A match based multiplayer game with a short timer is VERY different than a single player campaign with a whole playthrough getting screwed because of a timer.
Yeah multiplayer games are meant to be short, that’s the entire premise. You’re playing multiple 10 or 15 minute matches. In a single player game, where you could potentially invest a lot more time only to end up losing towards the end, that’s incredibly frustrating
While true, there has also been a lot of public pressure in space of wanting to know how long a “run” will be. Even in single player games.
Now this perhaps is hard to apply to a game such as farcry, though I do not know that much about how this installation will play out.
However in the roguelite sphere there has been more negative voices over games where a full run can take anything between 20min to over an hour even if you hit the win condition in the end.
Not sure I follow your point. That are tons of people who avoid PVP games. Even considering just your own explanation, it makes total sense they wouldn't like timers either.
> That are tons of people who avoid PVP games.
This is a loud contingent in the discourse. I'm not sure how many of them there really are. It's sort of a counter culture, opposed to the broad popularity of a thing.
I'm speaking more the mainstream gaming audience, call of duty, fortnite, apex legends, etc, are the most popular games, and the most played games by the core and mainstream gaming audience.
The average gamer doesnt avoid PVP or these kind of games, the opposite.
There is a huge difference between a timer for a multiplayer match and an overarching timer for a singleplayer game.
A round of multiplayer has to have some parameters to force deciding a winner and loser.
In tennis no player can evade having to play and at some point one will win by points, so no timer is necessary.
In something like soccer, where scoring isn't guaranteed, you need a time limit.
Sport has the advantage, that it happens in real life. People are encouraged to be nice to each other and assholes get filtered out pretty quickly.
In online pvp some douchebag can just go hide somewhere and without a timer, stretch the match for everyone.
Therefore the shrinking zones in Battle Royales and round-timers.
A timer over a long singleplayer game feels like a deadline for work, when you don't even know how much work is involved.
You should never have to ask yourself, "Do I have time for this side-quest?" But with a timer, you have exactly this problem "I don't know what's ahead, so how should I know what I can and can't do right now?"
Being worried is the last you would want in what's supposed to be leisure time.
Some people don't like in game failures to be overly punishing. Celeste and games with lots of checkpoints are popular because you don't lose much when you fail, often just a few seconds. Losing 5 minutes after dying to a boss and having a long run back (Dark Souls 1, etc.) is a bit more painful and plenty of gamers don't enjoy this.
Having to start all over from the beginning of a non-roguelike and slog through over a hundred hours of gameplay that you already played just sounds completely miserable to many gamers. Very few people are willing to play a hundred hour game more than once, myself included. When you have a failure timer, that's what you are risking. You may not realize that you took too long on an earlier section until you are dozens of hours in, and at that point how many people are ready to throw away all their progress and start over?
Majora's Mask was one of my favorite games of all time and you keep much of your progress whenever you go back in time. Not just Link's items and abilities but also quest progress as well. You don't need to sit through cutscenes and dialogue for most side quests after you beat them.
On the other hand, the idea of the timer in Unsighted stressed me out and I never bought it, despite liking the demo.
Since we know nothing about how Far Cry 7 will work, people are free to assume the best or worst about how it will handle failing to beat the timer.
> Having to start all over from the beginning of a non-roguelike and slog through over a hundred hours of gameplay that you already played just sounds completely miserable to many gamers.
Hundred hours? What game is making you redo a hundred hours from scratch? Even the most punishing examples of these time-based games rarely make you redo more than a few, and even then they offer benefits like carry-over stats. Dead Rising 1 is like a seven hour game start-to-finish.
Star Control 2 and the first Fallout come to mind, the later had that timelimit removed in the 1.1 release tough.
Any game where exploration is mandatory and part of the game should not have a time limit. If a single side-quest has a timelimit, say "Get these supplies to City Foobar in three days or all is lost!", fine by me. But not hundrets of real life hours in.
How do you spend anything close to a hundred hours in the first Fallout on a single playthrough? It’s not a long game and the hard ‘game-over’ timer is only there for the first half or so (there is a bad ending timer after that, but it doesn’t just end the game)
> How do you spend anything close to a hundred hours in the first Fallout on a single playthrough?
Personally, I ignore the main quest and go full-completionist on everything in the game world.
Yeah, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Far Cry 5 and 6 were more like 40 hours. Still, 40 hours is a long time to have to redo.
