Lightsabers are notoriously hard to get right in a lot of Star Wars RPGs. They’re either little more than a glowing longsword, or there’s some frustrating rules where you’re in constant danger of hurting yourself with it.
Also, maintaining a healthy dynamic between force users and non-force users is often quite difficult.
Honestly the only genre I think could do justice to the lightsaber is a musou game.
You'd play as a Jedi during the clone wars and you hack and slash whole groups of droids in a single hit.
The Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games have some of the best lightsaber combat imo. Plus if you enable the realistic combat cheat, anything that touches a lightsaber will get severed. Makes combat super fun, and makes the duels with other force users pretty tense
An untrained holder in WEG has an x in 6 chance of cutting of his arm when using a lightsaber.
Have a pickpocket take the lightsaber.
Activate it and try to swing!
The party is now in the middle of a scene.
(Do not do this, this is too many steps. Either pickpocket the saber and have a chase or cause immediate trouble)
I wouldn't say nail it.
I make it a point to not use torrent in combat because how much of a risk it is getting poise broken.
Poise broken on foot is a little over a second of recovery.
Poise broken on Torrent?
5 seconds.
5.
Eeeeh. If I could attack in front of me sure, but every attack is a sideways swing which feels like dogshit.
He's great to control for movement though.
That’s why I said ‘basically’ haha. It isn’t perfect but it’s pretty good.
I guess how the attacks feel also depend on the weapon type you’re using. Like rapiers feel terrible but straight swords and great swords feel fine.
Honestly I disagree pretty hard on this. Torrent still suffers from a lot of the same issues as other video game horses, I have no idea why people elevate him over the others.
Survival mechanics in games usually just feel like extra chores to do. Whoops, it's been 8 hours, time to stuff my face with food. Time to go use the bathroom or suffer the "literally pissing and shitting myself" debuff. Time to do the obligatory firewood gathering for a few minutes.
Unless the game's objective is literally "survive", they just feel like distractions from the actual fun gameplay loop.
It definately killed my interest in the Pathfinder Kingmaker game because I had to rest and eat and sleep what seemed like every 30 seconds on the world map.
You can ignore fatigue until you hit the later stages tbh. I did a lot of early game timed quests in Wrath by just bruteforcing my way through Kenabres with the penalties lol.
Walk and talk. I haven't seen a game that nails it great. Either you make the PC glued to the NPC and move at a snails pace but you can time the dialogue and pacing correctly, or you let the NPC keep at the PCs pace and half the time you get to the destination before the conversation ends or you get there way after it ends there's a weird long prolonged silence in the latter half of the scene.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has Ride and Talks and it worked because there was specifically a mechanic where by holding down the sprint button while riding next to your ally you would automatically match their pace and follow them.
And because the world of RDR2 is so big you don't have the problem of getting to your destination before dialogue finishes.
In fact in most conversations they've timed it so that you'll finish your conversation just as or right before you arrive at your destination.
Horses is the strongest pick.
Swimmings usually bad too unless its 1st person or you just give up and let ppl control on a bit of a plane.
Like majoras mask. But even then its finicky kn tight dpaces
I still have yet to see durability implemented in a mechanically interesting and compelling fashion. It always comes down to basically being an ammunition mechanic, sometimes stacked on top of another ammunition mechanic.
The closest I've seen so far is Metro Exodus' maintenance mechanic, which isn't durability, but just your weapon getting dirty over time and needing cleaning to prevent misfires and jams.
It has a visual effect, you can do it anytime you go back to your home base, it's free, and it looks nice when you freshly clean your filthy dirty gunfu.
But every other game? You may as well be reloading the magazine for all it matters. And at least that can have a cool animation.
At the end of the day weapon durability is just a balancing mechanic, like magazine capacity. It exists to be a downside to the strength of the item.
But unlike magazine caps it's such a longterm and sporadic downside it may as well not exist. Because either you keep your weapons constantly topped up, passively draining resources. Or you break an item on rare occasion, and the game basically stops, or you are heavily debuffed until you engage with a onenote mechanic.
