Dying Light 2 lets you pause at any time, at least when you arent playing co-op. But Dark Souls and Elden Ring dont let you pause at any time, which they should.
I split the things in two categories, hard things like no pause, no savegames, and soft things like no HUD, no reticule, game controller required, autosave only.
What are your thoughts? Right? Wrong? Things to add to the list?
Do game developers get to tell us how to play
Talking exclusively about action games here. 4x and strategy games generally include loads of options to customize games settings and parameters.
1. As far as no pause goes I fully support anyones right to pause a game at any time. Annoying when you can't.
2. Changing the HUD, no reason it shouldnt be totally customizable. Maybe a game choosing to have no minimap is a design choice I could understand as that can change the way a player explores and experiences the world.
3. Having a checkpoint system is more complicated. I actually prefer a check point system in a lot of more linear action games because it forces the player to engage with a games systems and learn them to get past an encounter. If you're not interested in learning how to beat an encounter with the tools given by devs, and just want to save scum your way through and wing it then it doesnt sound to me like you are having fun playing the actual game.
Sometimes check points aren't done well, there has to be a good balance of challenge and frustration. That could be an options slider as well, do you want frequent auto save or less often up to 'Iron man' on each level? Most of the time it would be good if a boss battle has 3 phases that the game saved after each was beaten, for example.
4. Something to add to the list.
@Zloth s post about Outer Wilds set me thinking about games that include options in their design instead of as a menu slider and brought me back here.
Its the difficulty in (Souls) games again. Since that thread I've watched/read/listened to a lot of different opinions and there's some things that didnt get mentioned. Summons were touched on previously in the old thread but I think its worth expanding on a bit.
Elden Ring doesn't have a difficulty slider. The game is the game. BUT.
-You can choose to use a spirit ash summon which gives you an AI companion. Some of these are very powerful and other just provide a distraction to draw agro.
-You can summon another person to help with co-op.
-You can explore more areas/grind previous ones to gain levels and weapons then come back stronger later.
-You can figure out elemental/technical weaknesses and use a specific character build to make a boss trivial by playing to its weaknesses.
-There are sometimes items in game that make a particular boss or enemy weak that you can find by exploring and reading lore entries.
-You can also just keep banging your head against it until you get gud and win.
All of the above are ways of managing the difficulty of the game included by the devs. Apart from spirit summons you can do all of those across the Fromsoft Souls games.
The point being that not all games need a difficulty slider if the developer can come up with ways to mitigate difficulty within game mechanics. Makes things much more interesting IMO than just making you take/receive less damage and altering the number of mobs. Takes a lot more work on the devs part, but it makes the player engage with the game a lot more and is much more rewarding to the player in the end.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram