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This might be a strange subject, but I feel like designers often have pet mechanics, quirks, or favorite little design tidbits that they are attached to. Here's my list, feel free to post your own in the comments.
One Hit Kills - instagib, the AWP, hammer item in Smash Bros., many an old school arcade game where you die in one attack from everything in the game (SHMUPS for obvious example)
Rolls/Dodges - in any 3rd person game where the character can roll to dodge attacks/falling boulders/lightning bolts (God of War, Zelda, God Hand, etc.)
Game Turn/Time/Round Structures - partially turn-based, partially real time games, or games that fit somehow in between the two categories.
Samurai Kirby minigame - a minigame from Kirby Superstar which is a randomly timed light-flash reaction test, which can be played PVP or PVCPU.
Physicalizing games - making games where physical interactions between pieces/participants determine the outcome. pinball is a good example of a physical interaction (ball and flippers)
Tri-stat systems - RPGs where there are three stats (the minimum? interesting number) rather than 6 or however many.
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Using buttons not for actions, but for body parts.
A good example of this came in Monster Hunter Tri. I was hunting a large carnivore, and trying to track its location when I saw a herd of obviously agitated herbivores rush out from another zone. I passed them into the zone they escaped from, and sure enough, the monster I was seeking was there. Great bit of gameplay for someone with my design fetish.
Also, perfected visual and aural tactile feedback. I don't like rumble controllers that much, but you know when you hit the sweet spot with a player controlled feature and it isn't a bore or too much feedback, so that you can really see where they tucked in minor details that add to the whole experience.
I love it in Orbiter, Morrowind, Jane's F-15E Simulator; anything where you go out there into the dangerous game world and, at some point, shift focus to making it home in one piece.
Town portal scrolls; light them on fire.
I'm open to modes with more restrictive save rules, but the option should be there for most games.
Metro/vania style save rooms, Diablo style corpse-runs, and no-save "all or nothing" playthroughs all have their place. Like most things, I think it heavily depends on what kind of game/mode you're making.
Now I wouldn't mind if free save was available behind a cheat code for those who want to toy around with the game instead of playing it. But when it is made the default, the designer gets lazy. After all, the player can always just load after that unfair death, right? And they can always save after that supremely boring section to avoid playing it again, right? The result of these things is that in most instances where the game has free save, there is no longer a real choice to play the game without saving. And as a player I cannot know what games are the exceptions.
Free save can indeed be used for learning. For example, many arcade game players have practiced the most critical sections of a game with savestates in an emulator. Thing is, they do this in preparation of a real scoring run and thus orthogonally to the "real" game. Most of them have also already beaten the game at the point they start this practice. In contrast, 99% of players use saves to get further in the game, and the trivialized challenge means the players no longer have to master the mechanics to succeed but can ignore them due to the mini-godmode supplied by the designer. The real result of free save is less learning and less skilled players.
Repetition as punishment (above) is e x c r u c i a t i n g
It's not god mode, that's just dumb. Games are not just 'mastering mechanics' or 'winning' or 'getting high scores'; its about the FEELING you get by being a badass with weapons battling adversaries inside a games universe.
ie. We need to invoke an emotional response from players (make them feel strong, heroic, smart etc) and you lose that by making them replay overly long and already completed sections of gameplay. God that's annoying.
Sections that are boring to replay - to be exact, too tedious and/or too easy - are very often a *symptom* of free saving because without free saving they stick out like a sore thumb. And most likely the section was bad even the first time around, not just when you replay it. It should be *fixed* instead of throwing one's hands up and implementing free saving.
I also don't get why you try to deny save anywhere equals god mode. Is there any way you, personally, can fail to beat a game - let's say a generic FPS of your choice - or even be significantly slowed down in it, if you save creep and only ever have to succeed a few seconds at a time?
In a game that challenges the player and has good difficulty balancing, the act of playing the game is its own reward and there's plenty of emotion in that. Watching a canned animation of my player character doing a heroic thing has never had 1/10th of the emotional impact of when *I* dodge the final wall of bullets from a boss and bring it down for the first time, limping on my last life.
Free saves are about valuing a players' time. If they have to stop playing for whatever reason they should not be forced to lose progress and repeat things they've already completed. It's a basic usability issue. If players want to abuse that freedom by saving after every minor challenge that's up to them.
