Things to avoid in (video) game design

[Cespenar]

A fitting anti-climax, appropriate to an alien, melancholy, Lovecraftian setting? Or simply a bad design decision?

Fitting anti-climax, in my opinion, and a nice twist. You already take on loads of enormous beasts and mythical creatures in face-to-face combat. It's wondrous that you actually don't use external forces or circumstances to help out in some of those battles.

Expansions that throw the game's sense of power scaling completely out of wack. This is especially bad when the content is available, even unavoidable, to new players and not just veterans. I'll provide two quick examples:

In the Elder Scrolls Morrowind, the Tribunal expansion includes sewer dwelling goblins, who can easily of a threat to even a high level character than the final boss of the main game (a 4,000+ year old mad-man who has tied his powers and consciousness to the heart of Tamriel's creator god and plans to spread his divine influence through disease and dreams until everything else is either dead or part of his shared lovecraftian hive-mind). This also added Assassins who would target the player in their sleep, and depending on build could be more than a match for a player while giving the stronger/luckier ones an overly reliable source of income and good gear.

Yeah, they banked it too much on everyone already having finished the vanilla game, I guess. Still, the level 45 goblins were quite silly.

One more, specific to strategy/tactics RPG games (do they even still make those?) is character perma-death for non-story reasons. I get that these games are supposed to be more difficult and challenging than turn-based games, but it irks the $#!& out of me that if I lose a character to a lucky critical hit, they're gone for good.

Many of these games have items or magic to revive characters, but I often find that when you lose a character in these circumstances and then try to bring them back, they just get killed again and you spiral into an endless cycle of pissing away items and magic to keep one character from being lost permanently after this battle, when if you were allowed to just revive them after battle like a normal RPG, you could end the fight quickly despite the loss of one character.

It would be like if D&D resurrection magic only worked while you were in the same battle, and once the encounter ended you could never raise them.

I like this, actually. It gives urgency to saving your fallen comrades, instead of going, "Oh, he just got a full-blast of dragon breath, but no worries, we'll resurrect him when things cool down."

Though I guess those perma-death systems work best with ironman runs, in my opinion. Otherwise what's the point?

[danzibr]

I too like the sudden different kinds of gameplay. One that springs to mind (mildly) is Undertale. Against all the regular mobs, you slide around with your left stick and try to dodge. But then bosses have different mechanics, like needing to shoot or jump or hop.

[Velaryon]

Fitting anti-climax, in my opinion, and a nice twist. You already take on loads of enormous beasts and mythical creatures in face-to-face combat. It's wondrous that you actually don't use external forces or circumstances to help out in some of those battles.



Yeah, they banked it too much on everyone already having finished the vanilla game, I guess. Still, the level 45 goblins were quite silly.



I like this, actually. It gives urgency to saving your fallen comrades, instead of going, "Oh, he just got a full-blast of dragon breath, but no worries, we'll resurrect him when things cool down."

Though I guess those perma-death systems work best with ironman runs, in my opinion. Otherwise what's the point?

In my experience, what would happen is Character A dies to a lucky critical hit. Character B moves in close enough to use resurrection magic, which brings back Character A but he still needs healing. Character A either gets killed again immediately, or their turn comes up, they attack, and then die again to a counterattack. So I'm no better off, but now Character B is in danger as well.

At the very least it should be an option that you can turn on/off.

[Aeson]

I like this, actually. It gives urgency to saving your fallen comrades, instead of going, "Oh, he just got a full-blast of dragon breath, but no worries, we'll resurrect him when things cool down."

I don't know that I'd say that I like resurrection timers, per se, but I don't usually mind them too much, certainly not enough to say that I feel that they shouldn't exist within a game.

I think, though, that I prefer "character goes down and is unavailable for the rest of the mission, and you have T time to stabilize them or they'll die" (e.g. modern XCOM, sometimes) and "you have T time to revive someone and get them back into the fight or they'll die, but you have some form of proper resurrection magic to bring them back later if you want to do so" (e.g. Dungeon Siege) to "you have T time to revive a downed character and get them back into the fight or they'll die" systems. My experience with the latter is similar to Velaryon's - a character who goes down and gets revived will often be low enough on HP to be a liability for the rest of the fight, and you can very easily get into a vicious cycle where reviving one character gets another character killed or where reviving one character effectively takes two characters out of the fight because the guy who gets revived doesn't have enough HP to stay in the fight and keeps getting knocked out, necessitating the constant attention of a second character to keep him up, with the result that neither is able to contribute to the fight.

Though I guess those perma-death systems work best with ironman runs, in my opinion. Otherwise what's the point?

I don't think that permadeath systems are in any way incompatible with non-ironman runs, but then I tend not to feel that I absolutely have to get the 'best' possible outcome all the time. I don't particularly like losing a special or important unit or character, but I'm also not likely to replay the entire mission or something like that to avoid having to accept that the unit or character was lost.

Somewhat relatedly, I'm ambivalent about mandatory ironman mode.

[Vaz]

I like Final Fantasy X's way of dealing with death; you have up to 7 members of the party, who all have their own individual HP. If a Character ends a battle killed, then they get no HP, but instantly regain 1HP when they return to the campaign map.

