/v/ - Video Games

>>16355537

>What are some old game mechanics you still see in modern games, despite the fact these mechanics only existed in the past due to programming limitations?

Game Overs. Needing input to progress. Gender binary.

>>16355537

Turn based games weren't because of hardware limitations(Ys is proof of that), but because they were emulating classic Dungeon Crawler games(Wizardry, Might and Magic, Ultima), which were based on Pen and Paper RPGs like Dungeon and Dragons, that were turn based.

Save button. Never trust autosaves

>title screens only existed due to programming limitations

Are you retarded?

>acquire item by touching it

I would be fucking furious if I had to press some button for each health/energy pickup in any Megaman game. It was quite annoying in Castlevania 64 to pick up any shit from the ground. The only exception I could accept is subweapons in most Castlevania games to prevent unexpected switching.

>>16355537

>acquire item by touching it

>programming limitation

Limitations had nothing to do with that decision - it was purely to improve the flow of gameplay you fucking retard.

>>16355601

>but still choose to sidescrollers and other 2.5d shit for some reason.

Probably because 3D modelling and animation is far more labour intensive than animating 2D sprites.

>>16355605

Good quality 2D is more costly than 3D, especially if you're doing pixel art for modern resolutions. There's a reason and Capcom and SNK use 3D instead of 2D now, and it's not just a stylistic choice.

>>16355601

>2.5d

A dimension is a dimension, you can't say it's only a half.

>>16355620

What's time then

>>16355551

White characters

>>16355551

>implying you can see game overs in a modern game

>>16355601

Not every game needs to have a fully explorable 3d environment, fag.

>>16355615

But does it have to look ugly? Trine looked pretty good.

loading

Not a mechanic per se but FUCKING PRE-RENDERED CUTSCENES. The only reason you'd need to interrupt the game with an FMV is if you need to present visuals aren't feasible to render on the target platform. Despite this, cutscenes in 10s era games that clearly didn't need pre-rendering (Metal Gear Rising: Revengance, Spec Ops: The Line, Deus Ex: Human Revolution…) still shipped cutscenes in shitty 720p30 Bink video that looks awful at modern resolutions.

>>16355670

Trine looks amateurish and garish

>acquire item by touching it

This is perfectly suited depending on the game, not just due to programming limitations. Why would you want to press a button to pick up things in a game like Quake?

>>16355678

There's still valid limitations and tradeoffs with that. For example there's no chance of an animation glitch in prerendered cutscenes. I do wish Bink would fuck off though

I like how this thread could have been:

>things we had in games we played years and years ago

>found them in more recent games to much of our surprise

>smile, with a sense of familiarity

Instead it turned out:

<everything is so fucking shit

<just kill me now please

<we will never play a good game again, boohoo

Pro-tip: if you can't find good games, you're in the wrong hobby. Try gardening or knitting.

>programming limitations

Every mechanic you see in 2D modern games could have been done in older games.

>>16356718

Tell OP not to start with a loaded and presumptuous question and then back it up with extremely retarded examples

>>16356718

Gardening is pay to win bullshit unless you're ready to grind for hours every fucking day

>>16356859

Its called not being a shit. Gardening is fuck easy 90% of the time.

>>16356864

What about the other 10%?

>>16355750

>4% is 2 out of 5

>4% is 2/5 of americans

>4% is 40% of americans

WHERE DID THIS CUCK GO TO SCHOOL

>>16356878

You live in South Africa and niggers skin you alive for 20 dollars.

>>16356718

>>>/reddit/

>>16356903

>You live in South Africa and niggers skin you alive for 20 dollars.

<10% chance

Fair price to pay for non-shit tomatos.

>>16356891

Math is a tool of the patriarchy to oppress minorities.

Even if xer math was wrong that isn't important as xe FELT it was right.

It was used to start a conversation, and that's a good thing.

>>16356922

Math was invented by Racist White people to make good jobs more difficult because they don't like it when Black folks get ahead.

>>16355601

3D graphics have always been an anathema to 2D mechanics. They fundamentally confuse and obscure collisions zones making it more difficult to design tight, demanding action and level design in 2.5D games. Keep the 3D in 3D games. 2D games deserve hand-drawn 2D graphics.

>>16355621

>half-time

Makes sense.

