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What are your favorite and least favorite gaming tropes?
Exploding barrels, invisible walls, cutscene deaths -- gaming has a whole host of tropes that range from loveable to hateable. Which are the ones you most like, and which are the ones you most dislike? Give examples of games that demonstrate these, and talk about how and why you feel the way that you do about them.
For those that you like, what games have really elevated their use? For those that you dislike, which games are the most egregious offenders? Also, have any games played with the tropes and subverted them in interesting or meaningful ways?
For the purposes of the question, these don't have to be tropes that only exist in gaming -- it's fine if there's crossover with other media.
Also, please mark any spoilers!
The thing that irks me the most about open-world games, especially fantasy titles, is the sheer number of enemies scattered across every corner of the map. The worst thing you can do to your game's already-bad combat system is to require the player to utilize it so often that they no longer enjoy it in any capacity (looking at you, Skyrim). I shouldn't have to battle a pack of wolves, sixteen trolls, three dragons, and two thousand bandits on my way from point A to point B on the map. Wild animals are not this common in real life, even in the middle of nowhere, and most of them try to avoid people anyway. Implementing so many unnecessary random encounters devalues the experience that the player has in each one.
I think that this is particularly irritating in The Witcher 3. I understand the whole "monsters are a big problem in this world" theme that they're trying to convey, and it's an important one for the series, but the overabundance of enemies makes traveling a chore instead of something to have fun with, whether it be roleplaying or just appreciating the environment. I should be afraid to encounter enemies, or at least apprehensive of it, even as a great warrior. If they're so common that my reaction is "ugh, another drowner," they no longer contribute to the game's horror themes and are simply fluff.
Yeah, games rely too much on combat to hold player interest. It was really egregious in the Bioshock games where it's mostly not even challenging or satisfying outside the boss fights. It's just a constant bloodbath that doesn't add much and detracts from the story itself. There is even a part where your daughter criticizes how much wanton killing you're doing, and then you immediately go on another killing spree.
The same thing kind of happens in the Uncharted games. They're supposed to be kind of evocative of 90s action movies, but your body count at the end of each level is INSANE. If you stop and think about it even for a second it starts to become kind of implausible that one person can kill this many people and still come out of it making wisecracks.
I'd rather see fewer combat encounters, but make them really challenging. And challenging mechanically, not just having damage sponges soak up everything you dish out. The Souls series actually does a decent job of that with the combat. It would also be nice if you get through fights by thinking through it and evening the odds instead of just blasting your way through situations where you're outnumbered. In games where you're not technically superhuman it starts to seem silly when you're mowing down people who technically have the same capabilities you do.
FWIW, my brain immediately went to Shadow of the Colossus. For anyone who doesn't know, the game consists entirely of sixteen boss fights and each fight is mostly pretty unique. You travel to those bosses and along the way, there are absolutely no other monsters to fight and not really any "puzzles" or "dungeons" in the traditional game sense either. You spend your between-boss time navigating, exploring, observing, and sometimes just goofing off (trying to grab birds or climb up tall stuff or whatever). The traveling and discovery is kind of its own reward, especially because you are told very little about the world the game takes place in. It is a masterpiece IMO, easily one of my top 10 games of all time.
I can see the case for some repetition or for "trash mobs" in some genres, but I agree they're often overused in open-world games especially. Wisely used they can allow a player to practice mechanics, discourage cheesing/hunkering down, or make the player think on a more macro level than per-encounter (e.g., managing their own resources in survival games or managing the overall space in stuff like twinstick shooters and hack 'n' slash games). And I don't get it personally, but I guess some people love "the grind".
This is probably part of why they do this. It's both easy for the developers to do AND it allows for better skinner box mechanics since it lets them give you lots of small successes to give you that steady stream of dopamine hits along the way.
Breath of the Wild kind of hit a good balance. There are plenty of trash mobs, but you only really fight them if you feel like it. The game is set up to where you basically don't have to do anything that's not fun for you.
