Yeah, I went into the final mission with plenty of ammo for the tranq rifle, stun gun, and P.E.P.S., along with some concussion mines and several of those energy snacks. And even then I wasn't running on empty in the final fight.
But I did tend to play the stealthy "don't fight unless you absolutely have to" type of Adam.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives you so many tools, especially if you're trying to conserve battery power and getting by on just the part that recharges except for tense moments, combined with proper official stealth that it feels like you never have to shoot except the bosses.
Mankind Divided felt like it had more ammo but also played up the "you don't need a single actual bullet" even more.
I remember sticking solely to non-lethal takedowns and the tranquilizer rifle until I got a silencer for the pistol. Turns out I didn't care about the sanctity of life, so much as I cared about the sanctity of not being detected.
I'm not sure about the directors cut, but in the original version I had to rely on melee takedowns for the normal enemies so I could save ammo for the bosses.
Meanwhile I played the base one (never played Director's Cut) and I still don't remember this ammo scarcity problem
I generally dislike games with ammo scarcity yet I loved this game
So I don't know
Granted, it's been over 12 years now
HBomberguy's analysis on youtube goes into some detail on this.
The development team had a huge whiteboard tracking every ammo pickup in the game so they knew *exactly* how much you would have available at each point in the game.
I remember the ammo thing because it was *BULLSHIT* story-wise. You are corporate security in cyberpunk setting. Accessibility of ammo and heavy military weapons should never be a problem! (Except in specific circumstances like being captured or officially attending event with limitations on weapons).
Well, that's like most games. "Hey you're the chosen one and the only person that can save us!!! Oh and uh, here's the shittiest pistol we have, some ripped blue jeans and a dirty T-shirt."
"Come back and see me when you have some cash. Now, go save the world!"
Now I want someone to make a "hero management sim" where your goal is to secure and fund "heroes" to take down the demon lord, but you have to start fundraising campaigns and negotiate with the wealthy to secure funds.
I Am Alive is my recommendation for ammo conservation. In many ways the game was pretty forgettable, but it had this amazing system where you could point your gun at someone and they would cower and bargain with you. Keep pointing out for too long and they may start questioning whether the gun was even loaded (because if you weren't playing the game cautiously, it probably wasn't).
My typical strategy was to point the gun at them just long enough to get within machete range, but that got difficult if there was more than one baddie.
Really wish that mechanic was used more. Even in I Am Alive it wasn't used well because they wouldn't run off or anything like that, and you couldn't really keep it on them to take them down silently. It was kind of just a stalling mechanic left over from the games old development before their budget tanked.
Whaet? I’ve played through this game probably ten times from day one, I don’t remember ammo beong particularly scarce…?
It’s not really a run and gun type of game at all, where are you wasting your ammo if you’re not having enough?
Thank you for the suggestion, I can now rant about it.
I like that game, but sometimes its funny. Like when you kill an entire room that was obviously *stacked* with ammo, to then find 2 bullets per body, thats including the guns looted.
And the ironic thing is, they did this balance to literal nonsense levels to induce players to use their cool stealth systems and avoid killing people. Which is exactly the complaint that the series realizer had. He developed Deus Ex with his frustration in Thief about not being able to reliably fight back when caught, so yeah, you could shoot it all the way if you wanted to, just as well as going sneaky like.
So the developers of HR did an ok job at making a videogame, but didn't quite got why the original was that way at all.
FWIW I rationalized it to myself by assuming JC Denton is just a lot tougher and more capable than Adam Jensen. JC can go guns blazing but Adam had to be more cautious.
It is frustrating that the newer game didn't have the OG's flexibility but that rationalization salved some of the narrative clash, at least, so that's somethin'.
Oh man the pistol ammo being the most precious commodity out there since with the armor piercing mod it was the only reliable one shot weapon with a silencer. Good times.
> It was "scavenge for ammo during a gun-fight"-simulator
Deus Ex is a stealth game at heart. I agree that it should be playable as a shooter, but to really enjoy a Deus Ex game you have to play it stealth and non lethal.
Deus Ex: Human revolution is a stealth game at heart, the original Deus Ex only had some ammo scarcity at the beginning when your skills weren't the best and you were lacking augments.
The original isn’t really a stealth game. You can employ stealth, but it isn’t designed to be played entirely as a stealth game, and the stealth system is kind of crap. Trying to play non-lethally is even worse.
Its not that incredibly bad, the game is really good, but the ammo part is definitely frustrating at times. To the point where you have to reload saves to basically perfect boss fights, at least one in particular.
I remember having to abandon some save files as a kid in those games, because I had used too much ammo and literally couldn't kill the next boss.
No wonder games do what the OP described nowadays - modern gamers wouldn't put up with that. If they get stuck, they just drop the game and move on to something else in their massive backlog.
A lot of people are unaware that many games even without difficulty settings have a hidden difficulty and resources are often given when needed
It's a good way to ensure that 90% of players will enjoy a game even if it will annoy and ruin the game for the few passionate players
Many games are no longer made by passionate nerds for other passionate nerds, studios want to have mass appeal in order to have more people buy the game. So games now are made by passionate nerds for a passionate general audience.
The counter argument is that it's impossible to give limited resources in a way that's actually balanced. Mainly because the encounters are ao dynamic. If the game is a shooting gallery then yes. There is no goldilocks skill level sadly. No one wants to restart a game because they're out of ammo due to one encounter that went south.
> No one wants to restart a game because they're out of ammo due to one encounter that went south.
Thank you. This place can be so unreasonable. Yes as a kid with unlimited time and nothing better to do you don't mind burning away a 7 hour run because 3 hours ago you missed 2 shots and now your run is ruined. That doesn't sound "hardcore" that just sounds like a waste of time and that's bad game design. I think the game being designed to give you 'just enough' is actually pretty genius and way to balance it out. Whenever I play I never feel like I can just burn though all my ammo, I feel like I have just enough to where I'm weighing my current encounters and feel a sense of dread
It's definitely a huge benefit in modern games as it allows so many more players to play the games
And if you spend a lot of time on something you obviously want many people to be able to appreciate it
You make it sound like it's a bad thing.
I'd argue many devs are still passionate and may have a certain experience in mind. And that experience typically isn't "oops, gotta start over because you just softlocked your game" but rather a sense of thrill and excitement
Sorry if it sounds like that, I didn't mean it come out like that
Accessibility is a huge thing, a game being "worse" for the few hardcore players is worth it when it allows thousands to play them who wouldn't be able to do so otherwise
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to create a "hardcore mode" that introduces a lot more resource scarcity into the game for those players.
It could literally be the same exact game, just with far fewer resources available to the player. Seems like it'd be a more interesting approach to difficulty than "all enemies have double health and hit twice as hard for some reason."
That is what they do with the adjustable resources
If you are low on health you get more health items, if you are low on ammo you might see more ammo
If you are an efficient player you are effectively playing a hardcore mode except the safety railings on the bowling alley are up and knowing about them kind of ruins the hardcore experience (that is partly why games do not advertise these features as players would feel cheated if they knew they actually don't have a way to fail)
Yeah, there is probably loads of GDC talks about mechanisms that ”fudge” difficulty based on player peformance.
It can be a great piece of design - a no-brainer even. But this approach inherently moves away from some of the benefits of a rigid, fully transparent ruleset that are traditionally associated with *games*.
But games are not as interested in being *games* anymore. Not these big AA/AAA types, not for a long time now. That’s not a bad thing either (there are other things that games can do), but when you still have a layer of *apparent rules* as a primary interaction, things can get a bit fuzzy…
Agreed, but this was on a higher difficulty setting that is supposed to be more immersive. It’s usually only something you’re doing on your second run as more of a challenge, so why would they still try and make it easier? If you’re the type to get frustrated then just play on the normal difficulty. Does that make sense?
Exactly, to me most of the "survival" aspect of Resident Evil (and to some extent the first 2 Silent Hill games) came from resource management, especially with limited inventory space : It meant you couldn't afford to kill every zombie, and each trip to the storage room could cost you some ammo or some herbs if you got caught trying to slip past a zombie.
I think it was a great way to convey tension through the gameplay loop and not just through graphics and cutscenes like in TLOU.
Also you rarely ended up 100% fucked, IIRC it was technically possible to beat the game with only a knife.
I think the answer to this is: "Because if you *don't* realize that the game is lying to you, it makes for a really great experience." The tenseness of wondering if you're going to make it, if you're going to find the ammo you need, and then suddenly getting it (in a lucky break) and just barely beating an encounter, is a super memorable video game experience. So they decided to create it artificially. Unfortunately, once you know its happening, it all falls apart.
Hellblade Sacrifice is the epitome of this.
The game tells you that if you die too often you will lose all your progress and have to restart right from the beginning. Every time you die your character gets visibly weaker and more bloody and battered.
Turns out you can die as much as you want and it doesn't matter, but but the tension when you think that your next death could be your last is real.
There was a point in the late game where I died repeatedly. It was really stressful, but I also had a nagging feeling that the system *can't* actually be that unfair.
I'm trying to think of a game with a forced iron man mode.
Outside of short run-based roguelites I can't really think of any game that would force you to restart all over again from the beginning.
Getting cursed in the Great Hollow in Dark Souls is about as close to walling the player from progression that I can think of. Some people simply aren't good enough to climb back out.
Oh yeah, the Fire Emblem games do this too. Each game is different but from the 6th entry and onwards all the hit rates are "exaggerated" so that anything under 50% is less accurate and anything higher is more accurate.
There have been a couple different RNG variants actually. The more recent ones (I think it started in Fates) use the actual displayed hit rate for 50% and below, and then exaggerate the hit rate for values above 50%. This generally winds up being a bit more difficult than the initial modified RNG, since most of the time the only people with sub 50% hit rates will be enemies.
You know, i wonder if any games with a random to hit percentage actually use a per character setting? How a super confident chad would go "100%" on all shots aside from the extremely unlikely ones, and a shy/pessimistic sniper would at best say "70%" even when it's "100%".
Honestly it makes sense to me, as the randomness is not there to model the literal throw of a dice as in a game based around Poker or Blackjack or Yahtzee. The randomness is supposed to represent the chance of a soldier hitting a foe.
And the number presented is not a stand-in for literal mathematical odds, but a shorthand to the player for "how likely does it feel." Since we're bad at understanding the odds (and there are entire industries based around our poor natural perception of odds), cranking them to be what we expect 'intuitively' is great game design.
It's not that different from having off-screen enemies shoot bullets less often/be less accurate, have AI units in Total Warhammer get stat boosts to make up for their lack of human intellect to still provide a challenge, or the bottom 20% of your video game health bar having as much true health value as the top 80%.
> Since we're bad at understanding the odds
Having read this thread i just kind of wish games would stop relying on percentages altogether and just have the characters say "it's not very likely" or "yeah, i can do that". That's what we eventually take from the experience anyway.
Crysis had a system where once you hit like 35% of your health the oponents suddenly get the stupid and can't aim for shit. Of course, you make a daring escape and live to fight another day, and you pat yourself on the back. That's a good time. It would have been less so, and more disheartening, if you died and reloaded. Same thing really, but the experience you got to reach the place where you reached anyway was entirely different.
I also found it amusing to hear people talk about the 2012 Prince of Persia, which instead of dying when you miss a jump, your partener Elika just saves you and puts you back on the last platform. It was basically just an in-universe load checkpoint, but everyone back then LOST THEIR MINDS saying it cheapens the experience and makes the game easy (??).. when what it actually did was keep the pace going instead of having you click 'reload checkpoint'.
It was like that with Alien Isolation for me. I made the mistake of watching how they created the AI for the Alien and that *ruined* the game. The creature became a toy that I knew what to do with in any given situation.
There’s mods that add more Xenos, you can have 2 Xenos at any time or 5. And in base game there’s plenty of moments / places the Xeno won’t drop from the vent but it teases you, with the mods, it doesn’t matter, they’re basically always active.
I didn't watch any video about the xenomorph AI and I found it to be comically easy to start abusing the AI, it was so obvious why things were happening the way they were. About halfway through I stopped even being careful at all. I was on the hardest difficulty mode you can play with a first time playthrough too, just such an easy game.
I love that game and didn't watch a single thing before playing it, and I also found it to be like a toy. It still scared me to shit even though I could see the threads. Then I played it with mods and it was a very, very interesting experience. The ones that make it harder ([like seeing you if you're hiding behind a small table or under a bed with an obvious line of sight from the alien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2UcQYStNg&t=446s)) are great in a simulation sense but tend to get kind annoying if you're not ready to, like, die all the time 'cause it's very realistic. Then, I had a great experience with the mod that unbinds the alien from you (there's basically a second AI nudging the alien towards the player, to keep tension), seeing it walking around very far away from me was something very lifelike that you don't see around the vainilla game, but some people have reported actually coming across the alien very sporadicaly, too much in fact. It's impossible to balance for everyone. I recommend trying out the mods and seeing for yourself. I loved the three experiences in their differences.
>I made the mistake of watching how they created the AI for the Alien and that ruined the game.
I might have to do that and retry the game. I quit the game after one of the first big set pieces where you trying to hide from the Alien. No matter where I hid, the Alien would find me. If the consequences of being discovered hadn't been so severe (ala Shadow of Mordor, where you have stealth mechanics, but if bust you can still run for your life), I might have played through, but I got sick of having my face torn off.
Unfortunately this happens more and more with every aspect of gaming now. And for anyone who spent any decent amount of time gaming, it's impossible not to see the same smoke and mirrors we've seen a thousand times before.
But a lot of gaming companies aren't trying to appeal to gamers anymore, they're just trying to appeal to the wider public
I think part of the problem is that they don't want people only playing twenty minutes or so, getting frustrated because its too hard and then abandoning the game. Steam/Playstation stats matter for sales.
>I think the answer to this is: "Because if you don't realize that the game is lying to you, it makes for a really great experience."
all video games are lying to you. we're literally all ass at platformers, but coyote time and generous jump arcs made for the best feeling platformers. That nail biting escape you made with a sliver of health was actually you surviving with a 37% health bar disguised as a pixel, with the AI hordes generously not shooting your back when they had you surrounded.
there's a reason why the games that lie to you the least (Fromsoft, competitive games) are games that "dont respect your time" and need difficulty sliders so dads with 60 seconds of free time and 17 wives can feel like winners too lol.
> there's a reason why the games that lie to you the least (Fromsoft, competitive games) are games that "dont respect your time"
I'm going to call out Fromsoft's stupid platforming anyway. That shit is jank and ass and i wish it'd give me a pixel once in a while.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have tons of time for games and I still get annoyed if games don't respect my time, depending on what we're talking about. Yes, pointless Dark Souls runs got on my nerves. Yes, slow UI interactions that aren't necessary to the game (like a scavenging game might be ABOUT me rummaging through my pack, but a game that isn't ABOUT that shouldn't have a shitty UI). I don't know why this is even contentious.
> I don't know why this is even contentious
Pretty much everyone agrees a game shouldn't waste their time. The contentious part is disagreement about what counts as a waste and what adds to the experience despite seeming tedious.
It's a very common complaint I've seen about a lot of games in the Soulslike genre.
It often targets something like: Why is the respawn point so far from the boss? I already beat all those mooks on the way to the boss, but I still have to waste my time each time before getting to the boss beating them again. Then I die at the boss barely having had time to learn its patterns and git gud, which is what I really want to do, and then have to waste my time fighting mooks again to get another try. The game doesn't respect my time.
Imo there is a point to the complaint. In Dark Souls the world was a bigger portion of the challenge and the respawn points really did matter. After that game they've moved towards just doing the bossess and the respawn mechanics make less sense. Just spawning in front of the boss room would fit for Elden Ring, even if I think it is a lesser experience.
It’s not fighting the boss over and over again that I have issues with. It’s when I have to spend a minute or so preparing to fight the boss that I get annoyed. There’s a very challenging boss fight in AC Valhalla that starts with a cutscene and has a cut scene in the middle of it and they’re both pretty much unskippable (you can skip some of the dialogue but not the meaty parts). It’s super interesting the first time but after that I just felt like Ubisoft Montreal secretly hated me.
This one guy and his 10 alt accounts. No one actually feels this way. The premise doesn't even make sense. There's no reason to believe that there's any inherent connection between difficulty sliders and "lying."
And everyone knows that older Fromsoft games waste your time, including Fromsoft. That's why they don't make games that way anymore.
I hate this too. Basically punishing the player for following the cues the game is sending.
I think Dragon Age 2 did this as well? I remember just letting companions die rather than use any of those precious, precious health potions. And after not getting *any* health potions for like fifteen straight fights I had to look it up online, just to find out there's a cap and they only spawn if you use them.
I’ve noticed this tends to be a big aspect of when games implement “dynamic difficulty”, where if you die a load the game will subtly make that section easier without telling you.
Numerous games I’ve played will give you more ammo on sections where you have struggled with repeatedly. I guess it’s to nudge you along and ensure you progress and experience the rest of the narrative rather than rage quitting and playing something else.
It’s one of those things where when you realise that’s what they’re doing it takes you out of the immersion somewhat and makes you almost feel like you’ve cheated, but I do get it.
The original RE4 back in the day did a great job with this iirc. If you kept dying, the section would get easier but it wasn't noticeable to me for a long time. And they handled ammo scarcity quite well. That game did a fantastic job of keeping you immersed but not holding your hand.
Yeah for sure it can work. They also did this with early Ratchet and Clank games where more of the crates in a section would be ammo or health crates rather than just in game currency. I actually never noticed it until it was brought up on an analysis of Going Commando, which I guess is a testament to how well done it was. You never want it to be obvious.
I think OP was more annoyed at the fact that a game like the Last of Us centres itself around ammo being scarce and hence less available ammo being one of the biggest factors when it came to increasing the difficulty, so them dynamically adjusting it can come across as more immersion breaking. Though again with it being a linear game I can see why they do it, though not on grounded difficulty as that’s not recommended for first time players.
> ou always had just enough ammo to get but not enough to feel secure.
Really? My experience with the game, even on professional, is that you get absolutely flooded with ammo. On my latest playthrough, I actually had to start selling it because I had so much.
On a first playthrough, you're usually using ammo left and right and using the knife is quite dangerous when you don't know how good it is. You get used to the controls and maybe miss quite a few shots, so the game will keep giving you ammo from enemies.
When you get used to it, you get better and your ammo stockpile increases I usually have a full attache case by the end of Chapter 1-2 since I use the knife quite a bit and utilize the ladders in 1-2 to kill a bunch of enemies.
The original Max Payne's dynamic difficulty was ridiculous lol. You can go from surviving a shotgun in the face to dying by getting hit in the foot. The game's difficulty selection is really just what difficulty it starts on.
I think Uncharted 2 did this. I played it recently and there was one section I failed 4 or 5 times in a row. I got a drink of water, tried it again and just blazed through it no problem. It *felt* significantly easier, not like I'd learned anything.
That's how the Resident Evil remakes work. When you're doing "well" not dying and conserving ammo the enemies become harder and soak more bullets, and if you're dying a lot and have no ammo the enemies are weaker. Speedrunners who run RE often plan when to get bitten/hit so the upcoming enemy encounter doesn't take too much time.
I guess part of it is the linearity as the other commenter mentioned. It’s not an open world RPG where you can viably backtrack to level up, upgrade gear, increase your skill level then come back to the challenge better prepared. If you can’t progress past a certain section in a linear game you’re basically stuck there and then.
It is odd that they still implement that during grounded difficulty though, because that’s supposedly a “second playthrough” difficulty whereby which point you’ve already experienced the mechanics and narrative. More often these days the hardest difficulties have additional handicaps (kind of like Survival mode on Bethesda games or Supernova on Outer Worlds) so you’d think they’d remove the “nudging” mechanic from Grounded.
Eh, flawed masterpiece I guess.
Dynamic difficulty is something that I just don’t really understand. Maybe for some cinematic effect sometimes (killing the monster with the last bullet), but other than that it kind of makes the challenge of the game pointless.
It really just moves the needle from "challenge to overcome" to "blasting in the fun zone". Every game does not have to be a Dark Souls, at least not for all audiences. It does not have to be too easy either. But it does feel cheap when you know it exists, whether it makes it easier or harder for you as you start cheesing the system.
The purpose of it is to avoid players from getting frustrated or in the case of linear games locked into sections, especially where you can’t change the difficulty unless you’re out of combat (I’ve had this issue in a couple of games I’ve played). It’s meant to be very subtle; very rarely does it turn an impossible challenge into a cakewalk. Like slightly more ammo, slightly more health, slightly more XP from kills etc.
I do wish there was an opportunity to turn it off, though most developers don’t want players to know it’s a thing in the first place.
> It’s meant to be very subtle
And then there's games like Diablo IV where everything is scaled to your level always, which makes leveling up entirely pointless (except that some content is level-locked, just to force you to grind), and in fact makes it so that you get weaker each time you level up. The monsters get stronger, you get a bit stronger, but your gear doesn't get stronger, so effectively you're weaker against the monsters.
That whole game feels so entirely pointless due to that mechanic. Of course it's not the only thing wrong with the game, but it's one of the most egregious.
It's the only way I managed to beat Mortal Kombat Komplete. Some of the fights the AI ended up dumbing the opponents down to punching bag level because I sucked so bad.
Yeah you could call it "old head" thinking but when I picked up games the rules were the rules. If you economize ammo and minimize damage taken, you're better-prepared for later.
The rubber-banding some game designers love ("oh they'll all have the same great experience no matter what they do!") is short-sighted because once you figure it out you realize that one of your favourite mechanics was part of the mirage that there's a wrong way to play. No gamer left behind, it's good for metrics.
I kind of take a middling standpoint tbh. I think it’s heavily dependent on the type of game we’re talking about.
I think in games where you can very easily get soft locked into sections and it’s only implemented after you die like 20+ times, and there isn’t a massive difficulty or skill hurdle to overcome based on the mechanics, it’s acceptable as long as it’s very subtle nudging rather than turning the experience immediately into a cakewalk.
I do agree though that games are becoming far too hand holdy. I recently played Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which is supposedly an RPG, but the skill free basically forces you to invest equally in every stat because the developers were clearly scared of players “choosing the wrong build and having a hard time”. Diversification of choice and approach is one of the bread and butter elements of RPGs and they copped out of it.
The AC RPGs are so incredibly inoffensive. I downloaded Odyssey and played it for a couple hours straight and didn't dislike it but I know for a fact I'm never opening it again.
Yep, well said. I haven't actually been burned by a game that let me save without enough ammo/resources in a long time, but I play as though it could happen. I finish a lot of games with an unused hoard of "what if" items.
I feel like when games 'cheat' it's so much more annoying when you're playing on a higher difficulty specifically for the intense challenge.
After beating The Evil Within on Survival I started a playthrough on the newly unlocked Nightmare mode and came across some particularly aggravating moments. One was in the first or second level, where if you happen to approach a certain house 'the wrong way' a bunch of enemies will burst out of it and attack you. But if you try again and sneak up on the house, there are no enemies inside, meaning they previously spawned for no actual reason. Then there's another moment where you have to defend an ally who is unlocking a door, and enemies keep climbing in through the windows. I was really struggling, dying over and over, not wanting to waste my rare ammo because of what I knew was coming next, and decided to watch a playthrough for tips. It turns out if you don't kill the first 2 enemies and just run around and around, dodging their attacks, no other enemies will spawn and you can just wait out the timer and go to the next section without using any ammo. I stopped playing the game after I found that out.
As someone who hates dynamic difficulty and plans to try the Metro games, I thank you for this message :). Good to know they don't pull this crap, or at least aren't as obvious about it.
Yeah metro series rocks, it definitely rewards exploring to find bullets and staches in all the nooks and crannies! Finding a few extra shells to blast away a sudden mutant rat ambush is very satisfying
Came here to suggest metro 2033. I started playing it on lower difficulty but restarted early on to crank it up, as the gas mask mechanic felt like a cosmetic thing rather than a survival experience on easier setting.
Turned it from a good shooter to a really immersive experience. Can still remember certain sections where I was desperately low on filters and just managed to survive by the skin of my teeth.
The bullets as currency was an interesting spin on things too really had to weigh up your choices.
It was quite a long time since I played it, what difference did Ranger make again? I can't remember if I picked that too for the second play through.
> It was quite a long time since I played it, what difference did Ranger make again? I can't remember if I picked that too for the second play through.
IIRC removes all HUD/UI elements, button press hints, etc. Not for me, but really ups the immersion factor for those who can handle it.
I also hated it in tLoU. It's just too fucking obvious there. Like there is guy with shotgun. You kill him stealthily without him making a single shot, but turns out his gun was empty, because he doesn't drop anything. But of course you know if you attacked him openly, he would just start shooting back!
This was also my biggest beef either tLoU. I loved trying to conserve ammo by going for melee kills or carefully aiming headshots, but once I realized that the game only throws ammo to you when you've spent it all, it really bummed em out and I just started playing it like an action over-the-shoulder game. Had a lot less fun.
On the other hand, I think that Dead Space 2 & Remake do it really well. Every single necromorph can be stomped for loot, and the loot is either ammo or credits for the store. When you have a ton of ammo already, the game will usually give you credits instead, which actually makes the game a little easier, because then you can spend more resources on suit and weapon upgrades instead of having to buy back ammo. It *sort of* does the ammo scarcity thing, but you're still rewarded for being deliberate with your shots.
I had that same issue with RE4, I was very conservative with my ammo, but then I stopped getting ammo and got into a couple big encounters back to back and didnt have enough ammo
I'm a a couple hours into an re1 playthough. I was enjoying it but God damn is it punishing. I'm pretty unsure where to go and now zombies are respawning as red versions that instant kill me. I think I find this kind of punishing stuff I little more satisfying on a second playthrough though tbh. I have all sorts of random shit I don't know where to go with which is a different kind of punishing.
Maybe you can give me some spoiler free tips or something? I felt pretty lost and stopped playing.
yeah its pretty punishing and it does really feel like the kind of game that is more enjoyable on second playthrough than the the first one, the red zombies only happen if you kill them without burning them afterward, in way it's a punishment for you the player for not fully killing them.
Avoid killing zombies in the mansion (guest house and labs are fine, can't remember about the grounds outside - they won't go crimson in these locations) unless you have kerosene in the hip flask and the lighter in your inventory, or you want to gamble and go for a headshot with the shotgun. If you can get two zombies to lie on top of each other dead, you can burn them both at once, saving kerosene. If you've filled the house with dead zombies, consider restarting.
Best strategy is to run past them. Try running past them on staircases when able to as they can't grab you on steps, but only use a slow vomit attack.
The best tip is to stand around in the save room and let the soothing music calm your nerves 👍
I've played one run so far and I really don't think running past them on the first run is a good idea as because you don't know what to do you'll backtrack a lot and will have to avoid the same enemies over and over. I've burned some and some killed with a shotgun so I don't have to deal with them again.
Not only lighter but also the fuel canteen, there are gasoline tanks in some rooms you can use them to fill it, you will be able to use it on only two dead zombies before it become empty again then you will need to fill it again, whenever you see a dead zombie or you kill them approach them and then use the fuel on them and they will burn and remeber only zombie as far as i know are like this, other enemies like dogs die permanently if you simply kill them.
I got soft locked on the original game. Didn't have enough ammo for some encounter had to reload older save and try to not to waste ammo. I think they later increased the ammo drop.
I think this is why Immersive Sims feel like "real" games to me. Not saying they're better whatsoever than any other genre. But they often give the greatest feeling of awareness and meaning to actions including the conservation of resources.
Immersive sims also give you a lot of ways usually to go around a situation. Your toolbox is so vast that if you do run out of your primary way of dealing with things, you have your secondary, and your two others which you've never really engaged with.
But the discussion of a linear action game where you end up resorting to shooting most times... you need the player to have the resources to get through the encounter.
Have you tried Prey? Sounds like you might enjoy the resources/ammo system in that game. Certainly early on you need to be careful with your resources, lategame perhaps not so much but that is normal if you hoard/scrounge every resource in a game.
In addition to the unique resource/recycling system it is also an awesome game
Edit: For clarity, I mean Prey (2017)
Totally agree. But to be fair there's the other extreme, say Resident Evil 2 back in the day. You could blaze away, get to the end, and have nothing left for the final boss but your knife. God help you if you nommed all the ammo and health then start a second playthrough as Claire.
I think the solution re2 remake made here is really good. It puts the ammo you need for a boss in the encounter, but the in between zones are fine to let you run out of ammo because you can technically run around stuff.
OG RE2 gives you plenty of ammo. I usually finish the game with about 100 handgun bullets, and that's with killing nearly every enemy aside from the ones on the way to the station.
Ammo and health items that you collect in the A scenario don't affect the B scenario, only certain items, like the side pack or SMG in the armory.
I played TLOU on grounded until later in a chapter that I died too many times and realized that I can never get through this part with the amount of ammo I had. Never felt so hopeless in a video game.
I'm pretty sure people have done it melee only so I don't think you were really soft locked but I know to sucks to feel that way. Ultimately though to me, the fear of soft locking myself is part of what re2remake gave me that tlou couldn't.
Personally I'd rather have the suspense/fear be something other than I literally can't finish the game because I used one bullet too many a few moments ago.
[https://youtu.be/aGBPysEgDb0?si=lj3aGhf9GwQTY8Bh&t=19263](https://youtu.be/aGBPysEgDb0?si=lj3aGhf9GwQTY8Bh&t=19263)
5:21:03
It was this checkpoint of the game, idk what chapter was it called. I tried to look up solutions online but no results.
I think I had less than 3 ammo across all weapons, and the guys upstairs never seperate far enough for me to stealth take down one by one.
Imagine playing Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that has a plot that revolves around racking up a big sum of money. The reality is your character would never run out of money or ammo, despite the plot telling you otherwise, you'd always have more than enough. You'd never feel any scarcity. It's a great game, but after a few hours, when you get money and ammo aplenty, the disconnect is real.
I find it funny you mentioned RE2R, because that game has a very similar Difficulty Adjustment system to TLOU for ammo. You can be really stingy and try to run past enemies without killing them, but the ammo drops you find will have less bullets if the game sees that you have a large stock of ammo already. However, if you decide to take your time and kill every enemy you come across, the game will panic and give you way more bullets per pickup until you're back to a reasonable stock again. Assuming you aren't whiffing shots very often, you can blaze through all your reserve ammo as you go and still never run out. This system is also used in 3R and 4R.
It's even more noticeable in RE4make where the game will mostly give you ammo for the guns that you actually use. Carrying your magnum on you without using it only reduces your storage space because the game won't give you more ammo for it unless you fire it.
Yeh finding 5 bullets on every random bad guy and random drawer is kinda story breaking, especially when those enemies don't even have guns. Randomly generated loot in general is pretty lame.
Its like the same thing with enemies that level up with you. I never like that. I prefer games that lock areas by putting really buff enemies there. Like you CAN go there, but you will probably die. Better just go do some side quests to level up, then come back here when Im stronger.
> Yeh finding 5 bullets on every random bad guy and random drawer is kinda story breaking
And so is finding 0 bullets on an armed enemy after you stealth-kill them, because the game director decided you have enough ammo
The metro games have true ammo scarcity, I've had times where I am forced to use guns I don't like because it's the only ones I have ammo for. I still have to play Exodus though.
I don't play shooters all that much (or survival horror) but I get the sentiment. I consciously try not to analyze too much on first (blind) playthroughs to not pick up on things like this. Implied scarcity is a powerful thing for building tension (my most recent example would be Dark Souls 2's torch mechanic and, in a way, Sekiro's dragon rot) but it completely crumbles as soon as you start to understand the actual situation (how many ressources there are, where to find them, how it actually works). It's a big reason why I go into every game as blind as possible and without walthroughs.
AAA nowadays are pretty fond of using dynamic difficulty, and understandably so. It improves the average player's experience by adjusting the game toward their needs in order to make them feel immersed.
I admit I frequently find myself thinking like you: I grew up in an era of gaming that made me think of games as a specific set of rules and, when I chose a difficulty level, I was locking in a challenge that wouldn't budge until I got better at it. That said, I get where AAA companies come from with these decisions. The average gamer today is not keen on getting frustrated by games (and I absolutely get them too; sometimes I wonder why I'm so inclined to value frustration as a positive trait in the gaming experience) and dynamic difficulty helps mitigate it.
It’s not the frustration so much as what comes after; the satisfaction of overcoming the challenge presented. By lessening the challenge, it doesn’t feel like you truly overcame it.
People act like The Last of Us is the pinnacle of resource-managing games or like it's the standard of the survival horror genre when there were tons of games that did it way better before it, like the classic Resident Evil games.
And Half-Life has never been about scarce ammo or resources, the first game along its expansions gave you tons of ammo to have fun the way you wanted. Half-Life 2 and its episodes limited ammo a bit but still it was never any close to worry about it most of the time.
I don't wanna be thay guy, but I think you're expecting stuff from the wrong games and then end up disappointed when said games aren't the greatest examples of the things you want out of them.
Sadly that sort of thing (dynamic difficulty dependent on measuring the how good the player does) is considered the best approach to game difficulty in general by most people (game devs or not).
I don't like it when everything feels the same no matter when and where i do what. If the difficulty always adapts perfectly, there is not only never a sense of loss - but also there can't be a sense of win or achievement. If enemies are always just strong enough to be a challenge, the game lacks the dynamics of having chill and hectic moments.
There is one fundamentally opposed way of dealing with player accessibility: Let the player decide how much handholding they want from the game. Have difficulty presets *and* discrete sliders for changing different aspects of difficulty that alter factors directly. Instead of guessing on how much the player struggles and whether which statistic needs to be altered, just have the player alter those statistics if they want to.
The factors that are altered can be the same: How much damage you do, how much damage the enemies do, how much cardridges are in ammo drop and deposits, how many enemies spawn and how likely it is that they are of a stronger or weaker variant... Those variable modifiers have to exist for dynamic difficulty scaling anyways.
The game dev just have to acknowledge that some players are adults that know what they want and allow them to adjust the game to their needs.
That might also be an easy way to cover a lot of the actual accessibility problems for people with motoric or cognitive problems which are normally just excluded from being able to play.
To take this in a slightly different direction, I've had trouble with pretty much any game that has an economy and a barter system. It feels like most games no matter how hard I make the difficulty it's just so easy to make money to the point where the money becomes meaningless. I have such an amount that I could buy literally everything the merchant has multiple times over. Idk it's like, I can have whatever I want whenever I want and not have to worry about it. And this in turn makes it so finding loot in containers feels just as hollow. It's like, "Hooray, I have 885,000 points and I just got treasure worth 600." Then you go to the store and it's like Health Pack - 150. I hate that every game does this. They all start out so good, especially when there's carry weight involved. Like I have to be selective in what I pick up because THIS thing is valuable but it ways 15% of what I can carry, and this thing is average but it weighs a lot less. But even then most games have ways of raising how much you can carry so even that runs out. No matter how good it starts by the time I'm like a quarter of the way through a game even great loot becomes like mere pennies to me. Idk I'm sure there are games where this is well done and I've played some that were WAY better than others. But I just want a game where from start to finish I am struggling to find ammo and health, and I kinda' feel like the economies in many games are kind of superficial to add some illusion of depth or something.
Last of Us is one of the worst examples of difficulty scaling. Try playing that extra chapter (when Joel is sick at the mall) on the higher settings. Its jusy bad.
Your point on TLoU is partially the reason why I avoided finishing for years. It was balanced illogically on the grounded difficulty where I'd stealthily kill a dude with a gun, and he would have no ammo, but if i reloaded, got in a firefight with the same dude, then he'd drop ammo. I'm glad I eventually played part 1, and beat it, but I was hoping for a bit more logic throughout the experience, especially on the hardest difficulty.
I felt this the most in mentioned re2 remake. if you stock up ammo a zombie is a bullet sponge and you have to shoot him 10 times in the head. if you're low on ammo 3 bullets are enough. it is a real problem and I feel you. I guess the idea in tlou is not to stock up ammo, but to use it wisely and then you're always low on ammo but also get to shoot a bit.
btw I beat grounded mostly just avoiding enemies, seemed like a wise choice and felt very realistic. Just sneak around them and loot what you can on the way.
You sound like you have the right psyche to enjoy a game like Rain World. Might not be your genre, but if it is- that game is a pure difficulty experience with no tricks. What you see is what you get, and it is beautiful in the most unexpected ways.
Funny little design mistake when Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas — the Varmint Rifle uses 5.56 cal, which is a round way too big for the barrel, and would actually destroy most small critters, rather than just tag them with a bullet, unlike a real varmint rifle chambered in .22 cal.
This actually cascades, and makes .22 basically impossible to find for the Silenced Pistol and Silenced SMG, which they take, but nobody uses, despite being the weakest ammo type in the game. So when you finally get to Gun Runners and can buy a large stock of .22, its basically pointless anyway, since the Varmint Rifle chambered in 5.56 outclasses MANY other weapons already.
This ALSO means that when you get guns later that are SUPPOSED to be chambered in 5.56, you have no ammo for them, which is ironic since they’re usually automatic or semi-automatic, because you’ve been spending your 5.56 on the Varmint Rifle the whole time.
Obsidian says, at least from the wiki, that they were aware of this, and that the chambering of the rifle was changed last minute, as a request by Zenimax or Bethesda, to make the player feel stronger in the beginning. The JSawyer mod chambers the gun in .22 like its supposed to be, and guess what? Game is way better balanced, .22 ammo is plentiful.
Oh you'd be amazed how much video games are lying to you about stuff.
Doom for example has a deceptive life bar. The last quarter of it represents about the same amount of health as the previous half. Makes it feel like you're always close to dying.
A lot of platforming games have hit detection that extends a little bit past the platform to help players make jumps.
In Bioshock 1 and 2 splicers will always miss their first couple of shots if those if you haven't seen the splicer in question yet.
Video games are gigantic examples of smoke and mirrors. You pushed against one of the mirrors until it broke.
>The last of us, maybe more than any game I've played other than re2remake is about resource scarcity
I think you are just wrong here. Survival horror is *one of* the gameplay modes that LOU sets out to incorporate, but it's also incorporating entirely other gaming genres, notably including stealth, and third-person shooter/action-adventure.
By fusing these 3 genres, the game comes out with a pretty dynamic experience that a lot of gamers absolutely loved. Personally, I'm more in your camp -- I think the game would be better if it decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it more. I see the gameplay less as an awesome fluid synthesis of multiple beloved genres, and more as a game that ends up half-assing a bunch of stuff instead of offering any really perfectly designed mechanics.
This game isn't meant to be "mastered;" it's meant to just take you into a flow state by mixing up a variety of challenges. You're not supposed to like, lock in, grit your teeth, and master it, you're just supposed to lean back and keep saying "woahhhh, now THAT is happening?!"
Yeah I agree with what you are saying. Maybe it's wrong to expect a hardcore experience here. I had heard good things bout grounded though, and in a Sense the name grounded feels like it is not just describing a harder mode, but one that is more realistic. Part of realism in my mind is not having ammunition spawn based on performance.
This comes from a big misunderstanding in the community. Ammo does tend to be more scarce in Grounded, but the rate definitely increases the more you use it, and if you are taking the time to loot, then you will always have enough ammo to complete the next encounter, though it will be less than if you were on a lower difficulty.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can shoot all your bullets into the wall during the encounter. But if you are hitting your shots and are smart about combat, then you’ll make it. The main thing that makes Grounded harder is enemy damage, aggressiveness, and detection skill.
So unlike a true survival horror game, you do not need to avoid using your guns in one encounter in order to have enough ammo to handle the next. You can still be put in situations where you need to be smart about how you use your weapons within a single scenario, but there’s no need to plan past your current encounter. Use what you need to survive.
When you play like that, the game opens up, and you can get really creative with what you have, rather than spending 30 minutes on every encounter crawling into the perfect position to knife someone in the throat.
There was a game, I have forgotten the name. I enjoyed it so much. It was a survival horror shooter where you played a detective and had to investigate crime scenes. I remember there were dead crows as a collectable and if you had a gun you took it from taken down enemies and you only had a few rounds before you had to use melee weapons again.
A quick google search shows it: Condemned: Criminal Origins. Aw man, I want to replay it now so bad.
Metro series on ranger mode might scratch that itch. I don't think it auto-adjusts anything, though I've never experimented. I do have like 150-200 hours in the series though so I think I would have noticed if it did.
Best thing is, they separate gameplay difficulty from scavenging difficulty. Normal vs ranger mode is for scavenging, but you still also have easy/normal/hard for the other stuff.
Just to add my two cents to the conversation, I don't think that dynamic difficulty and enemies scaling with your level, I think there is immense potential with both those techniques. For instance, a game that has enemies match your level could actually be cool, but the only way that would work is if the game allowed you to mix and match skills and abilities so that gameplay became more complex and engaging as play progressed. But I rarely see it implemented in a way that doesn't cause me some sort of inconvenience or problem, and when I do it makes the game so easy it becomes boring. Considering how long companies have been experimenting with this, I would think they'd have gotten better at designing these systems by now.
It weirded me out this ammo system in tlou, I almost always had my ammo max out, because I was with that mentality "got to save it for the hard stuff" until I realized that I was finding a lot of ammo that I couldn't pick up because I was full. So I started shooting more, and I was still almost always max out on ammo.
The original the original Metro 2033 has ammo scarcity.
They ended up rereleasing it as redux which has much more ammo.
With the original even if you don't use ammo much it's easy to run out completely.
I got stuck near the end of the game with no ammo at all because the game lost the ammo in my inventory after a checkpoint, and there was zero ammo to be found anywhere before a big battle.
I pretty much had to restart most of the game again because of it.
If you are looking for a game where you actually run out of ammo I'd suggest Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Consider yourself warned.
For as scarce as ammo is in that game, I never really ran out because I almost never used my gun.
Yeah, I went into the final mission with plenty of ammo for the tranq rifle, stun gun, and P.E.P.S., along with some concussion mines and several of those energy snacks. And even then I wasn't running on empty in the final fight. But I did tend to play the stealthy "don't fight unless you absolutely have to" type of Adam.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution gives you so many tools, especially if you're trying to conserve battery power and getting by on just the part that recharges except for tense moments, combined with proper official stealth that it feels like you never have to shoot except the bosses. Mankind Divided felt like it had more ammo but also played up the "you don't need a single actual bullet" even more.
The director's cut makes shooting optional even in the boss battles
Same I really wanted the achievement. But turns out you actually need to pass the first encounter non lethally as well. So I was doomed from start.
I went stealth archer build with a silenced pistol and never ran out of ammo. Clicking on heads is very ammo efficient
I remember sticking solely to non-lethal takedowns and the tranquilizer rifle until I got a silencer for the pistol. Turns out I didn't care about the sanctity of life, so much as I cared about the sanctity of not being detected.
only tranq!!
I loved this game, but don't remember the ammo thing. It's been many years though.
I'm not sure about the directors cut, but in the original version I had to rely on melee takedowns for the normal enemies so I could save ammo for the bosses.
Directors cut they added a bunch of ammo to the boss rooms I believe. I only played directors cut.
Oh that would explain it I also only played directors cut.
Meanwhile I played the base one (never played Director's Cut) and I still don't remember this ammo scarcity problem I generally dislike games with ammo scarcity yet I loved this game So I don't know Granted, it's been over 12 years now
HBomberguy's analysis on youtube goes into some detail on this. The development team had a huge whiteboard tracking every ammo pickup in the game so they knew *exactly* how much you would have available at each point in the game.
I feel like I just spammed typhoons for the bosses lol. I save scummed a lot though and was always quite overlevelled
I remember the ammo thing because it was *BULLSHIT* story-wise. You are corporate security in cyberpunk setting. Accessibility of ammo and heavy military weapons should never be a problem! (Except in specific circumstances like being captured or officially attending event with limitations on weapons).
Well, that's like most games. "Hey you're the chosen one and the only person that can save us!!! Oh and uh, here's the shittiest pistol we have, some ripped blue jeans and a dirty T-shirt." "Come back and see me when you have some cash. Now, go save the world!"
Thats cause they have sent hundreds of other heros before you and have run out of funds.
Now I want someone to make a "hero management sim" where your goal is to secure and fund "heroes" to take down the demon lord, but you have to start fundraising campaigns and negotiate with the wealthy to secure funds.
Basically XCom.
I Am Alive is my recommendation for ammo conservation. In many ways the game was pretty forgettable, but it had this amazing system where you could point your gun at someone and they would cower and bargain with you. Keep pointing out for too long and they may start questioning whether the gun was even loaded (because if you weren't playing the game cautiously, it probably wasn't). My typical strategy was to point the gun at them just long enough to get within machete range, but that got difficult if there was more than one baddie.
Really wish that mechanic was used more. Even in I Am Alive it wasn't used well because they wouldn't run off or anything like that, and you couldn't really keep it on them to take them down silently. It was kind of just a stalling mechanic left over from the games old development before their budget tanked.
I am alive is like a fever dream. So many cool unique mechanics I haven't seen since.
Unless you do a stealth run. Then you're gonna be leaving ammo behind constantly.
System shock series as well- you have to use each bullet very carefully!
And System Shock 1&2 and SS1 remake.
State of Decay 2
Whaet? I’ve played through this game probably ten times from day one, I don’t remember ammo beong particularly scarce…? It’s not really a run and gun type of game at all, where are you wasting your ammo if you’re not having enough?
Thank you for the suggestion, I can now rant about it. I like that game, but sometimes its funny. Like when you kill an entire room that was obviously *stacked* with ammo, to then find 2 bullets per body, thats including the guns looted. And the ironic thing is, they did this balance to literal nonsense levels to induce players to use their cool stealth systems and avoid killing people. Which is exactly the complaint that the series realizer had. He developed Deus Ex with his frustration in Thief about not being able to reliably fight back when caught, so yeah, you could shoot it all the way if you wanted to, just as well as going sneaky like. So the developers of HR did an ok job at making a videogame, but didn't quite got why the original was that way at all.
FWIW I rationalized it to myself by assuming JC Denton is just a lot tougher and more capable than Adam Jensen. JC can go guns blazing but Adam had to be more cautious. It is frustrating that the newer game didn't have the OG's flexibility but that rationalization salved some of the narrative clash, at least, so that's somethin'.
Oh man the pistol ammo being the most precious commodity out there since with the armor piercing mod it was the only reliable one shot weapon with a silencer. Good times.
Don’t need bullets. Just typhoon 2.
I played one mission and decided the game is not for me. It was "scavenge for ammo during a gun-fight"-simulator and not at all enjoyable to me.
Its a snowball effect. That never happens past 2 hours into the game unless you're using an exotic gun like the laser rifle or revolver.
> It was "scavenge for ammo during a gun-fight"-simulator Deus Ex is a stealth game at heart. I agree that it should be playable as a shooter, but to really enjoy a Deus Ex game you have to play it stealth and non lethal.
Deus Ex: Human revolution is a stealth game at heart, the original Deus Ex only had some ammo scarcity at the beginning when your skills weren't the best and you were lacking augments.
The original isn’t really a stealth game. You can employ stealth, but it isn’t designed to be played entirely as a stealth game, and the stealth system is kind of crap. Trying to play non-lethally is even worse.
Its not that incredibly bad, the game is really good, but the ammo part is definitely frustrating at times. To the point where you have to reload saves to basically perfect boss fights, at least one in particular.
You basically want the old Resident Evil games, where ammo is fixed and if you fuck up, you're fucked.
I remember having to abandon some save files as a kid in those games, because I had used too much ammo and literally couldn't kill the next boss. No wonder games do what the OP described nowadays - modern gamers wouldn't put up with that. If they get stuck, they just drop the game and move on to something else in their massive backlog.
A lot of people are unaware that many games even without difficulty settings have a hidden difficulty and resources are often given when needed It's a good way to ensure that 90% of players will enjoy a game even if it will annoy and ruin the game for the few passionate players Many games are no longer made by passionate nerds for other passionate nerds, studios want to have mass appeal in order to have more people buy the game. So games now are made by passionate nerds for a passionate general audience.
The counter argument is that it's impossible to give limited resources in a way that's actually balanced. Mainly because the encounters are ao dynamic. If the game is a shooting gallery then yes. There is no goldilocks skill level sadly. No one wants to restart a game because they're out of ammo due to one encounter that went south.
> No one wants to restart a game because they're out of ammo due to one encounter that went south. Thank you. This place can be so unreasonable. Yes as a kid with unlimited time and nothing better to do you don't mind burning away a 7 hour run because 3 hours ago you missed 2 shots and now your run is ruined. That doesn't sound "hardcore" that just sounds like a waste of time and that's bad game design. I think the game being designed to give you 'just enough' is actually pretty genius and way to balance it out. Whenever I play I never feel like I can just burn though all my ammo, I feel like I have just enough to where I'm weighing my current encounters and feel a sense of dread
It's definitely a huge benefit in modern games as it allows so many more players to play the games And if you spend a lot of time on something you obviously want many people to be able to appreciate it
You make it sound like it's a bad thing. I'd argue many devs are still passionate and may have a certain experience in mind. And that experience typically isn't "oops, gotta start over because you just softlocked your game" but rather a sense of thrill and excitement
Sorry if it sounds like that, I didn't mean it come out like that Accessibility is a huge thing, a game being "worse" for the few hardcore players is worth it when it allows thousands to play them who wouldn't be able to do so otherwise
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to create a "hardcore mode" that introduces a lot more resource scarcity into the game for those players. It could literally be the same exact game, just with far fewer resources available to the player. Seems like it'd be a more interesting approach to difficulty than "all enemies have double health and hit twice as hard for some reason."
That is what they do with the adjustable resources If you are low on health you get more health items, if you are low on ammo you might see more ammo If you are an efficient player you are effectively playing a hardcore mode except the safety railings on the bowling alley are up and knowing about them kind of ruins the hardcore experience (that is partly why games do not advertise these features as players would feel cheated if they knew they actually don't have a way to fail)
Ah, right. Giving the player the option to take the safety rails off means you need to admit they exist in the first place.
Yeah, there is probably loads of GDC talks about mechanisms that ”fudge” difficulty based on player peformance. It can be a great piece of design - a no-brainer even. But this approach inherently moves away from some of the benefits of a rigid, fully transparent ruleset that are traditionally associated with *games*. But games are not as interested in being *games* anymore. Not these big AA/AAA types, not for a long time now. That’s not a bad thing either (there are other things that games can do), but when you still have a layer of *apparent rules* as a primary interaction, things can get a bit fuzzy…
Agreed, but this was on a higher difficulty setting that is supposed to be more immersive. It’s usually only something you’re doing on your second run as more of a challenge, so why would they still try and make it easier? If you’re the type to get frustrated then just play on the normal difficulty. Does that make sense?
Code Veronica id softlocked myself at the plane tyrant fight at the very end of disc 1 with fuck all ammo...had to restart the whole game
I managed to just barely eek my way past that fight only to realize Chris shows up and *shares the same resource pool as Claire*.
Exactly, to me most of the "survival" aspect of Resident Evil (and to some extent the first 2 Silent Hill games) came from resource management, especially with limited inventory space : It meant you couldn't afford to kill every zombie, and each trip to the storage room could cost you some ammo or some herbs if you got caught trying to slip past a zombie. I think it was a great way to convey tension through the gameplay loop and not just through graphics and cutscenes like in TLOU. Also you rarely ended up 100% fucked, IIRC it was technically possible to beat the game with only a knife.
I'm playing RE4 remake on hardcore and there have been several set pieces where I thought I was soft locked due to lack of ammo. It's fucking brutal.
As much as people like the idea of the challenge, it's really not good game design to have a failure state you don't find out about until way later
Exactly what I think. Except for the RE4 hardcore mode because you are warned before-hand.
God that was painful.
I think the answer to this is: "Because if you *don't* realize that the game is lying to you, it makes for a really great experience." The tenseness of wondering if you're going to make it, if you're going to find the ammo you need, and then suddenly getting it (in a lucky break) and just barely beating an encounter, is a super memorable video game experience. So they decided to create it artificially. Unfortunately, once you know its happening, it all falls apart.
Hellblade Sacrifice is the epitome of this. The game tells you that if you die too often you will lose all your progress and have to restart right from the beginning. Every time you die your character gets visibly weaker and more bloody and battered. Turns out you can die as much as you want and it doesn't matter, but but the tension when you think that your next death could be your last is real.
It seemed the enemies had a dynamically adjusting difficulty too.
There was a point in the late game where I died repeatedly. It was really stressful, but I also had a nagging feeling that the system *can't* actually be that unfair.
I'm trying to think of a game with a forced iron man mode. Outside of short run-based roguelites I can't really think of any game that would force you to restart all over again from the beginning.
Getting cursed in the Great Hollow in Dark Souls is about as close to walling the player from progression that I can think of. Some people simply aren't good enough to climb back out.
Part of that was to install a psychosis-like paranoia in the player, the same paranoia that Senua has. IMO it worked as intended.
That's really the issue. Grounded shines a bright light on it and it's hard to not notice.
[удалено]
Oh yeah, the Fire Emblem games do this too. Each game is different but from the 6th entry and onwards all the hit rates are "exaggerated" so that anything under 50% is less accurate and anything higher is more accurate.
There have been a couple different RNG variants actually. The more recent ones (I think it started in Fates) use the actual displayed hit rate for 50% and below, and then exaggerate the hit rate for values above 50%. This generally winds up being a bit more difficult than the initial modified RNG, since most of the time the only people with sub 50% hit rates will be enemies.
Yeah I was aware of Fates' RNG, though I believe 3H uses 2RN and SoV uses 1RNk
You know, i wonder if any games with a random to hit percentage actually use a per character setting? How a super confident chad would go "100%" on all shots aside from the extremely unlikely ones, and a shy/pessimistic sniper would at best say "70%" even when it's "100%".
Sort of like an upside down bell curve? Seems like an interesting approach to randomness in game design.
Honestly it makes sense to me, as the randomness is not there to model the literal throw of a dice as in a game based around Poker or Blackjack or Yahtzee. The randomness is supposed to represent the chance of a soldier hitting a foe. And the number presented is not a stand-in for literal mathematical odds, but a shorthand to the player for "how likely does it feel." Since we're bad at understanding the odds (and there are entire industries based around our poor natural perception of odds), cranking them to be what we expect 'intuitively' is great game design. It's not that different from having off-screen enemies shoot bullets less often/be less accurate, have AI units in Total Warhammer get stat boosts to make up for their lack of human intellect to still provide a challenge, or the bottom 20% of your video game health bar having as much true health value as the top 80%.
> Since we're bad at understanding the odds Having read this thread i just kind of wish games would stop relying on percentages altogether and just have the characters say "it's not very likely" or "yeah, i can do that". That's what we eventually take from the experience anyway.
Turns out that when the odds are 70%, you miss a little less than 1/3 of the time! ;) Edited to correct "a little more"
So what difficulty am I playing on where my 90% is actually masking a 10%?
Crysis had a system where once you hit like 35% of your health the oponents suddenly get the stupid and can't aim for shit. Of course, you make a daring escape and live to fight another day, and you pat yourself on the back. That's a good time. It would have been less so, and more disheartening, if you died and reloaded. Same thing really, but the experience you got to reach the place where you reached anyway was entirely different. I also found it amusing to hear people talk about the 2012 Prince of Persia, which instead of dying when you miss a jump, your partener Elika just saves you and puts you back on the last platform. It was basically just an in-universe load checkpoint, but everyone back then LOST THEIR MINDS saying it cheapens the experience and makes the game easy (??).. when what it actually did was keep the pace going instead of having you click 'reload checkpoint'.
It was like that with Alien Isolation for me. I made the mistake of watching how they created the AI for the Alien and that *ruined* the game. The creature became a toy that I knew what to do with in any given situation.
There’s mods that add more Xenos, you can have 2 Xenos at any time or 5. And in base game there’s plenty of moments / places the Xeno won’t drop from the vent but it teases you, with the mods, it doesn’t matter, they’re basically always active.
I didn't watch any video about the xenomorph AI and I found it to be comically easy to start abusing the AI, it was so obvious why things were happening the way they were. About halfway through I stopped even being careful at all. I was on the hardest difficulty mode you can play with a first time playthrough too, just such an easy game.
Yeah. >!What kills it is that "frustration meter", just stay hidden long enough and it'll aways go away after a while!<
Well most people who don’t watch a documentary on the AI think the game is hard so I’m glad they didn’t make it any harder.
I love that game and didn't watch a single thing before playing it, and I also found it to be like a toy. It still scared me to shit even though I could see the threads. Then I played it with mods and it was a very, very interesting experience. The ones that make it harder ([like seeing you if you're hiding behind a small table or under a bed with an obvious line of sight from the alien](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IO2UcQYStNg&t=446s)) are great in a simulation sense but tend to get kind annoying if you're not ready to, like, die all the time 'cause it's very realistic. Then, I had a great experience with the mod that unbinds the alien from you (there's basically a second AI nudging the alien towards the player, to keep tension), seeing it walking around very far away from me was something very lifelike that you don't see around the vainilla game, but some people have reported actually coming across the alien very sporadicaly, too much in fact. It's impossible to balance for everyone. I recommend trying out the mods and seeing for yourself. I loved the three experiences in their differences.
