What's One "Old Game" Mechanic That You Don't Miss?

[Vinyadan]

Regarding the "Oh, thou must!" thing mentioned by Shneekey the Lost a minute ago, the version of that which annoys me most is the "meant to lose" fight--e.g. a fight which is deliberately designed to be so hard that you can't possibly win it. The game never actually tells you that you're just going through a glorified cutscene, though. Bonus points if the game designers never considered what would happen in the one in a million chance you actually do win the "meant to lose" fight and you leave the game in a broken state because of it!

The expansion of Aliens vs Predator 2 (Primal Hunt) had such a fight, but it was an fps. You were a mercenary human and had two human allies. You walked into an infested area, and you were swarmed by aliens coming from a tunnel. One of the features on Primal Hunt was that you could place sentry guns (auto-turrets). So I placed two of them. The aliens didn't stop coming. The humans and the sentry guns didn't stop shooting. I also shot, until I run out of bullets. I later understood that the level was designed so that the swarm would only stop once your two allies were dead.

[Balmas]

So, I'm probably about to get crucified by the grognard crowd for saying this, but there are a lot of old RPG systems whose complexity detracts from the game. For instance, Morrowind's "pick your class, abilities, skills, and star sign at the census office" approach, while it lets you generate a character that fits your vision, means that it's much less intuitive than Skyrim's "use what you like as you're using it" approach.

I'd especially like to call out Wasteland 2, as a modern sequel to an 80s DOS game, as having learned entirely the wrong lessons from twenty-five years of building RPGs. It's the embodiment of complexity for complexity's sake.

I'm talking twenty-nine different skill categories which require different investment of skill points to rank up, and listed in categories which are overly specialized and subdivided. For instance, Mechanical Repair, Weaponsmithing, and Toaster Repair could conceivably all fit under the same heading of Maintenance or Repair. The ability to notice small hidden details is not a function of the attribute Awareness, but is its own skill called Perception. There are four skills devoted to talking to people--Harda**, Smarta**, Kissa**, and Animal Whisperer--none of which are affected by the attribute Charisma. If you need to open a door safely, you need to first use Alarm Disarming to get rid of the alarm, then Trap Disarming to get rid of any traps, and then Lockpicking to actually open the door. (Note, also, that Lockpicking is distinct from Safecracking, Trap Disarming is separate from Demolitions, and Computer Science is different from Alarm Disarming.)

That isn't even touching on the perk system, which unlocks perks based on the rank you have in skills you've taken, or the attribute system, which has natural break points in each of its seven stats.

This is a game that released in 2014. I'm just saying, if the character creation screen sends players running for a guidebook, you've done a poor job designing your character system.

[Cikomyr]

So, I'm probably about to get crucified by the grognard crowd for saying this, but there are a lot of old RPG systems whose complexity detracts from the game. For instance, Morrowind's "pick your class, abilities, skills, and star sign at the census office" approach, while it lets you generate a character that fits your vision, means that it's much less intuitive than Skyrim's "use what you like as you're using it" approach.

I'd especially like to call out Wasteland 2, as a modern sequel to an 80s DOS game, as having learned entirely the wrong lessons from twenty-five years of building RPGs. It's the embodiment of complexity for complexity's sake.

I'm talking twenty-nine different skill categories which require different investment of skill points to rank up, and listed in categories which are overly specialized and subdivided. For instance, Mechanical Repair, Weaponsmithing, and Toaster Repair could conceivably all fit under the same heading of Maintenance or Repair. The ability to notice small hidden details is not a function of the attribute Awareness, but is its own skill called Perception. There are four skills devoted to talking to people--Harda**, Smarta**, Kissa**, and Animal Whisperer--none of which are affected by the attribute Charisma. If you need to open a door safely, you need to first use Alarm Disarming to get rid of the alarm, then Trap Disarming to get rid of any traps, and then Lockpicking to actually open the door. (Note, also, that Lockpicking is distinct from Safecracking, Trap Disarming is separate from Demolitions, and Computer Science is different from Alarm Disarming.)