Certain things I don't mind Grinding either. I kind of like little slow burn games, where it's not all high intensity, and play nice and relaxed little games. Runescape is actually one I've just got back into, where I can spend time AFKing mobs to grind some XP. It's the passivity of it that makes it fine, that I can have it on while I'm cooking tea, or just watching the kids. I don't need to be button mashing away all the time.

[Velaryon]

I don't mind a little bit of grinding, depending on the reason why I'm doing it. If I'm grinding XP to make my character stronger (or to raise an individual attribute, in games where that's a thing), I don't mind that.

If I'm grinding a certain stage or boss battle because I'm hoping RNG will work in my favor and drop a particularly rare piece of gear that I want, that just makes me angry. This is about half the reason I stopped playing the Borderlands games (the other half being obnoxious raid bosses that have bajillions of HP, and if you die then you're completely out of the fight until your teammates either win or lose while you twiddle your thumbs for the next 15 minutes).

[Vaz]

I don't mind a little bit of grinding, depending on the reason why I'm doing it. If I'm grinding XP to make my character stronger (or to raise an individual attribute, in games where that's a thing), I don't mind that.

If I'm grinding a certain stage or boss battle because I'm hoping RNG will work in my favor and drop a particularly rare piece of gear that I want, that just makes me angry. This is about half the reason I stopped playing the Borderlands games (the other half being obnoxious raid bosses that have bajillions of HP, and if you die then you're completely out of the fight until your teammates either win or lose while you twiddle your thumbs for the next 15 minutes).

I think Borderlands 2 and 1.5 were step backs. Replaying BL1 was much more fun, even if I wasn't dropping legendary loot. I was more invested in the story for one. Plus, Lilith is by far the beter Siren.

[Velaryon]

I think Borderlands 2 and 1.5 were step backs. Replaying BL1 was much more fun, even if I wasn't dropping legendary loot. I was more invested in the story for one. Plus, Lilith is by far the beter Siren.

I haven't gone back to play BL1 since I moved on to 2, so I can't be sure whether I agree. I do have a lot more pleasant memories of that game and a lot fewer frustrating ones, though. Crawmerax was a difficult challenge, but he didn't take like an hour of constant firing in order to kill him, and you weren't locked out of the fight if you died. And I think the drop rates on the rarest gear were much better than in the later games.

I enjoyed Borderlands 2 until I hit the end of the main game. Raid boss grinding after that got old really fast, and the first couple DLC expansions were clearly subpar efforts meant to quickly meet their season pass obligations.

Borderlands the Pre-Sequel was... not a bad game necessarily, but easily the weakest of the series so far. And Handsome Jack is not nearly as compelling a villain as Gearbox thinks he is. I really did not care enough about him to need the story of how he rose to power.

[deuterio12]

I don't think that permadeath systems are in any way incompatible with non-ironman runs, but then I tend not to feel that I absolutely have to get the 'best' possible outcome all the time. I don't particularly like losing a special or important unit or character, but I'm also not likely to replay the entire mission or something like that to avoid having to accept that the unit or character was lost.

Somewhat relatedly, I'm ambivalent about mandatory ironman mode.

Fire Emblem is one of the oldest video game series with permadeath, but never had an ironman mode (although it didn't allow you to save mid-battle either, only restart the mission). In the other hand was also kinda niche series until Awakening where they finally allowed to play whitout permadeath.

Before Fire Emblem almost died with the remake of the first game where over half of the game's secrets could only be unlocked by getting most of your own units killed, which not very surprisingly turned out to be quite unpopular.

[GloatingSwine]

Before Fire Emblem almost died with the remake of the first game where over half of the game's secrets could only be unlocked by getting most of your own units killed, which not very surprisingly turned out to be quite unpopular.

I think that's partly a communication issue. Most of the extra maps in Shadow Dragon for having less than X units surviving have lots of extra units on, they're probably intended to be a convenience for people who have encountered unexpected carnage to put them back on their feet.

But everyone just plays Fire Emblem as "game over if anyone dies" anyway....

[deuterio12]

I think that's partly a communication issue. Most of the extra maps in Shadow Dragon for having less than X units surviving have lots of extra units on, they're probably intended to be a convenience for people who have encountered unexpected carnage to put them back on their feet.

But everyone just plays Fire Emblem as "game over if anyone dies" anyway....

Precisely, thus to see all the units and maps you had to go against your instincts and get your characters killed left, right and center. Heck some of those extra characters were even pretty good so the "optimal" play would be to coldly slaughter your own lesser units to unlock those top ones.

Plus some of the extra maps had quite a bit of key lore, like being able to recruit the main goddess Naga herself on an alternate dimension. But want to see that? You need to get your units butchered for most of the game and lose the main plot weapon.

[JeenLeen]

While I dislike the need to grind, I think I dislike more the inability to grind. For example, I've played some tactical RPGs where there are X missions and no way to train on the side. If a member of your team falls behind on XP, they might become useless, and sometimes you need to use bad tactics to make sure kills are evenly distributed so everyone stays on par.
Ring of Red comes to mind.
I did prefer how one PS2 game I played had it how you could move across the map and choose to fight a 'random battle' or not on any valid map. That was better than FFT or Ogre Tactics' random battles, and way better than the prequel which was a 'no extra fights' game. I wish I could remember its name.

On non-platformings being platformers, that one tower stage in Xenogears comes to mind. Blargh.

