I haven’t played Tears of the Kingdom but that construction mechanic seems like the coolest and most engaging implementation of “crafting” ever.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2024
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It's so good. I've been playing it again and it is hard to stop sometimes.
When I learned that frozen meat had ice physics and I could glue a pile of the stuff to the bottom of a plank with a fan on it to make an all-terrain sled I knew it was the greatest mechanic ever added to a video game
Nintendo fans when their game is just gmod:
They knew more people would try to fly everywhere so they made the wing disappear after a minute or so... But then we figured out how to make a perfectly balanced single fan flier 😌
But... I like it when number go up!
Agreed. There's a reason there's an entire genre of mobile games doing exactly that
How about when the number goes up and has a real-time effect on the world you play in, showing you the fruit of your labour growing as you progress further and further?
I mean that sounds nice, but honestly I don't "progress" nearly as much as I "faff about" so stuff like XP lets me have the illusion of progress while I spend 30 hours roaming around the starting area looking for collectibles. I'm not sure what a real-time effect on that would look like.
XP-based progression isn't always padding. It definitely isn't hard to find examples where it is, but it's also a pretty good solution to a common problem: you want the game to present a hero's journey, where you start out weak and eventually become powerful, but you want a generic way to handle the players' progress.
It's really the same as the debate in TTRPGs like D&D, where the DM could either reward levels based on XP earned from killing monsters, or could forego that altogether and award levels at set points in the story. In a video game setting where you intend things to be really open ended / the player should have a lot of freedom about what tasks they do and in what order, it's hard to handcraft exactly what each player's adventure and progression should look like, so an XP system is a really simple way to generalize it for everyone.
It's only padding if it requires you to engage with a lot of content that you otherwise wouldn't want to do, before you can progress the story you're actually interested in. But that's not the fault of the system itself, it's in how the designers chose to use it.
Disagree. Progress is good. It's grinding when it becomes too much. A little salt on my chips is good, too much is inedible.
Too many people want games to just be the end and it's terrible. I gotta assume this is mostly coming from kids with a ruined attention span.
Really depends on the genre but especially AAA have definitely over done it. Personally I love terraria and forager and those games are grindy like that but it fits the game. As opposed to the loot/crafting system in Control, that game really didn't need it and would have been more enjoyable without it (tho I still really enjoyed the game due to the story and telekinesis combat)
Yeah, Terraria is a great example of a game where the grind is integral to the game. Needing to get 20 drops from a particular creature encourages you to explore the specific zone deeply enough to really enjoy it. There's no story to progress through, it's just exploration and grinding to get different materials.
Similarly for Minecraft. Is it "grinding" to mine diamonds at z-level 11, or is that the game?
JRPGs and MMOs are the ones who generally don't respect your time with their XP grind systems.
It's true but while no padding would be ideal, I'll take busywork padding over NES style "overwhelming difficulty spike" padding any day.
Yeah FUCK that shit, that's why I'm not into retro games at all. Oldest I'm going is Quake
Oh I play retrogames alright
But in emulation, with save states and rewind. And fuck any pretentious retrogamer that would call me a faker for that.
I'm sorry what's wrong with xp?
This meme has application versatility like Angry Hitler.