That isn't even touching on the perk system, which unlocks perks based on the rank you have in skills you've taken, or the attribute system, which has natural break points in each of its seven stats.

This is a game that released in 2014. I'm just saying, if the character creation screen sends players running for a guidebook, you've done a poor job designing your character system.

Im with you there. Simplicity has its own beauty

[Triaxx]

I kind of have the opposite view. I like that diverse granularity of skills, giving the ability to have one person specialize in one set of skills while someone else takes another. David talks to people, while Fingers repairs things. All sorts of things. And while I have mastered the art of sniping, I can also tease open any lock ever made.

[warty goblin]

I kind of have the opposite view. I like that diverse granularity of skills, giving the ability to have one person specialize in one set of skills while someone else takes another. David talks to people, while Fingers repairs things. All sorts of things. And while I have mastered the art of sniping, I can also tease open any lock ever made.

The big stumbling block with Wasteland 2 is that you have to make some pretty consequential character design choices before ever actually playing the game. Worse, you have to do this for like four characters at once. This is annoying enough in a game that uses a pre-existing system like D&D, but it's a pretty heavy lift in a game where you really can't know the system beforehand. It pretty much guarantees that a new player will realize they've totally hosed up at least one party member, or left some important skill uncovered, or doubled up on gun types too much and there simply isn't enough rifle caliber ammo to go around or something. You're gonna need to restart to get a decent party. Probably several times. It's really too damn bad, because the turn based fighty bits in Wasteland 2 are great, but the game doesn't really have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff, polished to a glassy smooth finish.

Which is one of the great irritations I have with RPGs that make me decide a huge amount about how a character plays before I actually play the game. I'm gonna restart this sucker a bunch of times, by which point I'll be hideously bored of the opening section, and probably burned out of the whole thing. Oblivion got a lot wrong, but letting you completely remake your character after the tutorial dungeon - and allowing you to save right there - was a piece of good design. By that point I knew at least a bit of how all the game systems actually played, which gave me some idea of what sort of character would actually be fun to play.

Of course being Oblivion, the actual RPG system was such a hot mess that designing a character to be good at the things you enjoyed was a secret trap option. But the concept of tutorial, then decide your character, is entirely respectable.

[Morty]

It helps a lot if the game has a respecialization option, the lack thereof being a thing that I definitely don't miss. Though of course there's still games that don't have one - Kingmaker apparently doesn't, which baffles me. So it's less an old game mechanic that I don't miss and more an option that has become more widespread in the past ten years that I greatly appreciate.

[warty goblin]

It helps a lot if the game has a respecialization option, the lack thereof being a thing that I definitely don't miss. Though of course there's still games that don't have one - Kingmaker apparently doesn't, which baffles me. So it's less an old game mechanic that I don't miss and more an option that has become more widespread in the past ten years that I greatly appreciate.

The character creation for Kingmaker is, I suspect, excellent if you've got a stack of Pathfinder books at your elbow. Otherwise be prepared to restart a lot. The tooltips are generally pretty good, but some of the more complex classes are seriously hard to decipher, with leveling flowcharts that look like somebody ran a tarantula through a pasta machine.

(Really makes me appreciate Drakensang all the more, where you basically just picked a pregen archtype, and then evolved it as you wanted. The only really immutable choices you made were species, gender and whether you could use magic or not. But DSA is a lot more straightforwards about flexibility in character advancement than d20 systems have ever been.)

[Crow]

Personally, I don't like systems where the skills are broken down to too many options. Having separate skills for rifles, smgs, assault rifles, sniper rifles, etc.

I much prefer when it is something like long guns and pistols, with the option to specialize.

Morrowind actually had a range for its level scaling in dungeons--e.g. you might specify 10-25, and the critters will always map to those ranges. This makes it actually harder to do those dungeons at level 1 because everything's level 10, whereas if you do it at level 30 it'd be easier because you're 5 levels higher than them.