I agree that BotW does it well! There's always space to avoid enemies, generally you won't get surprised by them, and many camps provide conveniently placed dry grass or boulders or metal boxes to use if you want to approach the encounter in a fun way.
I think the weapon degradation system contributes too, to encourage players to avoid or approach encounters more strategically. If you just run up to Bokoblins and start smacking them, what you get in resources might not be worth the wear and tear on your weapons.
The lower combat ratio is one of the reasons why I loved the latter Ubisoft Prince of Persia games. When enemies show up it seems like a fresh new thing, often because the scenery is so different each time. And likewise, it's the reason why I don't think the Assassin's Creed games are good as successors.
Embracing the respawn mechanic into the narrative really opened up a lot of space for that series to tell a story smoothly. They could make the enemies rare and difficult because dying and coming back is an expected part of how you go through the game rather than an interruption of your flow.
Prince of Persia 2008? That's still my favourite of the series by far because of these changes. It was super rewarding to get a "run" going in that game instead of a linear A to B adventure with mediocre combat strewn throughout.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy the series but PoP2008 got a totally unfair reputation for what I think is the best of the lot.
PoP 2008 was good too, but I was actually thinking the Sands of Time ones. You respawn by rewinding the clock, so it ended up being a smoother combat system that could make you do a lot of combat without necessarily killing a lot of people.
PoP2008 was way more platformer focused and less on combat from what I remember. And the whole tone of it seemed more to remind me more of games like Shadow of the Colossus. I kind of missed the Aladdin type palace intrigue angle, but it was still a really engaging game. I also liked them turning the conventional escort mission on its heads. Now the player character is the annoying baggage constantly in need of saving!
Ah, I thought you were referring to the combat heaviness that was Warrior Within, and then the more reasonable amount of Two Thrones, before PoP2008 did away with almost all the combat except for maybe a dozen or so occasions.
And yeah, PoP2008 was almost entirely platformer but kind of in the way of Mirror's Edge or even Tony Hawk Pro Skater games where it's about getting into a certain flow and going through a run in a certain way to collect all the things in a smooth motion. It's a very easy game but super pretty and very relaxing. And, yes, flipping the relationship between the Prince and Elika on its head combined with good dialogue writing and voice acting really elevated it for me, on top of the drop-dead gorgeous art style.
Though, weirdly, one of the few games where the DLC makes it worse.
I didn't even realize there was a DLC. Doesn't the original ending have you basically destroying the world to save the girl?
Yeah! The Epilogue DLC just takes it in a strange direction that I don't think many people liked or appreciated. To me it read like it had to ignore the characters' growth and bonding to force some conflict, and then ends very unsatisfyingly. The nature of the base game's ending was much stronger, especially when you take that game's story a finite one with no followup.
Though not to say I wouldn't have appreciated a proper sequel. Forgotten Sands was just so... blah to me.
This is my main gripe with Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. So much beautiful world, and the only thing in it is eight zillion interchangeable military camps. Maybe they're red team, maybe they're blue, maybe they're bandits, it doesn't matter to you.
Oh yeah, I totally get that. And I think the Witcher games are probably the worst offense - if they actually had that many monsters roaming around, everyone in the entire world would be dead.
I finally picked Far Cry after their fifth title came out because they really sold me on the setting and the story. But when I started playing the game it didn't take too long to discover that fights literally come looking for you everywhere, and that wasn't really what I was expecting; I thought I would be working on clearing a big map of enemies, but those enemies don't just go away because you won a battle. You could have completely cleared out all of their bases and they would still be out prowling in the middle of nowhere.
That being said, I did at least expect this game to be chocked full of combat, so I wasn't really too upset at this particular example. I actually enjoyed the whole experience after I got used to it.
I loved exploring Just Cause 2. It had such an amazing world.
