Game Mechanics that will almost never make sense

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go back to 4chan

A key uses as much room on inventory as a shotgun.

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And as usual

On the other hand

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the titles does say "almost"

This is a shitty movie meme. Second only to "if I shoot these computer screens, that will reverse or stop the evil computer program!"

Well, maybe I worded it poorly, maybe I should say, destroy the lock… and the knob, and everything surrounding it, but it would only work on wooden frame doors and the like.

Look up some police training videos, nigger. They tell you how to break a door with a ram or shotgun.

How many weapons could you carry in an active combat situation OP?

At least 3 or 4. Knife, pistol, rifle, maybe another pistol.

The guns and ammo are stored in an infinitely small portal to a storage chamber, which the protag keeps in their ass for easy access.


Protag's feet are jet thrusters.


The lock has a mechanism which breaks the key on use, so the dungeon works.

I think the idea behind dungeons in Zelda is that they were designed so only a hero can navigate past them and get to the sage/giant/whatever macguffin. Seeing as how the dungeons were designed as elaborate storage for powerful, important things in their respective regions.

The problem with instant heal packs or menu healing is that it instantaneus, as long as you don't get 1-shot you effectivelly have infinite health if you have enough healing items, there's no drawbacks to using them.
Fast regeneration is pretty dumb too, but is still better than that, only real drawback is that it's free, you can do it forever.
Slow regeneration is better, you can potentially regererate full health over a long time, but during combat it doesn't help you very much.

Best healing option is consumables or healing stuff that takes a little animation to take effect, you can't just use it whenever, this also makes better potions/spells much more useful, as you wont have to do the animation lots of time for greater health. Instant ones with cooldowns work too but aren't as good.

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if you flip foward you can jump again

It never made sense in one peice but whatever.

One Piece gleefully avoids making sense

In DMC games at least is explained that Dante/Nero use magic to produce a platform to jump from.

What's with Holla Forums's hateboner for weapon limits?

Holla Forums is not a single person, for some games I like laodout limits and for others I don't. Only retards that only think about one specific sub-genre think there is any system that is best for every game.

Sage for shitty template thread.

Double jumping is easy, you just jump and then you jump again.


Can't speak for all of Holla Forums, but I personally don't like how it's almost always paired with the weakest fucking character customization and a forced grind through multiplayer, forcing you into weapons for one or two roles until you've played for at least X amount of time.

spoiled stupid faggots who want to have every gun all the time instead of having to choose what will work best for the task at hand.

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This only works in games that at least tell you the type of environment you will be fighting in. Also its kinda compromised by the fact that ARs are almost always a safe bet in any form, so its more a choice of one than two.

Even then, simply having all weapons at ones disposal, needing to use on-the-fly judgement and rationing is still a better option:
Do you want to use explosives to clear hordes or save for a potential big bad?
Worth keeping a sniper loaded to deal with ranged enemies or could you use use it more like a railgun for now?
Hang back and deal with enemies however or get up close and put the shotgun to use?

With only two weapons you generally have to keep the off-weapon for whatever grabbed it in the first place. Assuming theres no guarantee of extra ammo laying about, of course.

I had typed a small essay but it got eaten. The main thrust is it often doesn't make sense (why can't you carry more than two pistols when you can carry two machineguns) and often forces/encourages lazy designs. Assault rifles often degenerate into reskins of a single one, for example, and because you can hit places you actually need weapon X or Y, you will be forced to have it or even more blatantly, be simply given it. See Rich Evan's "This is the lightning gun section".

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Yeah and they don't shoot the lock, they shoot the hinges

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Fuck you nigga I love tetris inventory

MAN I SURE LOVE CONSOLE FPS TRASH

change half empty magazine in virtually any shooter, the remaining cartridges are magically transferred

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RNG. It was just a technological crutch and does not belong in anything that doesn't pertain to pure fluff.

So that's mainly complaints for absolute weapon limits in "loadout shooters" like in CoD, but what about how it's implemented in something like Halo where there's a limit, but it's still an arena shooter in all other respects?

But most games don't let you do that either, or it's extremely limited. I'm still bothered by Deus Ex where most doors is theoretically destructible but most can only be taken out with explosives.

Seriously though, RNG hasn't really been a technological crutch for years. Now it's only a game design crutch that devs can drop in instead of actually making robust mechanics for determining results.

are there any games where it actually works realistically?

