Movalpolos
Banned
Gears of War 4 MP.
I hate this reasoning.
Life happens. I get phone calls. My wife needs my attention. A package arrives at the door. Folks need to use the bathroom. The kids are acting up. Etc.
Any game that demands that you schedule your whole life around it for an hour or two with no lenience whatsoever isn't exactly game design I'm fond of. We get older, and our schedules fill up. I'm not the jobless teenager I was back the glory days of save points and Xenogears's slow-scrolling text.
As much as I do like games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, I'd be lying if I said their inability to let me even pause the game to handle life issues has rubbed me the wrong way more times than I care to share.
Calling BS on this.Souls games don't have pause buttons for a couple of reasons. The most obvious one is that the online multiplayer and single player is supposed to be seamless, and that's how the game is meant to be played.
Hence why there's an "offline" mode to accommodate people who don't enjoy the multiplayer aspect.You can get invaded randomly or summon people to help. But what if you just wanna play online? Well, it would sort of ruin the tension if you could just pause the game midstream during a boss battle and change your entire loadout and select every item you need without having to worry about taking damage.
That doesn't make it any better game design.Yes, life happens. But wanting to change a fundamental piece of game design because you might lose some souls (and that'll happen only if you're already on your way to reclaiming them after a death) if something URGENT happens IRL is just... no.
I would never have made it through Bloodborne if I didn't use a guide. For example, to get a particular rune you need to use a certain gesture in front of a particular enemy for a certain amount of time. You don't even get the gesture in the same area. You find it earlier in the game and use it near the end. I guess it's a cool secret but the amount of stuff hidden in the game is ridiculous and I can only imagine it would be a huge waste of time trying to figure everything out on my own.
I felt this way in Everybody's Gone to the Rapture. The walking speed was ridiculously slow. But I guess at least the game was short.
The only monster hunter game I ever played, Monster Hunter 3 ultimate, feels like a solid 70-100 hours game stretched to be hundreds of hours long with ridiculous grinding and time wasting game mechanis.
- Grinding: Because you can't just make a cool armour from defeating a boss. No, you have to kill it like 15 times because you need 6 of the items it has a 30% chance of droping if you destroy its horn.
- Resources for the sake of resources: Cool now you have 6 of the item but wait, you also need minerals and insects and fish and other random shit (different stuff, mind you, for every part of the armour). So now you have to go mine for minerals and catch bugs in a way that adds literally NOTHING to the game other than some more game time.
- You have money? Can't use that, we need resources:
So here is a crazy idea: You take jobs to hunt down monsters, you complete those jobs and get rewarded with items and money. You use that money to upgrade your base of operations.
But no, the game doesn't want your money. It wants "resources" you get by going out into the wild to kill random monsters. So get ready to go kill mosters outside of missions (monsters you have no interest to kill) so you can get "resoucres" which you need to upgrade the village.
- Crafting yet more stuff:
So some monsters are weak to different types of traps and gadgets. That's a pretty cool idea, it makes what you bring into battle sometimes more important than the level and power of you gear.
Oh but geat ready to craft the shit you need because no one is selling it. Have fun farming more minerals and insects.
- Potions and stuff? More crafting!
Why replenish your potions after a battle if we can have you farming and combining them. It takes a few minutes after every battle, so if we battle hundreds of times we can add a few hours of "content" to the game!!!.
Oh also the whole farm/cultivating thing also "needs resources". Beause we really need you to waste some more time getting them
A real shame. Because the core gamplay is awesome
Bravely Default has A LOT of recycled content which made me never finish it.
I've completed MGSV 3 times, so I don't really understand personally why it keeps popping up here. It's a long game, sure, but the gameplay loop is fun. There aren't any missions that require *too* much time or effort to complete so I don't get the argument.
I've heard that FFXV has a boss (or bosses?) that take multiple hours to defeat. To me that's a legitimate example of not respecting time.
Fuck people with IBS, right?
I swear you Souls fans are so touchy. And I like the games.
Final Fantasy XI.
Bravely Default has A LOT of recycled content which made me never finish it.
The game has a run button, it just never tells you about it. The devs admitted they messed up on that one.
Kingdom Hearts 2 (tutorial)
Persona 4's terrible introduction that I never got past.
*punts you*
I've heard that FFXV has a boss (or bosses?) that take multiple hours to defeat. To me that's a legitimate example of not respecting time.
Any game where you can't pause.
Imagine you are in a tough boss battle for example in Dark Souls 3. Now you have to go to the bathroom otherwise you will literally shit your pants. But you can't pause!
whaaaaaat??????? This is the first time i hear this about metroid prime. You were playing it wrong.Every Metroid game I've ever played (Metroid, Metroid II, Super, Zero Mission, Prime, and Fusion) felt extraordinarily disrespectful to my time. Getting lost for hours on end walking in circles to see hours thrown in the garbage is something I never want any game to do.
Also felt some 3D Zelda (Wind Waker, especially) games fill into this and other assorted games that feel too long for its content like Ryse, Evil Within, etc.
As a strong believer of user centric design, I don't believe anyone can play anything wrong. So disagreed.whaaaaaat??????? This is the first time i hear this about metroid prime. You were playing it wrong.
