"Outdated" mechanics?

Literacy is an outdated mechanic. Why isn't your thread voice acted, OP? This is 2015, come on.

I said why when it's brought up it seems to be more of an excuse for the person being bad then an actual critic of the game.

vocaroo.com/i/s00qwzf44ROH

I think I messed up a line somewhere, sorry for my horrible voice while I'm at it.

I'm still mad I didn't get my final battle against Harbinger, on Earth, using Fleet elements gathered over the course of three games.

Turn based

You can probably put a lot of things under this umbrella, but the only real outdated mechanics are those born of technical limitations.

Everything about 2.5D games for example, let it be no mouse support or the fake verticality of the levels.

A lot of people will put things like boss fights under that umbrella and even if I hate boss fights, it's not an outdated mechanic. You can say it's old, it's out of trend, you can even say they fucking suck, but it's not outdated.

The only way mechanics can be outdated is when sacrifices were made in a game due to technical limitations or incompetence.
The best example is inertial frames in platformers. Bad devs {spoiler]and Nintendo in the N64 era [/spoiler] would not maintain momentum on moving platforms, making jumping awkward. I can't really think of a modern platformer that works this way.

Why do I always fuck up spoilers?

words between asterisks is a better way to spoiler

Don't be silly like me and make sure there's not a space gap between the text and them

Meanwhile, the ACTUAL progression of the industry started with real-time games, and moved to turn-based.

Generally though, anytime someone makes an argument for ANY type of gameplay to be inferior or superior simply based on when it was made you know they're full of shit and not worth talking to.

You people make me sick

This time it was just not seeing that I have put down braces instead of brackets

Haha holy shit, there is actually someone on Holla Forums using this argument too? Fucking christ…

I messed up because I was trying to do an example without having witch would cause it not to work but avoiding it also caused it not to work.

Just fuck my shit up onii fam

Something that comes to mind are the "fixed camera angles" in games like Resident Evil. I understand why they are there, but it can be frustrating when you can't move the camera around and/or the angles keep switching between areas. It's very disorienting.

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So what would be outdated? Storing shit in a bag like in ultima 7?

I think this can be applied to some mechanics that have been improved by technology, mainly tank controls.

One example of what feels like outdated mechanics in my opinion is Morrowind's melee combat. It feels like a CRPG ala Baldur's Gate, except since it isn't automated and you're controlling the swings, there's a huge level of disjointedness from a gameplay standpoint between your actions and the game's mechanics.

Later on it isn't as much as a problem when your agility is higher, but it doesn't mean it doesn't feel outdated by today's standards. It's something that works well in tile based dungeon crawlers like, for a modern example, Legend of Grim Rock, or games like the Wizardry, but for an RPG that is trying to have some form of real time gameplay, it feels super disjointed.

Honestly though, the terminology is pretty bad outside the context of some examples cited here (like old platformers vs modern ones, tank control action games in general, etc).

Just my opinion though.

I'd consider a fast combo-oriented fighting game having absolutelty no input-buffer to be outdated as shit.

I dont know man i played morrowind when i was twelve and it never felt disjointed to me. But i played it on xbox so maybe that was why.

Passwords for saves.

This.

If ME3 had a boss fight, it sure as shit wouldn't test your skills/items at your disposal
Too many boss fights nowadays are QTEs or gimmicks. The worst boss fight is the one that doesn't rely on any of the skills you've gained in the previous hours of playing the game. I'm ok with a game whose "boss fight" is just an extremely hard level, when the rest of the game was based off the level structure, like Champion Road in Mario 3D World.

I only see this "it doesn't work because it's confusing" argument it's from people who just aren't into RPGs. It's mostly Bethesda's fault for attracting the sort of people who are not into RPGs and convincing them "RPG" actually means "game where stats exist, but have no effect on gameplay".

No one complained when Daggerfall did this because everyone playing Daggerfall at the time were actual RPG fans who understood that your character's skills are supposed to impact gameplay more than your twitch skills as a player.

The Game Over/Continue? system used to make sense in the arcade age, but is completely pointless today.

Human tank controls in Silent Hill, Resident Evil et al was the best solution to the 3D character control problem for the time, but has been replaced by more modern twin stick movement systems that enable smooth, quick turning, strafing and aiming.

Pre-rendered backgrounds and the static camera angles they necessitated were a crutch that early 3D games had to work around.

A dedicated "run" key made no sense in games where you end up spending the vast majority of the time holding said key down.

Shitty outsourced FMV cutscenes that look completely different from the game, break the flow of gameplay and tell a story that's completely seperate from the gameplay itself.

Clunky interactions such as:
instead of:

Wasn't an early theory about PT that the scenery was all pre-rendered? Obviously we now know it was using the FOX engine, but could a game with limited camera/movement control have pre-rendered backgrounds? It could have really high fidelity graphics with low impact on performance.
Those can be used to make more complicated puzzles, but are usually underutilized. Imagine unlocking a door with a different key to go to a completely different room, or using a lockpick or axe on a door to bypass the lock. Maybe you want to unlock the door to get rid of the key from your inventory, but you don't want to go inside until you get another item. Also, in a game like Resi, where inventory management is key, the player isn't bothered much by opening the inventory.

This is more a matter of how the dev wants to style their game, however. If it's an action game based on killing zombies and saving the president's daughter, this only detracts from the gameplay.

Lives systems are fine as long as there's an actual penalty for losing your lives. In something like a modern Mario game, where the only penalty for a game over is having to reload your save, and start the level again, the life system may as well not be there.

vocaroo.com/i/s0y2CRnL7256

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Dude you sure shown how much of a normal fag I am with that facebook meme reenactment.

>"omg this game is too hard xD >_

That sounds fucking retarded
Like who the fuck even thought that makes sense?

damn why modern games stick to the old and busted principles

Why would you want to know what the neighbour's son thinks about games, made when he wasn't even born?

Yeah, Newton was a hack fraud, he wasn't even alive when Galileo's works came out
What the fuck does Del Toro know about movies, he was born after Casablanca came out

What a faggot. the 1950s were the peak of cinema.

The swan songs of a dying medium, nothing more.

I've been playing Ninja Gaiden Black and all I can say is thank fuck for modern checkpoint systems

You keep making these threads.
Why?

