:shrug: Ok. I mean, the majority of SotC’s landscape is goal-less. Doesn’t mean level design is absent. I don’t see the term as intrinsically connoting task-based design, so I guess we’re just not going to agree here. Which is fine.
Kind of amazing how we found things that’re even less interesting to talk about
the majority of SotC’s landscape is goal-less.
Well, what are we getting out of open-world levels?
Mario 64’s castle grounds are a proto-version of this, in that you can still see the production sandbox utility of them while they pull double-duty as consequence-free player training.
Wait. Let me drag it back to, “can movement be evaluated in a void?” I’'m arguing that it can, and an open-world level is much more void-like than a linear level and we can still meaningfully talk about fun movement and not in these spaces. We can complain about horse movement in every game that has quadrupeds and praise Crackdown and can imagine sticking these characters in other games with levels not designed for them and still proving them out as fun.
Sure. I was thinking of goals as things that involve a tactile relationship between your avatar and their environment.
The evaluation of character movement in a void is not going to be relative, which is what any sort of level design provides: context. So, sure, in an extremely broad sense, sensual evaluation of avatar can be done, but it’s all going to change once that character is put into an intentional environment with conflicting situations and topographical variations. Soma Cruz (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow) feels more interesting, nuanced, and fun to control than Simon Belmont (NES Castlevania) when putting either character onto a flat two-dimensional plane, but that ultimately doesn’t matter, because Simon’s movement engages the game he’s been placed into, whereas Soma’s doesn’t.
Soma Cruz (Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow) feels more interesting, nuanced,
and fun to control than Simon Belmont (NES Castlevania) when putting
either character onto a flat two-dimensional plane, but that ultimately
doesn’t matter, because Simon’s movement engages the game he’s been
placed into, whereas Soma’s doesn’t.
Yeah, I agree completely. I just think we can hold two truths, that in general Soma movement is more fun, and that in certain contexts Simon movement makes a better game.
It’s the sort of problem that’s tripped up a bunch of Japanese studios, certainly: survival horror trying to transition past control limitations without becoming action games, Monster Hunter steadfastly standing by long attack lock-ins, King’s Field’s ridiculous turning speed. All choices make their games better as designed but become focal points for frustration because in isolation they feel poor.
nothing is interesting
Maybe the talent is 90% in the ability to simply notice your plateau/weakness and start to think about what efforts you might undertake to break through?
It goes back to the earlier discussion about the similarity of skillset between critic and artist.
well la-di-fuckin-da
The whole positioning / slow actions countering dynamics in MH extends to the slow active use of healing and other consumables as well, which really made me really cringe in the little bit of Breath of the Wild I watched where Link just downed meat from the inventory menu to safely heal in a pause screen- I can’t really care about the combat balance (compared to however gorgeous the locales are) if they miss that sort of mark.
Did you guys know that Dolphin can run Super Mario Sunshine at 60fps instead of its native 30? I did not, and it is making me smile.
So do the Zelda games really have playground/learning areas that are equivalent to Peach’s Castle? The Kokiri Village in Zelda 64 captures some of that, but I have no idea if later games develop on that concept, or if they switch over fully to incremental/on-the-spot lessons that fit with the tool acquisition, with new opportunities being Metroid-esque revisits rather than expanded hub understanding. I have no idea what I’m actually typing.
All Zelda enemies are still area/room cluster-locked, right?
And helper characters don’t ever really act as familiars/Options.
Hmm, this is perhaps overly reductive. There is no reason why slow active healing has to be the way healing works in a game.
Hit points are designed to be a timer on combat, and healing items, whether instant or slow-drain are just game-isms to increase the quantity of time you have to stay in battle. A slow-acting heal is just as much an artifice as an instant pause-menu heal. The only practical difference is the very slight skill bump needed to use your healing item before you die in a game with active healing.
In return I’d argue saying “very slight skill bump” for the shift between instant (and stack-able) and delayed (and separated) healing is itself somewhat reductive- that such reducing attrition and risk/reward usage towards an abstracted “always can escape and heal” is denying flow can be part of difficulty in the experience.
I’m not sure what this means.
the skill bump is just learning to choose to heal instead of attacking all the time, it is not necessarily significant in itself and often times becomes just as rote as pausing the game and choosing to heal. However it may lead to interesting decisions if the combat is specifically balanced around the choice of healing vs attacking or defending. Whether or not items are stackable seems completely irrelevant.
The real issue is whether the healing economy will be balanced with the combat economy. If a player can ever reach the scenario during normal play (meaning not a ludicrous amount of grinding) where they have practically limitless healing resources, that WOULD destabilize the combat economy because the entire point of having these ‘timers’ is to guarantee an end-state to every combat encounter.
So, the point is that pause-menu instant healing is just another way of saying that your pool of virtual hit points is much larger than your pool of apparent hit points, and any combat design must be done in observation of this fact. Hit points pace a fight so the only requirement is that the decisions you do make in a battle are interesting.
