#a shitty video game trend (several actually because microtransactions) has gotten so popular with devs

[amplexadversary]

Here’s a take people are going to hate but I’m right: Hard timers in video games suck unless the game centers around PVP.

Rant incoming.

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In shit like TF2 or Overwatch the timer works because it’s not your main opponent. It’s a competition of which team can do thing most while preventing opponent from doing the thing. That’s great.

Fighting games? Yeah, it works because even in 1p mode the pc character is supposed to be a stand-in for another person, and you still face the challenge on (relatively) equal footing, since typically when the timer runs dry whomever has the most health left is given the win.

What’s not great is having a combat system in your real-time fighter with rpg elements where most of the actual rewards are locked behind an exceedingly strict timer. When you have your default “your party’s offense-enemy defense vs their offense-your defense,” there are a variety of ways to approach that. You can turtle. You can dodge. You can heal. You can overwhelm the enemy with Big PP Number before they can get their trousers back on.

But a hard timer that isn’t just meant to check for afk takes away all of those options and leaves you with nothing but Big PP damage, fuck your strategy. And when there’s only one viable way to go about it the game just isn’t fucking fun anymore. Someone obsessed with math figures out the *best strategy* (ugh) on day one and there. It’s over. Game’s solved. You copy the person who did the math on the internet or you don’t win.

Single-solution challenges like that are boring! If I wanted to see something that will only proceed with a certain input I’d watch a goddamn movie and take half the time! Or I’d play a different genre of video game, like a puzzle, or a virtual novel. Part of the appeal of an interactive medium like a video game is that the player has *input* and discovering one solution doesn’t take the element of challenge away because hey you can try to find a different solution than that one. Speedrunners, low level runs, powering through the game with the joke weapon are all things people find fun.

It just gets my goat that I could take most of the enemies in this game about 30 levels below what is suggested, using the resources the game gives me, and just taking more time. And when I do that, the game plays like Dark Souls, which is what I wanted anyway, except for all the parts where I run into a fucking timer, reducing the game to “oops, time for a NUMBER CHECK!!!!!!! If you don’t play the game a specific way then SORRY you don’t get to proceed!!!”.

Like, if it only happened occasionally I wouldn’t be so pissed but there’s so many of these bits in this damn game and the frequency gets on my nerves.

If you want to push a time limit on your player, go with accumulating damage or some other kind of “soft” time limit so your players will feel creative getting around it with shields, or healing, or managing the magic fairy dust that keeps you from getting smoke in your lungs.

Fucking hell I should just go back to better soulsbourne clones. Or Warframe. You don’t *technically* have to grind in Warframe if you’re fine doing single-player with most of your bots.