How do Devs Balance These? | Friction vs Fun in Gaming

[@PanicRolling]

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[@Jules_Diplopia]

I must remember to keep a save file before using that elevator. Yes in Honour Mode. I do keep savefiles! Yes we all have different likes and dislikes. One reason I love Larian is that they seem to have that balance correct. They have left so many options, so that if you want, you can fast travel. If you don't want to your team can walk. Same with all the options. And yes if it isn't fun, stop. Play something else.

[@Graysett]

Itsuno has the right point when he says that if a game has people preferring to fast travel constantly rather than walk and explore it then the world is uncompelling, but his response being "so let's make fast travel worse" instead of "let's fill the world with interesting things to see and do" was the wrong way to go about it. I like to play games slow and with minimal fast travel. I've done every shrine in BoTW 3 times, collected 700+ korok seeds without looking any up (except for where the mask to get the notification there's one nearby is at), did like 100 shrines and over half the lightroots in ToTK before I stopped (only because I decided to save my 100% run for the master mode that ended up never coming), started a new run of ToTK where I never get the paraglider at all (which actually makes the game WAY more interesting because now basic "how do I get there" traversal is a constant puzzle), I started my first playthrough of Skyrim in a decade last year and decided to do as little fast travel as possible, and literally right now I'm replaying full clearing ER (to set up the new DLC) on a new character and build while doing Torrentless (except for places where the only possible way to get to them is using him) and having a blast even though I've played through most of ER like 6 times now and just getting from place to place is like 3x as long. Hell, back when I played MMOs I'd usually spend more time running around the worlds exploring just to see what's around than questing or doing dungeons/raids. The reason I did it in all those games is simple. I liked the core gameplay, traversal itself was interesting, and it always felt like there was probably something worth finding if I went looking. If I'm fast traveling constantly then of course I'm not gonna see that interesting stuff, so I'm naturally incentivized to do it as little as possible. But DD2? Sick of exploring before I even reached Battahl. And ultimately it comes down to the fact that even though Itsuno explicitly knows that a world has to be interesting to explore for people to want to explore it instead of skipping over it with fast travel, DD2's world isn't full of interesting content. The story sucks. The sidequests top out at mid. The characters have as much depth as a piece of napkin. The "dungeons" aren't even worthy of the name, and most of the mini-dungeons are barely better. The enemy variety is incredibly repetitive and the encounter design is bland. Even the boss/miniboss variety is repetitive, in a game where the main hook is "look at all this cool stuff you can kill" I'm pretty sure I just killed the same 6 non-mooks for most of the game. And the loot? Complete dog. I never once found an item better than something I could buy in a shop I'd already been to. And when I did find items, most of the time I couldn't even use them because they're class locked, and even though I was rotating my vocation every time I maxed one out, every time I got to a vocation I'd already found items for I'd already have outclassed it with something I could easily afford at the shop. It's completely ridiculous. The only time looting felt good was in the post game where certain chests had copies of the top end gear I could buy from the shops (and you know what else helped? Ferrystones dropping like candy so I could actually go to the general areas of where I wanted to explore or back to town to drop stuff off at the drop of a hat), or when I stumbled on a golden beetle (which are kinda equivalent to Korok seeds, if every Korok was "oh hey there's Korok standing right over there") or token (and tokens only are as interesting as the last reward you're interested in getting). It's just a goddamn mess top to bottom. I could go on and on, but TL:DR, DD2 taught me a LOT about what I don't want to see in games I play. I'm really hoping updates + mods will put the game in a state where I'd be happy to replay it again because there is something I could love in there, but as is the literal handful of moments I really enjoyed myself across the 60+ hours I put into it trying to find the fun isn't leaving me hopeful. (And I'm pretty sure how I feel about DD2 is how a ton of people felt about DD1, which isn't a good sign.)

[@PanicRolling]

You make a lot of good points here. The loot situation is crazy to me, also...on top of the fact that the weight and stamina management systems are so tedious that you're almost punished for looting anything anyway. I modded away the stamina drain outside of combat, and the game instantly became better. Modding away the weight management system? Instantly makes the game better. And isn't it hilarious that the game became more fun and engaging for you when it started throwing Ferrystones at you? Same thing happened to me, and it was the moment I realized the travel systems in the game were bad. If removing a system from the game makes the game more fun to play, the system was bad.

