Gamers see an inventory screen and lose it?
I guess I understand why one would have a negative reaction to damage numbers popping up on the screen, it's visual clutter. But also those can be helpful to understand how different builds work in-game.
I haven't played many games that came out in the last few years, can someone help me understand? I want to understand the psychology of the :soypoint-2: .
Because most loot and RPG systems are really poorly implemented. Hell, take a game literally built around loot like Borderlands and then consider how much thought the player has to spend on making sure to dump the mountains of completely pointless common guns they're constantly picking up at the nearest vending machine every 20 minutes. Why do those guns even exist? If no one is ever going to use anything colored grey past the twenty minute mark then why pump out 800,000 of them per player per playthrough?
Someone already mentioned Assassin's Creed, but I think it really can't be overstated how dumb the RPG mechanics they added in over time are. It's literally to the point where in newer games you cannot reliably assassinate enemy guards because they're bulletsponges designed to force you to grind for. In a game about being an assassin. I dropped Odyssey despite it otherwise being a phenomenal open world game because every fight was taking 10 minutes just to hack and slash through obscene health pools on random enemies when I'd rather be exploring or doing a proper quest somewhere.
If no one is ever going to use anything colored grey past the twenty minute mark then why pump out 800,000 of them per player per playthrough?
Pretty much the only time a system like this can work is when the loot is sparse and the weapons have a durability meter. It can be extremely rewarding to plow through a dungeon with nothing but a +1 wooden spoon, but you're going to have to force me to use it over my legendary sword of blood.
I fucking love item durability. One of the many mistakes Bethesda made with fo4 made was removing durability
Some games toss in tons of loot to add a sense of progression. If most of it is not useful, it makes the system less fun
Depends on the kind of game also. In Assassins Creed I'm just going to pick the highest number. I do not appreciate the RPG elements here
but in a game like Divinity Original Sin that armor might enhance my playstyle and be something I focus on a ton
D&D 3.5 is a perfect example of how to do magic items right. Each one is unique and has weird effects and synergies.
Lost Ark on the other hand has the worst item system imaginable, where they are all commodified stat blocks with a number, and you grind spend points to slowly make number go up.
Extreme disagree on 3.5, a majority of items players will find are flat bonuses to attack/damage/AC/some stat.
Entry level gear tends to be "+1 this/that". But there's lots of mid/high level gear that gets more escoteric.
Rings of Spider Climbing, Boots of Haste, Lenses of Darkvision, and Crowns of Mind Shielding all have their own niche applications that go well beyond a simple "number go up"
I don’t think you are looking at enough items. +1 to +5 stuff is like 1% of magical items and enhancements and wondrous items
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/wondrousItems.htm
The rpg elements in AC games feel like they're there to slow down progression so that you'd spend money on items and boosts. Imo that's the main issue with them.
It has become synonymous with vertical progression. Horizontal progression can utilise it very well but it has not had a presence in many major titles in forever because it's more complicated to make and balance.
People are incredibly bored with vertical progression. It's just building up to a higher stat number in order to progress. They want to feel challenged and that they deserve their progress rather than that it is handed to them arbitrarily because they have x stat number.
I think it's mostly about gear that gets better in very small increments or that interacts with so many statistics that judging the quality of something becomes a chore. This is mostly a problem when combined with the first problem, so you have do some real crunching to tell what's better and then it doesn't even really matter very much and also you'll get a new piece to evaluate in twenty minutes.
I enjoy a lot of number-heavy games. I'm playing Dominions right now which has like 20 different stats for every character and hundreds of pieces of gear and like a thousand spells. A lot of the math is knowable, but it's obfuscated within the game's interface. But it works in that context because it's a game about weighing which dudes to build and which creatures to summon and how to use them in pitched battles. You don't have to constantly evaluate what's better as it gets piped in - you slowly learn what works and what doesn't through playing while the stats remain mostly unchanged. You can go through and look for particular builds and niches once you know what you want, and that's super rewarding! But it would megasuck if you were constantly getting a different footsoldier stat array with marginal improvements and had to evaluate that for a slight improvement in performance.
