So I’m a ways into Last of Us Part II now (somewhere in the middle-ish I’d guess) and it is failing to work for me in a way that didn’t happen with either the first game or the Uncharted series and it is almost entirely due to the combat/encounters. I think the knowledge of limited supplies/ammo combined with the uncharted combat designed for more maximalist “you’ve got a ton of ammo so who cares if some shots miss” situations kinda breaks it for me? Like you can stealth them but it takes a very long time, but if you get detected early on if you don’t like headshot one hit kill everyone you’re gonna use up all the ammo for at least one if not multiple weapons so I just say “to hell with it” stand up and let them kill me and redo a bunch of the encounter again (likely back in stealth approach) in order to not burn through that many resources.
I’m consciously aware that it makes the game much more of a slog and that the strength of Naughty Dog’s games are generally pacing-related, but I’ve been burned before by long-form games where you can seriously fuck yourself over if your limited resources get used up too quickly which made me come to a realization earlier today:
…The original Resident Evil kinda fucked me up in a way that likely has sporadically detracted from games I’ve played in the two-plus decades since.
I’ve never beaten the original Resident Evil. I’ve started it several times, I’ve enjoyed my time with the game and certainly would have liked to have beaten it, but every time I’ve played the game has ended the same way: with me several hours in without enough bullets left to realistically beat the game. I recall my last attempt at the game, going with the most effective approach I could figure out to safely kill zombies and I ended up running down to only a handful of bullets left right when the game introduced faster green enemies who even when I ran constantly always ended up swatting my head off my shoulders. I went as far some years later to look up superplays of people going on knife-only runs to try and figure out if I could emulate their strategy but it seemed like a lot of work.
I’ve looked back and there have been many times over the years since where a game will at least tease having limited ammo and I just commit to only using bullets when absolutely forced to even if it makes the act of playing the game so much less enjoyable. In Silent Hill 2 I basically only used guns on boss-esque enemies in the game’s first half, slowly meleeing enemies and dying way too much an generally having a bad time so that in the game’s second half I felt free being able to then shoot things without being worried about getting stuck. As noted I’m basically making every encounter in TLOU2 last 2-3 times as long as need be to avoid that fact. Even in something like Fallout 3 I gave myself all hand to hand combat tweaks to make sure I wouldn’t have to worry about that (it did not work).
Basically… I’d have probably been better off if I never played Resident Evil. Mine is kind of an extreme case but I’m curious if anyone else played a game earlier in their gaming live that ended up teaching them the wrong kind of lessons that caused troubles with unrelated games later on in life?
Baldur’s Gate II was introduced to me in highschool by a friend who pitched the game as “It’s a game where you can kill anyone!” For years after that I would feel compelled to do one playthrough of every applicable game where I kill every optionally killable entity, in order to get the intended adult experience out of it.
I’ve been thinking about dynamic ammo systems for a while for this reason. I think they work better in action games like Half-Life and Resident Evil 4, where gun use is required and limited ammo creates the aesthetic of anxiety and forces the player to switch between weapons. In a survival or horror game, like a classic Resident Evil or Last of Us, I think they are fundamentally misleading – the player doesn’t engage in the ammo economy enough to necessarily see past the illusion, and the game strongly encourages the player to avoid enemies. It puts the player in a playstyle box based on the beliefs they carry into the game.
Ammo is one of the main levers for tuning difficulty in Destiny 2 but outside of the highest difficulty setting it’s trivialized by the RPG systems. Ends up being optima change busywork in most encounters
I was dismayed at the generic ammo in Halo Infinite. Running out of workhorse gun ammo and being forced to use something worse was always fun
I think it was Dragon Quest that got me to start seeking out and talking to every single NPC in every game. First of all it’s hard to even find and keep track of all those townspeople. Then some games some NPCs have 2 different text boxes, I gotta talk to them all twice in a row to be sure. I think the vast majority of video games are designed for you to just act naturally and talk to a few people…so yeah it makes a lot of games really tedious and it’s easy to completely ruin the pace of a game when I enter a big city for instance.
Wait… you aren’t saying that Resident Evil has a dynamic ammo system and I somehow still screwed it up all these years, right? I would legit go log off and stare at something for a while if that was the case.
Playing mostly fighting game single player modes in my youth has hamstrung me with a litany of terrible rules of thumb.
One of the worst, that’s mostly on me, is just cycling through the movelist during a match rather than only using the move that’s appropriate for the situation. Tekken felt like reciting a 100 strong list of inputs rather than what it should be, identifying the 10 moves that are useful in most/all situations.
I’m pretty certain RE and RE2 do NOT have any kind of dynamic ammo or resource system. You can pretty much lock yourself in to being screwed. Unless you’re one of those “knife only, no herbs” lunatics.
for real though i would be a totally different person if i had gotten way into a traditional fighting game instead of smash, i’d actually be able to engage with a lot of the different ones that came out over the years instead of just wishing i knew how to play them intuitively
The latter-day Persona games actually broke a bad habit for me; I became much more liberal with item-usage instead of hoarding them all and winding up with a bunch leftover after the final battle.
Which is something because I trudged my way through 120 hours of Fallout 3 (and DLC episodes) using basically nothing but a shotgun and an assault rifle so I had a crazy amount of like, mini-nukes and other shit left over. I wound up decorating my little hovel in Megaton with a pile of ammunition
any game that gives me the barest reward for smashing a crate means that every fucking crate in that game will be smashed, wasting my and everyone’s time
baldur’s gate dark alliance gives you zero reward for smashing crates, and that is 100% the best thing about that game. now it’s a “just for fun” activity
Riot has a design interview question that goes, “Fallout 3 has a mini nuke with scarce ammo. But they find that players always hoard their nukes. How do you deal with this situation?” A consistent enough problem that it’s a good filter on whether a designer has thought about it.