[@Graysett]

@@PanicRolling I mostly agree man. There are definitely solid arguments for having stamina and weight limits, but the games in question really have to have been carefully designed around them intentionally to make them anything other than tedium. In my own personal perfect RPG I'd have stamina drain out of combat drain to 1 and then freeze there. That way you can sprint around out of combat as much as you want and you still have an actual risk of stumbling into a fight and being caught unaware and punished for being hasty/wasteful/whatever. Likewise I'd be totally fine with DD2's weight limits (or any other game's really) if the stuff you picked up while overweight just went straight to (town) storage instead of your inventory. Outside of that, the only place weight limits have is for active equipment so you can't just slap on every piece of armor with highest numbers at no opportunity cost, and if weight happens to also have an impact on stuff like weighing monsters down or moving around then great, makes sense, I'm down. But this whole "you picked up one too many berries, now you move like you're knee deep in tar" schtick has to go. Gradually decreasing speed tiers, I'm down, but that's it. As far as the fast travel situation goes I don't even mind ox carts breaking (I actually like the risk of them being attacked, I even used that possibility to make getting to some places faster than if the route had been completed) or the lack of ferrystones in the standard game (it was the portcrystals that got me). What pissed me off most was going to the elf village, thinking "there must be a portcrystal here, it's a town without a ox cart" and then looking it up only to see that yes, there is one, and it's only in the post game, so go screw yourself if you don't have a spare portcrystal. And the GALL this game has with its questlines to make you go back and forth from place to place, with no real alternate path to take getting there, and nothing new to see because it's the 3rd/6th time you've done this exact route, and no way of knowing whether or not you're gonna get sent right back so you should put a portcrystal down while you're already here, was absolutely maddening. I feel like every playtester who played these quests and brought it up must've been completely ignored.

[@Graysett]

Anyway in conclusion, I can't tell if DD2 is a terrible Good game or a fantastic Bad game, but it's definitely one of the two.

[@PanicRolling]

Yeh I don't really understand why the main quest hubs don't all have Portcrystals... This is a world where it is perfectly normal to throw a Ferrystone into the air and teleport across the continent...but NO ONE else put a Portcrystal in Bakbattahl? And even if the argument is that an Arisen is the only one that could (not sure if this is true or not...just Steelmanning the argument) there are other Arisen that we meet in the game. None of them placed one?

[@Graysett]

@@PanicRolling Who knows man. They probably just didn't think about the "why" of anything when it came to the story, the more I think about it the less sense it makes. How am I supposed to believe that there hasn't been a sovran of Vermund in like a century when there's all these other ex-arisen running around? At least a couple of them (seem to) look human, so do humans just live like 200+ years on average in this setting and no one says anything?

[@Linda-ro3yp]

Anyone else now has the line "there's a fraction too much friction" stuck in your head now? Just me?

[@PanicRolling]

🤣

[@borzak101]

Blizzard laid off the fun department when it came to D4.

[@PanicRolling]

That game was so disappointing. I wanted to love it so badly...but there just wasn't anything there to love. The friggin itemization of loot in D4 is an absolute joke. The memes like "+20% damage on a Cloudy Tuesday" are very accurate.

[@worldwatcher38]

Best friction… Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and learning the dance.

[@PanicRolling]

ting ting ting TING slash slash The best rhythm game I've played so far.

[@bernhardkruder4001]

In the last 2 Zeldas the strip all Items thing worked for me

[@PanicRolling]

When it's done properly, it really shows off the devs' talent. The Zelda devs also pulled off some witchcraft and managed to make those games waaaaay smaller than they should've been (talking about file size), so they have many talents.

[@benom4112]

I think you hit the nail on its head here, I'd hit a specific company harder. Between all the rage people have for games, I don't think we've been in a better time in gaming love (and hate :P ) .

[@PanicRolling]

Oh, absolutely. There are so many amazing games out there right now. That's why I advocate so strongly for people to stop playing games they aren't enjoying. There is almost always a better game that you either already own or can get for very cheap. I wasted way too much of my life doing chores in games that I wasn't enjoying. I just can't do it anymore.

[@Drucifer-1988]

Selfriction. Yup, I cosplay/base my characters based on Berserk and limit them to what their character would or should be able to do.. why, idk, but I have fun.

[@PanicRolling]

Hey, nothing at all wrong with that. Challenge runs and themed runs like this are a great way to add replayability to games, and I think players should always have options like that available to them.

[@longdeath8843]

I wonder what's causing this elevator bug. I have like 8 active playthroughs and I've never seen it. Is it PC exclusive maybe?

[@PanicRolling]

It might be, I'm not sure. I've only encountered it once, but it was on Honour Mode. I got lucky that only my Durge fell through.

[@longdeath8843]

@@PanicRolling could be something in the coding for honour mode. I don't play that mode.

[@worldwatcher38]

Here for the beer.

[@PanicRolling]

Does that fall under friction or fun?

[@th3b1rdbra1n3]

Meh...I love me some god mode. I have to pay bills, go to work, and be human in real life. If I can make my Dragonborn (Skyrim) an unkillable and unbeatable homeowner, I'm gonna 🤷🏽‍♂️