It's the same for games that focus on a single player character. You don't want to be spending your time and brainpower constantly evaluating what's better at the same micro level - at some point you want to have mastery of a system and move on to learning an mastering how it works on a different level: how systems interact, how different styles of gameplay work with different gear, et al. There are different ways that the micro-improvement gear system tackles this. Sometimes it is critically important to understand what small, frequent, incremental improvements are worth it at the expense of others so you can stay on the power curve, which can be frustrating because it requires consistent focus on what quickly becomes a fairly mundane process. This can still be fun in some cases! It depends on the particulars. Other times, and I think this is more frequent than the first case, the incremental improvements aren't that meaningful and progression is more forgiving, but this makes the whole system feel unnecessary at times and still like a chore.
That's my read on it anyway.
Well regarding the inventory screen, a lot of AAA games have the same inventory UI. I dislike that UI because it's silly to implement a cursor you control with the joysticks versus just arrowing through menus like games have been doing for decades.
As for the gear and items, people are talking about the loot-driven games. I've really come to hate these as well to the point where I'll avoid a game if has systems like that. Give me meaningful, hand crafted items as rewards for progressing in the game instead of randomly generated prefix and suffix combinations with one of five different weapon models.
Assassin's Creed is a great example. The games pre-Origins all had item progression tied to major plot points or secret unlocks. Getting new stuff feels good. In the newer games, enemies just vomit up loot and 98% of it is totally worthless. Just cut the system. The only thing I've been very cautiously optimistic about is AC Mirage since it's supposed to be a return to form.
r/gaming is full of nerds who call themselves gamers and yet they don't even know wtf a spreadsheet is so they say items and gear dumb rpg stupid give me gun the only number i want is my ammo count
r/gamingcirclejerk has been pretty funny today. related: https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/10uq067/stop/
I mostly just tire of certain systems getting shoehorned into games that do not justify the need for the system itself. Some studios just add mechanics seemingly because “this is what gamers want.”
The modern God of War games did not need a loot system. Last of Us did not need a crafting system. Albeit these games don’t really care if you interact with these mechanics, but that just begs the question “why include them at all?”
It would kind of like being able to put different hats on Cell in Portal, pointless.
Last of Us did not need a crafting system.
Idk about that. A survival horror game gets something from a MacGuyver style "turn a pile of random crap into a bomb" element. Also good for puzzles with multiple solutions. Maybe you can find the key to the door or you can cobble together a battering ram.
Last of Us didn't really do that. But it could have.
I mean sure, but even then I have an expectation. Like did Joel spend time doing hobbyist bomb making before everything went to shit? Does he have a copy of the anarchist cookbook lying around? Like I get it, rummaging around for things in a survival horror games makes sense. Sure I need shotgun shells, but packing a tampon with ball bearings and calling that ammo is kinda lame. Especially when I could just rummage for shotgun shells directly. Why the extra step?
Yes I realize I’m being pedantic.
Like did Joel spend time doing hobbyist bomb making before everything went to shit? Does he have a copy of the anarchist cookbook lying around?
Very easy elements to add to a survival horror story. Joel finding recipes to different craftable items that he can use to solve problems without just gunning down a bunch of zombies is a good way to give players alternative modes of play.
Why the extra step?
For one thing, cotton swabs might be an ingredient for makeshift shotgun shells OR medkit equipment. So you're given the choice between ammo and HP in a crafting system.
For another, cotton swabs are just more prolific than shotgun shells. So as you rummage through debris - be it a collapsed office building or an old ranch house - the cotton swab is a "common" find while real ammo is something you need to kill or trade for or get particularly lucky to find.
Yes I realize I’m being pedantic.