Since I started gaming on consoles with no possibility for patches, major bugs seem a big deal to me. I guess it might not be 'game design', but the overall game itself is damaged by the game company not putting enough resources into bug detection.
As an inverse, it also bugs me when there is a fun bug (like it gives a power-up or loot or something) and things are patched to turn it off. I get that in games where PvP is common, or there's some marketplace, but I've heard of it in single-player games. I can making it an option, but it seems like taking away a fun toy.

And since I have kids, being able to save at any time is really nice. It stinks to die in-game since my baby woke up screaming while I'm trying to get in an hour of gaming between their bedtime and mine.

[danzibr]

While I dislike the need to grind, I think I dislike more the inability to grind. For example, I've played some tactical RPGs where there are X missions and no way to train on the side. If a member of your team falls behind on XP, they might become useless, and sometimes you need to use bad tactics to make sure kills are evenly distributed so everyone stays on par.
Ring of Red comes to mind.
I did prefer how one PS2 game I played had it how you could move across the map and choose to fight a 'random battle' or not on any valid map. That was better than FFT or Ogre Tactics' random battles, and way better than the prequel which was a 'no extra fights' game. I wish I could remember its name.

OH!!!

Yeah, FFT. Oh man, there's a terrible, terrible design choice there. The random encounters level up with you, but the story battles don't. So you have a reasonably tough time just getting from point A to point B, then when you get to a story battle (where the challenge should be), you roflstomp it.

Terrible. Either have all encounters scale with you, or none.

[The_Jackal]

Something that many games nowadays avoid but used to be a large problem (and sometimes still occurs)... Unskippable cut scenes. I love the story in most games I play. But if replaying it means I need to sit through the third repeat of a scene I'm getting annoyed. If the scene is right before a hard boss and I need to watch it again if I die, you cannot expect me to be happy about that.

That's a simple pacing mistake. Put the respawn point AFTER the cut-scene. Simple. Or, better yet, don't put in the cut scene to start with. Because, for the most part, people play games for gameplay. The best cut-scenes are short and punchy, and fun to watch. If you're cramming your game with pointless dialogue and exposition, you need to re-think your game. Games live or die based on gameplay. You're not Martin Scorsese, and your dead-eyed mo-capped NPC isn't Meryl Streep.

Your other quibbles are, imo, just indications of bad gameplay. I'm convinced that as more and more games try to cram more "content" into games with wildly escalating budgets, you're seeing many of them resort to low-effort timesinks, in lieu of something interesting. Achievements. Jump Puzzles. Inventory Management. Scavenger Hunts. These are all cheap ways for a game designer to pad out content, without really putting much content there.

Take Grand Theft Auto. Sure, there's the core emergent gameplay of raising your wanted level and chasing cars and doing crimes, plus all the mission content they sprinkle around the game. Then there's all the dumb BS they put in there that's just lame filler. The haircuts and outfits, the dumb rhythm minigames (dancing, working out, etc.), the parts of the game that are just about traversing the map. Hidden spawns to find and pick up. The jumps. All that garbage takes almost no effort to implement and test, and really isn't very fun, but pads out the 'hours of gameplay' metric they can put on the box.

[The_Jackal]

Farming materials to craft equipment.

If, in the course of your adventures, you gradually assemble the unique components of a unique weapon of ancient mystic power - great!

If, on the other hand, you have to farm bears' butts - and only 1 out of every 50 bears even DROPS a butt - you are wasting your life.

I think that depends. Obviously, the 'collect 10 bear heads' quest where only one in 20 bears drop a head is idiotic. On the other hand, EQ made you collect bear hides to make bags, and bags were useful to increase your carrying capacity. Great idea, good game mechanic. If you wanted to farm up some mats to make and sell bags, then *you* are making that choice, and as long as the bear fights are reasonably interesting, I think it's got a potential incentive.

Where this formula goes wrong is when the primary barrier to completing your objective is just getting the bears to show up. You know the ones, where the drop rate is terrible and the spawn rate is worse, but the fights are trivial. That's another classic example of 'padding'. We're not going to make the content more interesting, or put in more of it, were just going to interject an inevitable amount of tedium and drudgery into your adventure.

[veti]

Points where you can't pause.

Interruptions can happen at any time. So a single-player game should be pausable instantly, at any time, without any in-game repercussions. No matter how precious your cutscene or important your exposition, just let me hit pause in the middle of it, OK?

And that goes for loading screens, too. If I hit the pause key while a loading screen is up, then finish the loading by all means, but don't restart play until I hit it again.

[Hiro Protagonest]

Farming materials to craft equipment.

If, in the course of your adventures, you gradually assemble the unique components of a unique weapon of ancient mystic power - great!

If, on the other hand, you have to farm bears' butts - and only 1 out of every 50 bears even DROPS a butt - you are wasting your life.

Major exception - immersion.

So shops are a mechanic that isn't very good. Why do you have to go collect an arbitrary point system only to go back and get an item you want/need later, rather than simply having that item be in the dungeon, allowing for more precise placement, specific challenges for optional ones, and saving time?

Because economy feels more like a realistic world. Shops are overused, they shouldn't be in games as much as they are. But Etrian Odyssey would feel very different if it cut out the steps of acquiring new items, even if it would just speed up the game. The fact that monsters drop monster parts, you go back to town and sell those monster parts, and that gets you money and unlocks items because the craftsmen now have more materials to work with is an immersion tool. You are part of a society with support structures.

