Riva TNT waves hello
The best double jumps have diegetic explanations like the mini-thrusters in Metroid Prime and Titanfall.
Hit pause, like Lethal League or parries in SF3.
First-person movement animations - embarking and getting ripped out of the cockpit in Titanfall 1 are so, so good.
“Filling in the map” - not climbing towers, but discovering sections that connect. I’ve been here before!
Building momentum/using inertia - Titanfall, of course, but I prefer Portal 2 to the original because of the gel puzzles. I like driving games and space sims with Newtonian physics for playing with weight.
NPC schedules: ideally, combine with a day/night cycle and done with enough granularity that you should be able to stalk a given NPC through their entire daily routine. Even better if it’s weather-dependent and/or extends beyond a single day. But if it’s a single day, then it can be a…
Time Loop: Majora style or whatever. Observe the course of events and set right what once went wrong, or just play groundhog day and observe the changes.
pushing a button to punch someone in 3D.
not enough games do this.
Every game is this now and it’s the fuckin worst
Anyway, my answer to the question is: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
The specific shitty fantasy paperback writing of DMoMM is maybe my best answer to this thread. I read so many shitty fantasy books and games with stories/writing in that vein really get me. Hunted: The Demon’s Forge was like that as well.
I like killing enemies by jumping over them and aiming straight down at the apex of my jump without losing any forward momentum.
In Odin Sphere, your inventory is limited, but you can combine items that are the same into more potent versions of themselves. You can then add other items to them to create a new item. Sometimes you’ll make a healing potion just to save space or just keep combining the base component of a potion until you have, like, a super potent base, and you’re like, “Dang. I guess I’ll make that thing that makes you temporarily invincible.”.
It is SO SATISFYING.
Also, shops exist but can basically be ignored. You get the veggies you use for alchemy from plucking them from the ground after a Battle. So, you basically forage for stuff to make your own power up, and you never worry about money.
It’s amazing.
Also, did you see that inventory Tetris game I asked someone to remind me of a while ago?
i dont necessarily like busywork or chores or difficulty as such but i do like a level of orneryness or resistance, which for me sort of falls between “difficulty” and “mystery”.
eg i was disappointed that bayo 2 got rid of instadeath QTE’s
Mutating monsters into new monsters is a biggie for me, because I played FF Legends as a kid. I just want that system (eat the meat of killed monsters to mutate) but with an actually comprehensible mutation tree.
It’s kind of cool that Kawazu wanted it to be totally mysterious (the underlying logic seems to be deliberately obscure, like feeding Pikachu a Squirtle and it becomes Ponyta), but it’s more fun if you’re making a decision, rather than taking a risk (it effectively felt random).
Is Horizon Zero Dawn no good?
Odin Sphere did this PERFECTLY, but they clearly worked very hard on the economies in a Japanese RPG nerd way, as opposed to the Bungie style, “We hired a Harvard economist” way.
Tangentially related to this: seeing the effects of choices you make via time travel or time passage.
Oracle of Time had an NPC bit in which some parents in Hyrule would ask you to name their kid and then give them more and more parenting advice as the sort goes on. When you unlock the future travke ability, you can visit their house and see how the kid turned out, based on your advice. I can’t remember if this is the case, but I think you can even tweak the future from the past, since you can travel at will between three time periods in that game. But you can’t undo decisions (other than through save manipulation). So you can basically make this kid a loser, then panic and try to fix it in an additive way, but never by actually undoing your mistakes. But at a certain. Point you’re locked in.
My kid ended up being a hikkikomori bookworm.
God, I would play a whole game of just that. It’s basically a BuzzFeed personality quiz.
Anyway Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was supposed to have this as a puzzle mechanic. Like, plant a tree in the past so you can climb it in the future. Judging by how terrible the first ten minutes of that game were and how Assassin’s Creed was designed, I’m assuming that this manifested as literally just traveling back in time to the past over and over again to plant seeds and nothing else.
Oh man. Someone should make a time travel game that’s autosave but has save states.
In-game photo cameras and bestiaries.
The figurine collection from Wind Waker, basically.
yes
I see your shitty zelda game and raise you dark cloud 2, where you take pictures of shit to use as ideas to help you invent things that you then craft. game rules
I never played the Dark Clouds but that sounds extremely good. I can’t stand crafting systems but that might be just the way they’ve evolved in the past decade
I think you’re mixing up something here. I didn’t play the Conan MMO (I mean, I once installed it and played it for a day but I don’t think I ever posted that on SB and I don’t know anything about the game at all besides that). I played the Conan survival game. If you’re referring to that: yes! You can definitely build a castle and even a throne, so you can be king in a way. You can start a clan and be head of that and if you’re the dominant clan, who’s to say you’re not king of the server. You can definitely cordon off resources. It all depends on where you build. There’s a certain limit to how close you can build next to another player’s structure, at least in the early days, so you could be shit out of luck if someone built a wall around all the iron, basically damning you to the stone age while they could build iron and steel weapons. That is pretty rad.
Now, this has changed certainly with siege weapons and what not, so the game became more dynamic in that regard. I don’t really know much about that though because I haven’t gotten back into the game yet, but I def plan on doing so.
You couldn’t really officially “employ” other players back then, outside of having them join your clan. There was no currency when I last played, so you couldn’t even pay them unless you did it unofficially with items or slaves or something. Don’t know if that has changed. But you could definitely pressure people into joining your clan. Players would be able to see which structures belonged to which clan or player and if you built your base somewhere where some clan built a wall around the iron then you’d be pretty well advised to join them.
I played with a clan once and it was definitely cool. We’d have all these boxes full of items that you could just grab and it felt so different from playing solo, where you would have to collect and craft everything yourself. You can just do exponentially more in a team and the feeling was one of overabundance. We had a sick castle and were butting heads with other powerful clans. It was pretty intense and it felt very large scale. More than you’d think possible with such a (back then) small map (which has expanded greatly now) and player count compared to MMOs. But the thing was that you could feel the individual players more. Their contribution was more tangible than in an MMO like, say, FFXIV.
I definitely always felt like a peasant that was just rising up through the ranks from the bottom and the guys leading the clan, overseeing building of the structures and managing everything, were in a different league altogether.
Conan Exiles is a very underrated game, especially on sb. When I go on steam I see that only one person I know also plays the game. It’s definitely no sb game and that’s kinda weird. I guess it all has to do with the PR the game received in the beginning and the dong slider controversy (lol) or whatnot. It’s a really interesting game, actually
or asymmetrical pvp