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I also feel like a lot of games have like, limited use consumables because developers think games are supposed to have them, and don't really think about what role they actually play. There's a lot of vestigial stuff that hangs around way longer than it has to like lives in platformers. And stuff like estus flasks gets treated like a weird gimmick rather than a perfectly sensible evolution of the concept.
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Apr 17, 2023 11:38
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Something I really liked in one of the later Tomb Raider DLC jobs for Power Wash Simulator; During cleaning the obstacle course in her backyard you also clean Lara's quad-bike and she mentions she's ridden the drat thing everywhere around, and through her home. The last job is cleaning her treasure room, and if you look at the floor you'll see tire marks from where she's taken a loop around the room on her quad bike 
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Apr 17, 2023 11:46
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I think consumables stick around in souls games partly so they can be a reward for exploration. There's more little hidden corners than there could sensibly be permanent upgrades. Although I'd rather they didn't hence consumables, the estus system should work for everything
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Apr 17, 2023 11:51
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I also feel like a lot of games have like, limited use consumables because developers think games are supposed to have them, and don't really think about what role they actually play. There's a lot of vestigial stuff that hangs around way longer than it has to like lives in platformers. And stuff like estus flasks gets treated like a weird gimmick rather than a perfectly sensible evolution of the concept. I kinda feel this way about one of my favorite series, Fire Emblem, specifically with promotions. I’d go into detail but this is the wrong thread for that. 
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Apr 17, 2023 11:53
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In my expert gamer opinion, games should have consumables but they should effectively be unlimited with a once-per encounter usage rate, so that you never feel bad about using them and can mix and match the ones you like best.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:21
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Look at all these people who didnt immediately buy 999 spirit talismans in Sekiro they are dirt cheap early on.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:26
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The particular bad thing in Sekiro is the tiny number of snap seeds you get before the lady butterfly fight which don't really help you beat her and if you run out they're gone
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Apr 17, 2023 12:33
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WaltherFeng posted:Look at all these people who didnt immediately buy 999 spirit talismans in Sekiro they are dirt cheap early on. I did this but it’s still kinda jank that they don’t run off of an MP bar. Like, you can only hold X amount of talismans at once to begin with so you’re already limited by how many casts of [insert prosthesis here] you get at once, making it be a thing that’s punishing specifically earlygame to discourage new players from experimenting just doesn’t make sense.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:36
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This discussion about using items is why I've been liking Atelier Ryza 2 and 3 so much - in some of the earlier Atelier games, once you use up an item's use count, it's gone and you have to make another one. In Ryza 2 and 3, item uses are linked to an in-battle point system called Core Charge - you and your allies build up AP by using basic attacks, then use AP on special attacks, and using special attacks get you CC to use items (and stronger items use more CC). It's a pretty nice linkage which means you're not afraid of using items, because you're not using them up directly - instead, you're using a replenishable resource. Extra CC gets stored up to a point so you can use healing items out of battle. The only reason to make new items is if you want to make bigger booms. I can see action games using something like this - like a MP bar that replenishes with attacks, and they provide you with better items as the plot progresses, or give you a way to upgrade them - except then they wouldn't be able to cram lovely healing items in half the chests for you to get disappointed about.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:56
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I’ve been playing Elex through again before playing the second one.The game does a few things I really like. They have different recipes for the same potions that use different types of materials, thus expanding how many you can make as the game progresses. Unlimited inventory organized by type so things are easy to find if you are a hoarder. Quest items are clearly marked and can’t be sold or destroyed, which is nice if you find a unique quest item before you have the quest. (Vs. Unique items that sell for $$$) Early on they give you a central town with most common items you need easy to get to from the teleport pad. Things like all your followers, a shop that sells almost everything, and a bed thats easy to get to.
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Apr 17, 2023 12:58
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Their flashing tongues, spitting out blood and poison.