And then there's Metroid. Most help comes in the form of abandoned technology that the Chozo power suit is compatible with. This technology was made by others, but they're long-gone now, Samus is alone. When I played Hollow Knight, wandering through the dark caves, it was jarring and weird in the first couple hours because of the town and the shops. Yes they're grim and dank but they're still non-hostile people just looking to make a buck in this mysterious world of hostile intrigue (it was cool to have a handful of legitimate allies, but the shopkeepers aren't that). I kind of got used to it because it was like "you can just take your pick of minor abilities once in a while" while all the major ones were achieved through more immersive measures - except arguably the quill, which should just be included with the map IMO, and the lantern. Getting the Mark of Pride in Mantis Village was really cool, there's no shop for that. I've never played Castlevania games so I can't really speak to the shops and NPCs in those.

Farming for materials follows the same rule - it's immersive in Monster Hunter (well, gathering plants and hunting smaller monsters is immersive. I don't like killing the same monster over and over for a low% piece drop). It's the core part of how Harvest Moon/Rune Factory/Stardew Valley feel, settling in or mixing up a work routine for in-game day after in-game day with steady progress to bigger goals. But low% drops are definitely a bad thing, don't do that.

[danzibr]

Points where you can't pause.

Interruptions can happen at any time. So a single-player game should be pausable instantly, at any time, without any in-game repercussions. No matter how precious your cutscene or important your exposition, just let me hit pause in the middle of it, OK?

And that goes for loading screens, too. If I hit the pause key while a loading screen is up, then finish the loading by all means, but don't restart play until I hit it again.

Seconded!

Especially when you have small, needy children.

[Aeson]

Another thing not to do in (video) games: The real-world time impacts the game in a meaningful way. However neat you think it is for X to only happen at (some time in the real world), it is far from certain that it will be convenient for me to play the game at, say, midnight to go pick moonflowers or whatever. If I need to pick moonflowers to progress through the game, or if I can pick moonflowers and there's even the slightest chance that I'll want to do so, then requiring me to block a specific time in my schedule out to play the game so that I can do so is asinine, especially if the time I need to block out to do it is particularly inconvenient. Something silly, like a space 4X replacing the moon/planet/star assets with pumpkins and jack-o-lanterns for Halloween or other things of that nature, is generally fine since it's irrelevant to gameplay.

So shops are a mechanic that isn't very good. Why do you have to go collect an arbitrary point system only to go back and get an item you want/need later, rather than simply having that item be in the dungeon, allowing for more precise placement, specific challenges for optional ones, and saving time?

While I mind plot progression being locked behind a game-currency wall and can mind equipment progression being locked behind a game-currency wall if it's handled poorly (only another thousand gold coins before you can buy that shiny new rusty iron longsword, adventurer! Good thing you get about three per encounter, eh?), I don't mind when the shops are handled mostly as a way to ensure that the player has access to a certain minimum grade of equipment in certain regions, at certain points in the plot, or when the player-character reaches certain levels, as is usually the case in hub-based or mostly-linear cRPGs and dungeon crawlers. In those types of games, you can usually find stuff which is at least as good, and probably better, than what you can get from the shops not long after the shops start selling whatever it is that they have, and obtaining items required to progress the plot are usually the nominal reason why you went into the wilderness or delved into the dungeon in the first place.

Also, if we're talking about "immersion," I personally find it less "immersive" for a shop's wares to be scaled to the player character's level than for the shops to be open 24-7 and staffed by unsleeping NPCs who're willing to trade with any random vagabond who wanders into town at two in the morning. The former is a case of the game-world revolving around the player-character for no apparent reason; the latter is mostly just anachronistic. Wares being tied to plot progression or to the region in which the shop is found, while often somewhat weird (why does this town a day away from the starting village have mithril armor and adamantine weapons when the starting village could only give me a rusty old sword and re-purposed farming implements; why did killing the bandits allow the village blacksmith to start selling steel weapons instead of copper/bronze/iron?), is usually somewhat easier to rationalize (this town is, relatively speaking, a big city or trading hub while the starting village is a relatively remote backwoods hamlet; killing the bandits reopened trade routes or the mines, freed a skilled blacksmith, etc).

Moreover, shops (especially the more specialized shops, like armorers, alchemists, enchanters, and spell merchants) in games are primarily a convenience for the player, being a place to dump all the junk that they've picked up, restock on useful consumable items, and maybe upgrade some equipment. Making the shop unavailable when the player wants to go to it because "it's more realistic" for the shop to be closed at two in the morning, game-time, just wastes the player's time. The only gameplay reason to do it is to provide the player an opportunity to rob the shop while NPCs are not around.

[Spore]

Moreover, shops (especially the more specialized shops, like armorers, alchemists, enchanters, and spell merchants) in games are primarily a convenience for the player

Shops with respawning or resetting inventory is certainly the easy way out and lets the developer focus on more important parts of the game. But I work in retail and I have to ignore the supply line problem every time a shop pops up.