I didn't play Streets of Rage when it was released and about two years ago I tried it for the first time with a friend of mine and, nigger, what the fuck.

I mean, maybe I have been pampered by games such as Street Fighter, but I didn't expect a game that's pretty much a brawl fighter to react only to two buttons. I expected something a little bit more complex.

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the worst part is thats real.

Video games clumsily aping TTRPGs instead of having good video game gameplay are outdated as fuck and only praised by people who can't, propably because of social retardation, play real RPGs.

Having non-regenerating health in FPS games is now outdated.

What about the magic system in Elder Scroll's games?
Somehow tons of options manage to be too outdated to be used any more.
In Morrowind we could augment out speed, jumps, fly, design spells for specific effects and scale to tailor them to the specific needs we had. And enchanting let us use practically any spell effect we could make as an enchantment too. The options where nigh endless. Also, spells let you teleport, but fast travel was strictly limited to moving you between a few specific NPC's and locations, forcing players to explore the country, giving a sense of scale that lead many players even today to think that morrowind was bigger than latter games and pay attention to directions you where given by NPC's, road markers and the land to help you find stuff and rewarded you by hiding tons of little things all over the place for you to find.

In Oblivion enchanting was bare bones, no flying, no super jumps, only limited effects available. Many effects where no longer available as magic effects, but at least we could still design spells.
Fast travel system that lets you go from anywhere to anywhere and compass that shows you where everything is killed the sense of scale, need to pay attention to what NPC's told you, showed you where everything was so there was no sense of accomplishment when you found some hidden vampire lair while looking for a dwemer ruin.

In Skyrim, we don't even get stats. That mechanic is outdated. We don't get to design spells anymore, that effect is outdated. We can only ever add one or two effects to anything we enchant, and strictly limited effects to choose from, and oblivions fast travel system is still there, to insure the place doesn't feel too grand or that finding anything is even remotely challenging. They even added the fast travel NPC's to move you from city to city so you won't even have to walk anywhere the first time before the fast travel system lets you go there instantly.

So in short, they keep updating core mechanics to keep them from cluttering the game with options that would just confuse the poor casual they are designing the game for.
PROGRESS!

Limited spell casts. Now everything is MP this MP that when before you had to manage the individual spells and encouraged you to use your lower level ones instead of nuking everything with all you got.

Fuck off underage faggot. Maybe you should become proficient and play an FPS before Halo you little nigger.

I really hope you kill yourself. You must be one of those faggots who can't watch black and white movies.

Whoa calm down gramps

Belt scrollers always had limited button input you little nigger. The whole purpose about the genre is crowd controller and positioning.

I'm guessing you're that faggot from the beat em up thread who has only played SoR1 and not the much improved sequels.

What fast paced games had tank controls?

I mean, boss fights can be shit if they're just bullet sponges, but a good game has interesting bosses that are fun.

I'm sure he just got stuck at blade wolf

When is open-world-games and quick time events going to be outdated game-choices?

It's like the developers don't even try anymore.

whoa kill yourself kid

The whole purpose of FPS is testing your aiming skills and reflexes and they can still afford more than two buttons. The whole purpose of RTS is resource and time management and unit positioning and boy, do they have rich input schemes.

Just because something is supposed to be about something doesn't excuse its poor performance in other areas, you daft cunt.

Also no, I'm not that guy. I have never been to a beat'em up thread.

Minor note - one of the things I find annoying about old movies is the lack of breathing room between lines - actors quite literally spill their lines over each other so that even when the script is well written and the subtext is there, it's stilted in favor of nothing but a shorter runtime. Strong example of this would be the Big Sleep.

That's how the genre has always been dumb nigger, you just don't get beat em ups. The whole purpose of them is crowd control and beating the shit out of groups of thugs. It's about muh 20 hit combos and shit from a fighting game, dumb little nigger.

You are a retard and have been spoiled by new movies. Actors were still informed by theater and stage acting, plus people don't talk the same the same they did 80 years ago. Also acting isn't the same for every movie, you clearly haven't seen enough.

Nice double post faggot

If devs don't try, opting for multiple level-based designs will simply boil down to the same shit, but with a different tune.

Drifting into anecdotes, but I watched Paths of Glory recently as well, and it had the same problem, (but to a lesser extent) especially during the trial scene.

Did he hurt your precious feelings or are you simply triggered? He said that the argument is comparable to movies in how some old movies had something new or fascinating for the time thus making them special, but since that one movie everyone did the same thing and now the once new/interesting thing is a trope or a cliché. I mean, go watch movies like Tron now and you'll understand. The movies posted are good movies and that's it, they didn't have a blast processing power or some other marketing ploy to attract "casuals", they were simply good.

THIS! Fucking casuals ruin everything.

Companies pander to them endlessly and all it ever amounts to is removing features, difficulty, and mechanics in order to appease these half-retarded casuals who barely even play games to begin with.

As time goes on, video games have, more or less, reached a "standard" of control.
Why do you think Far Cry plays like CoD 4 which plays like Titanfall which plays like Fuse which plays like Shadow Warrior which plays like…
You get my point.
Back in the day, there was much less of a "consensus", even informal, on how characters move and operate within a game world, so developers were much more likely to experiment. This is how tank controls came about. At the time, it was a pretty solid way of navigating in a 3D environment with fixed camera angles. Then along comes Resident Evil 4, which refined the control scheme to be much more fluid and controllable than before. This control came at an expense to the tension of the series, but the controls were so well received that pretty much every over the shoulder shooter shamelessly copied it. So now, you've got a bunch of super soldier protagonists that, for some reason, control as well as a US Secret Service agent.
This doesn't make the old controls worse or outdated, but it does mean that someone who has spent a lot of time playing modern games and are used to games being so standardized might be confused that they actually have to learn how a mechanic used to work, rather than assuming it works like in 30 other video games.
Or maybe I'm full of shit and typed all that for nothing.

I think that makes them more boring honestly. And then if any game tries to break that convention fags just say the controls suck or its a gimmick.

Standards change over time. It's just that the standard you're referring to proliferated beyond its call due to mass marketing.

God Hand

Non-analog controlled cameras? Like this was a problem on both the N64 and PS, PS's magnified because the lack of any analog stick at all. Like, if you're going to put a game on console, at least let the camera be controlled by an analog stick.