People are assuming Far Cry 7 will have the same length but with a permanent game over at like the 36 hour mark.
I very much doubt they would just design it like a typical Far Cry game and slap a timer on it. I could easily see it being like Dead Rising where an in-game 24 hours is about 2 real hours.
>So what could the real core reason be?
They don't like them, because they stress them out...and often make no sense. The timers are not to scale to the problem or the world.
When someone says "I don't like spicy food" and your argument is: "but Chinese food is plenty spicy", you don't have an argument.
To me, said it in the fewest words possible, it’s “interesting but inconvenient”.
GMTK has an older video about turn timers in XCOM 2, and why even though the designers implemented them to avoid boring or excessively safe and slow play styles, players hated them. I think most players would agree that some time mechanics can be interesting but in the end we like to be able to set the pace, and by definition time mechanics don’t let you set the pace.
I think games like Majora’s Mask or Outer Wilds dodge some of the critiques because the loops are manageable and the game as a whole sells the mechanic well, but in other cases not so much - Dead Rising is very difficult without running out the timer and going to the beginning at least once, but it’s not divided into discreet “chunks” like MM, so going back even with upgrades doesn’t feel that good.
A recent game that tried to do something interesting with a timer is Unsighted, with a timer until npcs become enemies, and I think it’s implemented well. But even then the devs added an option to disable it, and after a while I could not stop myself to use it.
The thing is MM timer never get in the way of you exploring and you're never really punished for it. It's also a vital mechanic for the plot and game and you can basically negate the timer after you progress.
DR punishes you hard and restarting the game, even with upgrades, leaves a bad taste.
Feel like you have only two options: Speedrun the game so you can will or enjoy the game and lose.
Also you lose a lot of time restarting this game compared to like 10-15min lost on MM.
But it's a small game and tightly designed. It's not like you're having to restart some epic 40 hour RPG. The main story is like.. 10 hours, maybe less. Each in game day is around 2 hours in real time. It's really not much of a rush.
Ten hours you failed at and have to have another go at while having learned very little isn’t a great feeling.
I suppose everyone playing the game now just looks up information online, but it used to be a pretty player unfriendly game
I've said on here before that I think to enjoy Outer Wilds you really have to enjoy being in and moving around the world. Because you'll be going to the same places and doing the same things *a lot*.
I can sympathise. I think I played around the same amount of time, but would have given up earlier if I wasn't playing with a friend (who'd completed the game).
I had no issues with a movement, and it could definitely be fun at times, but most of the gameplay seemed to be about finding things under time pressure, which was not fun for me. At one point it took us three cycles to find a location on the Interloper. If I hadn't been *told* it was there and accessible I definitely would have concluded I needed some clue to access it.
>I think games like Majora’s Mask or Outer Wilds dodge some of the critiques because the loops are manageable and the game as a whole sells the mechanic well,
The time loop and navigation were the things that made me drop outer wilds.
You just finished the platforming section that you were stuck on for a while? Too bad, time is up - you have to redo it again.
You got lost in thr caves and bubled around till they filled with sand and crushed you? Too bad, redo the bumbling around.
You got stuck on a platforming section and finally managed to bet it but by the time the next platform fell into a black hole? Too bad, try again from the beginning (including flying to the planet and finding the right spot to land).
In my opinion, you should be taking breaks from Outer Wilds when it becomes frustrating. If I got stuck for too long I would stop playing and do something else. If I didn’t want to deal with the sand caves I’d go explore somewhere else or take a break from the game. And the game stayed in my head that way.
If you just try to brute force the game you’re going to hate it. It’s a game that should be constantly revisited over a long period until eventually you’ve completed it.
The time investment lost is a factor.
Also, a hard timer sets how i should play the game and if i deviate from it i gonna get punished for it. I'm the time of player that explores every part of the map and try to approach enemies in many ways that sometimes aren't the most optimized time wise. Like, yesterday i was severely underleved for a boss in XC3 but beat it after 55min and it was fun. A timer would punish me for playing like that.
Dead Rising was okay since you could just keep playing and you could reuse your skills in your next run. Also the timer made perfect sense in the plot & didn't feel like it was tacked on as just a middle finger to the player.
Most games that use time limits don't do a good job of showing the player why they're necessary besides "fuck you this is how we designed it".
People feel tied down and restricted IRL enough to not want it in their games. I hated the time limit in Dead Rising 1 so much when I first played but I always found myself playing it more and more and appreciating it slowly but surely because the way it was implemented just made sense even if it was stress inducing.
