Mechanics in games that should just die.

[BidetoftheDead]

All achievements are is for companies to see how far someone will go to get something and to track progress. I have no clue why they would want to but it's the only real reason and people in the industry confirm this iirc. Honestly, I just think it's most companies going with the flow of something that became popular but I feel like a lot of people are just not caring about this feature anymore and we might potentially see it's death.

 

That being said if the achievements did give in-game bonuses like stat boosts or new perks or something I would like the feature a lot more but besides bragging rights I don't feel compelled to actually do anything to get the achievements.

[Descriptor]

That being said if the achievements did give in-game bonuses like stat boosts or new perks or something I would like the feature a lot more but besides bragging rights I don't feel compelled to actually do anything to get the achievements.

This was actually one of the easier to overlook features of Fallout: New Vegas. There were internal achievements that gave little mini-perks based on killing certain enemies, or doing specific things (like kill Mr. House with a golf club, or eat the 4 main leaders). If that feature was a little more obvious, I think it should be used a lot more.

[Heliocentrical]

I've came to a bit of a realization about the mechanics that I have grievances with. My issues lie more with how the mechanic was implemented rather than the mechanic itself. It's just that I've seen these mechanics implemented so poorly over and over again that I've assumed that was the default for that mechanic. As Descriptor pointed out that achievements can be implement well and with a purpose with his example of Fallout: New Vegas.

 

The experience system in Witcher 3 is another example of this mechanic done right. In Witcher 3 you do not gain experience points from monsters which makes them more meaningful and feel less like a mechanic that was thrown in there for the hell of it because RPG. Someone over at CD Projekt put a lot of thought into the Witcher 3 experience system and it shows. Whoever designed the system had concerns similar to my own. rather than bend over to designer peer-pressure and implement an experience system for the hell of it he/she asked "what does it mean to implement this system?". This change in thinking is one that I'd like to see more of in modern game design because I see it happen so rarely. It's a shame that so many game designers go with the philosophy of "If it ain't broke don't fix it" rather than experiment and innovate. I'll take a game that takes risks any day over one that does nothing in terms of innovation even the former fails. What matters is that the games designers actually give a damn about the games they make.

[Blightmare]

some people just like the sense of accomplishment

Or maybe people just like wasting time doing pointless bullshit. Remember that achievement where you had to carry a garden gnome through all of Half Life 2 Episode 2. That was a remarkable achievement that totally wasn't stupid as hell. It fills me with accomplishment.

i'd love it if you weren't such a negative nancy while voicing your concerns about harmless things

Look if my posts are bringing you down then you're more than welcome to block/ignore me. I don't care, being whiny, gripey and snarky is just how I roll and I have no intentions of changing. Making fun of what I believe to be stupid is a great deal of fun for me.

The problem is, that whether you mean to or not you end up coming off as someone who is getting personally offended that people are enjoying something you don't and wanting THEM to change which only results in ruining everyone's mood. And you can't argue that achievements are pointless time wasting bullshit because when it comes down to it, so are video games in general. Why play video games? Cuz some people find it fun. Why bother hunting achievements? Same reason. To me an achievement is not some trivialized pat on the back to boost a waning self esteem but a fun challenge to do when the main game has been completed. That gnome one you talked about? That was easily the most fun I had in that game, same with the One Free Bullet achievement.

[Heliocentrical]

The problem is, that whether you mean to or not you end up coming off as someone who is getting personally offended that people are enjoying something you don't and wanting THEM to change which only results in ruining everyone's mood.

But I've stated multiple times that's not what I'm after. I'm not interested in turning someone's opinion into my own. As far as I'm aware I was merely stating my opinion. I was complete snarky asshole about it but not once did I say "your opinion needs to be like mine" or something similar. I don't really know what to do outside of saying "This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's okay.".

[rairii]

The problem is, that whether you mean to or not you end up coming off as someone who is getting personally offended that people are enjoying something you don't and wanting THEM to change which only results in ruining everyone's mood.

But I've stated multiple times that's not what I'm after. I'm not interested in turning someone's opinion into my own. As far as I'm aware I was merely stating my opinion. I was complete snarky asshole about it but not once did I say "your opinion needs to be like mine" or something similar. I don't really know what to do outside of saying "This is just my opinion and if you disagree then that's okay.".