That's all I can think of, off the top of my head.

Yeah, but my point is that standards have become more widespread than they used to.
One thing I've noticed when going through my backlog is that I usually have to do a bit of experimentation to learn all of the controls, even if there's a short tutorial level or something. Now you just play the first level for 15-20 minutes and get everything spoonfed to you despite the fact that maybe two buttons do something different from other games in the modern genre.

Exactly, and their cinematography and acting is still good you fucking under aged nigger. Anyone who complains about them has shit taste and doesn't know shit about camera work or acting to begin with, kill yourself.

bruh

It's **not about 20 hit combos

Did I miscommunicate? That's a direct result of mass marketing - you've got to make sure that the game is easily accessible by the lowest common denominator. Due to the change in the market, now a good measure of quality is if the game is easy to learn, but hard to master.

Speaking of Morrowind combat.
Daggerfall had the same system of dice roll hits, but would sometimes play a sound effect of steel clinging or a shield being hit.
With that 1 little sound effect, I was able to imagine instead of my hit missing, the enemy blocked my strike. Morrowind only had that whoosh sound effect for misses, so my imagination only thought I was playing as the worlds worst warrior.

I have the strange feeling that we agree on the subject. I just used Resident Evil TPS controls as an example of how one game's mechanics can be transplanted into other games due to sheer popularity.
I distinctly remember a lot of the reviews I read in paper magazines really praised the step away from tank controls, almost universally. At the time, I could certainly see why, but it had the unfortunate side effect of being so popular that hundreds of other games copy it. While this may not diminish the quality of the work, it really diminishes my enjoyment of it, looking back. It's not the game's fault, but it's just sad to see what was once unique become… the regular practice.
I dunno. I think I'm just rambling.

TIL le retrogamrs believe themselves newton and del toro.

Or maybe they're just parroting Reddit's Top 10 Gsmes of all time, because they're afraid of being called faggots when they risk revealing their real taste.

Not really, you can always make an arcade-y game and maybe people will like it, roguelites somewhat proves that people like the "play it until you're dead" challenge.

Credits could be an in-game item, didn't Devil May Cry do that?

Tank controls work great in horror games because the clunkiness makes the character more fragile but not unplayable increasing the tension of a possible confrontation.

Unless you tell me Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 2, Dead Space and RE:make are outdated.

A crutch that rendered some amazing scenarios that mostly of the modern games fail to achieve. Today it is just a choice in tech, somebody could make an amazing pre-rendered bg + static camera game if they had the balls.

Pics related

That's just bad game design.

Not necessarily, Command and Conquer did it and it was fine. Twisted Metal too, but I never played that

Let's be honest user. ME1 and only ME1 of the series had the best boss fights. Making boss, before his final form, commit seppuku through dialog manipulation is great.

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It's not an unheard-of phenomenon eg. Warcraft did the same for MMOs, which caused every single publisher in the market to chase after the spectre of the WOW-killer. Problem was, over time, and due to shit decisions, WOW became a shadow of it's former self and the market wore itself out on ghosts.

Coming back to your point, it's incorrect to assume that you can't get creative because of the shift to OTS camera. It's just that people haven't really tried, and the ones that did, do stand out eg. compare RE4 and the first 2 Dead Space games.

Then the boss goes this isn't even my final form

I would really appreciate some good old pre-rendered backgrounds.
It's telling that a mediocre 90's JRPG like Legend of Dragoon, despite the blocky models, still looks fairly good today just because of how pretty the backgrounds are. Sometimes I'd be walking through a city and have to stop just to check out all the architecture and composition of the scenes. It may sound cheesy, but sometimes it felt almost like I was walking through a painting, it was so pretty.

But no, nowadays you've got to have total control over the camera no matter what.
Pretty skyboxes just aren't the same as going through a loading screen and coming out with a downright picturesque angle of the ocean and all the docks there, sounds of the city hustling and bustling in the background.

Thoughts on turn-based combat mechanics?
Fallout and Paper Mario seemed to pull it off really well.

turn based a decent turn/animation speed is a lot more tolerable than most "Action" jrpgs that's for shit sure

When a turn-based game is bad (Magic and skills are worthless, attack only can beat the game) it's really bad, like I would rather play a crummy action game then a crummy turn-based game.
But I'm still a fan of SMT, Legend of Heroes, or really any turn based that requires you to utilize your entire arsenal.

Oh, uh, I didn't realize that was an assumption I was making. You still can, don't get me wrong, but when you've got 30 games a year coming out with the RE4 camera, it gets harder and harder to find that creativity in the sea of samey, bland shit.
One game I think did the OTS camera rather creatively? Dead Space. The actual controls of the camera weren't impressive, but I absolutely adored how they integrated the the health display and inventory into it. The lack of a "proper" HUD really helped you forget you were playing a video game, and the camera struck a nice balance between letting you gun down space zombies easily and keeping things out of sight if you're not paying attention. Now, all the ammo certainly didn't help the horror atmosphere, but it's one of the few games that I feel actually did something halfway creative with the layout.
I don't even know why I keep going on about individual mechanics and games when that's totally not even the point I'm trying to make.

Dragon Quest has always used turn-based combat and it never feels "old" or "outdated"
Contrary to what the team working on the FF7 remake thinks

Are you blind? Those low-res pre-rendered backgrounds look like utter shit.

horrible relic from a time when consoles/pcs couldnt pull off real time combat, luckily newer rpgs have mostly ditches this shit-tier combat system

People actually like keycards?
Are constant waypoints and npcs inceesantly talking at you gonna be looked at nostalgically 20 years from now?

yes

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I think they're just looking back on them fondly as an element of level design complicated enough that you didn't just run down a straight corridor with literally no alternate paths or routes to explore.

Because games make their own standards. But we're in agreement, so any further elaboration could be considered nitpicking.

Also, I agree with . There's a cohesive style to the game, but that's a minimal standard, and the 3D clashes with the 2D aspects.

