Re: Gamplay "mechanics" you don't like?

On Tue, 31 Dec 2024 08:09:13 -0800, Dimensional Traveler
<dtravel@sonic.net> wrote:

On 12/30/2024 10:07 AM, Mike S. wrote:

On Mon, 30 Dec 2024 12:51:57 -0500, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:
 

- Really, any movement puzle where you have to time your way past
traps (spikes moving in and out of the floor, flame spurts, giant saw
blades in the wall)

 
Your list is good but I like this one the most. I should have thought
of it. It made me immediately  think of a game called Anvil of Dawn
where you had to make sure you never got hit by rolling boulders. :)
So you had to time your way in and out of corridors to avoid them.
 
Your post also had me thinking of this a bit more, and I have another.
 
Teleporters in older RPGs.
 
They aren't bad usually. BUT if the game does not play a sound effect
when you teleport and you teleport to a square where the walls are in
the same position, you will probably have no idea you were just
teleported.

>
ALL the developers of the "old school" RPGs for some reason had it stuck
in their minds that there ABSOLUTELY HAD to be puzzles and traps that
were one micron short of impossible to solve.  I really don't understand
what the point of it was and why they felt every single *censored* game
had to be that way.

It's a result of video-gaming history. Players -and developers-
started from an era when video-games were arcade games first, designed
to separate you from your money. Even as developers started to move
away from this philosophy, it was still something players expected and
openly complained about if the game was too easy. Distancing yourself
from this ideal took literal decades.

But there were other advantages to this ruthless difficulty too.
Obviously, by making your game so unfairly hard, it lengthened the
game-play time as players had to slog through the same annoying traps
and mazes again and again. Game length was (and often still is)
equated to game value; making your game harder meant people saw it as
a better purchase.

But also, it's just EASIER to throw in another darkness trap than it
is to make something that is a fun challenge. Especially on the
resource-strapped machines of the 80s and early 90s.  You just didn't
have the processing power or memory to create memorable challenges, so
instead we got spinners and teleports and all the rest. Even today,
it's HARD to make a good dungeon trap (even if nowadays its the
developer and not the hardware that is insufficient), so developers
often rely on the old stand-bys.

But mostly... early home games were ruthlessly hard because they were
expected to be ruthlessly hard because the earliest arcade games were
ruthlessly hard so you'd give them more quarters.