1) Buying what is essentially trash: I do not care if the shop only gives you 3 copper pieces for a torn piece of cloth or the snot of some exotic monster. Unless you are a skilled alchemist why bother. Because it is trash. It is a different thing if you sell a blacksmith a torn scalemail where he can use his skill to repair and resell it.

2) Restocking of shelves every x hours of game time or y ingame hours.: You cannot tell me Skyrim has a supply problem, Belethor and then magically warp in goods of ever increasing quality every 24 hours.

3) Shops with gear scaling to the level of the player: This one is majorly stupid. Usually shops should gate you out of overlevelled gear by buying prices. Not by randomly going: "Hey, this guy's level 5. I won't even SHOW him the magical boots that costs way too much that would make his life easier." Part of the motivation to go shopping is to see an awesome piece of gear that you cannot afford. And in the case of games like Skyrim, that is GONE once the restock period has expired and is replaced by a platemail with bonus to sneak.

4) Randomized gear without boundaries.: Plate Armor with bonus to Magic? Robes that increase your skill with the sword? Why devs? No decently thinking entepreneur would buy stuff like this. Because even if your character happens to be a robe wearing blademaster, he is the exception and should craft his gear himself. No shop would buy stock that is useful to 5% of its customers.

I think it's people like me who really want another Dungeonkeeper. But not to manage the economy of a dungeon but to manage the economy of a hub city that so happens to be placed upon the hell maw itself. People refuse to move away because adventurers just mean so much money. They go in and almost die for an an enchanted piece of armor. You give them crap money for it and sell it to the next schmuck that throws his life away in the demonic cathedral.

[Vaz]

Shops with respawning or resetting inventory is certainly the easy way out and lets the developer focus on more important parts of the game. But I work in retail and I have to ignore the supply line problem every time a shop pops up.

1) Buying what is essentially trash: I do not care if the shop only gives you 3 copper pieces for a torn piece of cloth or the snot of some exotic monster. Unless you are a skilled alchemist why bother. Because it is trash. It is a different thing if you sell a blacksmith a torn scalemail where he can use his skill to repair and resell it.

2) Restocking of shelves every x hours of game time or y ingame hours.: You cannot tell me Skyrim has a supply problem, Belethor and then magically warp in goods of ever increasing quality every 24 hours.

3) Shops with gear scaling to the level of the player: This one is majorly stupid. Usually shops should gate you out of overlevelled gear by buying prices. Not by randomly going: "Hey, this guy's level 5. I won't even SHOW him the magical boots that costs way too much that would make his life easier." Part of the motivation to go shopping is to see an awesome piece of gear that you cannot afford. And in the case of games like Skyrim, that is GONE once the restock period has expired and is replaced by a platemail with bonus to sneak.

4) Randomized gear without boundaries.: Plate Armor with bonus to Magic? Robes that increase your skill with the sword? Why devs? No decently thinking entepreneur would buy stuff like this. Because even if your character happens to be a robe wearing blademaster, he is the exception and should craft his gear himself. No shop would buy stock that is useful to 5% of its customers.

I think it's people like me who really want another Dungeonkeeper. But not to manage the economy of a dungeon but to manage the economy of a hub city that so happens to be placed upon the hell maw itself. People refuse to move away because adventurers just mean so much money. They go in and almost die for an an enchanted piece of armor. You give them crap money for it and sell it to the next schmuck that throws his life away in the demonic cathedral.

Good points.

1. Possibly. OSRS Runescape has a nice way of dealing with this. There are general stores which will buy anything, but for a much lower cost than if you to buy from a specialist store. Specialist stores have a certain amount of stock of things they sell, and will pay less for the things that they currently stock. As stock increases, the value of the product you're selling goes up. Shops have a "normalizing" mechanic, which in a set amount of ticks, depending on the item, will regain stock up to the base amount, or if over the stock amount, will decrease. For example, there is a guy who will sell non-magical Amulets, but he doesn't have any stock (normalizes to 0). If you were to sell him 30 Ruby Amulets, he would give you more than what you'd get from a General Store (general stores being in every major settlement), but you'd have to go there specifically.

2. Agree and Disagree. It might be an abstraction of people gathering the materials. See above. I think there has to be an abstraction somewhere. In a game, you are not (usually) the sole Resourcer in a game. If a game is going to be based on resourcing, I sometimes feel like I'd rather use a Gold Sink to buy materials rather than having to do so myself, especially late game. I've spent enough time grinding to play the game, I'd now much rather spend time playing the game.

3. Shops with scaling gear is something that's an odd one. Gen 7 pokemon does it by saying "you're not of a high enough rating to purchase XYZ"; that's because the economy is fubared, getting Thousands of in-game £Currency for one trainer fight, which might require 3-4 £500 potions at best to cure. Pokemon was never intended to be a hard game, however, and so houserules challenge oneself. Final Fantasy was another one of these; If I go to Besaid Island, why is it I'm only finding gear that gives +5% to single stats - why is it that just before the end game boss there is also end game gear? The problem is with a price-gated only in game economy, grinding certain content would allow you to bypass challenges.