I love turn-based combat. Love that shit. Chalk it up to me playing shitty JRPGs and strategy games my whole life, but I just adore it.
That being said, it's really, really easy to fuck it up. Attack animations take 5 seconds to play out? Buffs are worthless? Bosses are immune to every status? Worthwhile abilities take literally 30-60 seconds every time you select them? It's easy to fall into downright shitty design, and it's easy to ruin your whole game on a basic level and make it boring as shit.
Turn based combat, in my opinion: necessitates two things: a need for a diverse set of abilities, and quick combat.
Since I already brought up Legend of Dragoon, let's keep talking about it.
Like most above-average JRPGs, it has timed hits. As you progress, your basic attack command turns into a long string of combos and you've got to learn the rhythm behind each attack to unleash its full potential. You want to bust out the 8-hit combo that deals thousands of damage compared to a normal, basic hit? You're not gonna sit and watch them do it, you're going to make them do it, and that activity helps you forget that each attack is taking like, 10-15 seconds of fucking the other guy up.
The game is basic when it comes to magic, though, and it suffers from the classic minute long magic attack cutscenes. Can't skip them. If you want to hit an enemy's weak point and he's got a shit ton of armor, then you're going to have to put up with watching a cutscene every turn, and nobody wants to do that.

It's a balancing act, really. If the turns take too long to execute, then the game becomes a boring slog. If the turns become mindlessly mashing attack, then half of the mechanics are wasted and it becomes boring.

fuck this thread is making me autistic

A better example of pre-rendered backgrounds looking good would be Infinity Engine games. Some Icewind Dale areas look great to this very day, provided you look at them at the proper resolution. Pillars of Eternity while a shit game comes across as having a much bigger budget than it actually has due to pre-rendered backgrounds, etc.

K, fam.

Probably.
Mediocre design that we scream is shitty now isn't going to look as shitty compared to really shitty design in the future.
Much like how we can be blinded by hype and overlook a game's flaws, we can be blinded by hate and overlook what it does well.

Forgot the obligatory example.

This is 2000~ era graphics.

Biggest one I can think of is tank controls although some variants of it are actually just plain shit

People don't seem to understand that limiting the player is necessary in an horror game (although I can agree that tank control was a product of it's time and you can limit the movement of the player in many other ways), if you want it to actually be horror that is (see F.E.A.R), worst part is they replaced it with several other things that are just as shit when you really think about it (namely DOOM3 darkness or the usual "you can't have a weapon at all because reason")

PS: the shit variants of tank control I'm refering to are those that don't allow you to turn while moving forward or backwards and to a lesser extent those that don't include the quick 180 and those that don't let you choose between movement relative to the playable character or relative to the camera

Fine, I'll admit the backgrounds for LoD are low-res and pixellated as fuck.
What about the 2002 remake of Resident Evil? How do these hold up 14 years later? Granted, I'm not entirely sure if these are pre-rendered, so I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure they are.

Basic problem with 3D is that it takes expensive lighting to make them look good, and that's a resource hog compared to shitty global lighting, which is much cheaper. But then again, 2D backgrounds are the cheapest of them all, yet the most bang for your buck.

Try 2008. it seemed like the theme for nearly every release back then was anticlimactic endings. Off the top of my head I remember Saints Row 2, Gears 2, Fable 2 and Fallout 3 all either had no confrontations at the end of the game, or really easy bosses that were the equivalent of "hold shoot to win."

No, REmake was still pre-rendered.
Once more though if you try and play that at a resolution higher than 480 it starts to look like shit.
My favorite Pre-rendered game is Chrono Cross on the PSX, but it's only good if you play it at it's intended resolution.
The only reason people shit on your LoD picture is because you posted it at a higher resolution.

Much better, but the key problem remains - which is the inconsistency between 2D and 3D, and that can be attributed directly to the lighting. Given that you're much closer to the pre-rendered backgrounds that you'd be with an isometric camera angle, it's all the more jarring eg pic 1 is an easy example where they forgot to take light sources into account.

God Hand needed them though, and it compensated well by having a button that makes you turn 180 degrees and you could lock onto enemies easily. That's vastly different than a TPS having tank controls.

Having just revisited RE4 over the last couple days, I feel compelled to point out that it wasn't a very big step away from tank controls, it was mostly tank controls with a different camera angle.

It's still a great example for this thread though, in that it both represented an improvement in user control in it's genre, but feels clunky and awkward compared to similar control schemes today.

Also, most TPS games now let you fully rotate the camera, which RE4 doesn't, and, I feel that's actually the better choice in it's case, as even after all this time it's probably the third-person game that has come the closest to imitating the FPS's that have you lean around corners.

Not that long ago I would have said no, but recently I've come around to the idea that keycards and their equivalents lead to better level design than endless repeated scripted sequences of "Oh no! We were trying to get from point A to B but now thing happened and we must visit C first instead!"

Title Screens, the second I see one is the second I uninstall that piece of shit!

I think that's always going to be a problem inherent in the practice.
Maybe I'm just a shitter, but I can't imagine a way to reconcile the 3D characters with 2D backgrounds, but I personally don't mind the disjointedness of it at all. To me, it just draws more attention to the detail and composition of the backgrounds, but that's a really subjective aspect of it and I can get if you think it's dumb.

Eh, I didn't take the picture, so it doesn't bug me.
I swear it's not as bad in-game, though. Pre-rendered backgrounds are always going to look weird when you emulate it, you know?

It's the same control scheme as older RE with OTS camera and aiming, and 2 buttons QTE dodge instead of the RE3 dodging system.

It really isn't that bad if the camera is zoomed out a bit. RE has the clear issue of being too close up. Check out Temple of Elemental Evil for an older example. Previously mentioned Pillars of Eternity makes the player models blend in fairly well too. Images related.

Yeah, you're exactly right. The simple change from fixed cameras to OTS had a huge impact on the feel of the game and put a lot more control in the hands of the player. No more zombies shambling into view from around the screen, now you can deal with the threats as you please. Which is fine, I loved RE4 when it came out, but it goes to show how such a seemingly innocuous change can have huge ramifications.

I consider letting the player control the camera to be part of the control scheme, don't you?

Don't forget aim assist, this mechanic should considered outdated we got the tech for better smoother aiming. They still force us to play with semi aim bot even in multiplayer matches.

It ain't supposed to - the purpose of the background, at its most basic, is to be negative space. This sort of disjointedness means that while the background can be appreciated on its own merit (like you do, I suppose), it utterly fails in its purpose by not managing to mesh with the rest of the scene.

But like said, this problem disappears when you 'zoom out' and it's not so much in your face anymore.