1) free saving makes moment to moment games much easier (not ENTIRELY god mode, but for discusion sake close enough)
2) at least some savepoints are usualy not well placed (from players point of view)
3) some games require close to perfect play (or comunicate badly that they don't), so they get boring by being repetitive when players replays sections, or allow free saving and degrades difficulty
4) some games include decisions without information. With quick saving, player can explore short term effects of choices, without he either choose safest or replay section.
What would imo be better would be limited (but not predetermined by authors) save when safe + autosaves, and game that allows partial failure without long consequences (if consequences are just bit longer than loading, lot of players would accept them and continue). Imo serious failure -> load should still be in games, without it player feels like there is no way someone can fail.
Limited saving: for example in outcast, in order to save, character used some crystal that emited sound and light for some time, thus attracting nearby enemies and was not possible to succesfully use when under attack. Badly done limited saving: in X3: TerranConflict (and others X) player could buy one save enywhere for price that realy early was high (compared to starting money) and later it was laughably low, so limitation disapeared) (+ free saves when docked at station).
free saving has nothing to do with valuing the player's real-world commitments. Those can be taken care of 100% orthogonally to the actual game design simply by making pause persistent. So at any moment you can quit, and later resume. Nethack does this, for example.
Martin,
thanks for chiming in. Outcast's saving requirement seems to be about equal to World of Warcraft's log-out requirement, and old RPGs requiring you to be far enough from monsters to rest. Simple and proven.
Isn't the correct fix for 4) to supply the player with enough information to make the situation fair?
Now, you can play UG1 onwards installments and always get away winning all races. Undercover and Canyon had very special races, Highway Battle and Canyon Duel, very dangerous and thrilling. But if you lost, you could restart them, so the effect was very dilluted.
Some games need free saving, or at least are more suitable. But I'm opossed to having it in all games. What's worst is that you can't play a game and ignore free saving, because games rely on them. Old racing games had a lower driving level, so you could win a championship despite getting few wins a only a copuple of podiums. But now games like Dirt require you to win nearly every time to let you progress.
Let me decide what is too tough for my current level. I love games that offer me warnings about dangerous high level areas... but allow me to disregard it.
Finally, games that don't force me to play moronic tutorial sections. I like it when a game realizes that I may not enjoy wasting an hour learning that "The control stick will move your character! Good Job!"
- Sequence breaking: Finding a way to skip items, enemies or whole areas, either through pre-designed methods (ie: Metroid Zero Mission) or benign exploits (ie: Metroid Prime).
- Exploration and uncertainty: Exploring the unknown, facing the threat of danger at every turn. Having a home base, like a used said above, creates a nice contrast between the safe but not-so-rewarding inside and the inhospitable but bountiful outside.
- Cooperative multiplayer shenanigans: Not of the griefing variety, but rather of the funny and bizarre kind. New Super Mario Bros. Wii creates lots of those moments when four players are onscreen at once.
- Non-standard player-created/enforced game modes: Playing on Casino Zone's slots until time ran out in Sonic 2, filling the bottom part of Mario Kart 64's Block Fort with green shells and seeing how long we could survive or playing melee-only matches of CounterStrike or TeamFortress 2 are some of the things I loved doing in spite of the game's regular objectives.
The following are elements I obsess over:
GENERAL DESIGN
* playstyle-focused design (game elements intentionally meet specific entertainment desires)
* understanding & applying distinction between "strategy" and "tactics"
WORLDINESS
* large worlds (sense of place, lots of content)
* "living" worlds (dynamic simulation of interacting systems)
* intellectual consistency/coherence in all world lore & mechanics (feels like a secondary reality)
* seamlessness (minimize "level" transitions)
STORY
* emotionally plausible narrative
* actions have real emotional consequences
* heroes and villains not one-dimensional
* antagonist in particular has valid (if broken) motivation for all actions
INTERFACE
* first-person or very high up view (3rd-person OK if completely optional)
* full quicksave + transition autosave (and define difficulty accordingly)
* (multiplayer) player controls what character info can be accessed by other characters
* (multiplayer) player controls how info about other characters is displayed
* full support for all mouse buttons, no hard-coded acceleration/smoothing
* menu support for advanced graphical/audio options (with easy "auto-default" setting)
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If I had to pick just the personal quirks people are probably sick of hearing me talk about, I could narrow down the above list to just three things: player-centered design, large-scale dynamic world simulation, and quicksave. (With "design for PC first" as a strong runner-up.) For my money, probably 70-90% of a game's value is expressed through those first two things, so IMO they deserve a lot of attention.