Except the effectiveness of your weapons, armor, and spells are governed by your skills; which don't require sleeping to increase.

Try the insomniac run.

[Cikomyr]

The big stumbling block with Wasteland 2 is that you have to make some pretty consequential character design choices before ever actually playing the game. Worse, you have to do this for like four characters at once. This is annoying enough in a game that uses a pre-existing system like D&D, but it's a pretty heavy lift in a game where you really can't know the system beforehand. It pretty much guarantees that a new player will realize they've totally hosed up at least one party member, or left some important skill uncovered, or doubled up on gun types too much and there simply isn't enough rifle caliber ammo to go around or something. You're gonna need to restart to get a decent party. Probably several times. It's really too damn bad, because the turn based fighty bits in Wasteland 2 are great, but the game doesn't really have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff, polished to a glassy smooth finish.

Which is one of the great irritations I have with RPGs that make me decide a huge amount about how a character plays before I actually play the game. I'm gonna restart this sucker a bunch of times, by which point I'll be hideously bored of the opening section, and probably burned out of the whole thing. Oblivion got a lot wrong, but letting you completely remake your character after the tutorial dungeon - and allowing you to save right there - was a piece of good design. By that point I knew at least a bit of how all the game systems actually played, which gave me some idea of what sort of character would actually be fun to play.

Of course being Oblivion, the actual RPG system was such a hot mess that designing a character to be good at the things you enjoyed was a secret trap option. But the concept of tutorial, then decide your character, is entirely respectable.

A good system can have very sweet specialization options that gives personality to your character, forcing you to pick ways in which you will focus your character.

It can also do this without having literally 40 skills available. Some of the best rpgs have 10-15 skills available, and it's damn fine. There's nothing gained out of adding more skills for the sake of having more skills, and some video game that added skills for the heck of it may lead to some bad or useless implementations.

Arcanum is a good example of certain cool skills having only a limited number of applications. There's a balance problem when a skill is considered "essential" or another is considered "useless". That means proper skill balance wasn't properly thought out.

[Triaxx]

There's definitely a balance between hardcore you can totally screw this up character creation, and Do whatever it doesn't matter in the slightest. Some games definitely fall too far one way or the other. Wasteland 2 seems to assume you played the first, so all the inside jokes, like toaster repair make sense.

[Balmas]

I kind of have the opposite view. I like that diverse granularity of skills, giving the ability to have one person specialize in one set of skills while someone else takes another. David talks to people, while Fingers repairs things. All sorts of things. And while I have mastered the art of sniping, I can also tease open any lock ever made.

Unless, of course, that lock is on a safe, in which case the highly granular skill system means that you need to use your 0-level Safecracking skill instead of the Lockpicking skill which took 3/4 of the skill points from your max-level character to max out.

Look, I'm sure there's a way to make a highly granular RPG and do it well, but the further you subdivide your skills, the more chance there is for you to make skills that are basically pointless, and the more skill points you need to hand out to your characters to keep them competent. In Fallout 1 and 2, f'r'instance, you had both First Aid and Doctor; Doctor gave more XP per check, fixed broken limbs, and was often used as a skill check in quests, while First Aid restored HP. As such, everything First Aid did was neatly packaged into the humble Stimpak, and putting actual points in First Aid was a booby trap for new players.

Going back to Wasteland 2: not only does the Wasteland character system subdivide skills up unnecessarily, but it gives you barely any skill points to play with per level, and then makes it so that increasing skills to the point that you're competent with them takes a linearly-increasing amount of points. Even maxing out Intelligence means you end up with a maximum of 260ish skill points. Sounds like a lot until you realize that maxing out a skill--even if you use skill books efficiently--requires an investment of 36 points, and so even your max intelligence all-the-skills character at max level is only going to be able to really specialize in seven skills out of those 29 skills. Basic competency comes at skill level 3, which is two levels' worth of investment for the average 4 INT character.

The big stumbling block with Wasteland 2 is that you have to make some pretty consequential character design choices before ever actually playing the game. Worse, you have to do this for like four characters at once. This is annoying enough in a game that uses a pre-existing system like D&D, but it's a pretty heavy lift in a game where you really can't know the system beforehand. It pretty much guarantees that a new player will realize they've totally hosed up at least one party member, or left some important skill uncovered, or doubled up on gun types too much and there simply isn't enough rifle caliber ammo to go around or something. You're gonna need to restart to get a decent party. Probably several times. It's really too damn bad, because the turn based fighty bits in Wasteland 2 are great, but the game doesn't really have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff, polished to a glassy smooth finish.

Aye, that's the rub. This game basically throws you at this horrid skill creator, says have at it, and then doesn't tell you which skills are actually useful, which are traps, and which will actually become irrelevant because as soon as you hit the first town you pick up a surgeon who makes the points you put in that skill irrelevant. And until you get to that point and find that out, you're stuck basically guessing and redoing the first mission over and over until you can climb that cliff with the corpses of parties gone before.

A good system can have very sweet specialization options that gives personality to your character, forcing you to pick ways in which you will focus your character.

It can also do this without having literally 40 skills available. Some of the best rpgs have 10-15 skills available, and it's damn fine. There's nothing gained out of adding more skills for the sake of having more skills, and some video game that added skills for the heck of it may lead to some bad or useless implementations.

Exactly this. If a skill isn't useful, it really shouldn't be in the game.

[factotum]

Of course being Oblivion, the actual RPG system was such a hot mess that designing a character to be good at the things you enjoyed was a secret trap option. But the concept of tutorial, then decide your character, is entirely respectable.

This I agree with. While I like having a number of different ways to specialise a character, allowing you to respec once you've realised you've specced into the wrong things is a nice feature. Grim Dawn allows you to respec at any time but it costs in-game money to do so, which I think is a fair exchange given there's not a huge amount else to use money on (most of the time, the items you find adventuring will be better than what you can buy at a shop).

Even maxing out Intelligence means you end up with a maximum of 260ish skill points. Sounds like a lot until you realize that maxing out a skill--even if you use skill books efficiently--requires an investment of 36 points, and so even your max intelligence all-the-skills character at max level is only going to be able to really specialize in seven skills out of those 29 skills. Basic competency comes at skill level 3, which is two levels' worth of investment for the average 4 INT character.

The thing is, though, you have *four* characters in Wasteland 2, all of which you can create yourself--so you don't have to make any one of them be able to do everything, the game encourages you to specialise characters to do certain things. Although I will agree that having Safecracking and Lockpicking be two separate skills was annoying, it kind of makes sense because in real life safes often don't have the same type of locks as doors do--knowing how to pick a lock on someone's front door isn't going to help you figure out how to open a safe door that's protected by a combination lock.

On a wider point, I would argue that reducing the number of skills in an RPG is just part and parcel of the modern trend to ensure that any single character can see all of the content in the game, which I totally disagree with. In an RPG with a single character, if I choose to run my character with no lock picking skill, I don't expect to be able to get through every locked door--there will be some things I miss because of that. To my mind that's fine and expected. I shouldn't be able to be the Arch-Mage of the Winterhold College, the Speaker of the Night Mother, and the leader of the Companions simultaneously because they should all require totally different skill sets, and it annoys me to no end that Skyrim pretty much expects me to do that!

[veti]

Try the insomniac run.

I'm sure it's possible. I'm just not seeing how it would add to the fun. You miss out on levelling, which is a major benefit in Morrowind (unlike Oblivion), and you also miss out on the bigger, more impressive random enemies at higher level (with their bigger, more powerful souls). And instead you get - what, exactly?

[Morty]

(Really makes me appreciate Drakensang all the more, where you basically just picked a pregen archtype, and then evolved it as you wanted. The only really immutable choices you made were species, gender and whether you could use magic or not. But DSA is a lot more straightforwards about flexibility in character advancement than d20 systems have ever been.)