Doesn't Arma do it? I feel like it was Arma or something similar.

There are a decent number of semi realistic FPSes where the remaining rounds are completely discarded.

As says I think ArmA does it completely realistically, as do some of the more serious tactical shooters/survival games. It's definitely not the norm.

You're both wrong.
A key can only open one door, that's why it's one use only. It's assumed the MC throws the key away after it serves its purpose because it's useless otherwise

Red Orchestra

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I hope someone got fired for that one!

What shitty fucking games are you playing where a key opens more than one specific door?
Zelda?

Monster Hunter handles it pretty well: potions heal you quickly, but you have to stand still and actually drink it. Moving while using it makes it less effective. Or Rust, which makes you do an animation after which you get some instant health and then you regenerate the rest. Both improvements over typical health systems.


It's almost always just a balance crutch used by lazy developers, and it often causes some weapon classes to become unplayable because you have to invest one of your two precious slots on a specialist weapon that will not perform when you need it to.


Arma and Insurgency come to mind because you actually keep mags that aren't empty. Day of Defeat just chucks half-mags… there are other games with magazines instead of magical bullet-holders but I can't be assed to remember them all.

Most early survival horrors, the early Resident Evil games had that mechanic.

Pretty sure RE2 didn't. So just the first one?

Don't they have to use special ammunition for that? They wouldn't want pellets to ricochet.

m8 they have ADS now, CS:GO is closer to an arena shooter than halo is now.

In zelda there is a vaccum attached to each door, when you use the key it is sucked away and redistributed somewhere in the dungeon to be found again.

There were a few small keys that you could use in Leon's route. You didn't have to use it for Claire's route because she had a lockpick.

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I see. Well, I take it back then.

Time to off yourself for being a massive hypocritical faggot.

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The hunger "mechanic"

It's just lazy as shit coding to "add depth and difficulty"

Stalker had it not because it added anything to the game but because it was part of about a hundred broken mechanics from nearly a decades worth of development. I don't even remember it being a problem at all in later stalker games, maybe they nerfed it.

And The Forest is a pretty good implementation of it, you actually burn energy and need to eat regularly. Otherwise you would just level every tree on the island in about thirty minutes.

Wizardry 6

Who the fuck thought waiting was fun. Waiting is bullshit. I'm playing a videogame, not a USSR toilet paper queue simulator.

It can be fun in stealth games.

Fair point, but I'm thinking of other scenarios.


Worst culprit are the jews making mobile games with the "Pay 2 Not Wait" mechanics that my normalfag family plays.

Insurgency and Alien swarm did this. Insurgency has full detail on the ammo situation as in the start you can swap mags to keep the first bullet in the chamber. When you pick up an enemy weapon you only get whatever is left in the mag of the weapon, sort of wish you could search the bead body for the mags to fully replace your weapon for their's.
Alien swarm just tells you that you'd dumped whatever amount of ammo you had in the mag when you reload, made counting your shots vital and being very aware on your ammo consumption.

This can be avoided. Go buy some MP restoration items. Also it's your fault for running out of it when the game gives you ways to replenish it on the field.
I agree with this though, those things are fucking terrible.

MP restoration items are bullshit. If physical attack classes just use a quickly restoring "stamina" why doesn't the same apply to magic classes? I don't see the point in it at all. One of the best things Dragon's Dogma did was the magic mechanics.

I will never understand the pay 2 not wait genre. Why not just get emulators and play some shit on your phone?

So? That doesn't sound too bad…

Mp is one of the few things that restricts magic. Magic is very often broken and OP user. It's understandable that the cost of such power is that you have a pool that fuels it that isn't quickly regenerative.
Also it's not unheard of that using magic will not also use some stamina as well.

It's a weird part of human nature to like seeing numbers increase. I don't know why but it's a real thing.

You're forgetting how easy it is to play those games. Most normalfags only play mobile games for 60-90 seconds at a time so how mobile games are structured reflect this.

To use an emulator you need to get the emulator, get the ROMs and play the game over more than 90 seconds. That's something the majority of the mobile audience doesn't want or aren't smart enough to do.

If i want a number increasing game i can play disgaea. Or really any jrpg.

sora can use three, though

if not for the unskippable bit, that would be pretty comfy.