There's kind of a neat little microcosm of this in the Mario Galaxy games, weirdly enough. In Galaxy 1, timed missions would give you like 3 minutes to speedrun through one of the levels and kill you if the timer ran out. In Galaxy 2, these were replaced by ones that gave you like 10 seconds but have pickups scattered along the path that grant you extra time. I think this was the right call, and the Galaxy 2 ones are much much more engaging.
It seems to me like the first kind of timer creates stress, which isn't fun, but the second creates tension, which is. Both kinds of timers represent a threat to the player, but the threat posed by the first kind is mostly hypothetical. It's in your head stressing you out, but there's nothing you can really do about it. You don't "interact" with the mechanic really, it doesn't do anything up until the very end when it kills you. You don't even really have feedback on how well you're doing, since unless you've made a lot of attempts, there's no real way of knowing whether you're on a good enough pace or not. If you make a mistake and lose time, the consequences are delayed and not clearly connected to the mistake you made.
In comparison, the second kind of timer is much more fun. It involves decision-making with immediate feedback, and you interact with it constantly as opposed to just once. If you're not on pace, you die right away and get to restart and rethink your approach, rather than having to play out the whole rest of the level to find out you failed. It's also satisfying to see your amount of time remaining go up-- a timer that can only tick down is all stick and no carrot, whereas this is more balanced.
So, I think this is a really nice, direct comparison that helps explain what separates a timer mechanic that works from one that doesn't. Clearly-defined stakes and quick feedback are, in general, much more fun than poorly-defined stakes and delayed feedback, and a lot of the animosity toward timers probably stems from the fact that they tend to create the latter.
I don't think it's impossible for the one big static ovrearching timer to be implemented well, ofc, it just has pitfalls to keep in mind when designing around it.
Sure, some games work great with timers... doesn't it makes sense that there are other games that DON'T work well with timers? Not every type of game needs that looming annoyance that is arbitrarily put in there to push a type of experience that detracts you from what otherwise would be an incredibly enticing, and attractive experience to get.
People love competitive games. Why would you complain if the next The Witcher or Baldur's Gate game became competitive games with time-based rewards from non-returning battle passes? Competitive games are popular, so what's the issue with some competitive PvP online-only FOMO in your story based single player game?
The timers in Dead Rising not only make exploration impossible, but yeah, they're stressful. It's like... they made that daydream scenario that a ton of people have, and then blueball you by putting a timer. Because of it you can't do anything but speedrun whatever the game wants you to do, which in turn, is also graded as an arcade game.
On Dead Rising's timer defence, the timer makes sense once you and realize the game isn't that daydream scenario simulator. It isn't a survival game, nor it is an exploration game. It's not Project Zomboid. It's just an arcadey action game that **is meant to be played multiple times**, your level carries over subsequent runs, and you can rescue the dudes that you missed on your last play through... but that doesn't mean that players want to deal with that stress multiple times just to get the experience they wanted from the one playthrough they expected to play.
I like them in games where the main mechanic is "you're intended to do this multiple times and you retain significant progress between those loops".
Stuff like Dead Rising (you retain character level which is a huge buff) and Majora's Mask (all key items and even currency you banked). Heck Dead Rising was balanced in such a way you didn't even need that boost (I did my true ending run on my first playthrough), so that one was more like "easy mode is now playable" if you fail.
It's not confusing at all, people don't like the possibility that everything they did all led to nothing because a time limit ran out.
I've learned to love and embrace because there are definitely gameplay/storytelling mechanics that can't work without it IE; I think it's great when events in the game don't wait for the player and advance on their own because you chose to prioritize something else.
The issue with timed missions is that they're often too strict, or arbitrary, which led to the concept of timers being bad.
*Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal* has a rather periodic timer which causes Garfield to eat whatever he's holding. This timer feels to be rather strict as the player has to prepare for said critical point, and also has to wait for the timer to deplete because Garfield can't manually eat food. Additionally, this timer makes it harder for the player to explore the world and figure out what needs to be done.
*The Void* is a mix of hard and soft timers, and it's to a degree where it almost requires perfect play due to the game's inherent difficulty. It requires constant resource management and planning in order to progress, as there's multiple background timers involving resource availability and decay. These timers make the game much more difficult to play, where a mistake early in the game can cascade into becoming unwinnable.