There's many ways to approach this, but what it boils down to is that a game should minimize the chances of messing up your whole playthrough through decisions during chargen or early game. Whether it's through flexibility, respecialization or something else.

It's also quite true that old RPGs frequently suffer from an overabundance of skills, many of which are traps. The old Fallout games have been discussed above, but Morrowind is a fine example too. Particularly if you decide to pick a pre-made class. There's really not much of a point in having more than one melee weapon skill, and some of the pre-made classes have like three.

[Hunter Noventa]

"Oh, but thou must!"

I mean, used to be so common in JRPG's that it's become a Gaming Trope definition. Basically the 'not a choice' option, where picking the 'wrong' option just presented you the question again until you picked the 'right' one.

It is very nearly always used in a ham-handed manner, and extremely annoying if you don't want to or the 'correct' answer is the obviously dangerous or boss battle engaging option.

Dragon Warrior was the Trope Namer for this, but it's got examples all over the place. Fortunately, they seem to either be dialed way back, completely removed, or have a lampshade hung on them.

Basically, instead of offering you a non-option, most these days will simply do it in a cutscene with no player agency. Also annoying at times, but at least not as bad as literally saying 'you have two options, and one of them will not be accepted'.

It still happens, I mean almost all of Fallout 4 falls into this category, but it's not as common as it used to be.

I think Yoko Taro is a fan of lampshades, if this dialog from the event he wrote in FF14 is any indication.

[Cespenar]

I shouldn't be able to be the Arch-Mage of the Winterhold College, the Speaker of the Night Mother, and the leader of the Companions simultaneously because they should all require totally different skill sets, and it annoys me to no end that Skyrim pretty much expects me to do that!

That's pretty much the intentional and primary design point behind Skyrim as you said, aka "accessibility". Which irritates me to no end as well, despite the fact that I find the game pretty enjoyable.

Also, for everyone talking about bloated and redundant skill lists, check out Academagia's skill list if you haven't already. It's almost like a "don't do this" university course in game design. For a demo: Calligraphy is a "main" skill, and it has the following subskills: Bookbinding, Forgery, Forms, Illustration, Ink Compounds, and Orthography.

[factotum]

Also, for everyone talking about bloated and redundant skill lists, check out Academagia's skill list if you haven't already. It's almost like a "don't do this" university course in game design. For a demo: Calligraphy is a "main" skill, and it has the following subskills: Bookbinding, Forgery, Forms, Illustration, Ink Compounds, and Orthography.

Yeah, that's taking things to ridiculous levels. I just cut and paste that list into a spreadsheet--there are 55 "parent" skills and 310 skills in total!

Speaking of skill systems I think are actually pretty good, I think the Outer Worlds has a really nice idea there--basically, you can increase skills up to 50 (e.g. halfway) in groups of three, then you have to increase them individually beyond that. It means that you still have some level of competence with, say, rifles even if you're concentrating mainly on handguns.

[Triaxx]

One character can see everything, can be counter-acted by simply having multiple solutions. Doors going to be locked? Leave a key around. Or allow for the crafting/looting of lockpicking kits that allow characters of sufficient intelligence and insufficient skill to open locks. Or simply write lockbashing into the game code.

I play a fair bit of Dungeons and Dragons online, and they sell Bells of Opening, which anyone can use, Wizards and Sorcerors have Knock, and Half-Orcs can headbutt locks open based on their intimidation.

[Cikomyr]

. Although I will agree that having Safecracking and Lockpicking be two separate skills was annoying, it kind of makes sense because in real life safes often don't have the same type of locks as doors do--knowing how to pick a lock on someone's front door isn't going to help you figure out how to open a safe door that's protected by a combination lock.

But that's the problem. You are making a "realist" argument that doesn't has its place in a video game rpg. Unless the game's thematic is heavily focused on burglary, safe breaking and lockpicking, there is no effective gameplay reason to dissociate the two, and you are just inviting frustration for players who were suckers for the *wrong* skill.