4. Randomized Gear without Boundaries; this was awful in Diablo 3 pre-Loot 2.0. Imagine trying to gear an End-Game Barbarian. You're pushing your hardest difficulty, and want to find just the perfect weapon. Let's say that on every Elite Kill, you have a 1/3 chance of dropping a legendary with the correct affix. That legendary is one like a dozen potential slots (Main/Off Hand, Ring 1/2, Amulet, Head, Shoulders, Torso, Bracers, Gloves, Pants, Boots), so you're already up to 1/36 chance of getting the correct item. When you're looking to end-game your gear, you're going to want to get not only the 5 correct non-legendary affixes to be the correct ones, but you're also going to want those affixes to be in the upper percentiles. Imagine getting a perfectly affixed item, with nigh perfect rolls which is already something ridiculous like a 1/50000 chance, only to find out that your Barbarian is being buffed for intelligence whose only effect is to increase his resilience vs Elemental attacks, rather than giving him a +20% damage bonus. Utter joke. This was god-awful. Even outside of the verisimilitude, this is awful. That said, having shops which specifically cater to [Niche] are nice, simply because it eases the gearing for that style of play.

5. I love Dungeon Keeper; the nearest game to that is the Dungeons series. It has some of the charm, and 4th wall breaking-ness of the original. It has a slightly forced RTS parts of the combat, but it's enjoyable within Dungeons 2. I'm not overly sold on Dungeons 3 yet, but I've not played it enough.

[Talion]

Good points.

1. Possibly. OSRS Runescape has a nice way of dealing with this. There are general stores which will buy anything, but for a much lower cost than if you to buy from a specialist store. Specialist stores have a certain amount of stock of things they sell, and will pay more for the things that they currently stock. As stock increases, the value of the product you're selling goes up. Shops have a "normalizing" mechanic, which in a set amount of ticks, depending on the item, will regain stock up to the base amount, or if over the stock amount, will decrease. For example, there is a guy who will sell non-magical Amulets, but he doesn't have any stock (normalizes to 0). If you were to sell him 30 Ruby Amulets, he would give you more than what you'd get from a General Store (general stores being in every major settlement), but you'd have to go there specifically.

As an add on to this, it also isn't afraid to give you a base value of 0 for stuff that is literally trash (for example, piles of ashes). One the other hand there are also a couple other general stores that do buy things at otherwise wildly high prices...such as the one deep in the PvP zone that has no easy bank access. Ostentatiously, this is due to the lack of taxes on the goods there.

[Keltest]

Typically the purpose of trash loot is to help make random fights feel more productive. Kill a bandit? Take a gold cup or something off his body that you can sell. Kill a bear? Take some claws that you can trade. In a pinch, if youre desperate for cash, it also makes it easy for you to work yourself out of poverty. Yeah, killing 4000 bears for their buttocks isn't especially exciting, but if you need to raise 1000 gold to pay a ransom or something, it guarantees that you always have some way of getting to that point eventually.

[The_Jackal]

Shops with respawning or resetting inventory is certainly the easy way out and lets the developer focus on more important parts of the game. But I work in retail and I have to ignore the supply line problem every time a shop pops up.

Some of these I agree with, because we're talking about functionality that had to be implemented to begin with, but I'd definitely take a different attitude in terms of how inventory and itemization systems should be implemented in a game. Because what you're observing is actually a symptom of a larger issue, imo.

1) Buying what is essentially trash: I do not care if the shop only gives you 3 copper pieces for a torn piece of cloth or the snot of some exotic monster. Unless you are a skilled alchemist why bother. Because it is trash. It is a different thing if you sell a blacksmith a torn scalemail where he can use his skill to repair and resell it.

Rather than ask why a vendor would buy trash, I'd ask instead, why even give the opportunity for a player to acquire trash? I know everyone has memes in Bethsoft games where you collect every broom and cheese wheel in the realm, but at least you can argue that brooms and cheese wheels have a purpose. Rather, I'm talking about the grey vendor trash items that are dropped which have no conceivable use. That's actually one of the things I really liked about Fallout 4's inventory system. Nearly every item could be scrapped into usable materials, which also fit with Fallout's post-apocalyptic theme.

2) Restocking of shelves every x hours of game time or y ingame hours.: You cannot tell me Skyrim has a supply problem, Belethor and then magically warp in goods of ever increasing quality every 24 hours.

This is one of those systems whose only purpose is to give some other system meaning. For example, in Skyrim, the reason merchants have limited gold is specifically so that the Investor speech perk can become useful. Take away the gold cap, and the perk that raises the gold cap is suddenly meaningless. I'm not sure I would do away with it entirely, though. There is something more immersive about having a vendor who only has so much coin with which to pay you. I'm also the type of gamer who wants them to put back various denominations of coinage, and make them have weight, something I haven't seen since EverQuest.

3) Shops with gear scaling to the level of the player: This one is majorly stupid. Usually shops should gate you out of overlevelled gear by buying prices. Not by randomly going: "Hey, this guy's level 5. I won't even SHOW him the magical boots that costs way too much that would make his life easier." Part of the motivation to go shopping is to see an awesome piece of gear that you cannot afford. And in the case of games like Skyrim, that is GONE once the restock period has expired and is replaced by a platemail with bonus to sneak.

4) Randomized gear without boundaries.: Plate Armor with bonus to Magic? Robes that increase your skill with the sword? Why devs? No decently thinking entepreneur would buy stuff like this. Because even if your character happens to be a robe wearing blademaster, he is the exception and should craft his gear himself. No shop would buy stock that is useful to 5% of its customers.