My own preference is if they did away with in-combat-healing altogether and you had to find other ways to heal in between fights. It’s a mostly unexplored design space (at least in video games, it has been somewhat explored in RPGs and Board Games)
So I’d ask what is the point of even having healing items as opposed to simply increasing the size of the health bar.
These are all decisions that are interesting to make in the moment, as well as decisions you get better at making as you gain knowledge about map layout and attack damage levels, feeding into the mastery metagame.
If additionally the item has a delay to use, there’s yet another decision to make: do I have time right now, and will I have time later. That’s based on yet another kind of knowledge, about enemy movement and animation timings. It also means very aggressive and in-your-face enemies pose more of an interesting challenge, you cannot simply tank through them. So it adds another dimension of mastery and straight-up improves the game pretty much. It seems almost indisputable to me.
DkS thought enough about this question that the heal spells are slower to execute than Estus, and you have to pick which to use in a given context. As for the new Zelda, as per usual it’s mindlessly copying what previous Zeldas did.
Because it lets players feel like they are dictating the pace of a combat, even if ideally the combat pace was already designed around the assumption that player characters will have hit point pools several times larger than is apparent. There’s also a resource management angle to this, though this is just as dependent on designers balancing the resource economy to work with the combat.
I feel like you’re arguing against something I’m not saying with the next two paragraphs
Dark Souls is the go-to example of a game that actually makes combat healing feel right. @r-i was talking about the combat feel in monster hunter, however, and those games make healing into a boring non-decision (Am I nearly dead? ok I’ll run 20 feet away and chug a potion). And frankly, I don’t think that’s an improvement on pause-menu heals. It’s just as rote.
I never played Monster Hunter (well, I played a bit, it really bored me for some reason I couldn’t quite pin down, maybe this is one of the things). I agree if all the delay means is that healing forces you to waste more time, it doesn’t like like it has much value.
I don’t care much about how some game mechanic supposedly “makes me feel” if there is no substance behind that feeling, though. If healing was exactly equivalent to a larger health bar and a game just made me go through the motions, I would definitely complain about that (not really ever seen this in practice though, the basic healing systems of every game all have the same couple of interesting properties I mentioned). I quickly see through flimsy tricks and my actual feelings are based on the underlying reality of what’s going on. That’s one reason I can’t stand Ubisoft games which are stuffed full of hollow mechanics.
Consider the cleric in most poorly designed party based RPGs. Their purpose is to heal people, but they often have some limitation on their resources to do so, so eventually they run out and you have to rest at the inn to gain back their healing resource. Now, consider that there was no cleric and every class got that much more HP to make up for the deficit. Would your play-style change now that you had one less non-choice to make?
Now, obviously, you would feel confident approaching enemies that you avoided because of how much they damage they could output at once. So, suppose, to replace the cleric, you multiply everyone’s HP by 4 but you include a ‘massive damage’ rule where if they take “HP/4” damage in a single attack, that character is knocked out instantly. Would that not be the exact same game except that your resource management has been de-obfuscated into just hp management? I already play games with this assumption in mind, so to me the two hypothetical games are identical.
That’s not even close to identical: your cleric can use his mana more on one character than the others, your cleric can die and have to be Phoenix Downed, the boss can perform an AoE damage burst that temporarily outpaces his ability to heal, the healing can be inefficient if the target didn’t take enough damage yet – and that’s assuming healing is the only thing he can do. You seem a bit dismissive of nuances and focused on this fairly broad-scale game flow. These little interactions between nuances are what keep games engaging though.
it’s worth considering how healing worked in the original zelda, which was a “souls like difficult” game that still featured menu based healing
in that game, a healing potion basically was a one time extension to your health bar. there might be a rare time where you get caught up in the moment of combat and forget to pause and heal, but really it just functions like a “second chance” that you have to spend in game currency to use. the original zelda is entirely beatable without using this, but is still very difficult if you choose to use it.
this mechanic may not be objectionable if healing items were scarce or limited to a small amount per time in your inventory. but that doesn’t seem to be the vibe this game is going for. I don’t know. count me in the camp that it’s probably going to be a lousy mechanic. but I don’t think the mechanic is inherently lousy. BUT I also think the dark souls approach to healing is infinitely preferable.
I’d actually be interested in reading an article that compares healing systems in various action games. it’s not a topic that seems to be discussed much, but there are actually a huge variety of approaches present in various AAA games these days that all have different impacts and gameplay implications.
some examples:
bioshock (instant heal, bound to a face button (gross imo))
the last of us (happens in real time, requires a complete stop and significant dedication of time)
dark souls (delayed heal, requires partial stop/slowdown, small time commitment)
resident evil 4 (done from paused menu)
resident evil revelations 2 (done from real time menu without affecting mobility, requires small amount of time/fiddling)
some of these suck more than others but tbh I prefer them all to the “auto healing” of gears of war and halo. it even felt like a messy compromise in metal gear solid v, but since I tend to play those game so stealthily it was not really an issue. except in boss fights, where it was frustrating and annoying.