You also have to consider that this is an isometric RPG where you pretty much need to be more zoomed out than in a TPS. But then when you're more zoomed in, you've got to add details to the background or else they look funky and simplistic. But you can't add those same details to your character because they're a moving model as opposed to a static image and that would take a lot more resources to render.

I have really bad news for you user.
NOT having aim assist is considered outdated and it's probably going to get worse. Also,

Yeah, it's called a mouse, we've had them for a long time now.

Non-controllable camera

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Yeah, I am talking about console shooters espieaclly ported to pc.

Yeah, a lot of PS1 RPGs suffered from the fact that the backgrounds sometimes made it difficult to discern what you could actually interact with. Some games told you to go fuck yourself and figure out which doors and areas you could actually go to, while others, like LoD, just tossed up a marker telling you what you could go through.
It was flawed, to be sure, but I still think pre-rendered backgrounds can have their purpose in today's industry, especially given how much higher screen resolution is. But then that's just gonna look weird when the resolution gets higher anyway.

I gotta admit when you put it like that it makes sense to include it as part of the control scheme.

I mean, you go from not controlling cameras to controlling cameras.
It seems… a little obvious.

Yeah, pretty much. I feel pre-rendered backgrounds only work (with current tech) in isometric RPGs and adventure games. Daedalic adventure games are downright gorgeous because of their combination of 3D and 2D. Although in Daedalic's case I get the feeling the backgrounds are really just paintings, and not actual 3D modeling.

That's what i meant, i just wrote "were" instead of "are".

This is a good thread. Almost no shitposting in sight.
Is it because the subject is inherently difficult for underage tryhards to engage in?

Dunno I'm used to not controlling the camera directly and in my mind control scheme involves controlling the playable character which an external camera technically isn't.

Resolution isn't an issue if the 2D background doesn't conflict with the 3D foreground. Cheap solution - placing light sources and prebaked godrays according to the background, thus making the 3D objects look less out of place.

Minor note, the guy who did that needs to relearn perspective. There's artistic license (distant castle) and there's not following Euclidean geometry (everything else).

So in what sense is aim assist outdated? By which I mean what has changed?
Not to be a dick, and I hate aim assist, but if they've been too lazy to take it out before they aren't going to start now.

It's a topic that encourages full sentences and justifications of statements, rather than a pic and three words of greentext.

Give Fable II some credit: they clearly intended from the start to pull the rug out from under you at the end, and they did. The other games were cheaping out at best, and being tryhard edgy at worst.

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Shit I really set myself up for that

Eh, it's whatever. Gaming terminology is really nebulous and poorly defined anyway.

I don't really have much of a response to that, but you seem to have some ideas on how to overcome the 2D background / 3D character problem. Would you mind continuing?

Not a mechanic, but god they are so many people out there who won't play a video game just because it has the gall to not have voice acting.

"You mean we have to *read*? Fuck this, I'm out."

Citizen Kane is still the best test for how much of a pleb someone is at watching films.

Casuals watch it and say, "What's the point?", or "Maybe I could appreciate it for what it was, but it's not that interesting anymore".

People who actually appreciate films will see how well-crafted it is. It's a good story told well using film. That's all you need. Anyone who tells you otherwise is a moron who doesn't understand film.

Now extrapolate that to games and you can realize why you're a moron.

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Pics related thank you based WIP renderer having fun bugs

You opened the portal to hell, user.

Do some research eg vid related. I will say that, for better or worse, we're in a graphics race, so it's going to be some time before practical utility even enters the equation.

Yeah, that's prebaked godrays. Still opted for global lighting, though.

It's a dangerous prediction, but I still feel pretty confident in saying that in my lifetime we will not have rendering tech and hardware capable of making pre-rendering obsolete. For any given level of tech short of "we can simulate real life visuals PERFECTLY, down to the atom", pre-rendering will always be superior for visual fidelity since you can take environments that require a renderfarm to render, and run them smoothly on a toaster.

Too casual, imo. Hook 'em up to The Seventh Seal. If they can't expound on the theological themes and medieval nature of Swedish cinema, with historical reasons that tie into the general mindset of the people, their opinion is worthless.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_(graphics)
I give it till 2018, though you're correct about the performace aspect.

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That's what I mean. Performance is after all the reason end-user graphics tend to lag so far behind what is technically possible.

Baked lighting and ambient occlusion != pre rendered backgrounds. Mirrors edge did this as well in 2008, as should any game without a destructible environment or lighting that moves around a lot (but devs are lazy so they don't).

FYI: "baked" in this context refers to the fact that fancy lighting stuff like bouncing rays everywhere was calculated before the game even runs and the data was saved onto a texture on each object. This means that you don't have to calculate lighting for anything baked each frame, but you can't bake anything that moves or has moving lighting otherwise it will look very strange.

Kind of why I'm looking forward to AMD's Polaris and Vega cards. If they can put out cards that good that cheap, then we can all have a little optimism about the commercial market.

I guess another test for the modern film fan is comparing Road Warrior to Fury Road and saying which one is better.

You'll get either people saying RW is better because muh 80s nostalgia or people saying saying FR is better because WITNESS ME.

The true cinema fan would say something other than that.

Me, I think the two just do different aspects well. RW is better from a storytelling standpoint but FR is better in execution and style and economy of filmmaking.

I think any kind of fan worth their salt should be able to back up their answer with more than that. If you like the old one more, then give reasons as to why it is objectively superior and back it up with why you subjectively find it better. Same thing if you like the new one more.
I'm getting sick of what's basically one line greentext responses when I ask people why they like something. I'm not talking just about here, either, it plagues me in real life, too.

vs

Like, one of these I can have a conversation about, the other is just small talk filler, which is fine, but sometimes I want to talk about things like… I don't wanna say an adult, but I can't think of another way to put it. Someone who isn't a casual?

I routinely bring up to people that Armstrong basically brought boss fights back to what they should be since for years they're Mass Effect 3 or Watch_Dogs

TOP KEK

Pick one. Rasterization is superior for everything except reflections. Add partial tracing for reflections, like games are doing right now, and the only remaining argument in favor of tracing engines disappears. Whatever resolution rasterization produces near photorealistic images in, ray/path tracing will always cut that number at least in half.

