It isn’t, except in the sense that it was a fallow design choice from the start. It was resurrected with some adjustments to make it less kludgey in those Batman Arkham games and Sleeping Dogs. In those games, you have two attack buttons, and you just push the left stick in a direction of someone you want to lock on to and press an attack button to run over and punch them, and you change targets by just moving the left stick to a new target when you mash your attack button. It has a similar flow to Mark of Kri but with simplified controls. Unfortunately, it’s a boring system. It will continue to appear in games forever because it looks ‘awesome’ and ‘epic’ to take on 40 enemies at a time without ever getting hit but it’s just button-mashing.
Bushido Blade? Maybe (even if there was a sequel)?
I think the thing to have been learned there was that you can do more thing with fighting games than be fundamentally inspired by Street Fighter forever, or just allow for quick fatal encounters instead of protracted combofests.
Well, don’t know about those other games, but Mark of Kri at least tried to add some non-mashiness. You had blocking, which effected the rhythm, and your combos were consistent enough to plan around andvweapon dependent. But yeah: you didn’t have as much agency and awareness of your actions as with DMC. The worst offender I’ve experienced was Prince of Persia, which was pretty much pure button mashing, because every combo was so contextual.
I wish I knew how many of these critical deficits could be given context by litigation (mainly 20th-century stuff) or weird Japanese hang-ups regarding work ethics
yeah, arkham dogs also has blocking and counter attacks which effect the ‘rhythm’. I would actually consider PoP sands of time less button mashy since it was just default early 00s 3d action platformer combos. I pretty much cycled through the same two combo chains for the entire game, only having to adjust for a couple of enemies that hard-countered whatever combo I was using (I think it was the slash slash jump stab combo that I used for most of the entire game.)
When I’m home, maybe I’ll start a thread on this topic. I’d like to try to piece together all the players in the evolution of button mash melee. I think Ico’s kind of a player.
no way
Sands of Time’s combat is more of a puzzle game than anything, where every single enemy has one combo that works really well against them and after a certain point you figure it out and it becomes really routine.
Well, there’s one bit in the bathhouse where you have to do wall-kicks on the lady enemies because you can wall-run when your feet are slippery, but that’s about it.
I think the people making these games haven’t played enough games. I don’t think anyone designing Batman or whatever is at all familiar with really good or refined games like that like Street Fighter or God Hand.
I strongly disagree with this. It’s fair to argue that they’re not as good at designing combat as the designers of God Hand or Street Fighter, and that their understanding isn’t deep enough, but;
They have a different set of objectives. AAA game budgets as of late-00s require sales of 2 million-plus (and then after a successful game the next has to grow the audience (seriously, I remember hearing that they need to hit a ‘more broad audience’ for Gears 3 after Gears 2, and, uh how the heck do you do that?)). We’ve talked about this before, but part of the beauty of Devil May Cry is that it grows more beautiful as player skill increases. God of War smartly decided to amplify the skill/reward ratio so that right from the get-go, you take down a fricking hydra by chopping its heads off OH YEAH!!
And it made the game shallower and kind of gross but it opened 3D beat-em-ups to a much bigger audience.
Assassin’s Creed/Arkham-style combat systems solve a couple big problems with these games:
- Because players need only light input to correctly aim at an enemy, camera controls can be fully game-driven without causing problems. Considering how many players still have issues controlling cameras while independently moving characters around, this opens up a huge new audience segment.
- Most of the reward and punishment in the combat is in how many combos a player can get without losing the streak. Therefore, players of much lower skill can successfully play through the game. Players who enjoy wandering around the world or hearing the narrative in Batman (yes these players exist, or are at least believed to exist based on audience surveys) are included as potential players. Theoretically, players who are good at fightmans can remain engaged by attempting to up their combo score and appropriately using the unlocked moves.
Now this is all conventional wisdom and it’s plain to see that the combat resulting is pretty boring. But I don’t think the decisions that led the games here were necessarily dumb; each step fixes and optimizes a problem for the games based on how they work- from God Of War to Assassin’s Creed to Batman to Shadow of Mordor. At some point, yeah, this combat system will be dropped but in the narrow perspective of AAA massive-bloat open world games it’s useful to have a simple system that scales to different player skill.