Unfortunately, it also has a bunch of military bases with people to kill and structures to blow up in each one. The explorer and completionist in me loved navigating the island, uncovering new bases, and going from place to place to check things off the list. But I hated the actual combat part. It was old, stale, and formulaic. I found myself wanting a Just Cause 2 for explorers, where instead of killing off the nation's military one base at a time I was finding old ruins or interesting landmarks or cave entrances. I wanted to be able to venture into a new area without generating "heat" from coming too close to enemies who then hunt me down, interrupting my adventuring in the wilds with their scattered shots, triggering a constant need for me to fight or hide that's completely at odds with what I want to do in the game.
Hm. This might be something that differs from person to person. I really like Skyrim, and if I were to compile a list of things that could be improved, I don't think frequency of encounters or combat would be one of them.
That said, for a long while, there was a glitch in the game involving compounding potion effects that would let you craft unfairly powerful equipment. If you don't like the combat, you could avail of this glitch so that you dispatch opponents very very quickly, and nothing can hurt you, so you could just breeze past adversaries to advance the storyline.
Of course, my comment is my opinion and shouldn't be taken as The Truth (TM). Skyrim as a whole is one of my favorite games; I actually help run one of the wikis for it, and it's not impossible that my overplaying of the game for that purpose has contributed to my irritation with the combat.
I play story-driven RPGs for their narrative elements in the context of a game, so mechanics that become tedious snap me out of that relationship. But the issue is not that I just want the story (there are plenty of movies with better narratives out there that I could watch instead), it's more that I look for a balance between these two. I appreciate well-designed gameplay elements as much as anyone else; I very much enjoy being able to make choices and go at my own pace (I have no elitist qualms about playing on easy mode when I need to). But if I'm going into a game with the goal of feeling immersed in its world, an overpowered combat system would be just as jarring as an underpowered one. i.e., either way, the narrative and gameplay aren't working together to create an emergent experience so much as they're independent systems conflicting with each other within the same framework. Maybe I'm just too picky, haha. :P
Boss fights that you aren't supposed to win so you can trigger the cutscene and move forward with the story. There has to be some reward involved to make this a more engaging event. However, I don't think I have played a game in awhile that uses this trope. Anecdotally, I haven't encountered it since PS2 and early 360/PS3 days.
This has definitely happened to me at least a few times in The Witcher 3, which I've been very slowly going through for about a year now. I don't really mind if it's a fistfight that I'm doing for sport, but if I start fighting something for real, I should be able to kill it then and there. What I find even more annoying is when there isn't even a narrative reason for the cutscene, the enemy just runs away and I have to go track it down and kill it somewhere else. There's no purpose, and it's a waste of time.
Yeah. One hit kill where their head pops off, but a cutscene saves their life. Total BS.
It took my dad a month to beat the first Splinter Cell because of something like this. Not so much an unbeatable fight, but a too-subtle hint, and any actual option meaning death.
I think it can work as a narrative device, but it's got to give you the death quick and move you on quickly. It can't be something where you lose half your health and have time to get mad and restart the fight.
There's one game that I think does this extremely well.
Chrono Cross
There is only one 'unwinnable' fight in Chrono Cross, which happens after you swap bodies with the game's Big Bad, Lynx. You have a one-on-three battle with your party consisting of "yourself", the main female protagonist and platonic love interest Kid, and one more side character of your choice.
That being said, this game features a New Game + mode which lets you get strong enough to actually win this battle. If you do, Kid will get up off the ground, slowly shuffle towards your character, and stab you; you don't even defend yourself because *how could you?* It carries a lot of emotional weight, especially since Kid has a lot of emotional baggage left behind by the Big Bad.
Masato Kato really should go back to directing video games again, because it seems that there is nobody else who can make his work shine.
Ever considered that in many Action RPGs you can't work through a problem or a conflict the same way you can with combat? If you don't skill Perception or Persuasion or Lockpicking, you're perfectly barred from many a secret that would otherwise lay bare in front of the player, with highlighting and great rewards and everything.