It was made back then for gamepads to help them out with aiming. For every console generation is passing the deadzone in the sticks from the gamepads are getting more smaller, therefore aiming is getting more smoother and aiming assist is getting more annoying and less used.

Want to hit somebody from a far to bad aim assist is lock on to you nearest target.

Analog sticks are outdated. Even if you completely get rid of the dead zone (without making anything worse than before) you'd still have a very imprecise method of input.

Controllers are outdated.
We won't have proper control schemes until there's a lossless connection between your thoughts and the game.

Morrowind combat was shit day one, people ignored it because of everything else the game had to offer.
It didn't become outdated, it was shit since the beginning.

But user, that's literally what i said, are you capable of reading besides enjoying movies?

That shit is going to fuck up people so badly. Not that video games can't already do that, see WoW and Valve's gambling simulators. But it's going to get so much worse when manual behaviour is taken out of the equation. I hope it doesn't happen during my lifetime. If it does I'll be the grandpa who won't let go of his mouse and keyboard.

I would die.
Straight up, I would forget I was a person and starve to death. I couldn't imagine what people raised with that kind of entertainment would be like.

QTE which result in auto failure. Having a QTE where it forces you to make a quick choice that steers the story fine (until dawn). but trying to make you watch a movie and if you are not paying attention at the right point you die is stupid. At that point the give the player control and then give them a set time to figure something out.

Ammo, and even reloading are out dated mechanics. In the future, more games will drop both of them. Overwatch, for example, drops ammo pickup concept which TF2 still has. Many ideas like this that come from physical constraints in the real world do not make more fun games and will eventually go.

It's ok user, I didn't read OP's last sentence either. However, I don't double down when I make a dumb mistake.

If you fail the QTE, you should just be set back (take damage, have to fight enemy longer, go a different route, etc). If the game will not go on unless you press x, it's completely useless, and might as well just cut it out. RE4 had some like that, then again it started a lot of bad design philosophies

Both of those can be interesting mechanics when applied properly. It is an interesting dilemma if you have very few bullets left in your magazine, but if you hit the enemy with all of them they will die, but if you miss too much they won't, and the alternative would be prematurely reloading and wasting the remaining bullets and having less ammo for the remainder of the fight. Ammo also can make you use your weapons very deliberately if it is low rather than just constantly spamming them.

Of course most games just merge extra bullets in your mag with the rest, have enough ammo for you to not give a shit about conserving, reloading is quick enough to be a no brainer 99% of the time, and health regenerates meaning your mistakes don't often have lasting consequences.

But examples of games that did what I described well would be modded STALKER or FNV.

Vietcong did this too, and might even have went the extra mile and let you keep half used mags at the bottom of the stack.

Autosaving or saving in the pause menu.

Dying in games is a really outdated game mechanic, what's up with that, is this the rock age or something!? Pics related are the best examples of games that have left those old, antiquated methods to try and make games fun!

Agreed.

Agreed here too, though.

Patrician. The problem is that there's so few of them, and a society designed to limit real discussion as much as possible.

Patrician is a great way of putting it, but there's not much of a way I can say "I want to talk about things like a patrician" without sounding like a total tool.

there have been plenty of games before then that eschewed a final boss

permadeath > death so you're right in a sense.

A bit off the mark. Never felt confused by it, understood it, accepted it, but always felt it was definitely a weaker point of Morrowind as a whole.

Been a fan of RPGs since Baldur's Gate, Pokemon Red (kek), and FF Tactics, and really loved M&M and HoMM, but I was also very much an all rounder who also loved RTS's and FPS's (Warcraft 2, Half Life,C&C Games, Age of Empires, Starcraft, Deus Ex, etc).

My point is, I never had that feeling of disjointedness between mechanics and visuals in any of these other games, and I guess the variety might've spoiled my expectations for a 2003 game, though I ended up ignoring it in the long run because everything else about the game is amazing, but it's still the aspect that I dislike the most whenever talking about Morrowind.

Very true! Sometimes the smallest of things make the difference in immersion. Never really got the chance to play Daggerfall, think it's worth trying?

Fair enough, I love pretty much every other aspect of the game, just find myself playing mage/alchemy builds almost exclusively because they're just so much more fun mechanically.

Holding the right trigger to aim with a control stick that always snaps back towards the center so you can shoot with the z-trigger.
Crouching by holding down the r-trigger then pressing down-c to crouch.

That's the definition of a dated mechanic. It was acceptable in the era of 8-16 bit RPGs, but that shit just ain't fun and we have much better mechanics in today's games.

Depends on how you do them, having a system that is some sort of an hybrid between Parasite Eve 1 and Parasite Eve 2 would work pretty nicely imo.

Mechanics can be outdated if they were used to compensate for hardware limitations.
For example the PS1 controller didn't have analog sticks so every PS1 game that let you control the camera is "outdated" compared to games that let you control the camera better thanks to a dedicated analog stick.
It's unfair to equate "outdated" with bad, just that ideally "modern" game mechanics should be overall better thanks to years of refinement and advances in the video game industry.
Of course thanks to the eternal casual modern game mechanics aren't actually more refined, but that's how it would be in a less cancer-ridden industry.

I've never played parasite eve so I don't know what you mean. How does it work?

Most contemporary RPGs just have enemies on the map as visible entities which you may choose to avoid (usually by walking around/running away from them).

Fallout approached this well; travel is done by picking a destination, and you see a line progress through the world map. When you get an encounter, it stops and zooms in on you, at which point you see the enemy

PE1 has monsters that pop into existence randomly but don't magically transport to a separate field to fight, then you fight with a Vagrant Story styled system, there's also another mechanic that makes it so that the more encounter you had on a specific screen the less you will have chances to have a fight on that screen in the future.

PE2 has no random encounter but it prepopulates area (and shows area containing enemies on your map) so when you enter a room with enemies you have a small pause and the fight start.

And my idea would be combining the prepopulation of PE2 (and making it random unlike PE2) with the rest of the PE1 system which now that I think about it would just be Vagrant Story with randomized mobs

The only one is limited continues/lives. They were in arcades to milk quarters. In early consoles, a game could be beaten in two hours if you were good at it, so they made it super hard with few lives so you would have to start from the beginning and extend the life of the game. Now that arcades are dead and games are longer and with actual saves, limited lives are completely worthless.

