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i might need them (quokk.au)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/video_game_memes@piefed.social
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i might need them
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[–] 9 points 1 year ago (11 children)

I've never heard a good game design defense of limited resources as a game mechanic. It's lazy, not creative, and it breaks the most important 'rule of fun' as being one of the most unfun things in gaming. There are so many other actually fun ways to handle item rarity - simple would be make them expensive, hard to farm, hard to find. More complex but more fun would be lore related ways to acquire them - like rune arcs in Elden Ring, why not have a repeatable hidden dungeon explaining the source of the item that has one as a reward after a difficult run through it?

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I'm not a huge gamer; what is the difference between a limited resource and one that is hard to find?

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    The difference is that one is freely useable without worry that you'll have permanently wasted it, and the other weighs heavily on your mind that you've wasted it permanently.

    Hoarding behavior in video games has a lot do with players feeling like they've found a key for a special lock, but not knowing where that lock is. And part of the blame for that can be laid on game designers for not putting any appropriate locks in. There's a reason why, though: limited, wastable resources being keys to anything means players can soft-lock themselves out of content.

    Limited, wastable resources make quite a bit more intuitive sense in, say, Roguelikes, where runs are short and death is frequent enough that having a special, death-saving antidote as a key does actually fit the problem of you dying constantly.

    There's also the added effect that these resources are powerful, meaning that if you did save them for a boss fight or something, you might feel like you were skipping the fight instead of using your wits to overcome a difficulty. It lacks satisfaction.

    All that said, I don't really agree. Recognizing that these resources are, by nature, superfluous and counterintuitively low-value means that I should use them flippantly, and that has actually made them way more fun.

    [edit] Actually, one more point: You can think of limited, wastable, powerful resources as having a kind of negative inflation. That is, they become more valuable the longer you hold onto them. If they get you past a difficult fight, well, the next fight will be more difficult, so shouldn't you use it there? Much like with real currencies, this creates a system in which people are punished for spending, so they won't spend.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Really good rundown and I agree the most from my own personal preferences (as a completionist hoarder) with the last point you edited in. And states the point I was trying to make better than I did because - it doesn't create more fun, it actually can keep you from having fun with all the things they included.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Yeah, but I tend to see this as players failing to meet the game on its own terms. Not that a lot of them know they're failing to, but still.

    What's a good example of this...

    I got an older coworker of mine to play Inscryption. That game has a safe puzzle with a 3-digit combination. He told me, after he'd played as much as he could bare, that he really wished games would stop doing that. A 3-digit combination is not secure enough; you can sit there and try every number in about 5 minutes. Which is what he had done. He had sat there for 5 minutes trying every number.

    This really puzzled me. Not that I disagreed. I saw the same safe, I recognized I could probably crack it whenever I wanted. But rather that he was willing to actually sit there and do it, knowing it wasn't fun, knowing this probably wasn't "intended," only so he could complain about it later. I think that I had more fun with this safe because I was willing to let the game tell me when I had the solution, and let it work me into this eureka moment it obviously wanted me to have once I'd put two and two together.

    Could the safe have used a few more digits to force him down the same path? I mean... maybe? I guess so. But, I think that it's important as players to recognize that all games are some form of this safe puzzle. You can install CheatEngine and modify any game's health and bonus numbers to make yourself invincible whenever you want, it's not even difficult to do, but invincibility is not what makes a game fun. The game must impose limits on your freedom so that your skill has something to overcome.

    Too many Megalixirs would trivialize any Final Fantasy battle. Too few would never let you punch above your station. If you can recognize that a game is giving you items you're not using, I think that you should just use them. It's either a bit of fun that you're missing out on because you're optimizing your play too much, or as Ephera explained, it may just be a catch-up mechanic for less skilled players. But in either case, you don't really gain anything by refusing to use them. This is a self-imposed prison people lock themselves into.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Something like a reusable stationary healing station vs there bring only 5 medkits on a level.

    The former you can keep going back to even if it is out of the way. The other, if you use them all, they're gone.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    The problem with that or with making a resource hard to farm is that players will optimize the fun out of gameplay. You'll inevitably get players that walk back to the healing station after every encounter or farm that resource for hours. Neither of which is fun gameplay.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    The problem is that game design is difficult. One of the most prominent quotes in game design is that:

    Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game.

    Source: https://www.designer-notes.com/game-developer-column-17-water-finds-a-crack/

    Which means, if you make an item farmable, some players will subject themselves to hours upon hours of unfun gameplay, because it's technically more optimal to farm it. And if you make it more tedious, they will just spend even more time on it.

    A big part of good game design is just avoiding bad player experiences like:

    • Players optimizing the fun out.
    • Skilled players waltzing through without any challenge.
    • Less skilled players getting stuck, because they cannot handle the difficulty.

    Giving less skilled players consumables can allow those players to progress when they get stuck.
    Not giving an infinite amount of those consumables encourages skilled players to take on somewhat more of a challenge.
    And genuinely just limiting resources rather than allowing farming prevents players from optimizing the fun out.

    Ultimately, it's significantly less of a problem when skilled players don't use their limited consumables, than any of these other scenarios.

    Having said all that, a genre where having limited resources actually works well, is roguelikes. Knowing that all your consumables and whole character might be gone, if you don't use some of your consumables in a dangerous situation, works wonders.
    Of course, the downside here is that you likely exclude less skilled players.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago*

    Well that's a pretty good defense, gotta admit.

    Also you had me at Roguelikes, definitely agree there. Absolutely my favorite genre of game partly because it 'solves' a lot of those problems of balance and such that no other genre can.

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