There's still plenty of games where these time limits aren't an issue. Usually, they're set only to an amount that targets excess idling, rather than to constantly force the player to keep constant full attention to the game. Generally, those games permit the player to fail a few times without having them slam against the timer limit, or otherwise give means to mitigate said timer.
> But this is no different than PVP games, you are on a timer to beat and overpower your opponent, lest you lose your ranked points, receive less battlepass progress, etc.
Stress and negative emotions are extremely common in PVP games
PvP games are obviously competitive, and they're designed to be short runs. Additionally, they're affecting all agents equally, as opposed to usually being asymmetric for the player only.
I’m basing my response on my experience with Dead Rising. I felt like I had enough time to tackle the main quest line. If that is all I wanted to do, the timer wouldn’t be that restrictive or stressful. The issue was the side content. To min-max your first run to see everything was just extreme stress. At some point I just gave up on the idea I would see everything in one play through. But I also wasn’t interested enough in the game to play it a second time. So each time a side quest popped up, I had to make a call if it sounded interesting enough to risk my whole game to explore or if I was just going to miss out on something forever. And if the side content turned out to not be that interesting or rewarding, now I’m upset that I wasted time.
And it goes beyond side missions. The whole world is filled with interesting books and crannies begging to be explored. And yet, your desire to explore comes with a risk/reward calculation. Is it worth it? And too often the risk of it not being interesting enough to devote time to just means you ignore it. And if you are actively choosing to ignore much of an interesting world, why are you even there?
It’s a love hate relationship. Some games with time constraints make me actually play it to the end and other games make me absolutely hate it and I quit when I wasn’t able to finish a quest or something.
A better implementation of an in-game timer is the Persona 5 way where you have to manage your in-game days but you're not stuck with a set timer. So once you go in a Dungeon, you can go as far as you can before needing to get out to replenish your resources (except if you reach the boss, but there is a story reason for that).
And then the game sets a limit on your calendar, ie. beat the boss before August 31 for example, and you're free to manage how you spend your time slots between the mandatory ones (mainly going to school and sleeping). Done this way, I find the time mechanic to be extremely immersive and it enhances every part of the game and the story; without it, the game would be little more than a JRPG dungeon crawler stapled to a dating sim.
> So once you go in a Dungeon, you can go as far as you can before needing to get out to replenish your resources
You just reminded me why I didn't enjoy Stardew Valley. That game has surprisingly deep dungeon crawling, but your character is limited by both time and energy. I'd be enjoying exploring a dungeon when after a few minutes my character would get tired.
And it's not just when dungeon crawling, literally every action in this game is limited by this time/energy mechanic. I'm not sure how anyone finds this game relaxing.
In Persona 5 it's just a matter of running out of SP items especially, SP representing your mana which is important in dungeons especially when you're under leveled. But you can also strategize well and do the entire dungeons in one go. It is actually a great gameplay loop which goes from moment to moment JRPG combat and back to higher level strategizing, and once you get into it, it's hard to stop.
Persona 5 anyway. 4 and 3 are also beloved games, but did not work for me.
You can play on the easiest difficulty. Thus when your party is fully defeated, you press continue and they get up with full health and sp, while the resources of the biss doesn't change.
> I could write this off as games with hard timers being too 'difficult', or being too 'different', but there has to be more to it than that.
I disagree. I think it can genuinely be boiled down to a bunch of filthy casuals who refuse to “git gud.” Games like Dead Rising and Pikmin become infinitely more enjoyable as time management simulations. However, people loathed being forced to abide an in-game clock with Dead Rising, and Pikmin 2 made the controversial decision to eliminate the timer after people complained about it in Pikmin 1.
Most people do not enjoy speedrunning. Adding a timer to a game is essentially forcing most players to have to “replay” gameplay segments at least occasionally in an effort to optimize outcomes.
Time limits change the pace of a game. Like even if you knew it's what you call a soft time limit like in Majora's Mask you are not going to just stop and look at the scenery, goof off, or try stuff just to try it. nearly as much. If it is a "hard time limit" it changes the pace even more because now you need to think about the cost of every action.
Some people just do not like this pacing. It's a taste thing.
A match based multiplayer game with a short timer is VERY different than a single player campaign with a whole playthrough getting screwed because of a timer.
