Half-assed, cargo-cult, implementations of D&D’s long rest mechanic.
D&D’s long rest mechanic, where you have very powerful resources that only recharge when you “rest” for a long time only barely works in the original tabletop game. Most players in that context don’t even play by the books recommendations, but instead go nova on their powers and then rest anyway. It kind of works if there is a strong narrative pressure that prevents you from taking weeks to address the problem. But it turns out players in video games kind of hate timers.
Pillars of Eternity 1 just whole ass cargo culted it into the game. There aren’t any actual timers because players hate them. You can only use your cool powers a few times before needing to use “camping supplies” or return to town. Your max health eventually stops recovering until you take a full rest.
So a full rest is probably significant, right? A serious tactical choice? No, not really. At worst, it’s several loading screens to go back to the inn, a “resting” animation, and then several loading screens to get back to where you were. There are no consequences. Enemies don’t respawn. Quests aren’t timed. It is extremely tedious.
Dark Souls has a sort of long-rest mechanic, in that your healing and spells only recharge when you hit a checkpoint, but that respawns most of the enemies. Now it’s more of a choice, and the game is built around “Can you get from here to there this your resources?” PoE1 didn’t do that. It just felt like someone liked D&D but didn’t really understand anything about it.
I was pleasant surprised they changed the game design to be the infinitely more reasonable per-encounter cadence in the sequel.
Side note: There’s a difference between good and fun. Many players probably had fun with the d&d-like system, but players and customers are notoriously idiots. “A faster horse” and all that. Would they have had more fun with a better designed system? Probably, unless the nostalgia of “long rest” was weighted really heavily in their mind.
At least BG3 had plot stuff happen when you long rest, but that creates a whole separate set of problems: If you are too good at the game and don’t need to rest often, you miss out on the plot stuff.
Gods, I’m so sick of D&D and how much influence it has.
Tedious optimal play is probably a whole book you could write.
I remember one old RPG where you got XP from reading books in the world. But if you went three menus deep, swapped on a particular accessory, exited three menus, then read the book, you’d get double the xp. What the fuck kind of choice is that? It was super tedious to do every time, and annoying to realize I was a level behind because I hadn’t been doing it.
I think this has mostly fallen out of fashion, but some games would have a “your benefits from leveling are determined by your stats at the time of level up.” So if you’re about to level, you better swap on as much +wis +con +int gear as you can, or you’ll be significantly under powered at the end of the game. Extremely tedious. Takes you out of the gameplay loop. Trash.
This is a much smaller and more subjective answer than the (great) ones OP provided.
I was kicking around an enemy idea for my game, a spear-wielding knight that could poke you through walls. Well, I started playing Dead Cells recently and found basically that exact enemy in a later area. My immediate first thought upon getting poked from across a wall was “this sucks, I hate this”.
That’s not small at all. You undid the failing concept that devs there couldn’t see or were too entangled with it to get rid of it. That’s really cool.
Do you have any experience using it for targeting consoles? I think that it’s the biggest issue left… I would also be curious of support of stuff like Nanite from Unreal Engine 5…
Makes sense, as they correctly see that it’s the servers and the 🤢 marketplace that establish control in this space. I wish that open (federated?) systems had a better solution for the cloud/server/marketplace pattern. Self-hosting and benevolent patrons aren’t a real answer, but who’s going to build a bazaar they can’t control and profit from?
I think it’s perfectly ethical to have a closed source plugins marketplace as compensation for releasing a fully open source engine. I mean, look at all the good the Blender Marketplace has done for that ecosystem!
Not a joke! The Blender Marketplace is a thriving plugin ecosystem that makes Blender a professional tool. Virtually every small studio I know runs at least two or three plugins from that site.
I think about this alot. It’s a weird problem because free and open source doesn’t mean you can’t profit from it. It’s arguably the other way around. You’re supposed to contribute so the market services are the value add to your platform. A marketplace is the answer for this servicing problem but it can’t be free because then the consumers are the product.
I feel like the solution is to build the marketplace platform technology INTO Godot so then developers can target the platform and the service providers are then able to provide the same product with their own partners and value. This would create competition in the space but allow for growth in development.
I think this is what flatkpaks are trying to achieve with remotes like flathub. It’s just supposed to be one of many marketplaces but the marketplace technology has been standardized unlike the snapstore. This also prevents platform lock in.
The technology then remains free but service providers need to be able to derive value from the hosting as hosting costs money no matter the platform. The consumer can then drive the demand.
Of course lock-in is the goal of all service providers… So there’s that …
I will go over a couple of the valuable tools I am aware of for this:
‘Landmarking’-- making a location have a memorable set piece, shape, interaction, etc. in the environment. These will serve both as navigational aids, attention directors, and reminders during backtracking.
‘Loops’-- creating hubs and spokes or a looping location inter-connectivity such that players are naturally always going to find their way to a ‘home’ location, or at least know how to return to the home with minimal need to maintain a detailed mental map. These can serve as navigational aids as well as emotional modulators.
Example of Setpiece-Based Landmarking: Super Metroid is the obvious place to see this in action all over the place. For one example, look at the entrance to Kraids Lair-- It has a giant scary-looking statue guarding the door that is unique and is intended to leave a strong impression of ‘wow thats cool but I can’t climb it yet’, such that when you get the hi-jump in the near future down in Norfair, you have no problem thinking of somewhere to try it out. The game even plops you out next to it from the elevator once you have the given upgrade. The graphics on it also scream ‘SOMETHING BAD LIVES HERE’, and naturally draw you to it-- it tells you immediately that it is an important location and you should go here as soon as you can.
Linear traversal is a bit easier, as you have set paths and can direct players with other overarching methods like lighting, color, enemy placement, sound, etc. to the obvious path. Where this gets more interesting is when you begin to hone it and spice it up and give players linear routes that are NOT obvious so as to inspire feelings of problem solving and exploration / mystery.
Example of Interaction-Based Landmarking: Metroid fusion and Zero Mission do a good job simply using existing assets to do this, like putting a zoomer (enemy that crawls on surfaces) inside of a hidden area of a room, such that when you enter the room and find it is blocked, you then see an enemy emerge from a secret or hidden entrance / pipe-- cuing you to explore it further. Simple, effective, and super cheap in terms of time/effort.
Example of Loops: Dark Souls 1 is probably the best game to study for this method. Most places you go take you back to Firelink Shrine somehow, or are directly accessible from it. It is both a ‘hub’ from which different ‘spokes’ of the world emerge from, as well as something that all the looping paths touch. As you venture further into the world, many places become more interconnected with each other without feeling trite / forced (like a fast travel spot or transport), and instead feel natural (you venture from Firelink to the Burg, and into the Depths and find your way back by going through a sewer canal, leading you to the canal you first entered the Burg). Through this, the player knows how to get most places, or at least an idea of where to start. This is great, but where Dark Souls takes this from a navigation method into masterpiece game territory is the game does not have a map (!) and it deliberately uses this to impose a feeling of homesickness by taking away the loops sometimes, and forcing you down long linear diversions in which you are isolated from everything you have learned and know thus far. These emotional changes can themselves serve as landmarks and reminders in themselves, delightfully complicating this further.
Does this kind of make sense? Apologies for the rambling but I hope its a good start. Feel free to follow up if needed and we can continue chatting.
I was able to jump start my Unity game project with ChatGPT that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. I had almost zero C# and Unity knowledge when I started, while now, barely 2 months later, I can compete in game jams working solo without the help of ChatGPT. This is truly remarkable.
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