You can't be thorough, you can't find an argument that would change someone's mind by thinking it through on a meta level (the same way you do with tactical real-time combat), you can't bash or disassemble the container in a game where you usually battle armies or deities. You have to have the skill for that.
One of the worse gaming tropes is that gaming is combat.
Yeah, combat is a tough nut to crack in games because it's often used as the way of creating moment-to-moment action for the player. So-called "walking simulators" were widely derided when they first came out because they lacked this. People rightfully pointed out that you didn't "do" a whole lot in the game in terms of player agency, but others pointed out that filling those moments with meaningless interactions or combat would inhibit the story or experience that was trying to be conveyed. People are much more open to those types of experiences now, but it wasn't too long ago that Dear Esther and Gone Home were public enemies in gaming, with arguments against them going so far as to refuse to call them "games".
On the flipside, there's also plenty of criticism of games where combat does take center stage. Killing is easy to abstract away because it's so commonplace and such a convention of the medium, but when you negate that expectation for a moment, it's easy to see how someone like Nathan Drake or even the beloved, cartoony, family-friendly Mario amount to mass-murderers in their universes.
When I was growing up, my parents took a hard-line stance against violent video games. To them, the violence that was experienced on the screen was representative of real-world violence, so they were disgusted by Mortal Kombat and its gratuitous, bloody brawls. As a kid, I thought they were completely out of touch. Couldn't they see that it didn't mean anything? That the violence was just a means to an end? Mortal Kombat was more about the score than the spectacle for me -- more about winning than killing.
As I've gotten older, I understand more where they were coming from. I still find it easy to see videogame violence as an abstraction -- an easy way to engage the player in moments that are tense, rewarding, and satisfying to play. But I also find myself seeing it from the other side: just how many people has Lara killed in Tomb Raider? Is that... well... okay? How should I feel about her character, knowing what she -- and by proxy, I -- have done?
It isn't as much for me that combat in games could somehow represent any real representation of harming others. They're games for a reason: they present an escapist experience, much like books and films and comic books and actual child's play do, just in a different package. Videogames engage you differently, but their goal is the same: to let you escape to a fictional world where you can do and experience things you never could in reality.
(It's why I think killing in a videogame is okay on its own. We're all different, with different needs, desires, and peculiarities. Being able to kill someone with no repercussions in a videogame – and, more importantly, consider whether it's the right thing to do and why – is an exploratory experience, and perhaps a relaxing one if your real life is difficult.)
What I'm not content with is how much gaming is combat alone or mostly. The Lara Croft games could easily be engaging with historical outlook, or with persevering in a difficult situation. (The first game in the reboot series kinda did that, but it was still mostly about fighting your way through dozens of faceless mooks.) GTA games could explore what life of crime is about, in ways that portray criminal activities with fair amount of realism. (Not that they ever would be: it's not their core goal, it's not their purpose. I'm saying they could be if devs try to make it so: it has the foundation to enable it.)
I've been gushing over Disco Elysium a whole lot, for a lot of different reasons, on Tildes and outside it. This less-combat-more-fiction mode is what they explored well, too. There are, at best, three or four confrontations in the game that could turn violent. Most of it is talking to people, piecing plots together with clues, and taking part in others' machinations. It's a very humanizing, personal experience that takes your breath away.
It's easier to design a game where killing other creatures is rewarded with experience points, cash, or loot. It's a straightforward, polished mechanic that you can put a spin on to make it interesting. Sometimes, it makes sense. I just want the rest of the mechanics to be developed on par with the combat stuff.
An analogy I like to make is: Violence in video games is like Olympic fencing. It's a simulation, and nobody really gets hurt. That said, I do think there's a spectrum here, and not all real life depictions and activities in video games are okay. Like, I don't think it's okay to create or play games where the core gamplay in the game involves you(r character) enacting stuff like rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment for the sake of gratification or in-game character advancement (money, XP).
As a fencer myself, I would like to remark that people actually do get hurt in the sport (a lot). :P
Jokes aside, I think that this is a good way to think about mechanics; just as a lunge to your opponent's chest in a fencing bout is really just a way to score a touch, not to kill them, doing the same through the hands of an RPG character is less about the literal act and more about the broader context that it's in. Even in a game like Call of Duty, you inhabit the character of a soldier, not your own person, so your actions are only comprehensible through the lens of someone in that occupation. The standards of morality genuinely do change between a regular person and someone whose job it is to ostensibly "defend their country," and this isn't any different in an artistic representation. So I actually think that it hampers the potential creative meaning of a game to reduce or omit realistic or thematically useful aspects of violence, etc. solely because they "aren't morally acceptable." Of course they aren't; the game should show that.
When this becomes problematic, I think, is when the narrative or structure of the gameplay justify violent or cruel behavior when they should be using it as commentary against such acts, implicitly or explicitly. To connect this to my earlier comment about what I think are excessive random encounters with enemies in open-world RPGs, while The Witcher 3 (for example) introduces a reasonable system of morality for your character (a monster-hunter, not a murderer, doesn't kill sentient monsters, etc.), it largely ignores it by placing innumerable packs of bandits and pirates whom you're clearly supposed to kill in locales across the map, with no real dialogue options to deal with most of them in an alternative way. It's possible to just run past them, but this forfeits the treasure they have and isn't even always possible. My favorite morality system in any game I've played is that in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, wherein:
MGSV spoilers
Killing enemy soldiers contributes to an invisible "demon point" counter for Snake, which literally changes his appearance if it gets high enough. At its worst stage, he has a demonic horn sticking out of the side of his forehead, and his face is permanently covered in blood. The game actively encourages you not to kill all enemy soldiers, but instead to stun them and parachute them away to join *your* army instead, thereby giving them a "second chance" at life instead of ending their first for no reason. It's a little goofy, but it's an enticing alternative, and I took it at nearly every opportunity I had. The mechanics surrounding this are very complex, and very intentional. There's nothing stopping you from killing all of the enemy soldiers you see, but the game reminds you well of the effects that this should be having on your character's psyche (or yours).I also have a few thoughts on the somewhat gratuitous treatment of sexual imagery in The Witcher 3, much in the spirit of the above. Many instances of the depiction of sexual violence in the game contribute to its broader moral themes; its representation of humanity's potential for cruelness. This, I would say, is done appropriately, if a tad more often than is strictly necessary. But what doesn't make sense is how the game occasionally treats sex with women as a reward for finishing quests. This can occur while Geralt is in a relationship, but has no effect on its status, even though the narrative otherwise makes it clear that his partner would care very much if they knew what he was up to. There is always the option of just not doing it, but in these moments the game presents very little in the way of active suggestions that what Geralt is doing actually matters, i.e. representations of the inner moral turmoil that someone cheating on their SO could potentially have. In my opinion, this contributes negatively to the overall representation of sex in the game, and more generally to the implicit characteristics of masculinity that Geralt's character carries for many players.
The way that I approach games is not "Is this game literally perfect? If not, I won't play it," as if that were the case, I would have nothing to play. Plenty of games make mistakes like the ones I mentioned above, intentionally or otherwise, and that shouldn't necessarily disqualify them from getting any playtime. However, I think that it's very important for players to be conscious of the actions that they're taking in the context of their characters, and themselves. Video games are an art form, and art cannot just be passed off as... "just art." That makes no sense. Art is meaning, and vice versa. The normalization of certain behaviors in video games, I would argue, actually does have an effect on the way that players view the world in the context of those things, and for that reason we should be aware of our actions in-game as manifestations of our real wills.
Yeah, as a kickboxer I don't agree with the analogy at all. To me, combat sports aren't really about whether or not anyone gets hurt, it's more of a consensus between the two people that we're okay with hurting each other while we're in the ring. The hitting is almost a kind of self expression. I spar and fight in the ring much the same way I approach challenges in games and problems in real life. I'm cautious and deliberate, I'm big on anticipating what's going to happen next and negating it, I'm focused on tight fundamentals and clever tricks rather than flashy moves or big haymakers. I'm willing to take a shot if it means I get to give back harder. One of the beautiful things about combat sports is that we strip out so many artifices we put up about ourselves when we get in the ring, because you can't have any gaps between thought and action if we want to be successful. The fear and the real threat of pain a huge part of that.
None of that is there with video-game violence. Combat sports are inherently about the interplay between two people. Video games (single-player ones at least) are about the interplay between a person and whatever system the game operates under. The whole point of that system is to communicate something through what it compels you to do. It's not about whether the people are real or not. And usually the thing they're communicating through the systems are at odds with the thing they're ostensibly trying to say through the narrative. When the cheap thrills are undermining the message, it implies the message was never that serious or sincere to begin with. They make you act like a sociopath while still pretending the character is a normal and relatable dude, which relies on us not thinking too hard about what we're doing to actually work out.
It actually makes me think of one of the flaws with Scorsese movies and even flicks like Wall Street or Scarface. If they have 120 minutes of run time, they'll spend 100 minutes showing how great it is to be an unrepentant sociopath. These guys do whatever they want, get what they want, they look and sound cool. It's fucking awesome. Then they spend 20 minutes at the very end being like "But actually it all falls apart and everyone dies/goes to jail." And usually even that part looks kinda cool. Like, yeah the theme, ostensibly, is that this kind of life is ultimately empty, shallow, and self-destructive. But then why does every fucking college dorm room have 40 guys with that Scarface poster of Tony Soprano saying "The world is yours?" You can't spend almost the entirety of a movie showing how cool something is and then tack on "but actually, it's bad!" as an afterthought at the end. You end up undermining the whole premise that way.
In contrast, Breaking Bad did it really well where they show you Walter White is kind of self righteous and willing to sacrifice innocent people all throughout. Then again, lots of people went around being like "I am the one who knocks!" as if that was something a big damn hero would say instead of being pretty horrifying behavior. So maybe even that wasn't done so well.
I really hate the "fight your way in" to some goal or whatever, then "fight your way back out." It just feels lazy. Like the developers didn't want to do the work of making another level, so they just have you go through the same level again, but this time in reverse and with harder enemies.
I remember first running into this in the original Halo, where you fight past the flood to follow the cursor to the index, or whatever the fuck that was. Then when you're done, you basically have to go back out the way you came in and do it all over again. Those levels were pretty dark and irritating the first time around, so seeing I had to do them again, I almost just gave up out of boredom.
I mentioned this to a friend a few years ago and he said the first time he played through Halo, he slipped up somehow, and ended up dropping down from one of the higher-up parts of the level to the very bottom where the goal was. So he skipped all of the "Fight Your Way In" parts. But then fighting his way out was twice as hard because he hadn't killed the original enemies the first time around!
Years ago, playing one of the Call of Duty games (I think it was Modern Warfare 1), I disliked how you couldn't progress in the single player mode without literally advancing (gaining ground). I tended to have a cautious, defensive, turtle style of play, where I'd want to carefully dispatch oncoming enemies from a strong defensible position. The intention was to whittle down their numbers until there were fewer threats, and only then would I want to advance, when it was less dangerous. However, the game was literally programmed to make the enemy count infinite while you stayed in place. So the end of oncoming enemies... never came. It took me a while to figure that out, and it irritated me to the end of the storyline.
They actually changed that mechanic after that particular game, enemies would run low and then stop spawning eventually starting from MW2 on. The COD games have never been very good about proper AI or difficulty design and that was one of the few changes they ever really bothered to make in that era.
Personally, I find the battle royal genre quite overrated. In an FPS, I take the time to level up my char, unlock stuff, and meticulously research and analyze data so as to come up with optimal loadouts. In battle royale, all of that is thrown out the window, and your equipment comes down to dice rolls. I understand that the ideas is to become good with all equipment types, and also get good at ways to gather the best equipment the fastest -- but that still doesn't mean I like it.
If it helps, you can look at this from the same standpoint of analytical strategy. You get supplies at random. What's your best strategy in a given situation that utilizes the most potential of the equipment you've been given?
Equipment stats in battle royals rarely change. PUBG in particular offers a small selection of weapons and gear that you can analyze with a greater degree of depth.
Doesn't mean you have to like it all the same, but if it lets you enjoy more games, I'm offering.
Do you like games like Escape From Tarkov? Battle royales are like a big bag of potato chips, where EFT is like cooking an entire meal from scratch.
When higher "difficulty" settings make the AI literally cheat, it is a bad AI.
In Stellaris, and Civilization, and many other games, rather than making the AI better, high difficulties give the AI players free resources. My personal rule is to play on the highest difficulty setting which is still materially fair, and in many games, it is honestly a little upsetting how "low" that level is.
I recognize that game AI, especially for a grand strategy game, is in no way trivial. But come on.
Fun fact: one of the most hidden new features of the new Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition is that they've improved the AI so much that it no longer cheats on harder difficulties!
That sounds neat. Is there any documentation that talks about it in-depth?
Noted AOE2 YouTuber Spirit of the Law has covered the AI quite a bit over the years. Here's his latest that he made after the latest updates, but you can find more on his channel.
Thanks!
Collectibles.
They ruin my immersion in half the games I play. And I know I don't have to collect them, but when I'm aware they exist, something in my brain just gets obsessive about finding them where I can. "You probably won't play this game again" it says, "this will be the one time you'll be able to do this."
Plague, Uncharted, God of War-- the side characters will even tease you for it, "Hey, where are you going? We need to go this way!"
I wish developers would either turn them off until I've beaten the game once, or turn them into small, optional story-blip moments like the original Deus Ex did (e.g. I wandered into the women's restroom, my boss berates me for doing so; I read the newspaper, it adjusts its headlines based on what I've been up to).
Mature games where you're not just killing things.
I'm just generally getting sick of killing lots of people in every game I play. Neil Druckman said he wanted to make the player really ask themselves if they need to kill someone in The Last of Us and not just have the enemies be nameless thugs, but then the game's enemies are all pretty much horrible people complaining that the survivors they killed didn't have shoes that fit. Fallout 4 had a lot of cool places and things to explore, but it felt like every quest I was given involved me killing someone. I was disappointed there was a "haunted" place with a backstory that wound up just being another kill-this-thing event.
Like:
I don’t think I have favorite mechanics. That’s implementation specific.
Dislike:
One more I thought of was playing with the player's expectations, but having one early decision decide the outcome of the game. This happened to me when playing the first Bioshock game. At the start of the game, another unseen character starts helping you get around and telling you how to deal with various objects and enemies, so you start to trust them. In the end they turn out not to be trustworthy. OK, that's cool.
But it turns out there's 1 thing they tell you at the very beginning of the game that's untrue, but you don't know it yet. You have a choice to make right then but don't realize you're making it – you just think you're doing what you need to get to the next level of the game. Once you've made one particular choice at the very beginning of the game, there's an ending you can no longer get to. I thought that was pretty shitty of them. About 2 minutes later someone else reveals that the information you had and which you just used to screw yourself with might not have been good information, but it's too late to do anything about it – but even worse, you don't find that out until the end of the game! Talk about infuriating.
violence
Could you expand on your thoughts a bit? It's hard to tell if this is a favorite or least favorite trope, for example.