+1 (Gaming)

by EffortlessFury , Thursday, June 23, 2016, 02:40 (3079 days ago) @ Kahzgul

In some ways, Doom is the most modern single player shooter to come out in a long time. Thanks to the success of Halo and Gears, the whole "regenerating health" model has been the ubiquitous standard in shooters for almost 15 years. While most 1st or 3rd person shooters try to differentiate themselves from the pack in various ways, there is a common sort of flow just about all modern shooters have. You attack, do as much damage as you can until you need to retreat behind cover and wait for your health to recharge. Repeat.

But Doom turns that flow completely on its head by ditching regenerating health, and adding the "execution" mechanic that lets you get health and ammo back by performing finishing-move melee kills on wounded enemies. It's a brilliant mechanic, in that it encourages the player to stay in the fight rather than retreat from it. As you take damage, you become more aggressive.

I don't think I've seen another game do anything quite like it.

I haven't played doom, but I'm a big fan of positive reinforcement in game design. My go-to example up until this point has been the traditional "mana" model where a wizard slowly gains a pool of mana that they can quickly drain for burst damage, but then need to wait some time for the mana to replenish. In WoW, for example, almost all of the original classes used mana. They were spikey, inconsistent, and generally punished for blowing their wad too soon rather than doing things like downscaling the spell they used in order to be more even in their mana usage. It was frustrating to play. Warriors had rage, but you had to take damage to gain it (mostly), so - again, it was a "use it all" and then wait for it to regen resource. Same with rogue energy. use it, wait, use it wait. And then Death Knights appeared. They had two resources, one of which was on a strict timer (runes), but the use of that one rapidly filled your other resource (runic energy? I forget what it was called). The feedback loop was brilliant. You wanted to burn your runes as quickly as possible so you could unleash your big runic energy attacks. Optimization wasn't about resource management and control so much as about spending as much of your resources as you could as quickly as possible. There was a never a point in combat where you wanted to back off, slow down, or otherwise remove yourself from doing the fun stuff of chopping enemies to bits.

Now I'm not saying mana is a terrible resource model, but it's become a video game crutch and is poorly implemented just as often as it is well utilized. There are other options, and the ones that feel good to me these days are the ones that reward me for having fun more than the ones that actively attempt to stop me from doing the fun things.

Interesting assessment. For some reason it made me think of Diablo 3 and my time with it; I played the Wizard on my first go through and while that class has the classic mana problem (of course), what's also interesting is that the loot system leads to a lot of min-maxing where its absolutely possible to remove the cooldown problem. I very rarely ran out of mana on my character. I don't think the cooldown is problem is as bad when you're offered a path to remove the obstacle, at that point its just part of the game. (but then again that system poses its own pros and cons, and that's a separate conversation)