Half the fun of online discourse
Idk its just useless stats like "5% resistance against poison" that's just super meh.
But for some reason I like getting gear in Grim Dawn, to the point by the time my characters run to level 100 instead of farming/cheat for legendaries i just make another PC to level up. Idk theres just something satisfying about finding better gear there.
Lots of games make gear little more than an extension of your stat block. I'd highlight the Diablo series as a prime example.
Whether you're wielding a sword or an axe or a club has little to no effect on your play style. Better gear isn't novel - you're not tripping people with a kopesh or skewering cavalry with longspears. It's just a number that goes up.
Compare that to, say, Mount & Blade. Every weapon has a technique to it. Different hot boxes, different swing speeds, different status impairments when you connect.
There's very little scale in quality. No Excalibur that's 100x better than a normal broadsword. Equipment is more a complex game of paper-rock-scissors with the opposing team, combined with your personal play skills using that gear set.
Particularly in D3, I didn't feel it. Gear felt interchangeable - or, at least, some things were strictly better than others.
D2 had some marginal variance early on, especially with the plot specific items, but kinda turned to generic mush after the first playthrough.
I've definitely seen worse gear systems, but Diablo was one I figured people would be familiar with.
Build wooden mallet
Sell wooden mallet
High damage equals high price
Become rich selling glorified fence posts
i know what gear is, ive just never seen people complain that gear exists. Usually its more targetted about certain gear being OP or UP
I like when loot items have different relationships to the player and give you different inventory management decisions to make, especially if it's a game where different builds recontextualize them in interesting ways. A lot of item-heavy games pick one of "use it or sell it", "use it or leave it on the floor", or "craft it or do nothing" across the board as the single decision for everything you can pick up.
Good gear and inventory: RE4. Tetris is fun. Replacement level gear and inventory: Horizon. It's fine but not anything super special. Bad gear and inventory: Shit where it's just number go up assassin's Creed style
I think the main reasonings are that
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it's generic
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it's a gateway for introducing micro transactions
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having to fiddle constantly with equipment to optimize is just a chore
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the implication of different gear existing is that there is some gear that is the best and that you have to grind for it if you want to be able to beat the big bad at the end
So the worry is that the most maximized build is unachievable without investing an unfair amount of time? This doesn't seem like a new concept.
Is dlc a contributing factor? Some players can drop cash to accelerate to the endgame? Is that a problem in single player games?
Yeah I think gear is becoming synonymous with microtransactions, even in single-player games. Obviously there are genres where gear is essential to the genre, like survival games. People are probably mostly mad that Gear(TM) is coming to every type of game regardless of whether it fits the gameplay. But I'm just speculating wildly here so :shrug-outta-hecks:
i love gear with shit tons of stats and numbers and i love damage numbers and nonsense like that. ive played a lot of MMOs that are simple with stats and ones that arent and while i prefer lots of stats, i guess it can be overwhelming or feel like adding game time when the game doesnt need it. in a game with lots of stats it can be hard to quickly judge if an item is better if the stats are different but important (like attack speed or crit chance or whatever), that i understand because then like i either have to try it out and see what feels better, losing attack speed or losing crit. it becomes trial and error rather than like a green number with an up arrow that says its better
i see the comparison of 2018 god of war adding gear for some reason, when god of war prior to that didnt need gear. i think you could upgrade weapons and combos, but it wasn't like you gained +17 defense or -21 runic for wearing a new pair of bracers.
but i think what annoys me more is leveling up in a game and having boring level up perks or upgrades. im already not very enthusiastic about the upcoming game starfield but in the gameplay preview a little while ago, when they showed off perks, it looked like what it had what i dont like about fallout 4 where the gun perks are just 10%/20%/30%/40%/50% more damage with a specific gun type, increasing per perk. give me a slightly mechanic change or something. even if the last perk added like poison or bleed effect or something that changes things up a bit i'd almost tolerate it more