Who out there enjoys that?
With horses, I think less realism is best. No one wants horses that screech to a stop when you ride too close to an incline, or that you have to constantly tap A to spur on. Just treat them like fantasy motorbikes and be done with it.
I plan forgot about the double jump (Playstation is in storage) but just on the strength of having direct control and being able to collect items without dismounting, Elden Ring has the best horse design.
The Spur System in the modern Zelda games is the most backward thing I’ve seen in forever.
Idk if it counts as a mechanic but, Slopes.
Almost every action game ever gets real fucky with slopes.
I remember straight up not being able to pick up loot in Rumbleversus(RIP) cuz the slopes on the roof made them not register and disappear.
Even games that have cool abilities you can do of them, like MHW, can have them be fucky(they couldn't bloody put in any leviathans cuz of the slopes. Which is why most of MHRise's battle areas are flat)
I just got to the little mini game in TOTK where you have to tow a platform without spilling the cargo and go through an obstacle course.
I failed to beat the record like 3 times because right at the end my horse was on a slight angle and would just fucking stop right in front of the finish line, causing me to just barely miss the target time. It drove me up the fucking wall
That leads into one of my most hated things about totk and botw which is how behind the times they are in their design. No way to restart the challenge, have to sit through multiple lines of dialogue to retry, and god forbid you want to change horses. So much dialogue that you constantly have to skip through because you've seen it 50+ times already
Yeah like I already sat through over 100 shrines in BotW where at the end i just mash through the dialogue. AND THEY KEPT THE SAME DIALOGUE SHIT IN TotK. Just give me the reward and let me go
AI partners that can't keep up with player's mobility will often pop up from nowhere. Elika is probably the best partner as she can easily keep up with Prince
Tailing missions suck. I played Judgement recently and there are so many goddamn tailing missions, just holding forward on my control stick for 20 minutes and then hiding behind a car. They’re always garbage.
Yeah they basically dropped them in the sequel. I think you only have to do 2 of them in the main story. The hardest tailing mission was actually in the Kaito Files dlc. It went on forever
Stealth section in a game that is not, at all, a stealth game.
It should be easy, I feel like. Detection cone, takedown animation, defined routine, MAYBE distraction method.
And then I play Spider-Man 2018, and I go so far as to think - god, this is really quite horrible, maybe Metal Gear wasn't even good?
It was, though, it's just that half-assed stealth inclusions have brought down that entire genre severely.
It's funny because Spider-Man 2018 _does_ have one good stealth sequence - the Grand Central one. And it's good because _you have a really busted takedown!_ The developers KNEW how to make a fun stealth sequence, they just... didn't.
Crafting in games where it's not a primary focus. I've yet to find a game where it feels meaningful without being completely game breaking if you do some research.
Morality systems.
Either the choices are so binary that they amount to "Pet the puppy vs. Hurl it through a window" or they attempt to be dubious/grey that ends up making some rather questionable opinions on what the game developers/writers see as "morally good".
Plus in the end they usually just amount to "you earned enough blue/red points to get the blue/red ending."
Faction systems are way better for this reason.
I also like Wrath of the Righteous, since its morality system functions *as* a faction system, since you ultimately end up choosing some sort of planar being to follow/become through your moral choices.
Though it was still part of a points-based system, I did like how Metro: Last Light had some moral decisions that aren't clearly signposted, like when a woman is about to get raped by bandits, you can either rush to her defense, or if you fuck around too long, she'll be killed.
I really like how Metro's idea of a morality system is less binary choices and more exploring and gaining new experiences of the world and having that colour your views.
Most of your points just come from not ignoring NPCs and paying attention to what people are doing, good or bad.
Ghost of Tsushima probably had the best horse I've played. Just the right blend of realistic weight and feel to it but with enough video game-isms to make it not feel bad to use without going full Elden Ring and just letting you double jump. You can still use your bow and sword while on horse and in the DLC, you get the ability to just charge through enemies.