In 5? It's not actually ADS, it merely looks like it. Mechanically and in terms of how it effects gameplay it's almost identical to zoom (it's actually closer to halo ce/2/3 zoom then to halo 4 zoom, since unlike 4 it has descope) the series has always had, just skinned to look like ADS

Guns are still accurate without using it (they are in fact more accurate then guns have ever been in the series even without it) your movement speed is unchanged when using it. It has descope, etc.

It's basically just zoom and is best treated as such in terms of gameplau. Using it like ADS will lead to you getting your shit pushed in. Literally the only thing that you have to think about or do different compared zoom in H1/2/3 is that more guns have it. But the actual situations where it's useful and how it's used is still the same as ever

You could play halo 5 and only ever use it on guns that have always had zoom (BR, etc), and you'd still do fine provided you aren't shit.

anyone who sacrifices game design for realism deserve neither

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E.Y.E

Also

Swat 4.

I only like that mechanic in Project Zomboid. You get bonuses if you overeat and penalties if you starve.

What fucking door ever needs a key to be opened from the fucking inside? This shit makes no sense if you're in a house or some low-security building. The only place I would think this makes any sense is in a bank.

I'd rather developers just replace "le find the key :^)" with puzzles or some shit. I'll take pressure plate puzzles or mechanisms that depend on water to work over FIND THE KEY TO UNLOCK THE BATHROOM FROM THE IN-FUCKING-SIDE

FUCK

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I personally think Metro 2033 on the hardest setting with Ranger mode handled health in the best way possible besides Far Cry 2 and 3.


In Far Cry 2 and 3

Unturned, each magazine is separate and you can combine them to redistribute rounds

Ask yourself another question; why does halo 'need' a limit if it is, as you say, effectively an arena shooter like UT or Q3A or the like? Part of the balance system for those two games was the more powerful weapons were in more dangerous areas (more exposed, harder to get to, ect) and often had limited ammo, forcing you to keep it for the Special Occasion. Back to the location thing; sometimes the port-a-nuke Redeemer in UT was in an open spot over a pit; if someone saw you and had a hitscan weapon like the sniper rifle or shock rifle (both with knockback) they could (and if were a decent shot, would) just shoot you. even if they didn't kill you with the shot, they'd knock you off the platform and the falling damage could kill you, assuming it wasn't a deathpit. It could be in a very enclosed area, making using the Redeemer (or even scaling back, a rocket launcher) potentially suicide. Because all the weapons are specialized it means you can kill someone with the 'better' weapon so long as you can exploit terrain or even just get to optimal ranges for your weapons against his.
A good example of this outside those two games is Half-Life's deathmatch. The Egon is functionally an unlimited range high damage energy gun. If the name of it didn't top you off, think Ghostbuster's proton pack. It does high, steady damage but you need to keep it on the target, so a shotgun to the face is still perfectly possible. A well placed crossbow bolt, grenade, hell, a blast from the charged up gauss gun will all do the jobs, but all of them have different situations they're useful in.

Two weapon limit, again, means that every weapon needs to stand a chance against the more powerful weapons, so they're homogenized. If they're not there is simply no point going for any weapon except X or Y. Alternatively there is no 'super' weapon and, again, they have to be homogenized.
This isn't even getting into 'fluff'. If the guns all handle the same (or same-enough) it can get boring and you lose interest in the game. Payday 2 has fucked up in lots of things but this is one of the ways they've not; most of the guns are different enough to have actual weapon variety (there are functional reskins ofc, but considering how many weapons there are it's inevitable)

If you want a slightly different example of the same principle try playing some RTS games.

Planetary Annihilation (it's shit) has two sides with the exactly same units and shit, and while that can work (hello chess!) it's not nearly as interesting as Supreme Commander where you have different units that behave differently.

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Oh for fucks sake. You carry a battle rifle and bayonet/knife and couple of grenades. Maybe a sidearm if your an officer or SF. Real actual combat is not CoD.

Real actual combat is a clusterfuck as everyone has very little experience, is probably a teenager or close, and is scared shitless. They'll dump several hundred pounds of ordinance to kill one raghead with a leftover AK from the '60s. I don't think we have any games that come anywhere close to simulating real combat.

Come on, play the game as it was meant to be.


Original Total Annihilation was sort of like that too, except for the Arm bias (Pelican >> Gimp, EMG >>> wimpy laser)

Actually wouldn't you bounce if you could kick the air faster than mach 1?