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Qwertycoatl posted:The particular bad thing in Sekiro is the tiny number of snap seeds you get before the lady butterfly fight which don't really help you beat her and if you run out they're gone Yeah, it’s this. I’m not going to use the consumables until I’m sure I’m going to win that time, because if I use them and don’t they’re wasted. And the only way to be sure you win is to actually do it, and then clearly you didn’t need to spend them
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Apr 17, 2023 13:10
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A lot of games, especially the RPGs that are most infamous for item hoarding, are pretty bad with pacing and UI and teaching you how you're 'supposed' to be playing them, especially when you already got spells/attacks/special abilities that do the same thing right there. And half the time the items are poorly explained and extremely underwhelming when actually used compared to spending the turn using a spell or otherwise engaging in mechanics that don't feel tacked on. And then mix that together with dubious game balance or pointlessly open-ended systems. As I've related in one of these threads before, when I was playing Skyrim I eventually figured out a full 30~% of my carrying weight was being taken up by an endless array of minor potion of light fire resistances and other such overly specific types. So I dumped all of them out and pared things down to about 10~ niche potion types that I might actually conceivably use at some point, effects you couldn't really get anywhere else and had a concrete purpose. I ended the game having still not used any of those potions either. Ghost Leviathan posted:I also feel like a lot of games have like, limited use consumables because developers think games are supposed to have them, and don't really think about what role they actually play. There's a lot of vestigial stuff that hangs around way longer than it has to like lives in platformers. And stuff like estus flasks gets treated like a weird gimmick rather than a perfectly sensible evolution of the concept. Yup. It's interesting how there's a scant few games out there that really sell the consumables concept by taking a sort of "toolbox" approach where your inventory specifically exists to fix problems. I've heard Baldur's Gate's myriad of limited use magic items described that way, Dark Souls has a bit of that DNA in there too. Tellingly those games have enough challenge and friction that the player is nudged into finding solutions to problems rather than doggedly hoarding items. But in a lot of other games "hit bad guy with gun/sword" works 99% of the time and then players get stuck on the remaining 1% because they completely forgot they have access to a ridiculous pile of items that were designed to take the edge off. And this is all on top of the extra layer of "what if I need it later???" brainworms. RPGs also have a big problem with abstract numbers and hidden information. If you give me a potion that grants +10% damage for one battle, there's very few games out there where you'd actually be able to figure out how good that actually is. And if you don't know how good it actually is, you're never going to use it. God forbid if it doesn't even say +10%, instead it says some weasely bullshit like "slightly increases damage". Or because it's a percentage effect you experiment with it early in the game where 10% of 10 is 1 so it clearly does gently caress and all, except oops at endgame you're doing 100,000 damage per attack and 10% is actually enormous then. If you made effects like "for one turn deal double damage" you'd be way more likely to get players using those effects because they're significant and feel appropriately strong. Speaking of Fromsoft, you can see this first in Dark Souls 2 and then carried up into Elden Ring. The crafting system gets you access to like a hundred discrete consumable items, of which you'll probably use maybe 5 of over the course of a playthrough unless you really force yourself to experiment with everything.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:34
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Elden Ring's crafting system is terrible because everything requires a recipe and I've had at least one playthrough where I didn't have the sleeping potion recipe when I really could've used one.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:53
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It's funny that all the smithing stones can eventually be bought back at Roundtable Hold but if you wanna craft some scarlet boluses welp I hope you didn't pass by that crafting page in Siofra River Well from 30 hours ago.
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Apr 17, 2023 13:55
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exquisite tea posted:In my expert gamer opinion, games should have consumables but they should effectively be unlimited with a once-per encounter usage rate, so that you never feel bad about using them and can mix and match the ones you like best. That was one thing I really appreciated about Nioh 2. If you spec into magic or ninjutsu, you unlock new consumables and immediately have an unlimited amount of them, but can only bring a small number at a time that is automatically refreshed at each shrine/bonfire. As you go deeper into those skills the overall number of consumables you can bring at a time increases, and you can choose which ones you want to prioritise. So e.g. if you've got 10 points in ninjutsu you could bring 10 shurikens, or 5 shurikens and 5 smoke bombs, or any other combination. It was a pretty neat system that let you just dabble a little bit in those areas without having to fully commit. Even with just a few points you still got useful consumables out of them, just not as many of them as a character who specialises in those areas would.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:10
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exquisite tea posted:It's funny that all the smithing stones can eventually be bought back at Roundtable Hold but if you wanna craft some scarlet boluses welp I hope you didn't pass by that crafting page in Siofra River Well from 30 hours ago. Also you gotta find enough of the non-respawning plants! Elden Ring, why.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:16
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Last Celebration posted:I kinda feel this way about one of my favorite series, Fire Emblem, specifically with promotions. I’d go into detail but this is the wrong thread for that. I do like that in Awakening you can still use pretty much all items including promotions in-battle, which of course I know is a thing because the series originally doesn't have an 'out of battle' mode. Because I don't know if it was on purpose, but my Chrom reached the level of being able to promote to Great Lord right during the climactic battle with Gangrel. Which is just one of those anime as gently caress moments I love.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:37
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exquisite tea posted:In my expert gamer opinion, games should have consumables but they should effectively be unlimited with a once-per encounter usage rate, so that you never feel bad about using them and can mix and match the ones you like best. I kind of agree, but as a system where consumables and ammo are abilities and cooldowns. Although I will accept the middleground of something like DOOM or Spider-Man that has moves you can use to replenish health and ammo.