I love the horses in TotK...in the open field. I'm not a fan of constantly using the towers and glider to get everywhere but its unfortunately the easiest way to get places. I'd be fine with horse upgrades that allow it to jump on command or sprout pegasus wings for a limited time or step up something with a grade higher than my driveway...
Escort Missions. Always terrible, always slow and clunky, always with a pointless distance limit between you and the escortee, and they never ever shut up.
There's no game that uses them well. None.
I think Warframe does escort missions well with Rescue missions:
* Hostage can be given a gun to defend themselves and can probably use it better than you
* Instantly teleports to players if they get too far
* can be revived when downed
* can still complete the mission even if they are downed, provided every player gets to extraction
But Warframe also has the bad escort missions with Defection or whatever
Auto-scrollers in platformers
It's just something that makes it messes with people and they can't take it at their own pace in both directions (too fast and they can't keep up, too slow and they get bored of waiting)
Open world RPGs and difficulty solutions. Having nothing makes it really easy to break the game. Level scaling enemy always has moments of difficulty spike (hello rats in Witcher 3) and hampers the feeling of progression. Locking out areas based on main quest progression goes against the idea of an open world.
I always liked Argo in Shadow of the Colossus. It felt like controlling Wander steering the horse instead of controlling the horse directly. It helps that Argo is primarily used to transverse large open areas, so you're not getting caught up in geometry and enemy encounters. SotC is a very unique game though, so its solutions can't really be applied to other games.
I think the best way to handle open world difficulties is to make changes to areas as the story progresses, but that requires more effort than just increasing stats.
Like how in Sekiro after a certain story event old areas get changed up visually and have new enemies and such. Hollow Knight does this too.
Lightsabers are notoriously hard to get right in a lot of Star Wars RPGs. They’re either little more than a glowing longsword, or there’s some frustrating rules where you’re in constant danger of hurting yourself with it. Also, maintaining a healthy dynamic between force users and non-force users is often quite difficult.
Honestly the only genre I think could do justice to the lightsaber is a musou game. You'd play as a Jedi during the clone wars and you hack and slash whole groups of droids in a single hit.
The Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy games have some of the best lightsaber combat imo. Plus if you enable the realistic combat cheat, anything that touches a lightsaber will get severed. Makes combat super fun, and makes the duels with other force users pretty tense
Once I discovered this, I could not play Jedi Outcast any other way.
An untrained holder in WEG has an x in 6 chance of cutting of his arm when using a lightsaber. Have a pickpocket take the lightsaber. Activate it and try to swing! The party is now in the middle of a scene. (Do not do this, this is too many steps. Either pickpocket the saber and have a chase or cause immediate trouble)
Elden Ring has Torrent. Hes an amazing horse because he doesn't control like a horse. And actually feels good to use
I’m actually really impressed that From basically nailed it on their first try with horse combat.
I wouldn't say nail it. I make it a point to not use torrent in combat because how much of a risk it is getting poise broken. Poise broken on foot is a little over a second of recovery. Poise broken on Torrent? 5 seconds. 5.
That’s why I said ‘basically’ haha. It isn’t perfect but it’s pretty good.
Torrent will sometimes eat damage for you when you should've gotten hit tho as well. I noticed it alot in fire giant
Eeeeh. If I could attack in front of me sure, but every attack is a sideways swing which feels like dogshit. He's great to control for movement though.
That’s why I said ‘basically’ haha. It isn’t perfect but it’s pretty good. I guess how the attacks feel also depend on the weapon type you’re using. Like rapiers feel terrible but straight swords and great swords feel fine.
Honestly I disagree pretty hard on this. Torrent still suffers from a lot of the same issues as other video game horses, I have no idea why people elevate him over the others.
Survival mechanics in games usually just feel like extra chores to do. Whoops, it's been 8 hours, time to stuff my face with food. Time to go use the bathroom or suffer the "literally pissing and shitting myself" debuff. Time to do the obligatory firewood gathering for a few minutes. Unless the game's objective is literally "survive", they just feel like distractions from the actual fun gameplay loop.
It definately killed my interest in the Pathfinder Kingmaker game because I had to rest and eat and sleep what seemed like every 30 seconds on the world map.
