Silly Game Mechanics

[cowsmanaut]

spawing monsters.. alien Vs predator.. when playing predator and you pass over a ditch.. and there's nothing in it.. and the moment you leave, 8 aliens spawn in behind you.. WTF? and other similar examples.. oh.. and how about Doom3 where they put people behind wall panels.. what the hell was he doing in there in the first place.. choking the weasle? .. ugh.. again.. Justification.. we need it!

[beowuuf]

Peaceful mod doens't stop the monsters spawning in your house, just stops them hurtng you, right? :p

And all the other light sources are still things you would not necessarily place. Jack-o-lanterns and restone are unsightly and less powerful/more costly respectivly. Glowstone is better, but of course you need to go to the nether, plus its still a diffeernt building block than you might want.


Anyway, its just a silly mechanic, as things spawn wwhere you would not expect, evne if logically you've sealed off a building/town!

[Ameena]

Peaceful mode stops anything spawning that can be hostile (eg Endermen). Only passive mobs such as cows and Testificates will spawn. If you try to spawn something in (eg via a spawn egg), it'll instantly disappear.
Anyway, the commands aren't "cheats"...they're there for people who might want to turn the mobs off, eg if you're trying to just build something in Creative and don't want zombies and stuff randomly wandering about and getting in the way. Also, you might be trying to build something really cool in Survival mode and have it messed up by a Creeper, which of course can be really annoying. Though you can turn off the environment damage caused by a Creeper (they still hurt you, they just don't destroy blocks), as well as Enderman block-stealing abilities via another of the new commands.
Minecraft is supposed to be a "do what you want" game - if random-spawning mobs are appearing and messing things up for you, you can't really do what you want . A lot of the changes made in the new patch (and in the one before that, and possibly the one before that as well) have clearly been made to accommodate Adventure mode, the third mode that was added in a patch or two ago. You can't break or place blocks. It's so that people can design their own adventure map for other people to play. Now you actually can build a spooky-looking dark dungeon that's actually empty but the darkness makes it seem otherwise, because you can turn of mob spawning when the player enters, but then have a trigger than turns it back on again when they reach an area where you do want mobs to spawn.
People are gonna be able to do so much regarding adventure-making since this last patch, without having to ask people to constantly change the difficulty level in the Options (something you can't do if playing online unless you restart the server) or worry that random mobs might spawn in a supposed "safehouse" or whatever . It also means formerly-complicated stuff which some people got around by having hugely-complicated redstone mechanics can now be achieved with a lot less difficulty...and a lot less space .
I suppose technically having mobs spawn anywhere it's dark can be annoying, but the mobs are now just another thing you can include in the game, if you want to, in order to add to the challenge. Plus there's some items you can only get off certain mobs unless you spawn them in via Creative mode or the command to spawn in an item via its item number.

[Gambit37]

I was interested in Far Cry 3 until I read this:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12 ... far-cry-3/

More nonsensical saving issues than Dead Island by the sounds of it! FFS, why do they do crap like that!?

[beowuuf]

Wow, it's the worst parts of the quicksave (mechanical progress loss) with the worst part of save points (needing to finding one and physical progess loss)

[Gambit37]

Ha, yes, worst parts indeed! Sometimes I wonder if games developers have learned *anything* about designing decent save systems, or if they just really hate gamers.

[oh_brother]

I have never played a game that had a weird save system and benefited from it. Ishar - pay to save, hated it. RE - get ink ribbons, hated it.

Not being able to save freely does not make things more "tense" or "atmospheric", it just annoys people and means that you have to repeat parts of the game you already finished for no good reason.

Wow, it's the worst parts of the quicksave (mechanical progress loss)

Mechanical progress lost with quicksave, have I missed something? Or do you mean that each save overrides the previous?

[beowuuf]

I meant your quicksave is only good to where you saved - so automatically everything you gained in terms of levelling, or killing things, or opening things is gone. whereas the checkpoint usually puts you back in to the world as is - well, ok, with some arbitrary resets depending on the game/situation. Farcry actually retracting your mechanical progress is like a quicksave, but also with the hassle of the checkpoint for lack of convenience and forcing you back to their pre-determined in game location.