Cohesiveness: Where everything in the game (art style, HUD, character abilities, progression systems, currency, etc.) feels like it fits with and reinforces everything else. Example: Psychonauts
Rhythm: When game inputs are more (or only) effective if performed to a specific rhythm, provided it's well articulated, through audio, visual, or tactile feedback. Example: wall jumping in Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
Foreshadowing/Payoff: Particularly noticeable in effective level/environment design, I love it when games show me a really awesome area well before I actually reach it. It's even better if I can also see the area that I saw the awesome area from, from the awesome area. It helps reinforce feelings of progress and accomplishment. Examples: Ico, Jak 2
Emotionally Meaningful Character Interaction: Either by infusing gameplay relevant actions with an emotional element (through narrative, animation) or by including interactions that serve no function other than emotional expression between characters. Examples: Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, A Boy and his Blob (Wii version), Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, as well as the 2008 version)
Personal Narratives: Ok so this really doesn't have much if anything to do with game design, but I love it when games tell a personal story. Saving the world is all well and good, but I prefer when games focus on a well fleshed out and interesting character. Examples: Grim Fandango, Syberia
I just love the feeling when everything around you slows down for a while.
In old-school shooters they sometimes had more bullets on screen than the hardware could handle. This leads to slowdown whenever the action became hectic. This slowdown leads to tense moments where I find myself planning paths through bullets grateful for the extra time to think.
Again, I am in no way condoning unintentional slow down in games. I just find that the slowdown during extremely dangerous sequences can sometimes, just by luck, feel cinematic and add to my experience.
Extra-Life sounds: From Centipede to Zuma, I just love to hear the sound of earning an extra life.
Recognition of love for the game: I love it when games recognize you love them and spend all your time with them. FM Manager keeps track of your playing times and comments on your level of addictedness; The Sims starts to tell you stories about its dev team members if you play it long enough; and maybe unintended recognition to your effort, but Civ2 returns to Future Technology 1, if you reach Future Technology 255 ;)
Reaching the "machine" limit: No matter how efficient you drive, that track in Need for Speed 2 can't be taken faster: its just under 54 seconds. You know you were perfect when you reproduce exactly that time, over and over again.
Theme songs that make you remember about the wonderful moments you had with that game: The Jean-Michel Jarre midi re-make at the end of Yie Ar Kung Fu.
Reference to Art, Literature, Philosophy etc + funny Self-reference
I realize there's a deliberate reason with FPS games enabling the players to feel like they are personally doing the things in the game, and it's worked wonderfully for me in games like Fallout 3, Skyrim and Team Fortress 2 where first person view is far better than the third person views. But for most of the games I play, I prefer third person view. Perhaps it's the overall better sense of the things around me and where boundaries lie.
MOBA games, RTS's, 2D or 3D? platform games, in a flying game i prefer to see my ship, car, character... etc!
I also love a good noticeable critical hit! Shake the screen! make something explode! a louder and distinct noise! A bigger damage number that's a different color is nice, but more can be done than simply that! Torchlight knows what's up - I had a big stupid smile the first time I got a critical hit in that game. I think it had all of the above!
Sequence breaking like Julian Impelluso said! especially if it doesn't break the game! I really like the way it was done in Shadow Complex for XBLA- where alternate routes were available if you were observant and properly equipped. Such paths could lead to power-ups and/or ammo and potentially better positioning against enemies "guarding" an area.
Flavor Text! The way Dungeons of Dredmor describes their classes, skills, and items is probably some of my favorite ever. "Acidic Damage: Acidic damage is why you should always be careful when attempting to make a really large baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano." -Dungeons of Dredmor
The capability for chain reactions! Recently while playing Skyrim, I stumbled too close to a bandit camp. Since they were bandits, they attacked me for sport and loot. I didn't take kindly to their assault and ran away past a Mammoth. It was a joy to see the Mammoth thrash those hoodlums before it set its eyes upon me and became my new nuisance :T
and the last favorite design quirk I can think of for this list will be:
Friendly Fire amongst enemies! It's enjoyable when I can get my enemies to blow each other up or otherwise cause them to whittle down their own numbers while I do what I can to keep alive and drop them as well.
Nice topic! The responses are nice also!
Summons. The only reason why I could possibly play something like Golden Sun and not get bored
Sliding-on-ice Puzzles. This is definitely because of Chip's Challenge. I remember spending about an hour on that one stage trying to get it right, and when I did, I felt like a champion.