At some point someone will figure out a better way to represent melee combat that remains simple and can be slotted into these massive games, or technology (VR) will require new designs that break free. But AAA can only move by tweaks and addons.
I think the real cancer comes from the budget and audience selection in the first place. Without having to serve a massive audience you can make strong choices because they’re right for the game, dammit and argue that making a better game will sell more copies. But that argument gets real hard to make when you need to sell-through ten million copies.
if we’re talking about Ico, the thing people didn’t take from that game was it’s lack of a hud and menus. basically it’s minimalism in general. minimalism was A Thing in game design in the earl 2ks. so much for that.
Are you serious
Yeah that was the late-LPN, early-ABDN holy grail wasn’t it? Games giving you information in a way that’s entirely contextual, if not diegetic exactly. The AAA gameform has utterly abandoned that idea for HUD madness.
Prince of Persia Sands of Time was pretty explicitly influenced by Ico, right down to level design. The way you could see the end goal of the game from the very beginning and it became more prominent as you approached it was an intentional call back to Ico’s style of level design. The devs are even on record as saying that they played through the game every day for like a month while making Sands of Time.
@Father.Torque the problem isn’t huds, it’s pointless huds. There’s not a single pointless screen in Crusader Kings 2. I know it’s fashionable to talk about how impenetrable the interface of a Paradox Grand Strategy game is, but they literally could not function with less info available at all times. Whereas the average AAA lawnmower sim omni genre game has like 3 layers of redundant information at every step. Text telling you where to go, objective markers visible on your hud pointing you in the right direction, a compass with the objective marker on it, and a minimap with the objective marker on it.
I will play this, now.
it’s actually a really good game. it’s obviously inspired by Ico, but superficially so. it’s not exactly a contemplative game. but it’s very well designed and filled the modern tomb raider niche in a way that nothing else has since.
I would argue for this too, but the camera niceties and and, again, God of War is more ‘about combat’ than Batman is, so it can ask more of players to learn its mechanics. God of War has real easy crowd control but AC-style combat scales easier up to a point (at >6 enemies the game needs to tell the player to leave; see Shadow of Mordor and how they give ranged specials and environmental powers to fill this space). Another benefit to auto-combat is that it’s an easy art sink: just keep larding it up with contextual animations. The low input demand to high output visuals make it attractive at that price level.
We’ve also got another ridiculously complicated yet extremely popular control scheme: console FPS. Twin-stick movement is a high skill-ceiling ability and the first 10% of learning is a near-vertical wall. Luckily the control scheme was kickstarted by a system seller and is nearly identical across hundreds of games, but still, it should be an example to give spine to series stuck with combo combat.
Jordan Mechner’s design superpower is clever narrative contextualizations.
This is the only redeeming element of the Karateka remake but it almost save the project.
From what I can recall, Ico came out partway through the development of popsot, so the inspiration being superficial totally makes sense. popsot had a fairly protracted development time so everyone taking a break to play ico over and over kind of made sense as kind of the ludic kindred spirit that it was (glossy cinematic platformer designed by an animator, ico itself was obviously indebted to the original pop)
I should make a long post on Sands of Time and how fucking good it is. Overlong combat sequences notwithstanding (actually, the only really bad one is the oft-cited elevator fight near the end). But I’d need to replay it first, and who has time for that?
yeah I remember it having some milquetoast turnkey action elements but the aesthetic and the rewinding were pretty damn novel for a big-budget ubisoft console game in 2003
you could reasonably accuse it of artlessness by comparison to the darlings of that era and irrelevance compared to post-HL2 big-budget narrative games (because this school of game design has been mined extensively by uncharted et al over the past decade and is ultimately one of, if not the most hollow prevailing genre stereotype in terms of player expressiveness/open-endedness/qualifications as a “game”), but there is no denying it earned that 9.6 from IGN.