You know what else is irrealist? Reloading after dying. Not pooping. Killing zombies makes you better at Science! (tm) because that's how "the system works".

We tolerate a lot of irrealist things in video games for the sake of convenience, I don't see why having Safe Breaking vs Lockpicking as two skills adds to a game about survival in a post apocalyptic landscape.

On a wider point, I would argue that reducing the number of skills in an RPG is just part and parcel of the modern trend to ensure that any single character can see all of the content in the game, which I totally disagree with.

That's a strawman. There are a lot of classic, solid rpg that have branching path based on skills and choices. Just because a few RPGs decided to go the Skyrim/Fallout 4 approach to "'you can do everything" doesn't mean the alternative is *50 skills* to manage.

Fallout New Vegas kind of made your build impact how you progress, without going with 50 skills.

Tyranny is the same. Pillars OF eternity. All of these didn't had 50 skills to develop.

[Crow]

I'm sure it's possible. I'm just not seeing how it would add to the fun. You miss out on levelling, which is a major benefit in Morrowind (unlike Oblivion), and you also miss out on the bigger, more impressive random enemies at higher level (with their bigger, more powerful souls). And instead you get - what, exactly?

Leveling is not a major benefit in Morrowind though. The game is actually easier without it. As the poster earlier mentioned, you can still run into higher level monsters, and their souls. Not that you need them. I ran through most of the high level content in Morrowind using a crossbow with silver bolts and a silver sword.

The game can be a huge grind, and a lot of people have never finished it. I would just suggest to those people to try it without sleeping; and anyone who disagrees, I would encourage them to see for themselves as well.

[Cygnia]

I don't miss looting individuals one at a time. WoW's "Loot All" has me now spoiled.

[LibraryOgre]

The trick with Morrowind is to never sleep. If you can do that, where you put your skills and stats doesn't matter. I managed sll the game's content only sleeping twice.

That's also the trick in Oblivion, unless you get a friendly-leveling mod.

[Erloas]

I'm replaying Wastelands 2 right now, and while I do think the skill system could use some tweaking, I don't think it is that bad. There are a lot of skills, but you've got 4 characters and 3 companions so it is really easy to cover all the skills and *because* the skills go up in points, picking "the wrong skill" at the start means you haven't actually sunk much into any given skill by the time you've learned the system fairly well. As it is, there isn't much in the game that you can't do in any given play-through.

To me, if they gave out a lot more skill points or the same number of skill points and much fewer total skills then they may as well just remove all the skills because you could always do everything successfully without even having to think about it, so why put in a skill at all? The only thing I don't like is that even if you can/do detect traps/alarms the characters will just automatically run into it without giving you a pause, but that isn't an issue with the skills but how characters interact with the world/how perception information is portrayed to the player.

[Traab]

Im not sorry to see less of the "We offer tons of alternate choices on how to play. Oops! Only playing this way lets you get past the bottleneck!" As an example, one of the first (might actually be the first) final fantasy games. You basically need to have a black mage in your party and cast toad on a boss otherwise he will obliterate your party, pretty much no matter how much you grind. For a game that old it had a surprising amount of flexibility with party setups and such but yeah, you kinda got your wheels spiked if you didnt do this one strategy. I was also never really a fan of the class system games like the other final fantasies where by the time you were done you had like a dozen+ options on classes for your characters because, again, some were going to make things much easier, some made things all but impossible, and there was no real way to know for sure without trying them then grinding a lot to earn the skills. I had this issue in tactics iirc. Suddenly the next battle destroys my crew because it turns out its really hard to reach the enemy before they crush us with the classes I have been playing as up till now.

