I don't post on this forum much except about my game, but I just couldn't resist this thread. I don't play Call of Duty or any of those generic military shooters. There's just nothing interesting about them for me. I only play shooters with something interesting about them. Half Life has its amazing characters and story, Duke Nukem has, well, Duke.
Regenerative health: The only game I've played that has this was Mass Effect 2, and I didn't think it took away from the game at all.
Challenge: There is no such thing as "challenge" or "difficulty". There is only the amount of times you die before beating a level. Everyone has different preferences about this amount, so I say we need lots of difficulty settings. Easy/Normal/Hard just won't cut it for many games. Laughable/Very Easy/Easy/Normal/Hard/Very Hard/ Nightmare. That seems better to me.
Game length: I completely agree that games nowadays are too short. Splinter Cell Conviction, for example. I finished that game (on my first run) in literally 4 hours. Seriously, that's the amount of time it said on Steam. I forced myself to play it again just to get my money's worth (well, my father's money's worth anyway).
Modern gamers: I am solely a single player gamer, because every time I try to play a multiplayer game I become horrified at the juvenile insults people throw around at each other. I mean come on, games are supposed to be fun and friendly, not to make crude jokes about each other's mothers and the genitals of random animals.
Quote: "Stupid design decisions geared toward making the game more "challenging"
Time limits (SMB1), arbitrary player lives (Super Mario Galaxy), continue limits, respawn points that time out (Little Big Planet). This kind of crap make me not get into coming back to a game.
"
I agree completely. Challenge should come from the gameplay itself, not from arbitrary restrictions.
One thing I'm really sick of hearing about is "immersion". People throw this term around so much that it's really lost its meaning. As I see it, there are immersive games and arcadey games. Neither is better than the other, they merely offer different types of fun.
What I don't like is when the two are mixed.
It's frustrating when I'm playing an immersive game and really getting into it, but then all of a sudden something arcadey and immersion breaking happens. Like in Minecraft. The first few nights of the game are really fun and immersive, where survival is an actual challenge. But once you make a sword and a bow, the monsters cease to be a threat and it becomes an arcadey game. But Minecraft lacks the gameplay features of an arcadey game, it has the gameplay features of an immersive game. So it really becomes pointless once survival is no longer a challenge.
Likewise, it's annoying when I'm playing an arcadey game and the game tries to be immersive. Immersive things in an arcadey game are just tedious and only drag down the flow of the gameplay. A lot of people use the Oblivion/Fallout 3 mod that disables Fast Travel. Personally, I find that fast travel is an essential part of these games, because of how limited inventory space is. Imagine how tedious it would be to have to run back and forth from the dungeon you're exploring all the way to the nearest city, just because there isn't enough space in your inventory to carry all of the loot. Fast travel minimizes this tediousness, and disabling it for the sake of immersion can only hurt the gameplay.
Anyway, there's my little rant.
Hail to the king baby
I love Evil Dead.