>>16357939

I think Tropical Freeze did a good job of easily identifying what was foreground and background. Sometimes models are more clear than sprite layers where I think I can jump on a darkly colored rock only to fall through and die. It has to do more with visual design and following a clear aesthetic than anything else. That said, I do usually prefer 2D to 3D, especially in 2.5D games where it feels so unnecessary. Compare modern Kirby, which play similarly to older titles with a flat, static camera, to Kirby 64 with what felt like true depth and a dynamic camera (Pokemon 5th Gen did similar things despite being isometric 2D).

>>16357939

>They fundamentally confused and obscure collision zones

Smash Brothers has this problem in spades. Characters can only move along a single 2D plane, but the hitboxes for their attacks and bodies exist in 3D space. As a result, you can miss with attacks that look like they should've hit.

OP could have picked something like lives. Lives exist as limited failstates where you can restart at the level's checkpoint with your high score, but force you to restart your game when you run out. Save files wound up making lives obsolete in the end. So devs just give you either infinite lives or just drop a shit ton of 1ups to make the game accessible in one playthrough.

>>16358235

Lives were more a carry over from arcade games, where they were used to determine how much you can play the game, before you need to insert another quarter.

>>16358251

>>16358235

Go to bed Edmund, limited retry systems are an integral mechanic for establishing risk-reward tradeoffs and developing good pacing.

>>16358256

>Edmund

I don't know who that faggot s, nor do I want to know

>the rest of all that bullshit

And yet games like Doom had excellent pacing without lives. Should all games that take more than an hour or two to complete, say 30 also have a limited lives system? At least admit, that arcade games, used them as an excuse to eat more quarters.

OK. Instead of me making passive aggressive remarks about OP's stupidity, I'll explain why OP's thread is shit even if he didn't give those retarded examples. Even genuinely antiquated mechanics like a password system can be given new life in games like SMT:SJ where it is used to summon demons with specific stats at the cost of maccan. Lives can be used as a compromise on an ironman mode of certain games. I remember an article that considered limited storage space as an outdated.The industry already considers entire genres to be obsolete and seeks to chase trends and modern expectations. I really don't give a shit what some armchair/shit dev thinks is an outdated mechanic.

>>16358262

>And yet games like Doom had excellent pacing without lives

He's the shit-eating indie faggot who makes trash like Super Meat Boy that first started this argument because the only games with lives he's apparently ever played are Super Mario Galaxy.

>And yet games like Doom had excellent pacing without lives.

Doom is many things, but well-paced has never really been one of them. Both the ability to restart levels infinitely and the ability to save and reload an infinite number of times meant that tension only ever built up near the end of a given level, assuming the player limited their saving behavior. Risk-reward mechanics in Doom typically work on only an isolated, localized level within levels where for instance it might bait players into grabbing that big weapon or soulsphere with the implied response that it would warp in a bunch of monsters somewhere once grabbed. Long-term cohesiveness from one level to another is largely missing from Doom and in fact most levels were designed to be beaten from a pistol start so the ability to carry your gear over from the previous level isn't all that big either.

I think I've probably conflated one argument for another here so let me clarify. Not only do lives limited retry mechanics support the development of risk-reward systems, but they also facilitate the design of good pacing by forcing the developer to think about long-term cohesiveness and consistently of challenge between areas. Lives are not in fact "some relic of unfair quarter-munching design", they were picked up and continued to be used in console games for decades because they work well. And if you knew anything about arcade history you would see that the trend in most early arcade games was in fact to allow players to rack up unlimited numbers of extra lives if they had the skills. The world records for a lot of these games feature the player getting up from the machine for a bathroom or food break because they're stacked up so many extra lives that they can afford to walk away for a bit. That's not quarter-munching design.

One last point. A case for quarter munching in relation to lives can really only be made for a very limited number of arcade games that do not allow the player to ever increase their extra life stock, such as Metal Slug or the Raiden Fighters series. Most arcade games feature some way to increase the number of retries on a single credit which is in fact the complete opposite of quarter munching.

>>16355537

>acquire item by touching it

>title screen

>menus

I refuse to believe you're that stupid. With that out of the way, two mechanics carried from older arcade games that somehow made their way to early console and PCs:

Score in Megaman (the first game) even though there's no highscore screen, no way to save it, they don't impact the gameplay (no reward such as lives up) and are all around pointless in that kind of game.

Lives in Wolfenstein-3D since you would still lose all your stuff after death while being returned to the begining of the level… plus lives didn't have any importance since there was a save feature…

>>16358254

The brainlet doubled-down with:

>i've already found out how bad my math is. you don't need to take this whole 'realistic' thing serious, i just kinda like using math sometimes

"Using math" and failing at it, just like he likes to write stuff sometimes, but fails to understand how letter capitalization works. I'm so glad those entitled retards are telling the rest of the world how they should run their lives.

