this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
167 points (94.7% liked)
Games
32647 readers
1484 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Knockdowns/stuns/silences/freezes on the player, and immunities that enemies have, are bad game design because they all have the same issue: they remove player choice.
The issue with knockdowns/stuns/freezes is that they remove the player's ability to do anything, at least how they work in most games. They make you take a timeout, essentially, and that's very unfun for the player. Essentially, it's removing your choice of what to do in the moment. You can't react, you can't flee, you can't fight, you just get to sit and wait or maybe press a button repeatedly just to wait a bit less. It is terrible game design that is wholly uninteresting, and it needs to be telegraphed nearly as hard as an instant-death move to be anything other than completely bad.
Silences do much the same thing in that they limit the player's ability to react and use their cool tools you just gave them. It's like handing a lumberjack a chainsaw and then saying "cool, now don't use it". It's not as bad as a stun, but it's pretty close.
Immunities for enemies are similar in that they limit player choice. You wanted to use cool X thing? Too bad, you literally can't win with that method. Resistances are fine (within reason, doing 1 damage is no different from 0 damage in a lot of games) because they allow a sufficiently-skilled player to still use a method they like (ideally), but immunities do nothing but kill build variety.
Eh, I think it's fine for fights to have certain requirements to succeed. Many things in games are basically a puzzle, and figuring out the puzzle is the purpose of playing.
I do agree to a point about the stun thing. I wouldn't say it has zero place in games, but it does general just become a feel-bad moment, leaving the player feeling helpless. That said, I'm not sure what exactly would need to be done to make it appropriate.
There's a difference between offering choices, and taking them away. All the things I mentioned take away choices, choices you would've had before. A game can have rules and limits, but when those rules and limits change you have to be very careful, especially when they're narrowing down and removing choice.
I totally agree with the immunities thing. It's a common issue in RPGs. Eg, games will have countless status effects but none of them work on tougher enemies, making them basically useless. I think a lot of more modern games have understood this issue and tried to fix it.
Eg, for all it's flaws, FFXIII did status effects really great. Poison is actually very potent and a legitimate way to kill even the toughest bosses. Similarly, the death spell was useless in a lot of older games (where it was just a chance of instant death), but was extremely useful in FFXIII because it just straight up dealt heavy damage with a chance of instant death. Spamming it was a valid strategy for a lot of moderately difficult enemies that would otherwise be annoying to whittle down.
God, bosses that have i-frames drive me up the wall in any game