Forces player to move to swap weapons on the ground during combat. Doom did many weapons right, each serves a purpose, but garbage games like Half-Life do it extremely wrong.

The only intrinsically bad thing about 2-weapon limit is that it incentivizes swap-carrying, like if you want the assault rifle, sniper and rocket launcher with you, you'll run around spamming swap to move the third weapon along.

press F to pay respect.

Double jumping is amazing in Super Ghouls n' Ghosts.

Well, that depends on how you want me to interpret the question. Does halo benefit from the weapon limit with how the games were balanced, or had it been balanced differently without it in mind, would it be just as good? If it's the former, then the answer is "That depends on which halo game you mean", and if you mean the latter, then the answer is much more complicated and involves a lot of guesswork, and i'm not really interested in going down that angle of it since it's so hypothetical.

In any case, halo CE's approach to weapon balance is pretty similar to the games you described in philosophy. Each gun is built around a specific niche and there's little to no overlap in what those niches are. Some weapons in general better then others, and these in particular are placed in certain areas on the map that then facilitate player pathways in certain way and rewards players who have good map control skills.

However, CE differs a bit in that there's more of a distinction between the "better guns" and other guns. Not hugely, but enough that it's worth noting, especially since the difference gets way, way bigger in later titles. In halo, though, those better guns are called Power Weapons It would be easier to explain if I outlined the whole sandbox but i'm not gonna do that. Another thing to note is that while the whole point of bungie having a weapon limit was to make you make choices about what weapons you had on you, in CE (and sadly in most of the other halo games), the magnum was so good in so many situations, you basically wanted one with you at all times.

I don't think that's a result of the two weapon limit, though. I think that's just bad balance. Same with the balance issues later halo games have (more on that later). Had it not been a 3sk on headshots it probably wouldn't have been overpowered and it's usage would be more balanced. '


A core difference between later halo games and other arena shooters (in terms of MP at least, they diverge more in the later halo games in terms of SP as well in other ways), is that the way power weapons work differ. I said before that CE has slightly more of a distinction between normal guns and power weapons then say UT, but it's still a pretty small one. In every other halo game, though there is a huge distinction. In fact, normal guns aren't even meant to be balanced against power weapons for the most part.

Your whole statement there just sorta breaks down in regards to them because "every weapon needs to stand a chance against the more powerful weapons" just isn't even part of the design philosophy for the balance. Obviously power weapons still can't just break the game, and they do have weaknesses, but it's not balanced the same way as in UT where even the redeemer or the minigun is still in the same sandbox group as the enforcer. In the later halo games, there is just outright an intentional gulf between non power weapons and power weapons.

Even in CE, where it's really close to UT in the way weapon balance works and there's almost not a distinction between power weapons and normal guns, I would say that the lack of a weapon limit would be a bit broken simply because having the ability to have the Sniper, the shotgun, and the magnum at once would be too broken, because you have guns that are amazing at pretty much every range. This would only get way worse in later halo titles.

Most of the later halo games do have issues with weapon similarity and niche overlap though, and I'd argue that's actually part of where the normal gun power weapon gap geting bigger comes from, and the "there's 1 medium range gun that you always want on you" thing isn't fixed for a longass time, but these, again, aren't really a result of the lack of a weapon limit. It's just a result of balance being bad.

It'll take me another full like 1-2 posts to finish explaining this, so if you want me to let me know, i'm not gonna spend my time continuing unless you are gonna read it

They also basically never shoot anyone. Something like 99% of ammunition is just shot somewhere near where the enemy is presumably located as "cover fire" or "keeping them pinned down" or whatever.

I think the buildings in Iraq are roughly half composed of lead by now.

As a console game, I'm going to say that it's not even that.
I think Halo has limited inventory out of necessity/convenience.
It would get very complicated to efficiently manage a large supply of weapons with only a handful of available buttons on the controller. Restricting you to two weapons allows you to easily toggle between the two, and always be able to switch to the intended weapon.

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Not that hard fam.

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A high low-tech weapon skill would let you bust weak doors with a crowbar or sword. Though once you get the Dragon Tooth all bets are off.