Both of these are byproducts of procedurally generated loot, something I've always felt is kind of lame. Unique loot has so much more character, and permits the designer to put in far more interesting trade-offs in terms of how they work. Even if you're going to work off a fixed menu of affixes or bonuses, at least make your best items a customized set of those affixes or bonuses, so that the item created has some sense of purpose, like it was made by a person for a function, not just a grab-bag of random perks.

I think it's people like me who really want another Dungeonkeeper. But not to manage the economy of a dungeon but to manage the economy of a hub city that so happens to be placed upon the hell maw itself. People refuse to move away because adventurers just mean so much money. They go in and almost die for an an enchanted piece of armor. You give them crap money for it and sell it to the next schmuck that throws his life away in the demonic cathedral.

I'd thought that games like Minecraft and Craft the World had become the spiritual successors to Dungeon Keeper.

Typically the purpose of trash loot is to help make random fights feel more productive. Kill a bandit? Take a gold cup or something off his body that you can sell. Kill a bear? Take some claws that you can trade. In a pinch, if youre desperate for cash, it also makes it easy for you to work yourself out of poverty. Yeah, killing 4000 bears for their buttocks isn't especially exciting, but if you need to raise 1000 gold to pay a ransom or something, it guarantees that you always have some way of getting to that point eventually.

Then why not just have him drop cash, or better yet, put the effort into your crafting system to make a way to scavenge items into useful materials? Some of my favorite memories of EverQuest was fighting my way into Cazic Thule or Runnyeye citadel so I could get crafting materials off the monsters in there, or in WoW, sneaking through Blackrock Depths to mine Dark Iron Ore, or craft items at the Black Anvil. IMO, it's stuff like that which is missing in the modern, theme-park MMO that has replaced WoW: The notion that the world has a purpose other than to spawn enemies for you to butcher.

[veti]

This is one of those systems whose only purpose is to give some other system meaning. For example, in Skyrim, the reason merchants have limited gold is specifically so that the Investor speech perk can become useful.

Cart/horse inversion error, I think. The Investor perk is an afterthought, on a perk tree that's not very well thought out at its best. I don't think the whole retail model was designed around it.

The reason for limiting merchant gold in Skyrim is so that you don't simply break the economy by picking up one insanely valuable loot item. (Thinking back to Morrowind here, where you could relatively easily acquire loot worth tens of thousands of gold at low level. Of course, in Skyrim nothing is worth that much anyway, but the limited gold system remains as a legacy.)

I'm also the type of gamer who wants them to put back various denominations of coinage, and make them have weight, something I haven't seen since EverQuest.

There's a mod for that. The second part, anyway.

[Rodin]

Then why not just have him drop cash, or better yet, put the effort into your crafting system to make a way to scavenge items into useful materials? Some of my favorite memories of EverQuest was fighting my way into Cazic Thule or Runnyeye citadel so I could get crafting materials off the monsters in there, or in WoW, sneaking through Blackrock Depths to mine Dark Iron Ore, or craft items at the Black Anvil. IMO, it's stuff like that which is missing in the modern, theme-park MMO that has replaced WoW: The notion that the world has a purpose other than to spawn enemies for you to butcher.

Because they're trying to cater to a wide range of audiences, I'd say. What you get depends on who you expect to be playing your game.

In Diablo II, nobody really cares if a swarm of locusts drops a magical set of plate armor.

In a more realistic Survival game, people would be pretty upset if the bears are running around carrying sacks of gold. However, they have no problem with whittling a knife to skin the bear to make the wrapping for the handle of their hatchet, along with a dozen other items required to make the hatchet.

Meanwhile, Skyrim tends to have both sets playing. Bears dropping gold tends to ruin immersion, but many players won't be interested in the crafting. Hence: vendor trash. Casual players get loot, crafters get materials. Everyone wins.

My personal taste is that crafting can die in a fire, but that's just me.

---------

My most recent bugbear is inconsistent auto-saving. Specifically, Kingdom Come Deliverance. I quickly observed while playing that the game was regularly auto-saving when I made progress on quests. This makes up a lot for the "pay to save" mechanic that can get so irritating otherwise.

Except...there's no rhyme or reason to what consists of a save point. I did a quest that was in multiple parts and didn't have any saves between the segments, despite other quests of similar length giving me that auto-save. For other quests, completing the quest constituted a save point. Not this one. And to really rub it in, sleeping is supposed to be a guaranteed way to save, and the quest has a scripted sleep in it. That one sleep doesn't count for a save.

Result? A couple hours of gameplay lost, because the game doesn't auto-save in places where it's common sense to do so. And for no reason I can see, either.

[Keltest]

My most recent bugbear is inconsistent auto-saving. Specifically, Kingdom Come Deliverance. I quickly observed while playing that the game was regularly auto-saving when I made progress on quests. This makes up a lot for the "pay to save" mechanic that can get so irritating otherwise.

Except...there's no rhyme or reason to what consists of a save point. I did a quest that was in multiple parts and didn't have any saves between the segments, despite other quests of similar length giving me that auto-save. For other quests, completing the quest constituted a save point. Not this one. And to really rub it in, sleeping is supposed to be a guaranteed way to save, and the quest has a scripted sleep in it. That one sleep doesn't count for a save.

Result? A couple hours of gameplay lost, because the game doesn't auto-save in places where it's common sense to do so. And for no reason I can see, either.

