Essays 03 April 2020, 16:17

95% Chances of Success and I Missed?! Game Mechanics We Hate

Yes, we love games. But there are times when the only sensible reaction seems... throwing the keyboard out the window. Some of the mechanics have been under the players' skin, and today, we're exposing them all.

Force of entropy – weapon wear

Zelda is a truly wonderful game, one that makes you go "holy smokes!" pretty often.

And here's the deal with realism: we want it, but we don't want too much of it. Contrary to popular belief, realism in games is not a representation of reality, but a means to maintain the credibility of the convention. The oxygen bar is realistic insofar as we agree that lungs have limited capacity, and that reaching it results in losing consciousness, but it's completely unrealistic on the less superficial level – the time a regular person can spend underwater is usually very short, rather insufficient for exploring underwater caves.

We don't usually pay attention to most of these cases. But there are much more hardcore concepts in game design, and although they use the same principle, they're much more controversial. Take the weapon damage mechanic from Zelda: Breath of the Wild – players were actually afraid to use their favorite weapons, as they could turn into ash. Weapons were destroyed permanently (unlike in, say, Diablo), which, by the way, isn't terribly realistic...

And then, you cannot break your fists.

Things were similar – i.e. equally bad – in Dying Light. People who get attached to their weapons had to opt for a more open relationship. The creators probably wanted to promote improvisation, give off the feeling that we really need to improvise and use anything that comes to hands, even if it's a gas pipe – it's a matter of life and death. To tell you the truth, they managed. They did – at the price of our sanity, and our game controllers, thrown out the window.

Table of Contents

Force of entropy – weapon wear