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Apr 17, 2023 14:42
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Lobok posted:I kind of agree, but as a system where consumables and ammo are abilities and cooldowns. Although I will accept the middleground of something like DOOM or Spider-Man that has moves you can use to replenish health and ammo. Far Cry 6's and Evil West's healing are on a relatively fast recharging cooldowns, and I love that.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:08
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Philippe posted:Also you gotta find enough of the non-respawning plants! Elden Ring, why. That's another thing that fractalizes out into a bigger mess. I will never, ever remember what the actual crafting recipes are in a system like that, so the rug gets pulled out from under me if I do need something specific only to find out I'm fresh out of its ingredients and then I need to go figure out how to source more. With 60% of the crafting items being ridiculously common, growing just about everywhere and you can mash interact on horseback and hoover everything up in a 10 ft radius, another 30% are specific to certain biomes, and then the last 10% are rare plants that come in limited quantities. Basically the only thing I remember is that you can combine two sun flowers into a "turn on co-op" item, because I made note of the fact that they made it as easy as possible to make more and you can't run out of them. But then yeah you've got recipes scattered everywhere, some vendors sell some consumable stuff sometimes but other times not, you can take out the Bell Bearing Hunters at great difficulty for the amazing reward of buying animal-based crafting components at the hub but then you still need to spend runes on them and then manually craft whatever you need them for. I have no idea what game that mish-mash of a system was built for but Elden Ring wasn't it.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:12
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Witcher is probably the best of those consumable systems. You have to find the recipes and ingredients to make your various potions, but once you do you have them and they refill every time you rest, It's a good mix. The only odd choice was that there aren't enough resources in the game to actually make all of them so you have to plan ahead
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Apr 17, 2023 16:27
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I'm going to specifically call out two roguelikes here: ToME and Dungeonmans. In the former, there are no consumables, just equippable items that give you cooldown-based powers that do most of the stuff that consumables do in other games. In the latter, there's a wide range of consumables that are all very useful, but few of them have instant effects. For example, all of the healing items bar one just make you regenerate for awhile, so they're not "panic buttons" that you mash when you're already in trouble. The game asks you to judge your chances and decide if you need to buff up or run away, but once you commit to a fight, it's quite hard to escape. ...and then when you die, you get a post-mortem that points out which of the hundreds of items in your pack might have saved your life
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Apr 17, 2023 16:41
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exquisite tea posted:It's funny that all the smithing stones can eventually be bought back at Roundtable Hold ...if you find and bring back the objects that unlock each tier
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Apr 17, 2023 16:48
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John Murdoch posted:That's another thing that fractalizes out into a bigger mess. I will never, ever remember what the actual crafting recipes are in a system like that, so the rug gets pulled out from under me if I do need something specific only to find out I'm fresh out of its ingredients and then I need to go figure out how to source more. With 60% of the crafting items being ridiculously common, growing just about everywhere and you can mash interact on horseback and hoover everything up in a 10 ft radius, another 30% are specific to certain biomes, and then the last 10% are rare plants that come in limited quantities. Elden Ring, like AC: Valhalla, had one system too many.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:48
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In Yakuza 0 you can run a cabaret club and eventually poach hostesses from rival clubs named after planets. Club Mercury has a lady dressed in blue, Club Venus has a lady dressed in orange, Club Mars has a lady dressed in red, and Club Jupiter has a lady dressed in green. These match the colours of Sailors Mercury, Venus, Mars and Jupiter in Sailor Moon and while I don't think it means a damned thing I do think it's funny.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:52
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It means that Yakuza is a game that just don't let up.
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Apr 17, 2023 16:56
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John Murdoch posted:. Erdleaf flower, not sunflowers, but close enough!
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Apr 17, 2023 16:57
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Solenna posted:In Yakuza 0 you can run a cabaret club and eventually poach hostesses from rival clubs named after planets. Does your cabaret hostess dress in white/yellow?