Art by adversity.

I think there is a real virtue to the idea of a game which allows only limited failure, escalating difficulty, and through mastery you come to beat it.

It came about because of a paticular design philosophy for making money at an arcade, but like a lot of things in media, something good came out of this limitation.

The limited continues only makes sense if the progression through the game as a continuous experience is the goal. Much like the ammo thing talked about earlier, many games no longer follow the paradigm where it adds anything to the experience, as a whole just writing off the mechanic is writing off a useful tool in the designers tool chest.

Yeah, I know! Why waste time on cinematography when you could just CGI it?

Underage detected.

It goes on faggot. What is with this meme that turn based was created because of technical limitations? Turn based existed along side action rpgs in the late 80s and 90s.

Dear jesus are you masochist?
I can barely function with a trackpad, much less with a multi-function one that has the surface acting as buttons.

Well, what kind of enemy doesn't have locked doors?
I agree that it's too much like leaving the key under the rug, but well done it can lead to some fun exploration.

Some things are incorperated well in gaming such as tank controls, or simply necessity and can be improved like save slots rather than passwords to load.

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I'm casual at cinema and I loved Seventh Seal, it's simply good, not only-patricians-will-appreciate good.

Citizen Kane isn't the big game changer everyone claims it was
The game Changer was A Birth of a Nation, but no we can't say positive things about a KKK movie can't we

that's basically the excuse for all CoD shitters who cant git gud at CS. Or any other FPS.

Copy protection objects

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You are literally and laterally retarded.

This game is in desperate need of a remake, it would work real well with the 3DS touchscreen.

If only HM moves were all as good as Waterfall or Surf.

Do you really want to go back to the second analog stick not moving the camera? Because any game that doesn't use that shit today is garbage.

Andrei Rublev is superior in every way.

This, more or less.

Game does X one way, it gets the job done. Later, you play a different game that does X a different way, and it's more enjoyable. Now, compared to the better option, the original way of doing X just doesn't seem as good. The original way didn't technically actually get worse, your standards just increased. But either way, your ability to enjoy the original way is lessened.

For example, purely linear style shooters like the classics such as Doom and the like were fine until I played STALKER. I really liked how that wasn't purely linear, you could go back to previous maps and such, it had a more adventure style format, I guess? Whatever you'd call it, ever since then the purely linear progression of classic style FPS games kinda bugs me. Actually, just in general, I've pretty much only wanted first person shooting with more adventure/RPG type game structure since then. It drives me crazy how little we still get that.

Real time action without proper real-time control has always been garbage forever. It's what basically makes all MMOs unplayable to me, for example.

Fucking kill yourself.

Sleeping dogs is great because it feels like a ps2 game but with decent graphics, hong kong is also just neat as fuck

You call it clunky, I call it immersive.
While certainly it has more steps, that also gives the developer and player more options.
For example, you can try various keys. Of may try using an axe on the door, to chop it down?
A hammer to break down the lock?

While I agree with you an0n, the problem is that different people come into these movies/game WANTING DIFFERENT THINGS - sometimes even when it doesn't make sense.

You got idiots playing tactical games and wanting brainless action out of it. So a streamlined and simplified "game" is "more fun" for them, ergo better.
People with very narrow tastes and experiences tend to be very limited in both their purchases and expectations.

The implication is you can't.

Okay, here's one. Try Might and Magic 2 sometime.

It's a first-person turn-based dungeon crawler, but the draw distance and graphics are such shit because of technical limitations that it's scarcely more than a board game, and extremely confusing to navigate. The basic movement mechanics are outdated because they were trying to do something that couldn't yet be done with any level of grace.

You'd have to be a masochist to play it now, but at the time it was probably pretty damn cool.

Both movies are a big deal and recognized as such. Your point?

I wish I had unlimited time just so I could spend all day yelling at all these wrong opinions.

if you kill yourself, the average human IQ might stop overlapping with monkeys

Play the first Dragon Quest and you'll understand what outdated mechanics are.

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How dense are you? Go back and play some atari 2600 games. Everything evolves, including game mechanics.

What I expected:

What I got:

>this shit: chinaview.wordpress.com/2007/03/29/list-of-china-modern-torture-methods-photo/

YOU FUCKING EUPHORICS HAVE SO MUCH POTENTIAL BUT WASTE TIME DEFENDING SOME NONSENSICAL SHIT

I'm not a stormfag, Hitler was fucking sick

Sage for no vydia.

Forgot to sage fuck

Did you forget your meds?

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Some fucking faggot made this exact statement in a Fallout thread yesterday.

I can't even be sure if we are full of trolls or just e-celeb watching retards who can't actually play games.

Why would there be that much unused land?

It's not like styles ever descended from the limitations of the form that existed in a medium at any time. Any guitarist who uses distortion needs to upgrade his amps, that shit only happened because they were sending inputs the electronics couldn't handle but it's 2016 now, come on.

you need to chill down on that verbosity a little because I have no idea what you are trying to say

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Because strafing is such a hard skill to learn. That's my only problem with tank controls is that the inability to strafe makes absolutely no sense. Maybe reduce the player's ability to move forward/backward while they strafe, but it should be possible to do things that most humans can do.

Daggerfall is worth a try.

Even waterfall was garbage until gen 4

List of outdated mechanic

New mechanic that I hate

Pre-renders were only used because of the shitty rendering the PS1 was capable of (or rather limited to) but had a high amount of data capacity to store pictures.

Not that I hate pre-renders, but think of this next time…

You're essentially playing a game on a sheet of paper

You mean lack of one.

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Why do you dislike turn-based RPGs? My only guess is that it's not realistic, but then I must ask why you dislike cover and health regen

Cover and health regen just makes everything boring and easy mode, cover shooter also have this "unnatural" level design where they put like crates or obstacles for your cover that looks force as fuck.

After playing good action RPG like Ys, Monster Hunter(?) and Dragon's Dogma, turn based RPG seems boring and challenging. I like it when I was a kid but now, not so much. I dont hate turn based game where strategy is involved like Valkyria Chronicle, FF tactic and Advance War

*boring and not challenging

like it all rot in hell

No mechanic becomes outdated, but the way they're implemented can be.