 

Well unfortunately, being an asshole is in direct violation of rule #1

So try not to do that and we'll just leave it at that

[Heliocentrical]

Well unfortunately, being an asshole is in direct violation of rule #1

So try not to do that and we'll just leave it at that

The same could be argued for you when you called me an enormous cunt. This is what happens when rules like #1 are this vague. Not only are they unhelpful when it comes to actually following forum guidelines their vagueness leaves them open to interpretation and unless they become more defined this misunderstanding will only get worse. When I read the rules I thought it only applied if you're being an asshole directly to someone else and not being an asshole indirectly. The rules even state they're intentionally vague. At the end of the day who knows who's right or wrong because let's be honest here we have no clue.

 

Also when do you draw the line from just someone stating their opinion to them being an asshole? You can't with these kinds of rules.

[Jeb_CC]

Going off topic again, hush, hush, hush.

[Heliocentrical]

@Rarity Alright would you have taken the gnome with you through the entirety of Half Life 2 Episode 2 if the achievement wasn't there? Would you have done it just because? If not then the achievement system is arbitrarily manipulating you to play a specific way. Now let me provide you an example of this being done naturally rather then artificially. Every time I play Morrowind I make it a personal goal of mine to track down all of the Limeware in the game and all of the rare books just because I can. Now is there an achievement in Morrowind for doing so? No, it's just a fun little goal set by me for me. Achievement systems subvert the way we would play games naturally. That is why I think they're bad. Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with telling the player a specific way of doing something. But it should help the player and be more of a suggestion rather than having them do mindless things for the sake of mindless points. Now if you find this to be meaningless semantics then fair enough but I think the principle of Just because is far more important then we give it credit for.

[Blightmare]

Well yes it is meaningless semantics because fun is fun whether or not I'm the one who figured out how to do it. Who cares if I came up with it on my own? I do stuff I discover in games anyways, doesn't mean I'm gonna look at suggestions from an outside source and consider it inferior fun because I didn't think of it myself. Besides I don't do achievements out of some point obligation. I do them if it's fun. I have one achievement in Terraria left before I've 100% gotten all of them but I don't because 200 fishing quests is absurd in a game where you can only do one an ingame day and each day is 24 minutes, and I got all the item rewards from them after about 50 anyways. But if I go through the list and see something potentially fun that I'd have never thought to do myself sure I'm gonna give it a try. If it turns out to not be fun, I stop. And even after I got the achievement I still usually do the challenge when I go through the game again if I enjoyed it the first time. I literally haven't played episode one with more than 1 bullet fired ever since finding out about that because I find it THAT fun.

 

There's a whole demographic of people who enjoy having goals set for them to meet or challenges for them to overcome and that's often the target of these systems. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

[Heliocentrical]

Then I suppose the next question would be what is fun and since fun is entirely subjective then that renders my entire premise moot. All of this is boils down to pure subjectivity so that means any argument I attempt to make for killing a mechanic isn't in good faith because of that subjectivity. I mean honestly is there any mechanic that any of us could say objectively deserves to die? No we can't. There may be instances where we might be able to say that a mechanic could've been executed better but even then that still has some subjective aspects to it. You can't eliminate subjectivity so who knows. Objectivity might not even exist based on my deduction here.

[Kirkreng]

But having these challenges come naturally or artificially are not mutually exclusive. There can be achievements which people can hunt after, as well as self imposed challenges(see: speed running or melee only challenges in games without achievements for them for example).

[Blightmare]

When it comes down to it, yes, most every mechanic people dislike is from a subjective point of view which is my main concern with this thread. There are still mechanics out there that on an objective sense (as in widely accepted by both industry and consumer) are just bad. Some of these would be backtracking and pay-to-win.

 

Backtracking is a way of artificially extending game time without requiring the game designers to actually add more content to it. It's a time waster born of lazy execution and games STILL do it to this day. Thankfully not as much but it's not entirely gone either.

 

Pay-to-win is pretty self explanatory. It's a shit mechanic because it's not made in favor of the player or the game and often leads to that games death. It creates essentially a "members only club" with the added bonus of the members being allowed to walk over everyone else and claim elitism in the comunity (member-only PUG raid invites for example). Even then it creates a hierarchy in the paying community if done exceptionally poorly where those with the most money to throw away will beat everyone else, even those who've put a lot of money in already.

[Descriptor]

When it comes down to it, yes, most every mechanic people dislike is from a subjective point of view which is my main concern with this thread. There are still mechanics out there that on an objective sense (as in widely accepted by both industry and consumer) are just bad. Some of these would be backtracking and pay-to-win.

 

Backtracking is a way of artificially extending game time without requiring the game designers to actually add more content to it. It's a time waster born of lazy execution and games STILL do it to this day. Thankfully not as much but it's not entirely gone either.

This was what finally made me quit playing Skyward Sword. When I had to go back and re-do the first temple to get that water for the dragon lady, I finally just completely lost interest. Very disappointed with that game.