I think the Half-life method - where there was an autosave, a quicksave, and yet also a history of those autosaves and quicksaves incase you really got yourself in to a dead end - was really cool.

[Gambit37]

I don't understand why there would be a difference between a quicksave and a normal save? They should both do the same thing, the only difference is that a quicksave can be done by a single keypress, while a normal save pops up a menu where you can name your save and see your other save games, etc. Or am I misunderstading something fundamental?

The Half-Life model is the one that makes sense to me; anything else is exactly what oh_brother suggested: it simply adds false "difficulty" to a game for absolutely no reason whatsoever. If you're going to offer the ability to save, then let the user save wherever and whenever they choose, otherwise you may as well not bother having a save feature.

[beowuuf]

Was talking about saves/quicksaves/autosaves versus checkpoint saves

[Seriously Unserious]

I have never played a game that had a weird save system and benefited from it. Ishar - pay to save, hated it. RE - get ink ribbons, hated it.

Not being able to save freely does not make things more "tense" or "atmospheric", it just annoys people and means that you have to repeat parts of the game you already finished for no good reason.

I couldn't agree more. Another thing I hate about any artificial limitations on saving the game is what do I do if something in RL comes up and I need to stop playing the game right away. Normally I save the game (so I don't lose my progress) then quit, but with some weird save system, I can't, I either have to neglect whatever it is, or quit without saving and re-do everything all over again. That's turned me off of more then a few games that limit saves to only very specific circumstances or only partially save the game. And that definitely falls under the category of a "silly game mechanic" IMO.

Another type of silly game mechanic I've also run into are with bad controls of some sort. Once example of this dates back to the early '90's when I got this baseball game for my Genesis from EA. The graphics were great, but overall it was the worst sports game I've ever played because I couldn't control the players on the field properly at all. The game was way too sensitive to control the players while on defense. After the 10th time I had a slow rolling ground ball go by an infielder because while I was getting him to charge after it in a straight line and have him zig-zaging back and forth across half of the infield and end up swerving around the slowly rolling ball, that slowly rolls right though the spot I was trying in vain to get my player to run to only to have him go everywhere else but that spot, turning a sure out into a double, I finally gave up on that game. I've also played a few flight/fighter simulations games, Fighter Bomber and Jet both come to mind that also had this problem. I would be lining my plane up on the runway to land, and have it keep veering wildly back and forth across the runway, turning so fast that I couldn't get it to stop when I wanted it to, and this would keep happening until I would either miss the runway and crash into the ground on either side of it, or run out of fuel, after aborted landing attempt after aborted landing attempt, and crash. Controls this bad take a perfectly good game concept and make an other wise good game unplayable.

[Phoenix]

I've played many games with control issues, but the worst game mechanism in my book has to be a game that siezes control out from under you. Top offenders: C&C Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, Homeworld, and Homeworld 2. All of these RTS games at one point or another completely disable the controls while they "brief you" on information. It always happens when you are in the middle of a battle or rushing to get some task done then boom, controls freeze, hey watch this info graphic. Homeworld 2 was the worst in this aspect. It also decided when to end the mission, so you needed to learn what not to do if you wanted to reorganize or rebuild your fleet before the next mission.

[Seriously Unserious]

I haven't played those games before or any others that actually disable your controls like that buy I can see how that would be very frustrating, especially if the game doesn't at least pause while you have no control over anything.

Actually, come to think of it, I have encountered a bit of that in Dungeon Lords, were if I was talking with an NPC, I could end up in the middle of a fight while I have no control over my character besides talking with that NPC. However, if a fight did start I could at least end the conversation and regain control of my character so it isn't exactly game breaking as at least there is something I can do about it.

