multipass!!! things which do other things.

[lechat]

so having just played wolfenstein and mad max I would like to get your thoughts on things which do other things or which are otherwise really other things.

Example. wolfenstein had a climbing mechanic which had you alternate button presses to scale a wall. Now call me crazy but a few years back we would have accomplished the same thing with a single button press and holding an analogue stick and a few years earlier it was a single button press and I still remember the days when you climbed ladders just by walking up to them and tilting the camera upwards (albeit with mixed results)

mad max seems to want to tack on extra busy work to every little piece of game play every hour or two. you start off just jumping in a hot air balloon, then you need to refuel it, then you need to cut the cables, then you need to winch it down, then you need to refuel the winch. seriously every single gameplay mechanic which is already tedious has to have five extra tedious steps added to it which add no extra challenge.

Is this the way gaming is heading? trying to give a sense of immersion by making you press an extra couple of buttons to do exactly the same thing you can do with one? I fail to see how this is any better than nintendo waggling or another subject close to my heart the forced expository slow walk where the exact same result can be achieved with zero player input.


while we are on the subject of things which do other things how bout assigning different actions to the same button in games. mad max has the ignite fuel button be the exact same button as refuel which you can imagine is not a good thing. To be fair it hasn't effected me much but trying to refuel a car and instead blowing it the fuck up seems to be a slight design flaw.
what is your worse dual button assignment so far in a game?

 

[Salsajoe]

Haven't played wolfenstein so I know nothing of the climbing mechanic, but if it is like the climbing in the second mission of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 I would kinda like it. It is better to have climbing as a bit of an obstacle (In MW2 you'd fall and die if you failed to climb it properly), having it be a part of the interactivity of the game. Otherwise it'd simply be press x to perform climbing cutscene. It all depends on what you climb too, if it were a ladder I'd be happy to just press a button to use said ladder and move up or down with my stick or w and s.

As far as Mad Max goes, haven't played it either but just seeing the hot air balloon sequence almost completely killed any desire I had to play it, then hearing about the tedious collecting of everything pushed it to complete disinterest.

I do find it a bit weird to ask that question "Is this the way gaming is heading?" as it is just two games out of hundreds or thousands games in a year or two. The gaming industry evolves constantly and the different genres won't necessarily develop towards a common mechanic.
Maybe the developers are thinking of new ways to do climbing and doing otherwise tedious stuff, I would sure as hell hope so. I don't like to do chores in my vidya.

 

[freaper]

Depends on the pacing or context, I guess. In Tomb Raider there are multiple scenes where Lara is perilously hanging from a rocky wall; making you do those QTE's there adds to the tension. If they're just making you do mundane things like you described it becomes a chore and artificially increases game time.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

Well to be fair, the older climbing mechanics of yesteryear were somewhat annoying. Take original Half-Life, where climbing ladders was a testament to perseverance, patience and not a bit amount of acrophobia. The slippery mechanics of movement didn't translate well into climbing and that meant an ill-timed movement left or right could make you fall off ladders to your death.
Climbing shouldn't be a chore, no but in some games I'd like for it to be somewhat contextual, like MW2's mention. It wasn't super-hard but it made you interact more than pressing x to climb.
Likewise over-complicating climbing mechanics is detracting to the experience. A good balance of button presses which make you feel like you're interacting beyond the game removing player agency without making it too much a chore seems the best course, IMHO.

 

[Evil Moo]

For me, it is all about mechanical consistency. If a game has some perfectly good movement controls I will be unhappy if I'm suddenly dropped into minigame mode where I have to press completely new buttons to accomplish the similar actions just to make some attempt at simulating the situation differently for some reason.

This is also something I dislike intensely about sticky cover systems. I have movement controls, I have a duck button, why do I need a separate button that latches me to a wall and restricts my control of the character?

As far as extra busy work goes, I don't think I'd mind it too much as long as it creates room for some mechanical depth. So less fetch quest style objectives (like cut the cables to progress) and more that there are objects in the world that you can interact in certain ways (i.e. cutting a cable has a certain effect, which you can use throughout a game to accomplish various things in various ways depending on what cables are attached to, which cables you cut, in which order you cut them etc.).