It offers you the illusion of gameplay, but usually these segments could be replaced with cut-scenes and there would essentially be no difference.
more and more when I see this type of thing these are deliberately placed to mask loading. a 2 in 1. At first it seems genius; but then it becomes aggravating and tedious. And then downright assaulting to playing the game as you are not actually playing the game at all.
I personally would have preferred a cut scene I could skip than to mull through walking slowly through an area.
no; I would prefer a loading screen.
I will give a perfect example of what constitutes good gameplay flow and design such that I would want to play a game again. Just recently released The Outer Worlds. A no frills low budget production game.
No fancy animations, no cutscenes, chock full of loading screens.
But control is never wrestled away from the player. The player is NEVER asked to do meaningless actions for the sake of masking a loading screen. So none of this hitting a wall three times with a pick axe and squeeze through a narrow space.
None of the taking control away to force the player to look at a vista or to make the player they are supposed to look at this objective or that objective. No quick time events.
Everything the player needs to do in terms of the gameplay is distilled to purely the gameplay that they want you to focus on.
Fast travel routes everywhere. They removed any sort of space traversal. They removed as many animations as possible.
And that means they respect my time. The game is designed so that the player gets to where they want to go right away, without control being wrestled away from the player to hide loading screens or whatever else the developer wants me to see. Their game is distilled down to combat skills; non combat skills; dialog skills. That’s it. And it’s absolutely full of being able to use all three. You are constantly allowed to see the effect of your skill tree decisions as well as your choices for arming yourself and your companions.
that’s an important distinction and I hope with the new SSDs we are no longer seeing this type of stuff. Because it’s frankly a flow killer. And when games are designed with these fake gameplay actions to mask loading or to up the coolness factor I see this as pure tedious because they show up everywhere. These little QTE actions that have nothing to do with the gameplay of the game.
I once saw a quick gameplay snippet in UC4 where they have to drive the Jeep to section, get out of the car and bring the pulley out of the Jeep. Wrap it around two trees and lock it. Go back into the car. Drive it up. And unlock it. I’m guessing players have had to do that more than once.
That’s painful; I’m surprised that people don’t get aggravated over things like that. Because that’s not gameplay. The gameplay is the shooting and cover fire.
To be clear; this is not gameplay.
Those mini actions are the type of tediousness that turned me off Shadow of the Tomb Raider; which I’m almost positive are loading points.
in such a desperate desire to remove loading screens; they’ve put mini elevator games everywhere masked as gameplay. Instead of having good level design where it’s distilled right to what the player wants. Thinking someone wouldn’t catch on; but we all feel it even if we can’t put words to it.
I will take a long elevator or a loading screen over these meaningless action checkpoints anyway. I’ll explain why you should too;
Firstly; the faster the hardware the faster it loads. If PS5 is to believed things drop to < 5 seconds. Elevators would take 5 seconds
secondly; even if you can’t load that fast; I can walk away and do something else while it’s loading. Like taking a drink or using the bathroom.
but these mini checkpoint games. Nothing advances until you complete it. And regardless of how fast the hardware is; you still have to do it. So you are forced to do it.
This winch sequence is 1.5 minutes at least. Nearly 2 minutes. 6x times that’s 12 minutes. 12 minutes you cannot divert.
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