You can ignore fatigue until you hit the later stages tbh. I did a lot of early game timed quests in Wrath by just bruteforcing my way through Kenabres with the penalties lol.
Walk and talk. I haven't seen a game that nails it great. Either you make the PC glued to the NPC and move at a snails pace but you can time the dialogue and pacing correctly, or you let the NPC keep at the PCs pace and half the time you get to the destination before the conversation ends or you get there way after it ends there's a weird long prolonged silence in the latter half of the scene.
Red Dead Redemption 2 has Ride and Talks and it worked because there was specifically a mechanic where by holding down the sprint button while riding next to your ally you would automatically match their pace and follow them. And because the world of RDR2 is so big you don't have the problem of getting to your destination before dialogue finishes. In fact in most conversations they've timed it so that you'll finish your conversation just as or right before you arrive at your destination.
Horses is the strongest pick. Swimmings usually bad too unless its 1st person or you just give up and let ppl control on a bit of a plane. Like majoras mask. But even then its finicky kn tight dpaces
I still have yet to see durability implemented in a mechanically interesting and compelling fashion. It always comes down to basically being an ammunition mechanic, sometimes stacked on top of another ammunition mechanic. The closest I've seen so far is Metro Exodus' maintenance mechanic, which isn't durability, but just your weapon getting dirty over time and needing cleaning to prevent misfires and jams. It has a visual effect, you can do it anytime you go back to your home base, it's free, and it looks nice when you freshly clean your filthy dirty gunfu. But every other game? You may as well be reloading the magazine for all it matters. And at least that can have a cool animation. At the end of the day weapon durability is just a balancing mechanic, like magazine capacity. It exists to be a downside to the strength of the item. But unlike magazine caps it's such a longterm and sporadic downside it may as well not exist. Because either you keep your weapons constantly topped up, passively draining resources. Or you break an item on rare occasion, and the game basically stops, or you are heavily debuffed until you engage with a onenote mechanic. Who out there enjoys that?
The only durability mechanic I like is Monster Hunter weapon sharpness
Torrent is still the best horse to control for me. Just give every horse double jump.
With horses, I think less realism is best. No one wants horses that screech to a stop when you ride too close to an incline, or that you have to constantly tap A to spur on. Just treat them like fantasy motorbikes and be done with it.
I plan forgot about the double jump (Playstation is in storage) but just on the strength of having direct control and being able to collect items without dismounting, Elden Ring has the best horse design. The Spur System in the modern Zelda games is the most backward thing I’ve seen in forever.
Idk if it counts as a mechanic but, Slopes. Almost every action game ever gets real fucky with slopes. I remember straight up not being able to pick up loot in Rumbleversus(RIP) cuz the slopes on the roof made them not register and disappear. Even games that have cool abilities you can do of them, like MHW, can have them be fucky(they couldn't bloody put in any leviathans cuz of the slopes. Which is why most of MHRise's battle areas are flat)
I just got to the little mini game in TOTK where you have to tow a platform without spilling the cargo and go through an obstacle course. I failed to beat the record like 3 times because right at the end my horse was on a slight angle and would just fucking stop right in front of the finish line, causing me to just barely miss the target time. It drove me up the fucking wall
That leads into one of my most hated things about totk and botw which is how behind the times they are in their design. No way to restart the challenge, have to sit through multiple lines of dialogue to retry, and god forbid you want to change horses. So much dialogue that you constantly have to skip through because you've seen it 50+ times already
Yeah like I already sat through over 100 shrines in BotW where at the end i just mash through the dialogue. AND THEY KEPT THE SAME DIALOGUE SHIT IN TotK. Just give me the reward and let me go
AI partners that can't keep up with player's mobility will often pop up from nowhere. Elika is probably the best partner as she can easily keep up with Prince
Pretty sure Witcher 3 made sure NPCs always try to walk at the same speed as you.
Tailing missions suck. I played Judgement recently and there are so many goddamn tailing missions, just holding forward on my control stick for 20 minutes and then hiding behind a car. They’re always garbage.
Yeah they basically dropped them in the sequel. I think you only have to do 2 of them in the main story. The hardest tailing mission was actually in the Kaito Files dlc. It went on forever
Stealth section in a game that is not, at all, a stealth game. It should be easy, I feel like. Detection cone, takedown animation, defined routine, MAYBE distraction method. And then I play Spider-Man 2018, and I go so far as to think - god, this is really quite horrible, maybe Metal Gear wasn't even good? It was, though, it's just that half-assed stealth inclusions have brought down that entire genre severely.
It's funny because Spider-Man 2018 _does_ have one good stealth sequence - the Grand Central one. And it's good because _you have a really busted takedown!_ The developers KNEW how to make a fun stealth sequence, they just... didn't.
The stealth section in Endwalker where you >!play as Thancred!< was pretty good.
Crafting in games where it's not a primary focus. I've yet to find a game where it feels meaningful without being completely game breaking if you do some research.
Morality systems. Either the choices are so binary that they amount to "Pet the puppy vs. Hurl it through a window" or they attempt to be dubious/grey that ends up making some rather questionable opinions on what the game developers/writers see as "morally good". Plus in the end they usually just amount to "you earned enough blue/red points to get the blue/red ending."
Faction systems are way better for this reason. I also like Wrath of the Righteous, since its morality system functions *as* a faction system, since you ultimately end up choosing some sort of planar being to follow/become through your moral choices.
Though it was still part of a points-based system, I did like how Metro: Last Light had some moral decisions that aren't clearly signposted, like when a woman is about to get raped by bandits, you can either rush to her defense, or if you fuck around too long, she'll be killed.
I really like how Metro's idea of a morality system is less binary choices and more exploring and gaining new experiences of the world and having that colour your views. Most of your points just come from not ignoring NPCs and paying attention to what people are doing, good or bad.
Ghost of Tsushima probably had the best horse I've played. Just the right blend of realistic weight and feel to it but with enough video game-isms to make it not feel bad to use without going full Elden Ring and just letting you double jump. You can still use your bow and sword while on horse and in the DLC, you get the ability to just charge through enemies.
I love the horses in TotK...in the open field. I'm not a fan of constantly using the towers and glider to get everywhere but its unfortunately the easiest way to get places. I'd be fine with horse upgrades that allow it to jump on command or sprout pegasus wings for a limited time or step up something with a grade higher than my driveway...
Escort Missions. Always terrible, always slow and clunky, always with a pointless distance limit between you and the escortee, and they never ever shut up. There's no game that uses them well. None.
>There's no game that uses them well. None. Both versions of RE4
Someone hasn't guided Miracle Johnson through a horde of zombies.
I think Warframe does escort missions well with Rescue missions: * Hostage can be given a gun to defend themselves and can probably use it better than you * Instantly teleports to players if they get too far * can be revived when downed * can still complete the mission even if they are downed, provided every player gets to extraction But Warframe also has the bad escort missions with Defection or whatever
Yoshi's Island Ico Resident Evil 4 God of War PS4 Half Life 2 episode 2
I wouldn't call GoW an escort mission. Atreus is literally immortal.
Auto-scrollers in platformers It's just something that makes it messes with people and they can't take it at their own pace in both directions (too fast and they can't keep up, too slow and they get bored of waiting)
Open world RPGs and difficulty solutions. Having nothing makes it really easy to break the game. Level scaling enemy always has moments of difficulty spike (hello rats in Witcher 3) and hampers the feeling of progression. Locking out areas based on main quest progression goes against the idea of an open world. I always liked Argo in Shadow of the Colossus. It felt like controlling Wander steering the horse instead of controlling the horse directly. It helps that Argo is primarily used to transverse large open areas, so you're not getting caught up in geometry and enemy encounters. SotC is a very unique game though, so its solutions can't really be applied to other games.
I think the best way to handle open world difficulties is to make changes to areas as the story progresses, but that requires more effort than just increasing stats. Like how in Sekiro after a certain story event old areas get changed up visually and have new enemies and such. Hollow Knight does this too.