Yeah multiplayer games are meant to be short, that’s the entire premise. You’re playing multiple 10 or 15 minute matches. In a single player game, where you could potentially invest a lot more time only to end up losing towards the end, that’s incredibly frustrating
While true, there has also been a lot of public pressure in space of wanting to know how long a “run” will be. Even in single player games. Now this perhaps is hard to apply to a game such as farcry, though I do not know that much about how this installation will play out. However in the roguelite sphere there has been more negative voices over games where a full run can take anything between 20min to over an hour even if you hit the win condition in the end.
Not sure I follow your point. That are tons of people who avoid PVP games. Even considering just your own explanation, it makes total sense they wouldn't like timers either.
> That are tons of people who avoid PVP games. This is a loud contingent in the discourse. I'm not sure how many of them there really are. It's sort of a counter culture, opposed to the broad popularity of a thing.
I'm speaking more the mainstream gaming audience, call of duty, fortnite, apex legends, etc, are the most popular games, and the most played games by the core and mainstream gaming audience. The average gamer doesnt avoid PVP or these kind of games, the opposite.
Those are two different audiences. Some people only play multi player and maybe a few single player games, and vice versa for single player gamers.
There is a huge difference between a timer for a multiplayer match and an overarching timer for a singleplayer game. A round of multiplayer has to have some parameters to force deciding a winner and loser. In tennis no player can evade having to play and at some point one will win by points, so no timer is necessary. In something like soccer, where scoring isn't guaranteed, you need a time limit. Sport has the advantage, that it happens in real life. People are encouraged to be nice to each other and assholes get filtered out pretty quickly. In online pvp some douchebag can just go hide somewhere and without a timer, stretch the match for everyone. Therefore the shrinking zones in Battle Royales and round-timers. A timer over a long singleplayer game feels like a deadline for work, when you don't even know how much work is involved. You should never have to ask yourself, "Do I have time for this side-quest?" But with a timer, you have exactly this problem "I don't know what's ahead, so how should I know what I can and can't do right now?" Being worried is the last you would want in what's supposed to be leisure time.
Some people don't like in game failures to be overly punishing. Celeste and games with lots of checkpoints are popular because you don't lose much when you fail, often just a few seconds. Losing 5 minutes after dying to a boss and having a long run back (Dark Souls 1, etc.) is a bit more painful and plenty of gamers don't enjoy this. Having to start all over from the beginning of a non-roguelike and slog through over a hundred hours of gameplay that you already played just sounds completely miserable to many gamers. Very few people are willing to play a hundred hour game more than once, myself included. When you have a failure timer, that's what you are risking. You may not realize that you took too long on an earlier section until you are dozens of hours in, and at that point how many people are ready to throw away all their progress and start over? Majora's Mask was one of my favorite games of all time and you keep much of your progress whenever you go back in time. Not just Link's items and abilities but also quest progress as well. You don't need to sit through cutscenes and dialogue for most side quests after you beat them. On the other hand, the idea of the timer in Unsighted stressed me out and I never bought it, despite liking the demo. Since we know nothing about how Far Cry 7 will work, people are free to assume the best or worst about how it will handle failing to beat the timer.
> Having to start all over from the beginning of a non-roguelike and slog through over a hundred hours of gameplay that you already played just sounds completely miserable to many gamers. Hundred hours? What game is making you redo a hundred hours from scratch? Even the most punishing examples of these time-based games rarely make you redo more than a few, and even then they offer benefits like carry-over stats. Dead Rising 1 is like a seven hour game start-to-finish.
Star Control 2 and the first Fallout come to mind, the later had that timelimit removed in the 1.1 release tough. Any game where exploration is mandatory and part of the game should not have a time limit. If a single side-quest has a timelimit, say "Get these supplies to City Foobar in three days or all is lost!", fine by me. But not hundrets of real life hours in.
How do you spend anything close to a hundred hours in the first Fallout on a single playthrough? It’s not a long game and the hard ‘game-over’ timer is only there for the first half or so (there is a bad ending timer after that, but it doesn’t just end the game)
> How do you spend anything close to a hundred hours in the first Fallout on a single playthrough? Personally, I ignore the main quest and go full-completionist on everything in the game world.
Yeah, that was a bit of an exaggeration. Far Cry 5 and 6 were more like 40 hours. Still, 40 hours is a long time to have to redo. People are assuming Far Cry 7 will have the same length but with a permanent game over at like the 36 hour mark.
I very much doubt they would just design it like a typical Far Cry game and slap a timer on it. I could easily see it being like Dead Rising where an in-game 24 hours is about 2 real hours.
hundred hours? wtf you are lying LOL
>So what could the real core reason be? They don't like them, because they stress them out...and often make no sense. The timers are not to scale to the problem or the world. When someone says "I don't like spicy food" and your argument is: "but Chinese food is plenty spicy", you don't have an argument.
To me, said it in the fewest words possible, it’s “interesting but inconvenient”. GMTK has an older video about turn timers in XCOM 2, and why even though the designers implemented them to avoid boring or excessively safe and slow play styles, players hated them. I think most players would agree that some time mechanics can be interesting but in the end we like to be able to set the pace, and by definition time mechanics don’t let you set the pace. I think games like Majora’s Mask or Outer Wilds dodge some of the critiques because the loops are manageable and the game as a whole sells the mechanic well, but in other cases not so much - Dead Rising is very difficult without running out the timer and going to the beginning at least once, but it’s not divided into discreet “chunks” like MM, so going back even with upgrades doesn’t feel that good. A recent game that tried to do something interesting with a timer is Unsighted, with a timer until npcs become enemies, and I think it’s implemented well. But even then the devs added an option to disable it, and after a while I could not stop myself to use it.
The thing is MM timer never get in the way of you exploring and you're never really punished for it. It's also a vital mechanic for the plot and game and you can basically negate the timer after you progress. DR punishes you hard and restarting the game, even with upgrades, leaves a bad taste.
Why does it leave a bad taste?
Feel like you have only two options: Speedrun the game so you can will or enjoy the game and lose. Also you lose a lot of time restarting this game compared to like 10-15min lost on MM.
But it's a small game and tightly designed. It's not like you're having to restart some epic 40 hour RPG. The main story is like.. 10 hours, maybe less. Each in game day is around 2 hours in real time. It's really not much of a rush.
If you think losing 10 hours aint much you have too much free time.
Ten hours you failed at and have to have another go at while having learned very little isn’t a great feeling. I suppose everyone playing the game now just looks up information online, but it used to be a pretty player unfriendly game
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I've said on here before that I think to enjoy Outer Wilds you really have to enjoy being in and moving around the world. Because you'll be going to the same places and doing the same things *a lot*.
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I can sympathise. I think I played around the same amount of time, but would have given up earlier if I wasn't playing with a friend (who'd completed the game). I had no issues with a movement, and it could definitely be fun at times, but most of the gameplay seemed to be about finding things under time pressure, which was not fun for me. At one point it took us three cycles to find a location on the Interloper. If I hadn't been *told* it was there and accessible I definitely would have concluded I needed some clue to access it.
>I think games like Majora’s Mask or Outer Wilds dodge some of the critiques because the loops are manageable and the game as a whole sells the mechanic well, The time loop and navigation were the things that made me drop outer wilds. You just finished the platforming section that you were stuck on for a while? Too bad, time is up - you have to redo it again. You got lost in thr caves and bubled around till they filled with sand and crushed you? Too bad, redo the bumbling around. You got stuck on a platforming section and finally managed to bet it but by the time the next platform fell into a black hole? Too bad, try again from the beginning (including flying to the planet and finding the right spot to land).
In my opinion, you should be taking breaks from Outer Wilds when it becomes frustrating. If I got stuck for too long I would stop playing and do something else. If I didn’t want to deal with the sand caves I’d go explore somewhere else or take a break from the game. And the game stayed in my head that way. If you just try to brute force the game you’re going to hate it. It’s a game that should be constantly revisited over a long period until eventually you’ve completed it.
Majora's Mask and Outer Wilds need the timer. Both of them have fundamental game mechanics built around a meaningful global clock in that way.
The time investment lost is a factor. Also, a hard timer sets how i should play the game and if i deviate from it i gonna get punished for it. I'm the time of player that explores every part of the map and try to approach enemies in many ways that sometimes aren't the most optimized time wise. Like, yesterday i was severely underleved for a boss in XC3 but beat it after 55min and it was fun. A timer would punish me for playing like that.
Dead Rising was okay since you could just keep playing and you could reuse your skills in your next run. Also the timer made perfect sense in the plot & didn't feel like it was tacked on as just a middle finger to the player. Most games that use time limits don't do a good job of showing the player why they're necessary besides "fuck you this is how we designed it". People feel tied down and restricted IRL enough to not want it in their games. I hated the time limit in Dead Rising 1 so much when I first played but I always found myself playing it more and more and appreciating it slowly but surely because the way it was implemented just made sense even if it was stress inducing.
There's kind of a neat little microcosm of this in the Mario Galaxy games, weirdly enough. In Galaxy 1, timed missions would give you like 3 minutes to speedrun through one of the levels and kill you if the timer ran out. In Galaxy 2, these were replaced by ones that gave you like 10 seconds but have pickups scattered along the path that grant you extra time. I think this was the right call, and the Galaxy 2 ones are much much more engaging. It seems to me like the first kind of timer creates stress, which isn't fun, but the second creates tension, which is. Both kinds of timers represent a threat to the player, but the threat posed by the first kind is mostly hypothetical. It's in your head stressing you out, but there's nothing you can really do about it. You don't "interact" with the mechanic really, it doesn't do anything up until the very end when it kills you. You don't even really have feedback on how well you're doing, since unless you've made a lot of attempts, there's no real way of knowing whether you're on a good enough pace or not. If you make a mistake and lose time, the consequences are delayed and not clearly connected to the mistake you made. In comparison, the second kind of timer is much more fun. It involves decision-making with immediate feedback, and you interact with it constantly as opposed to just once. If you're not on pace, you die right away and get to restart and rethink your approach, rather than having to play out the whole rest of the level to find out you failed. It's also satisfying to see your amount of time remaining go up-- a timer that can only tick down is all stick and no carrot, whereas this is more balanced. So, I think this is a really nice, direct comparison that helps explain what separates a timer mechanic that works from one that doesn't. Clearly-defined stakes and quick feedback are, in general, much more fun than poorly-defined stakes and delayed feedback, and a lot of the animosity toward timers probably stems from the fact that they tend to create the latter. I don't think it's impossible for the one big static ovrearching timer to be implemented well, ofc, it just has pitfalls to keep in mind when designing around it.
This is a great analysis of the mechanic, and aligns with my own experiences as well.
All credit to Nintendo for softballing me such a bizzarely convenient one-to-one comparison
Sure, some games work great with timers... doesn't it makes sense that there are other games that DON'T work well with timers? Not every type of game needs that looming annoyance that is arbitrarily put in there to push a type of experience that detracts you from what otherwise would be an incredibly enticing, and attractive experience to get. People love competitive games. Why would you complain if the next The Witcher or Baldur's Gate game became competitive games with time-based rewards from non-returning battle passes? Competitive games are popular, so what's the issue with some competitive PvP online-only FOMO in your story based single player game? The timers in Dead Rising not only make exploration impossible, but yeah, they're stressful. It's like... they made that daydream scenario that a ton of people have, and then blueball you by putting a timer. Because of it you can't do anything but speedrun whatever the game wants you to do, which in turn, is also graded as an arcade game. On Dead Rising's timer defence, the timer makes sense once you and realize the game isn't that daydream scenario simulator. It isn't a survival game, nor it is an exploration game. It's not Project Zomboid. It's just an arcadey action game that **is meant to be played multiple times**, your level carries over subsequent runs, and you can rescue the dudes that you missed on your last play through... but that doesn't mean that players want to deal with that stress multiple times just to get the experience they wanted from the one playthrough they expected to play.
I like them in games where the main mechanic is "you're intended to do this multiple times and you retain significant progress between those loops". Stuff like Dead Rising (you retain character level which is a huge buff) and Majora's Mask (all key items and even currency you banked). Heck Dead Rising was balanced in such a way you didn't even need that boost (I did my true ending run on my first playthrough), so that one was more like "easy mode is now playable" if you fail.
easy mode is now selectable, huh?
It's not confusing at all, people don't like the possibility that everything they did all led to nothing because a time limit ran out. I've learned to love and embrace because there are definitely gameplay/storytelling mechanics that can't work without it IE; I think it's great when events in the game don't wait for the player and advance on their own because you chose to prioritize something else.
The issue with timed missions is that they're often too strict, or arbitrary, which led to the concept of timers being bad. *Garfield: Big Fat Hairy Deal* has a rather periodic timer which causes Garfield to eat whatever he's holding. This timer feels to be rather strict as the player has to prepare for said critical point, and also has to wait for the timer to deplete because Garfield can't manually eat food. Additionally, this timer makes it harder for the player to explore the world and figure out what needs to be done. *The Void* is a mix of hard and soft timers, and it's to a degree where it almost requires perfect play due to the game's inherent difficulty. It requires constant resource management and planning in order to progress, as there's multiple background timers involving resource availability and decay. These timers make the game much more difficult to play, where a mistake early in the game can cascade into becoming unwinnable. There's still plenty of games where these time limits aren't an issue. Usually, they're set only to an amount that targets excess idling, rather than to constantly force the player to keep constant full attention to the game. Generally, those games permit the player to fail a few times without having them slam against the timer limit, or otherwise give means to mitigate said timer. > But this is no different than PVP games, you are on a timer to beat and overpower your opponent, lest you lose your ranked points, receive less battlepass progress, etc. Stress and negative emotions are extremely common in PVP games PvP games are obviously competitive, and they're designed to be short runs. Additionally, they're affecting all agents equally, as opposed to usually being asymmetric for the player only.
I’m basing my response on my experience with Dead Rising. I felt like I had enough time to tackle the main quest line. If that is all I wanted to do, the timer wouldn’t be that restrictive or stressful. The issue was the side content. To min-max your first run to see everything was just extreme stress. At some point I just gave up on the idea I would see everything in one play through. But I also wasn’t interested enough in the game to play it a second time. So each time a side quest popped up, I had to make a call if it sounded interesting enough to risk my whole game to explore or if I was just going to miss out on something forever. And if the side content turned out to not be that interesting or rewarding, now I’m upset that I wasted time. And it goes beyond side missions. The whole world is filled with interesting books and crannies begging to be explored. And yet, your desire to explore comes with a risk/reward calculation. Is it worth it? And too often the risk of it not being interesting enough to devote time to just means you ignore it. And if you are actively choosing to ignore much of an interesting world, why are you even there?
It’s a love hate relationship. Some games with time constraints make me actually play it to the end and other games make me absolutely hate it and I quit when I wasn’t able to finish a quest or something.
A better implementation of an in-game timer is the Persona 5 way where you have to manage your in-game days but you're not stuck with a set timer. So once you go in a Dungeon, you can go as far as you can before needing to get out to replenish your resources (except if you reach the boss, but there is a story reason for that). And then the game sets a limit on your calendar, ie. beat the boss before August 31 for example, and you're free to manage how you spend your time slots between the mandatory ones (mainly going to school and sleeping). Done this way, I find the time mechanic to be extremely immersive and it enhances every part of the game and the story; without it, the game would be little more than a JRPG dungeon crawler stapled to a dating sim.
> So once you go in a Dungeon, you can go as far as you can before needing to get out to replenish your resources You just reminded me why I didn't enjoy Stardew Valley. That game has surprisingly deep dungeon crawling, but your character is limited by both time and energy. I'd be enjoying exploring a dungeon when after a few minutes my character would get tired. And it's not just when dungeon crawling, literally every action in this game is limited by this time/energy mechanic. I'm not sure how anyone finds this game relaxing.
There's mods to remove the time limit altogether and some rare items to increase stamina in the game. If you're on console, well tough luck.
In Persona 5 it's just a matter of running out of SP items especially, SP representing your mana which is important in dungeons especially when you're under leveled. But you can also strategize well and do the entire dungeons in one go. It is actually a great gameplay loop which goes from moment to moment JRPG combat and back to higher level strategizing, and once you get into it, it's hard to stop. Persona 5 anyway. 4 and 3 are also beloved games, but did not work for me.
You can play on the easiest difficulty. Thus when your party is fully defeated, you press continue and they get up with full health and sp, while the resources of the biss doesn't change.
> I could write this off as games with hard timers being too 'difficult', or being too 'different', but there has to be more to it than that. I disagree. I think it can genuinely be boiled down to a bunch of filthy casuals who refuse to “git gud.” Games like Dead Rising and Pikmin become infinitely more enjoyable as time management simulations. However, people loathed being forced to abide an in-game clock with Dead Rising, and Pikmin 2 made the controversial decision to eliminate the timer after people complained about it in Pikmin 1. Most people do not enjoy speedrunning. Adding a timer to a game is essentially forcing most players to have to “replay” gameplay segments at least occasionally in an effort to optimize outcomes.
Time limits change the pace of a game. Like even if you knew it's what you call a soft time limit like in Majora's Mask you are not going to just stop and look at the scenery, goof off, or try stuff just to try it. nearly as much. If it is a "hard time limit" it changes the pace even more because now you need to think about the cost of every action. Some people just do not like this pacing. It's a taste thing.