>>16359334

You can always quit and restart from the beginning of the game when you die if you want to make it challenging (Doom only takes around five hours to beat). Why is an in-game life system necessary?

>>16358235

What about Mega Man? Losing a life sends you back to a checkpoint. Losing all your lives sends you back to the level select screen. Saving at least one extra life for a boss can help you essentially refill your health. At the same time, don't waste your ammo, because that doesn't come back when you die. And if you're just a shitter and can't beat the boss regardless, then fuck you. Go back to the level select screen and come back when you're not shit.

>And yet games like Doom had excellent pacing without lives.

No game that lets you save and reload whenever you want has excellent pacing, unless you actually get rewards for not doing that. Otherwise it relies on the player making their own rules, like not using the save feature to its full ability, in order to make any actual sense of pacing.

>>16360516

You might as well say the devs of Mario 64 intended for you do to the A Button Challenge. At that point the player is creating their own game. It's not what the devs delivered to them.

>>16355583

Pressing to pick up works very well in horror games though.

>>16361390

Horror isn't a real game genre. It's a story genre. You wouldn't call something a comedy game. It's still whatever gameplay genre it would normally be, but with a comedic tone. Does Ratchet & Clank stop being a shooter/platformer because it has comedy in it?

>>16359350

Yes, but the amount of time you need to practice to git gud enough to do that is so great that you've already invested enough quarters into the game for it to have been worth it. In fact, it's probably done deliberately so that the player feels he's got one over on the game creators by mastering the ability to get extra lives, when in fact mastering that skill cost him more time (and therefore quarters) that he otherwise would have spent playing the game if it didn't have that "challenge".

OP here. I should've explained my examples.

>acquire item by touching it

I meant the notion of touching an item rather than the character being animated to pick it up with its hands, and/or eat the item if it's food. Just touching the item seems like it's going inside the body like a sponge absorbs water.

>title screen

Title screen are a relic from arcade days, you should really just start at the first level - provided you have a manual that tells you how to play, and/or some way to configure the game while it's paused.

>menus

Menus, like in RPGs, aren't needed, not even item and save menus. You can manage everything realistically in a game. Say you have a sword; just press a button to unsheath it. Or say you want to save, go to Candy Kong's save booth. It just works.

>>16364881

The guy who gave the first reply here.

You are still a fucking retard.

>I meant the notion of touching an item rather than the character being animated to pick it up with its hands, and/or eat the item if it's food.

Not a mechanic and it slows down the game unnecessarily with stupid animations.

>you should really just start at the first level - provided you have a manual that tells you how to play, and/or some way to configure the game while it's paused.

Besides how plenty of games have different modes of play, you don't want to have load a the whole game only for the player to exit it start a new game.

>Menus, like in RPGs, aren't needed, not even item and save menus. You can manage everything realistically in a game. Say you have a sword; just press a button to unsheath it. Or say you want to save, go to Candy Kong's save booth. It just works.

Besides the retarded one-size-fits-all mentality, it is extremely contrived and adds almost nothing.

>>16364881

>Title screen are a relic from arcade days, you should really just start at the first level - provided you have a manual that tells you how to play, and/or some way to configure the game while it's paused.

Black & White did it this way, and it was fucking annoying, at least a minute of automatically loading the last autosave on contemporary hardware, and only after that can I open the menu to select a different savefile leading to another minute of loading. I don't want to see this kind of shit again.

The other guy is correct, you have brain problems.

Of all the games that have been destroyed by retards, RPGs have had it the worst by far. People want all the gameplay removed so they can drool over the same shit story that has been repeated LITERALLY (as in actually literally) hundreds of thousands of times. The only games left in this genre are an occasional eroge every half decade.

>>16355620

My nigga TJ """"""""Henry"""""""" Yoshi is in the house.

>>16361449

Horror is a story genre. Survival horror is a game genre.

>>16374045

>>16373833

>>16374206

Is this a coordinated series of false flag posts intended to be annoying for the purpose of making people hate torposters so everyone agrees banning torposting on /v/ is fine?

If so, it's working

>>16364881

You're one of those fags that thinks every game should strive for realism and "immersion", aren't you? Those things still exist because they're convenient, realism be damned.

>>16361877

That's nothing intrinsic to lives systems themselves though.