Ive heard the devs are aware that their save system isn't accomplishing what they really wanted it to, so theyre working on making it easier to save on demand like, say, when you need to quit.

[Wookieetank]

I'd like to add unskippable tutorials on newgame-freaking-plus. Looking at you right now Persona Q. Just finished taking out the last set of optional bosses/quests on my first playthrough this weekend, have 100+ hours on the game, and you're gonna put me back through the ENTIRE tutorial because you've decided to make it part of the plot. GDI!

[The_Jackal]

Cart/horse inversion error, I think. The Investor perk is an afterthought, on a perk tree that's not very well thought out at its best. I don't think the whole retail model was designed around it.

The reason for limiting merchant gold in Skyrim is so that you don't simply break the economy by picking up one insanely valuable loot item. (Thinking back to Morrowind here, where you could relatively easily acquire loot worth tens of thousands of gold at low level. Of course, in Skyrim nothing is worth that much anyway, but the limited gold system remains as a legacy.)

I suppose. It seems to me like they could have taken care of that simply by not giving it out so easily, plus I've never found any vendor-sold loot to be particularly awe-inspiring compared to what can be gotten from quests or crafting.

Because they're trying to cater to a wide range of audiences, I'd say. What you get depends on who you expect to be playing your game.

In Diablo II, nobody really cares if a swarm of locusts drops a magical set of plate armor.

I guess what puzzles me is why you'd go the non-immersive route for a MMO, when you're specifically selling the game on the notion of the player residing in a persistent world. I don't make it to be catering to a certain type of player, rather I make it to be intellectual laziness. The fact is, putting in systems that reward players for playing the game, and do so in a reasonably plausible manner is not hard at all, just requires that you devote some time to communicate that to your team when they're programming the drop table.

Meanwhile, Skyrim tends to have both sets playing. Bears dropping gold tends to ruin immersion, but many players won't be interested in the crafting. Hence: vendor trash. Casual players get loot, crafters get materials. Everyone wins.

The thing is, they could accomplish that without vendor trash. How, you may ask? Simply by making vendors respond to the player economy. One of the thing that's always bugged me about many MMOs is how the inter-player economy is bifurcated from the NPC economy. No matter how high the demand for bear hides might be in the player economy, the NPC vendor is buying it for the same 2 silver. Plus, you've got to impose the annoyance on the player of hauling that loot back to your auction house, posting it, getting the proceeds in the mail, etc. The whole thing is unnecessarily tedious. Why not just let the price of commodities float? Players are selling more bear hides than are buying? Price falls. You can set a floor and a ceiling price on anything, so that it doesn't get too crazy, to simulate the effect of the rest of the world's effect on the economy, and as a backstop against unexpected market behavior. And this system is a win-win for everyone: Non-crafters don't have to keep track of craftable item value to decide whether something needs to be posted for auction, and crafters can have access to a more stable supply of materials, if they don't want to farm all their inputs personally. The only ones who lose out are the Auction-House flippers, but **** those guys.

My personal taste is that crafting can die in a fire, but that's just me.

I'm sure it's not just you, there's lots of players who can't be arsed to figure out in-game economies. If there weren't, gold farmers wouldn't exist. But I think, regardless of whether you think about them or not, game economies (of which crafting can be a part) are important for how they can simultaneously provide immersion and a motivation to engage the game content. Effectively, the crafting economy in WoW is part of the reward system, like lockboxes in Overwatch. And that's true, even if you're not a crafter, so long as you can sell craftable loot for cash, which you can then use to buy cool stuff.

[JeenLeen]

The thing is, they could accomplish that without vendor trash. How, you may ask? Simply by making vendors respond to the player economy. One of the thing that's always bugged me about many MMOs is how the inter-player economy is bifurcated from the NPC economy. No matter how high the demand for bear hides might be in the player economy, the NPC vendor is buying it for the same 2 silver. Plus, you've got to impose the annoyance on the player of hauling that loot back to your auction house, posting it, getting the proceeds in the mail, etc. The whole thing is unnecessarily tedious. Why not just let the price of commodities float? Players are selling more bear hides than are buying? Price falls. You can set a floor and a ceiling price on anything, so that it doesn't get too crazy, to simulate the effect of the rest of the world's effect on the economy, and as a backstop against unexpected market behavior. And this system is a win-win for everyone: Non-crafters don't have to keep track of craftable item value to decide whether something needs to be posted for auction, and crafters can have access to a more stable supply of materials, if they don't want to farm all their inputs personally. The only ones who lose out are the Auction-House flippers, but **** those guys.

That sounds like a pretty cool solution. It could even be tied to supply, so that if a lot of bear pelts are sold, shops carry more.

The biggest downside I see is that it hurts players who want to play it solo, and perhaps without an internet connection, since for such to work it would probably require an internet connection. But I've heard some of the more popular MMOs already require that.

For non-MMOs that do vendor trash (like Final Fantasy XII, I think... had Vaan as the main character): something in-game like that the vendor trash is proof of slaying monsters, and the government/guild/kingdom whatever plays X gold for killing that monster can justify it. Though that game is helped by having an infinite (or near-enough) inventory space that you don't have to worry about hauling it back to town as a hassle, like Diablo's limited inventory causes.