Ladders. (Destiny)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Thursday, March 27, 2014, 07:13 (3903 days ago) @ Cody Miller
edited by uberfoop, Thursday, March 27, 2014, 07:25

Speaking of gameplay mechanics being matched to game worlds, ladders are a great example of a huge issue with many modern games.

When you're working in a realistic style, the artists seem to want to keep everything feeling realistic by ensuring that characters animate fairly realistically in their world all the time. Ladders get hit really hard, because seemingly the only way to keep things both realistic and sane for the design teams is to make some kind of system where a character slowly locks to a ladder, is allowed to climb, and then slowly dismounts.

This is going to sound weird, but I just picked up Dark Souls, and I have one major annoyance with it. No, it has nothing to do with when I did a stupid and lost about 7000 souls in the early part of the Undead Burg. It's the ladders. Even with the ability to slide down them, and even with the game generally having a lot of sluggish weight to actions, the ladder-mounting is just plain obnoxious.

I find it really sad that the first time I hit a ladder in Lightning Returns felt like a breath of fresh air (speaking of which, I need to get back to playing that). I see a ladder, I run at it, I prepare for the worst, and... the unrealistically nimble player character just sort of swoops up it. YES!

The core problem seems to be that, because of how games are controlled in a very coarse-grained way, there's a tradeoff between experiential smoothness and perfectly realistic animation. See also: Halo 4 and non-telekinetic button presses.