For example, "random encounters" aren't a bad mechanic by themselves, but the way they were implemented in older games was generally pretty simplistic (understandably so for the time), and that led to them being pretty fucking obnoxious for the player. If your name is Ulillillia, then there's nothing more fun than trying to walk back to town and having to fight 15 billion trash mobs that die in one hit and give 0-2xp, but for everyone else it's just frustrating.

You can always improve on an existing formula if you try.

Improve this:

H2O

How about "regen" health that only works with a medkit aka you pick up that medkit and it takes a little while to work.

Not really a mechanic, and the way the game was designed, there was no reason to look up or down iirc
Is it disorienting for the player when they transition between areas? Yes, but you have to admit that fixed camera angles created a lot of drama and atmosphere for the game. It hardly even counts as a jumpscare since you knew the scene transition was coming, you just never knew what to expect. It's a harrowing experience that's hard to replicate without using a similar set-up.
This is a genre, not a mechanic, and I personally find text adventures to be pretty interesting if they're well written. Interactive books, my man, they never go out of style.
Again, not a mechanic… maybe you misunderstood the topic?

H2O2

Bam, now it's even more corrosive. Improved as FUCK

daily reminder NASA or anyone with rocketfu has the reasons and money to launch an ozone bomb high up and fix any damage in the ozone layer but they have to get shekels from skin protectors

Really fucking short render distance in tpses because errythng's foggy seems to be gone now.
Really, a fair chunk of the hardware limitation workarounds seem to have gone away for the better,like tank controls.

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I can understand some things are unbearable now, even if at the time they were OK.
Turn-based systems in RPGs are a prime example.

In the 8-bit and 16-bit games, it would be time-consuming, difficult and wonky to implement real-time combat in an RPG that took all your stats into account. The turn-based system was a way to avoid that.
But now that we CAN implement real-time combat in RPGs effectively, turn-based systems no longer have much place in gaming.

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Turn-based is the best, though.

What makes turn-based better?

For some reason this reminds me of a video called if quake was made today. The final boss was in a cage and did jack shit, but if you shot a target a boulder dropped on him and killed him instantly.
It's so fucking true, every new game has gimmicky mechanics that either do assloads of damage to a boss, or the boss somehow manages to injure himself because he's a fucking retard. I even got this feeling in Dark Souls 3 for half the fights.

I want more fights like Senator in MGR:R, 30 minute slug fests that require a few re-tries and use literally every single mechanic and tool you've been given up to that point. Nothing beats that final moment when you strike the boss down and jump into the air because you fucking did it with your own skill and will power.

Strategy, fore-thought, predictions, time to actually think. It's also comfy and relaxing.

Pretty much

Turn-based allows for far more complex things. See: any roguelike ever

There's nothing outdated because nothing new has happened. We could have text adventures with dwarf fortress' depths that utilize incredible linguistics engines that put google talk bots to shame!

Says you and torr howard?

I want you to even try thinking about a real-time system that does party vs party (say, 8vs20) combat manageable taking into consideration today's AI.
Go.

Does real-time-with-pause count?

Sure it does.

Then 7.62 High Caliber.

Still not even on the same level as JA2 1.13 or ToEE.

Ahahahahahahahaha, wrong. Jagged Alliance is fucking awful.

Never heard of ToEE, though. I'm really liking that aesthetic.

Ok bud.

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If you genuinely think JA is good, then you clearly haven't played 7.62.

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I very much value opinions of (((people))) who don't even know what's ToEE.

Nice autism there, cuck.

Woah there hotshot, keep those memes under control.

Heh…I haven't even gotten started…*removes fedora from under trenchcoat and puts it on head*

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The most I can think of is Gungrave.

Don't these hipster faggots also universally praise Shadow of the Colossus, a game where every enemy is a boss fight?

Honestly password saves were cool when you didn't use it to load your save, but to instantly get to a certain part of a game with whatever conditions you wanted. Like if you wanted to fight the final boss again but didn't have a save before him. Good luck going online to find a save that has just that.

How is it different when you about to open a door but dont know what inside of it?
Static camera angle is shit and tank control is clunky as fuck

Did you missed my post saying
>Turn based game(with the exception of strategy games): old RPG

I like Valkyria Chronicle and advance war but old RPG like FF6 require no strategy, just common sense, they even have auto mode if you too lazy to choose the action. If you argue that you want a party based game where you can control all you party member manually, Rogue Galaxy already done this, ARPG where you can switch between party members.

Turn based only good for strategy game

Did you miss my post where I said the exact same shit and pointed to an entire RPG genre as an example of something that benefits greatly from it? Because I'm pretty sure you just skipped over it on purpose.

I dont remember quoting you, autismo

Literally exactly what I just said.

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This has to be clickbait, nobody can seriously argue that having a climactic ending is outdated.

Also, if it hasn't been said, text adventure games. It was frustrating then and it's frustrating now. Context-sensitive buttons are way better than having to learn strict rules of grammar just to progress. There has yet to be a game where inserting sentences feels like a natural, smooth process.

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Edges of levels being walls or pits.
This was acceptable back in N64 days but now there's a lot of ways to block the edge in a clever way. Forest level? A thick patch of trees. Beach level? The waves push you back. Just thought of it because I've been playing Gex 64 and I can't get over how bad that game is compared to Banjo-Kazooie.

Bump.

This thread doesnt deserve to die cause of E3, page 16 bump.

I think you meant to use a word like "parser". You can have text games with no parser commands, where you either select from options (CYOA) or have a set amount of commands that require no guessing.

Hell, plenty of black and white movies are great watches.

What HAS changed is that old movies seem slow because modern movies are made more and more expecting the audience to leave if they haven't seen someone die, swear or explode in thirty seconds.

Or worse, invisible walls and chest-high obstacles.

Problem is they've gotten worse about it with newer games because GRAFFIX, so now games have less and less content but sure look shiny.

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Well, later HMs, sure. Early HMs being super good would make the game more trivial than it already is. But since TMs are mostly similar to HMs now, I don't see why they haven't buffed HM stuff at this point.

On-topic: Big Head Mode. Due to hitboxes, this is very rare in games nowadays.

literally never played the game

mine was binary domain

really good game, if only it didn't have forced mouse acceleration

Reminds me of trying to Surf in early pokemon games, you better have Repel or you're going to drown in Tentacools.