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Apr 17, 2023 17:01
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Randalor posted:Does your cabaret hostess dress in white/yellow? The club Majima manages is actually Club Sunshine, but Club Moon's best hostess does of course dress in white. Apparently their names are also somewhat similar to the Sailor Senshi's too, the Japanese ones anyway.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:34
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i would play the hell out of a full version of that side game
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Apr 17, 2023 17:38
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The regenerating item thing is a good idea and encourages you to use your stuff without being concerned you’ll be hosed later. But honestly if RPGs are gonna have items and avoid the trap of people hording, just make items extremely rare in general and give them highly potent effects. If you know what you’re getting into right off the bat, you’ll be less likely to horrde. I think the commonness of items almost makes hording worse, because you’re dealing with buckets of poo poo getting dumped on your head and never really knowing which things are actually useful vs which are not. If you know from the jump that items can/will save your bacon, and in fact might be necessary in certain situations, you’ll use them. Obviously something that focuses on finiteness like that would have to be carefully curated in such a way that ther’es a balance of encounters to items found so that you don’t end up in an untennable situation, but it would be a kinda novel approach to the problem. I try to use items in all RPGs these days because their usefulness is so variable from game to game that I’d like to see what’s going on in there.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:41
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BurningBeard posted:But honestly if RPGs are gonna have items and avoid the trap of people hording, just make items extremely rare in general and give them highly potent effects. If they're rare then you'll be more inclined to hoard, because of the fear that you'll need it later. Really, I think the problem with item hoarding is that many games make it hard to know, going into a fight, whether items will make a material difference. And if they would, you often figure that out too late, die, and try the fight again, and now you know it well enough that you don't need the items anyway. Dungeonmans, which I mentioned earlier, gives you a large supply, because it's balanced around you using items as part of your standard toolkit. In effect they're an ability set that every character has access to, regardless of their build. They're not so plentiful that you can spam them willy-nilly, but you're expected to use several items against dungeon bosses and to use the occasional one or two in a tricky fight getting to that point. And if you don't use the items, and you die, then because it's a roguelike, you start a new character. The permadeath encourages you to be more cautious about your engagements.
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Apr 17, 2023 17:53
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E: wrong thread
NonzeroCircle has a new favorite as of 17:59 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 17:55
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I think the game that broke that instinct in me was bloodborne. There was a moment where I was about to fight a boss and nearly turned around due to having 18 vials instead of 20. And then I was like, holy crap, they let me have 20, that's a lot of wiggle room. That caused me to realize that most of my losses in video games are due to refusing to back off and heal, be it RPGs or Souls. So thanks bloodborne! The number even turns blue when you're at your max, and all the enemies drop vials in addition to their usual stuff. Edit: I recall picking up the runes that combined let you carry nearly 30 and thinking Fromsoft had lost their minds, and then I played the DLC!
CJacobs has a new favorite as of 17:58 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 17:55
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:If they're rare then you'll be more inclined to hoard, because of the fear that you'll need it later. Really, I think the problem with item hoarding is that many games make it hard to know, going into a fight, whether items will make a material difference. And if they would, you often figure that out too late, die, and try the fight again, and now you know it well enough that you don't need the items anyway. In a roguelike context I agree with you but permadeath will change a lot of your decision making around item use. I guess my psychology around items is weird because if I noticed that they were rare, I would use them because of that rarity offering perceived value. Maybe other people don’t really think that way lol.
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Apr 17, 2023 18:05
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I also like DOS2's approach to consumables, which are limited use, but the game encourages you to scrap and scrounge so thoroughly for every possible advantage that throwing a water balloon on the floor can wildly swing the battle in your favor.
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Apr 17, 2023 18:28
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... what's DOS2?
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Apr 17, 2023 18:29
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"Use the items, nerd." /  (I really wanted the ice cream memories scene but couldn't find a good screenshot.)
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Apr 17, 2023 18:30
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exquisite tea posted:It's funny that all the smithing stones can eventually be bought back at Roundtable Hold but if you wanna craft some scarlet boluses welp I hope you didn't pass by that crafting page in Siofra River Well from 30 hours ago. Philippe posted:Also you gotta find enough of the non-respawning plants! Elden Ring, why. Honestly, in this case it is kind of intentional. The Scarlet Rot is a big deal in universe, and it would feel off if half the populace could cook up a cure from common materials whenever they need to. Basically it allows them to avoid the 'why don't they just use a phoenix down in the cutscene' issue by making the player feel how rare the cure and its materials are.
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Apr 17, 2023 18:33
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First time i play megaman games i end up buster duelling half the bosses because i am bad enough to not be able to win the first time using their weaknesses. So either >deplete ammo on weakness >die >buster duel with remaining lives Or >buster duel first few times to learn pattern >once i know pattern, can beat boss without weakness, never bother equipping it
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Apr 17, 2023 18:37
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