[Meelis13]

actually here's an idea- as someone (cant remember who) pointed out, that this topic is basically just extreme version of gaming pet peeves, plus it has tendency going off-topic, why not merge it with pet peeves or close this one?

[Heliocentrical]

When it comes down to it, yes, most every mechanic people dislike is from a subjective point of view which is my main concern with this thread. There are still mechanics out there that on an objective sense (as in widely accepted by both industry and consumer) are just bad. Some of these would be backtracking and pay-to-win.

 

Backtracking is a way of artificially extending game time without requiring the game designers to actually add more content to it. It's a time waster born of lazy execution and games STILL do it to this day. Thankfully not as much but it's not entirely gone either.

 

Pay-to-win is pretty self explanatory. It's a shit mechanic because it's not made in favor of the player or the game and often leads to that games death. It creates essentially a "members only club" with the added bonus of the members being allowed to walk over everyone else and claim elitism in the comunity (member-only PUG raid invites for example). Even then it creates a hierarchy in the paying community if done exceptionally poorly where those with the most money to throw away will beat everyone else, even those who've put a lot of money in already.

So would it be fair to state that an objective opinion must stem from either a pro-industry or pro-consumer basis? Something where the harm dealt to either the industry or consumer is obvious?

 

Let me see if I can try this. HoMM3 had an incident involving a faction the devs had been working on known as Heavenly Forge. Heavenly Forge had a technological elements whereas the rest of HoMM3's factions had fantasy elements . This lead to an outcry from fans and eventually a death threat emerged which resulted in one of the devs leaving the company. Heavenly Forge was scrapped and replaced with Elemental Conflux. This is bad because the fans effectively censored the devs' vision for their game because the fans didn't like the direction HoMM3 was heading.

 

In that short paragraph my premise was pro-industry and anti-censorship. Now is there anything you could say is objectively wrong with the paragraph I just wrote? I'm just using the Heavenly Forge incident as an example for what could be an objective opinion and thus it doesn't go into the incident in full detail.

 

If you'd like more information about the incident itself I would suggest watching this DYKG video for HoMM as it covers the Heavenly Forge incident much better than I did in the paragraph as that wasn't the example's intent.

cK5JMbZ4CDM

[Kirkreng]

Pay-to-win is pretty self explanatory. It's a shit mechanic because it's not made in favor of the player or the game and often leads to that games death. It creates essentially a "members only club" with the added bonus of the members being allowed to walk over everyone else and claim elitism in the comunity (member-only PUG raid invites for example). Even then it creates a hierarchy in the paying community if done exceptionally poorly where those with the most money to throw away will beat everyone else, even those who've put a lot of money in already.

 

Defining pay to win gets fuzzy, though. I for example don't have a problem if multiplayer games allow a play to pay to skip progression content. Simply because it allows with people with more money than time to enjoy all of the content as well as letting players with more time than money enjoy content.

[Blightmare]

To me it's whatever gives a paying player a significant, uncounterable advantage over those who don't and/or locks content behind a paywall such as endgame areas or significantly powerful gear where the only way to access this game changing content is to shovel out money, generally in large amounts. I don't have a problem with paying to skip to later content that you'd be able to reach anyways because the only one's really affected by that are those who pay(maybe a bit anyone who plays with them as well but that's a gray area) Hell, WoW let's you buy max level character boosts which comes with appropriate gear yet the only ones really hurt by that are the people purchasing it because they now have a max level character they probably don't know how to play.

[Heliocentrical]

I think what this boils down to is that I need to change my angle when it comes to arguing. I should be arguing for more and better mechanics. Not the death of ones that were merely poorly implemented. I feel that it was a logical fallible on my part to let the majority of implemented mechanics speak for all mechanics because as others have pointed out that just isn't the case. Every mechanic in which I've argued for its death has a counterpoint. The Fast Travel in Morrowind and Daggerfall, the leveling system in Witcher 3 and the achievement system in Fallout New Vegas are all great examples of how these mechanics can be done well so how can I condemn entire mechanics that have been used by the games industry for decades? There are no bad mechanics, just bad implementations. That is where my critique has ultimately failed.

 

Also what contribution have I made to the overall conversation of video games by being executioner thirsty for blood? Fucking nothing that's what. I've wasted my time and all those around me by trying to work with a broken way of thinking. Now I have to rebuild the way I think if it is to work as I feel it should. If nothing else I have at least the humility to admit that it's broken rather than sweeping the problem under the rug and pretending it's not there. So for what it's worth I do apologize for this mess. It's apparent that I still have much to learn.

[Kirkreng]

^ I have respect for that.