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EYE: Divine Cybermancy limits you by number of mags, not number of bullets. That's more thanks to the inventory system than any desire to preserve realism though; if they gave half a damn about realism, you wouldn't be able to use a revolver to take down a low-altitude fighter ship at 2000 yards. In one shot.

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I do like the idea of "oh shit, the situation changed, quick, pick up a weapon and improvise" instead of "ok the situation changed, let me just access the armory I'm always carrying at all times and use something else". But I think there are better ways to do it than a 2-weapon limit. IMO a perfect weapon system would punish you for hoarding weapons, but still let you do it if you're dedicated. A good, simple method of doing this would be the way EYE and Fistful of Frags do it: you can carry tons of guns, but your movement speed is hampered by how much weight you're lugging around. This also adds an additional element of strategy because you might be willing to use a worse gun if it's lighter, or you might want to be more conservative with your ammo because carrying tons of it will slow you down.

I never said that it was a BAD thing to not be realistic. I love the Bear Killer, and almost all the guns in EYE in fact. I just wish that the rest of the game wasn't such a mess, because the guns are FAN-FUCKING-TASTIC, and completely salvage the rest of the game by being so fun to use.

You have to admit though, sure, it would penetrate the hull, but unless you get really lucky and hit something vital like a fuel tank, engine block, or the pilot, that's just going to put a hole in the craft, not take it down. The Bear Killer does not give a shit, you can shoot a plane in the wing and it'll fucking explode.

There's a mod for New Vegas that does this, Realistic Reloading which is included in Gun Behavior Mod Merge. I think there's a STALKER mod that does it too.

Unturned, ARMA, Insurgency, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Receiver

And that's the main thrust of my arugment. You've probably noticed I'm not very eloquent, but this is touching on my point; you have guns that are just 'better' when you could have guns that are different instead, with their own pros and cons. But because you can only carry two, you can't have them wildly different. You have 'better' and 'worse'. That's obviously a way to do it, I personally prefer games like Doom and Unreal.
The weapons in Unreal, since I keep going back to that, do have a heirarchy. The enforcers are hardly perfect, and if you run into someone with a minigun or whatever you're going to get shredded unless you're good or they're wounded or both. Another knock-on effect of different weapons is in single player games you can potentially find a secret weapon/ammo pickup that gives you more options against an upcoming fight. In a multiplayer game like Unreal Tournament it rewards the player for staying alive and knowing the map layout, as again, it gives them more options for situations.

Turn-based combat

i remember reading about halo CE back in the day, and this was one of the things cited as a reason for the two-weapon limit.

now, keep in mind, at this point, the last big console FPS was Goldeneye 64 on the n64, and you could easily carry every weapon on the map at once, complete with hundreds of rounds of ammo, dozens of rockets, several grenades and other high explosives, all while wearing body armor underneath your tuxedo.

and that was awesome. but tbh, i think the bungie crew just got lazy with halo CE, tried to doll it up like a "feature" instead of a needless limitation, and then that became the "gold standard" because "muh realism."

yeah, sorting through a dozen+ weapons on Goldeneye was annoying at times, but eventually you learned what the pattern was. in other words, people got gud.

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you know, I have to wonder about some better systems of health regen health that really haven't been copied anywhere. Two I can think of are Blacklight Retribution and Stranger's Wrath.

In BLR, you only regen half your life bar, the other half must be healed by other means. So you can get yourself off the brink of death by just waiting, but you have to put some more effort into it to get back to full strength. It gives you an incentive to avoid damage while also not turning you into a useless glass figurine if you barely escape from a battle with your life. Also makes self-healing items balanced; you can only get 50 health back at a time with the heal injector, and the default max HP is 200; the heal injector wouldn't be too useful if it took 3 or 4 hits (which you can only do every 15 seconds, take time to do, and take even longer to recharge if you're healing anyone else) to get you back to full health, but instead you only need 2, since your health goes to 100 after you get injured anyway.

Stranger's Wrath, instead of having a health bar that regenerates automatically, allowed you to "shake off" damage. You had a separate stamina bar, and you could consume stamina to get your health back. However, you had to stand still while doing this, and your stamina was also used for melee attacks, so conserving health was still important.

Ninja Gaiden II (modern 3d one) had something like this. Every enemy attack does temporary and permanent damage, and you recover temporary damage when there are no enemies on screen. You need to use an item or a save point to recover the permanent damage. This is flexible while still having a penalty for getting hit.