New concepts you wish games had.

Sep 25, 2020
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... i.e. some little quality of life improvements in games that you wish existed but no one has seemingly thought of before.

1) Overflow health storage:
tl;dr: Nobody likes wasting health kits.
You know how, say, in Doom 2, medikits are worth 25 health, but if you have somewhere between 76 and 99 health you basically waste some health points from that medikit? I can see two alternatives here:
  1. Just have the game not pick up the medikit at all unless you can use all of it. However, this gets complicated when you have an item that restores al of your health. What determines the cut-off point where you can pick it up? An arbitrary 75% or 50% of health lost?
  2. Whatever health you would've wasted actually goes above your health max, and then you can't pick up another health item until you go below your health max. For example, if I'm at 80 health and my cap is 100, and I pick up a medikit worth 25 health, my health would be 105. (80 health + 25 health = 105.) ... and then I can't pick up another medikit until I'm under 100 health.


2) Overflow money bank:
tl;dr: Nobody likes wasting money pickups when their money is capped either.
Similar to the health pickups, remember when you played Legend of Zelda and you were at 999 rupees and picked up a 200 rupee piece? You were so mad! So what I had in mind is some "karma" NPC somewhere that acts as a reverse bank or something. Basically, for every bit of cash you pick up after having reached your cap, it increases a hidden variable somewhere in the game file, and the next time you visit this karma NPC, they give you cash from that stash of invisible karma, assuming you aren't at your monetary cap. The only limit here is the size of that variable. (Is it an INT, is it a Double, etc. Hopefully it's a large capacity value.)

And of course you could have similar scenarios for ammo. Make it immersive in your game. Folks love immersion.

Anything you want to add?
 
Don't really like these ideas, they take away the player's responsibility to manage resources on his own, especially with a challenging shooter game. To auto manage such things is kinda contrary to the point of it being a challenging shooter.

What upsets me in a lot of games is lazy construction, and yes, I'm talking about things like adding trophies and achievements that not only have no reward or use in game, they are often ridiculously easy to get.

For instance in Titanfall 2, for collecting the Pilots Helmets, you only get achievements. They cannot be used for upgrades, or even buying so much as skins (not a big fan of skins though, unless they have a functional vs just visual purpose).
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
Health Kit Overflow - makes sense for small health kits. The bigger they get, the bigger the balance issue, though.

I've never played a game that maxxed out money - at least not at levels you would actually care about. I can't even remember any from back in the Apple ][+ days.

Something I've been unhappy about for a long time: "Press any key" after loading. WHY?? This isn't some arcade game that's going to play an "attract" demo after getting plugged in. However, No Man's Sky taught me that I wasn't thinking far enough out of the box. Why even go to that main menu?? Sure, the very first time you play you want to set option. If you crash, you might want to set them, too. But, if there's a save to continue with and I exited normally in the last session, just do the continue without even loading the main menu. On the off chance I actually want to do something on the main menu, I'll go back to it.
 
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I would very much like the option of doing a shorter tutorial, preferably one that can be started separately from the rest of the game. The tutorial of some games take way too long and it would be nice to just get a quick refresher when I get back to a game after not playing it for a while without having to go through the entire tutorial.
 

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