As an alternate to "but thou must!" And not an old mechanic, choices that mean nothing to the game. Lets go with starcraft 2. When playing as terran you get the choice to either fight off a protoss fleet to protect a human colony (and a potential romantic interest woo hoo) or to help wipe out the infested colony. No matter what option you pick, the attractive scientist is gone by the end, and it never, ever gets brought up again, having absolutely no connection to the storyline. But yeah, aside from some research points, which long term dont mean anything as you will easily max out all research your decision only effects what the next mission is despite being portrayed as one with huge ramifications. On the one hand, you are fighting the protoss, a group of powerful aliens that are actually friends and allies of yours to at least some extent. On the other, you are wiping out a human colony because its infested with zerg. That SHOULD make a difference long term, it SOUNDS like it will, and you have every reason to think its an important choice. But it isnt. Its not like mass effect where it could alter relationships with the crew, its not going to change how the protoss view jim later, and the girl was never, EVER going to be a part of the crew no matter what you picked. That always bugged me.

[Misery Esquire]

Leveling is not a major benefit in Morrowind though. The game is actually easier without it. As the poster earlier mentioned, you can still run into higher level monsters, and their souls. Not that you need them. I ran through most of the high level content in Morrowind using a crossbow with silver bolts and a silver sword.

The game can be a huge grind, and a lot of people have never finished it. I would just suggest to those people to try it without sleeping; and anyone who disagrees, I would encourage them to see for themselves as well.

You gain health, more mana, more stamina, damage, walking/running speed, dodge chance, more health per level, more stamina per level, better magic resistance... And crit chance/Speechcraft bonus, I guess. Your enemies don't advance with you, except cliffracers and slaughterfish who go up to level... 50?

Levelling up is purely beneficial, even if you don't get the "right" stat boost spread. Why would you not?

[deuterio12]

I play a fair bit of Dungeons and Dragons online, and they sell Bells of Opening, which anyone can use, Wizards and Sorcerors have Knock, and Half-Orcs can headbutt locks open based on their intimidation.

Wait, you can be so intimidating that doors open themselves for you? That sounds pretty awesome.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

Im not sorry to see less of the "We offer tons of alternate choices on how to play. Oops! Only playing this way lets you get past the bottleneck!" As an example, one of the first (might actually be the first) final fantasy games. You basically need to have a black mage in your party and cast toad on a boss otherwise he will obliterate your party, pretty much no matter how much you grind. For a game that old it had a surprising amount of flexibility with party setups and such but yeah, you kinda got your wheels spiked if you didnt do this one strategy. I was also never really a fan of the class system games like the other final fantasies where by the time you were done you had like a dozen+ options on classes for your characters because, again, some were going to make things much easier, some made things all but impossible, and there was no real way to know for sure without trying them then grinding a lot to earn the skills. I had this issue in tactics iirc. Suddenly the next battle destroys my crew because it turns out its really hard to reach the enemy before they crush us with the classes I have been playing as up till now.

Uhh... the only FF game which has 'Toad' you can cast, to my knowledge, is FF IV which doesn't actually have any alternative choices because characters enter and leave your party based purely on plot events, thus which party members, and skills, are available to you are predefined. Maybe 5? I never got a chance to play that one much, since it didn't show up in America until the Playstation, where it was combo'd with 6.

As an alternate to "but thou must!" And not an old mechanic, choices that mean nothing to the game. Lets go with starcraft 2. When playing as terran you get the choice to either fight off a protoss fleet to protect a human colony (and a potential romantic interest woo hoo) or to help wipe out the infested colony. No matter what option you pick, the attractive scientist is gone by the end, and it never, ever gets brought up again, having absolutely no connection to the storyline. But yeah, aside from some research points, which long term dont mean anything as you will easily max out all research your decision only effects what the next mission is despite being portrayed as one with huge ramifications. On the one hand, you are fighting the protoss, a group of powerful aliens that are actually friends and allies of yours to at least some extent. On the other, you are wiping out a human colony because its infested with zerg. That SHOULD make a difference long term, it SOUNDS like it will, and you have every reason to think its an important choice. But it isnt. Its not like mass effect where it could alter relationships with the crew, its not going to change how the protoss view jim later, and the girl was never, EVER going to be a part of the crew no matter what you picked. That always bugged me.

The writing team for Legacy of the Void in general dropped a whole lot of balls, in my opinion, and it feels basically like Joss Wheaton directed the first two SC II games, while they got Michael Bay to do the third. Lots of pretty shiny explosions, and not just ignoring the previous two games and their buildup but directly spitting in their face and taking a leak on them.

There is a marginal advantage in siding with the Protoss, in that at that stage of the game, you likely don't have much Protoss research and the next couple of Protoss tiers are hecka good while the Zerg tree has you slogging through a couple of mostly-useless decisions until you get to bio-reactors. It also gets you to Tech Reactors much sooner, which are pretty insanely OP. Specifically, if you side with the Protoss, and do things in a certain way, you can have Tech Reactors by the time the Banshee mission comes along, which permits you to build banshees twice as fast. Needless to say... this is kind of ridiculously good in a timed game with the firewall slowly marching onward (not that anyone should have any real issues with the firewall).

[Enixon]

For JRPGs specifically - and mostly FF - the 9999 number limit. It makes the mechanics nearing the end of the game increasingly less interesting.

The second is related to FF as well as it's particularly found in old JRPGs, but poorly translated or just plain uncommunicative games where the next objective to moving the game along is opaque to say the least. Like where you have to talk with some specific NPCs in the world, in a specific order, with a specific item. It's one thing to have objectives be something the player has to puzzle out, and another to maybe give a vague sentence suggesting what you ought to do that got muddled even more through the localization.

One recent-ish example I went through was in Pokemon Red. To get through a checkpoint and continue the game you need to pass a guard blocking it, who, if prompted, will say he's thirsty. Which might be a pretty clear clue if, for example, there was a specific place to buy beverages in the game world or you could win something beverage-related at an arranged battle somewhere... something like that. However, you get bottled water, lemonade, and soda as regular items throughout the game to give to Pokemon that you can buy from a dozen vending machines. The game could've done something to specify which drink the guard wanted so you got the clue, but the only indication that the beverages in your inventory don't work is that you cannot pass. Of course, what it comes down to is you need a specific key item, tea, to pass through.

Usually these are more along the lines of "you need to visit every village/town/city on the map and talk to every available NPC and hope maybe something will happen" kinds of flags though.

Ironically, in the original game boy versions of Red, Blue, and Yellow, you actually DID just give the guard either a Fresh Water, Soda Pop, or Lemonade, they changed it to be that Tea key item in the remakes.

[Kitten Champion]

Ironically, in the original game boy versions of Red, Blue, and Yellow, you actually DID just give the guard either a Fresh Water, Soda Pop, or Lemonade, they changed it to be that Tea key item in the remakes.

Yeah, someone mentioned that before. I just assumed it was a direct copy of the original, as it's the same NES-era Dragon Quest kind of game design.

I've never played original Red/Blue. I was given a copy of Pokemon Blue to play - this was back when I was designing a campaign for a Pokemon TTRPG and wanted to play the games in order to know what I was doing - but the cartridge malfunctioned. Same thing happened with the Gold I was given, but that seemed to be an issue of the internal battery.

[Crow]

You gain health, more mana, more stamina, damage, walking/running speed, dodge chance, more health per level, more stamina per level, better magic resistance... And crit chance/Speechcraft bonus, I guess. Your enemies don't advance with you, except cliffracers and slaughterfish who go up to level... 50?

Levelling up is purely beneficial, even if you don't get the "right" stat boost spread. Why would you not?

All those are governed by attributes and skills, and there are plenty of other ways to pump attributes, just through playing, without resorting to exploits or grinding. You miss out on an attribute dependent boost (small) boost to hp, mana, and stamina per level; but you won't miss them at all. You get stronger and the levelled spawns you face don't. It's the easiest way to get through the game. Just try it and see.