Perhaps, but I still disagree with it.I don't like most of the souls fanbase either, but let's be realistic though: a Pause button doesn't exist because FS doesn't want to give you a quick way to calm down a little, even if the game is offline, not because 'fuck people with IBS'. The pause button has saved me while playing games like NG black, to me pausing a game is another resource for the player and FS understands that and deliberately took it out from their Souls games. There's a reason they did 5 games without it, they clearly understand what they are taking away from you.
"Stop whining about something that's a legit problem for you".You have two options to confront the absence of a in-game pause option: either you accept it and try to find a way to substitute it with something else (quit to the main menu) like me, or keep complaining that they took a commodity away from you; there's not much to do about it now that the series are over. And bet that if they make a DS4 and you can play the game offline you won't be able to pause it either.
Perhaps, but I still disagree with it.
Ninja Gaiden didn't become "easier" if I could pause to use the restroom.
Actually, quite the opposite. Every time I ever paused a game to do something, and then came back, it was even harder to continue because I had interrupted my groove and had to struggle to get back mentally and physically to the state I was in the midst of the interruption.
Dark Souls, I refuse to believe, would "suffer" for a pause menu during offline play. I can see absolutely no detriments to having the option.
But, by all means, let's having inconveniences like grass and healing grinding in Demons's Souls and Bloodborne, as if THAT doesn't grind the game's pacing down to a screeching halt at times for certain players.
Sorry, but I'm going to call it as I see it. I think it's a BAD DESIGN in an otherwise great set of games.
And I refuse to believe FromSoftware isn't talented enough as a developer to develop a game around the ability to pause a game either. They're not incompetent. I'll repeat; I have never played a single, solitary, legendary "hard" game where the pause option ruined the challenge or difficulty. I've never played an "immersive" game where having to pause the game ruined the immersion for me. I have never played a single, solitary game where pausing the game hurt the game for me in any way, and I've played a metric ton of hardcore games for the past thirty years.
"Stop whining about something that's a legit problem for you".
Damn, Dark Souls fans are some of the best and yet most insufferable...
I better not even mention "easy mode" lest the pitchforks and torches come out.
This is old-hat to me. This reminds me of old school survival horror defenders who whined about people who struggled with tank controls, ink ribbons, and fixed camera angles. While many of them could make a legit point, so many of them were insufferably stubborn that nothing BUT those choices could make a game true survival horror and they screamed and raged whenever a fan asked for smoother controls, or checkpoints, or anything at all that made the games more accessible to anything but the most elite and time-liberated players.
Shock and awe, great horror games with great controls, check-points, and better cameras did indeed come out. We got games like Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2 and Dead Space and Condemned and Outlast and others that used some or all of those elements. Same thing with Fire Emblem fans and the OPTION to remove perma-death in the newer games. It's embarrassing.
I just refuse to believe that Dark Souls lives or dies by its inability to pause the game, as if that's the sacred cow that Dark Souls fans cling to and to rob them of this optional ability would somehow throw the whole balance of the series out the door and flush all its goodwill and skillful game design down the toilet, especially if it was only available offline.
Really, I heard the jokes over the years before playing the games, that Dark Souls fans were averse to almost any criticism of the series, that they were "perfect" and any attempt to change them, alter them, or make them more accessible was seen as blasphemy, and I sort of chuckled at the "exaggeration"...
... But having beaten all the games, and loved them, and talked to countless fans and... I don't think it's an exaggeration any more. I've bumped into far, far, FAR too many Dark Souls fans that bristle at the merest hint of life improvement features like offline pausing or giving less skilled or more time-constrained players an easier mode.
God forbid a player other than yourself has a feature that enhances their experience with the game.
Just find a corner and stand behind it. No big deal.
Final Fantasy XI.
Final Fantasy XI.
Kingdom Hearts 2 (tutorial)
Persona 4's terrible introduction that I never got past.
I'm not overreacting.You're overreacting tbh. Just find a corner and stand behind it. No big deal.
For the most part... but there are a lot of people - myself included - who spend a great deal of the game time in those boss fights.I know that Dark Souls not having a pause can be a problem in boss fights, and Dark Souls III has that shit where if you're playing in online mode and lose connection, it instantly kicks you back to the main menu. But Dark Souls is also constantly saving your game. As long as you weren't in the middle of a fight, you'll pick up exactly where you left off if you have to quit. No need to finish the level, reach a checkpoint, or find a save point. I'd say the game respects the player's time just fine.
If you are a completionist, you already have no respect for your time, so it seems dumb to blame the games for it.
Some games make that more reasonable than others, though. Not all games have the same barometer to get to 100%.
I could 100% everything in Tomb Raider, yet in that same timeframe get only 2% done in Dragon Age: Inquisition, for instance.
Some games are just more sensibly paced and some games make completing everything FUN rather than a slog and grind. A lot of games don't understand that balance.
I've 100% completed plenty of games where the whole experience was a joy and I loved every second and it could be done in a reasonable amount of time.
... And then there's the games where that's far from the case.
I find the base concept of an exploration game that forces you to get lost for hours on end is inherently disrespectful of my time. There are ways to do it well, of course (I'm very much in love with how Silent Hill and Etrian Odyssey handles it), but I've always loathed how Metroid does it.
I'd much rather be railroaded and make lots of quantifiable progress than be lost and waste my valuable time that I could be doing literally anything else.