Actually, another ridiculous game mechanic I encountered was in Master of Orion 3, where when I save the game it only saves the state the game was in at the beginning of the turn, and it doesn't save the Sit Report, which basically, for those who haven't played MOO3, the Sit Report tells you all the events that happened between turns, so without that I have to look at every colony, and info screen in the game to see if something happened that I need to address, which can be very time consuming late in the game when you have dozens of colonies and contact with many rivals to sort though. The worst part is that I need this Sit Rep the most when I'm loading a saved game, but it's not available any more. Also, if a do a lot of actions in a turn but can't finish it for some reason, all my actions will be lost and I'll have to start from the beginning of the turn and try to remember what I did last time, which is a huge waste of time.

Why the developers didn't have the news reports in the Situation Report saved when you save the game, and why they didn't have the game save the current state, including all actions done during the current turn is a mystery to me, because all it does it turn me off of wanting to play that game. Without those stupid features I would thoroughly enjoy playing that game, so IMO that ruined a really good game.

[Gambit37]

Bad control issues are usually about bad implementations or poor programming. I don't think it's really in the same bracket as a silly game mechanic, though I totally agree how frustrating that can be. Some of the early Tomb Raider games had a tank like Lara who was heavy and sluggish to control. She'd often plunge to her death when not reacting quickly enough to player input.

[Seriously Unserious]

Actually, many control issues are caused by a side effect of intended game mechanics, and so were designed by the programmers on purpose. IMO some programers and game designers operate on the mantra that faster is better, never mind if the human body can't process the information and respond to it at the speed it's being presented to you in the game, and never mind if the controls can't keep up with the action, just make the game push those pixels at you faster, faster, faster. Make those game objects flash across the screen faster, never mind if that speed looks completely unnatural, and makes the game unplayable. So yes, control issues can come from a silly game mechanic if that silly game mechanic is the speed the game runs at, because IMO a game's speed is part of the game's mechanics, and if the speed is unreasonable then that's just silly IMO.

Also, silly mechanics don't just come from an intended design, poor programing and bad design can also cause silly mechanics as an unintended side effect. The earlier posts about ridiculous spawning in some games from some of the earlier posts in this thread is a good example of that. The kinds of spawning described in Dead Islands is a good example of poorly designed and programs spawning causing a silly game mechanic.

[JETENGINE]

Going back many years to enemy spawning, Earthbound (SNES) had the weirdest monster spawn system. If you blundered into a room full of foes, you could simply run back through the door. That does make sense. But they don't follow Ness and his allies through the door. Why is this? Is there some kind of mystic (or psionic) barrier that stops them? If you re-entered the room, sometimes the mobs would be gone. Where did they go and how did they leave?

Just some mind food to chew on.
Jay.

[Sophia]

All these years later, Gambit's initial post seems oddly prophetic.

A lot more games have a "cash based progress system" nowadays.

[JETENGINE]

At least the currency system makes sense in Earthbound. You don't receive any dough (unless it's a bread roll or a cookie or the like) from foes directly. Instead, your unseen dad deposits what he makes from the "bounty" of your "kills" into your bank account. You can then withdraw what your dad's earnings via an ATM.

Another question I have is why don't wild pokemon kill a trainer's pokemon? The series explained that they are jealous, for whatever reason. Shouldn't they be glad to be free, and not oppressed by the possibility of a cruel trainer? Why don't they attack to kill, if they are so jealous?

[JETENGINE]

In DM, respawning is justified by way of Chaos' power: he creates all the creatures from magic (which is why they vanish in a puff of smoke when killed.) I've no problem with it in DM or CSB, ....

What about DM2? The bats, thicket/axeman thieves, thorn demons, tiger striped worms, dark vexirks, and wolves probably weren't all created by the evil magic of Dragoth and Lord Chaos. How do they respawn when the player is around (without using the trigger explanation)? Or are you going to give the "Black flies and the leeches" tale?

P.S.
When a mosquito "bites" you, it's actually a sting. When a black fly bites you, you lose a good chunk of flesh.

[Henry]

I figure a significant number of the mechanics would really would remove people from it if irresolutely endeavored to clarify things...