unique takes on game mechanics. Someone recently convinced me that limited inventories are kind of abused currently and that unlimited inventory systems would give more player choices.
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.
Death Stranding is Kojima attempting to sell out by making a walking simulator and accidentally putting too much work into it.
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.
Or just let me call them on a call phone.
How do you incorporate phones in Skyrim?
They never said Skyrim.
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.
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.
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.