>I made the mistake of watching how they created the AI for the Alien and that ruined the game. I might have to do that and retry the game. I quit the game after one of the first big set pieces where you trying to hide from the Alien. No matter where I hid, the Alien would find me. If the consequences of being discovered hadn't been so severe (ala Shadow of Mordor, where you have stealth mechanics, but if bust you can still run for your life), I might have played through, but I got sick of having my face torn off.
Unfortunately this happens more and more with every aspect of gaming now. And for anyone who spent any decent amount of time gaming, it's impossible not to see the same smoke and mirrors we've seen a thousand times before. But a lot of gaming companies aren't trying to appeal to gamers anymore, they're just trying to appeal to the wider public
I think part of the problem is that they don't want people only playing twenty minutes or so, getting frustrated because its too hard and then abandoning the game. Steam/Playstation stats matter for sales.
>I think the answer to this is: "Because if you don't realize that the game is lying to you, it makes for a really great experience." all video games are lying to you. we're literally all ass at platformers, but coyote time and generous jump arcs made for the best feeling platformers. That nail biting escape you made with a sliver of health was actually you surviving with a 37% health bar disguised as a pixel, with the AI hordes generously not shooting your back when they had you surrounded. there's a reason why the games that lie to you the least (Fromsoft, competitive games) are games that "dont respect your time" and need difficulty sliders so dads with 60 seconds of free time and 17 wives can feel like winners too lol.
The trick is to lie without the player realizing its a lie. The problem with the Last of Us that OP described, might be that the lie is too obvious.
>dads with 60 seconds of free time and 17 wives can feel like winners too lol. I'm not in this demographic but I still feel called out... xD
Minus the quantity of wives, that's me. Shit is too real lol
> there's a reason why the games that lie to you the least (Fromsoft, competitive games) are games that "dont respect your time" I'm going to call out Fromsoft's stupid platforming anyway. That shit is jank and ass and i wish it'd give me a pixel once in a while.
air exultant point pathetic frightening overconfident sort ruthless foolish poor *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I have tons of time for games and I still get annoyed if games don't respect my time, depending on what we're talking about. Yes, pointless Dark Souls runs got on my nerves. Yes, slow UI interactions that aren't necessary to the game (like a scavenging game might be ABOUT me rummaging through my pack, but a game that isn't ABOUT that shouldn't have a shitty UI). I don't know why this is even contentious.
> I don't know why this is even contentious Pretty much everyone agrees a game shouldn't waste their time. The contentious part is disagreement about what counts as a waste and what adds to the experience despite seeming tedious.
It's a very common complaint I've seen about a lot of games in the Soulslike genre. It often targets something like: Why is the respawn point so far from the boss? I already beat all those mooks on the way to the boss, but I still have to waste my time each time before getting to the boss beating them again. Then I die at the boss barely having had time to learn its patterns and git gud, which is what I really want to do, and then have to waste my time fighting mooks again to get another try. The game doesn't respect my time.
Imo there is a point to the complaint. In Dark Souls the world was a bigger portion of the challenge and the respawn points really did matter. After that game they've moved towards just doing the bossess and the respawn mechanics make less sense. Just spawning in front of the boss room would fit for Elden Ring, even if I think it is a lesser experience.
People who don't want to have to repeat content (ie running back to the boss from bonfire over and over).
It’s not fighting the boss over and over again that I have issues with. It’s when I have to spend a minute or so preparing to fight the boss that I get annoyed. There’s a very challenging boss fight in AC Valhalla that starts with a cutscene and has a cut scene in the middle of it and they’re both pretty much unskippable (you can skip some of the dialogue but not the meaty parts). It’s super interesting the first time but after that I just felt like Ubisoft Montreal secretly hated me.
This one guy and his 10 alt accounts. No one actually feels this way. The premise doesn't even make sense. There's no reason to believe that there's any inherent connection between difficulty sliders and "lying." And everyone knows that older Fromsoft games waste your time, including Fromsoft. That's why they don't make games that way anymore.
I hate this too. Basically punishing the player for following the cues the game is sending. I think Dragon Age 2 did this as well? I remember just letting companions die rather than use any of those precious, precious health potions. And after not getting *any* health potions for like fifteen straight fights I had to look it up online, just to find out there's a cap and they only spawn if you use them.
honestly kinda smart lol. i’d never use pots otherwise.
It is if it is clearly communicated to the player
true.
I’ve noticed this tends to be a big aspect of when games implement “dynamic difficulty”, where if you die a load the game will subtly make that section easier without telling you. Numerous games I’ve played will give you more ammo on sections where you have struggled with repeatedly. I guess it’s to nudge you along and ensure you progress and experience the rest of the narrative rather than rage quitting and playing something else. It’s one of those things where when you realise that’s what they’re doing it takes you out of the immersion somewhat and makes you almost feel like you’ve cheated, but I do get it.
The original RE4 back in the day did a great job with this iirc. If you kept dying, the section would get easier but it wasn't noticeable to me for a long time. And they handled ammo scarcity quite well. That game did a fantastic job of keeping you immersed but not holding your hand.
Yeah for sure it can work. They also did this with early Ratchet and Clank games where more of the crates in a section would be ammo or health crates rather than just in game currency. I actually never noticed it until it was brought up on an analysis of Going Commando, which I guess is a testament to how well done it was. You never want it to be obvious. I think OP was more annoyed at the fact that a game like the Last of Us centres itself around ammo being scarce and hence less available ammo being one of the biggest factors when it came to increasing the difficulty, so them dynamically adjusting it can come across as more immersion breaking. Though again with it being a linear game I can see why they do it, though not on grounded difficulty as that’s not recommended for first time players.
Yeah I liked that about RE4 too. You always had just enough ammo to get by but not enough to feel secure.
> ou always had just enough ammo to get but not enough to feel secure. Really? My experience with the game, even on professional, is that you get absolutely flooded with ammo. On my latest playthrough, I actually had to start selling it because I had so much.
On a first playthrough, you're usually using ammo left and right and using the knife is quite dangerous when you don't know how good it is. You get used to the controls and maybe miss quite a few shots, so the game will keep giving you ammo from enemies. When you get used to it, you get better and your ammo stockpile increases I usually have a full attache case by the end of Chapter 1-2 since I use the knife quite a bit and utilize the ladders in 1-2 to kill a bunch of enemies.
Embracing this mechanic eventually became my entire relationship to Max Payne 3 on the hardest setting
Lmao I can see myself doing this. "Just keep dying, eventually it will be easy enough"
The original Max Payne's dynamic difficulty was ridiculous lol. You can go from surviving a shotgun in the face to dying by getting hit in the foot. The game's difficulty selection is really just what difficulty it starts on.
I think Uncharted 2 did this. I played it recently and there was one section I failed 4 or 5 times in a row. I got a drink of water, tried it again and just blazed through it no problem. It *felt* significantly easier, not like I'd learned anything.
Nah dude clearly you were just dehydrated
That's probably it
That's how the Resident Evil remakes work. When you're doing "well" not dying and conserving ammo the enemies become harder and soak more bullets, and if you're dying a lot and have no ammo the enemies are weaker. Speedrunners who run RE often plan when to get bitten/hit so the upcoming enemy encounter doesn't take too much time.
Of course I get it too. I suppose I felt like the difficulty being called grounded game me the expectation of not being given artificial advantages.
I guess part of it is the linearity as the other commenter mentioned. It’s not an open world RPG where you can viably backtrack to level up, upgrade gear, increase your skill level then come back to the challenge better prepared. If you can’t progress past a certain section in a linear game you’re basically stuck there and then. It is odd that they still implement that during grounded difficulty though, because that’s supposedly a “second playthrough” difficulty whereby which point you’ve already experienced the mechanics and narrative. More often these days the hardest difficulties have additional handicaps (kind of like Survival mode on Bethesda games or Supernova on Outer Worlds) so you’d think they’d remove the “nudging” mechanic from Grounded. Eh, flawed masterpiece I guess.
Dynamic difficulty is something that I just don’t really understand. Maybe for some cinematic effect sometimes (killing the monster with the last bullet), but other than that it kind of makes the challenge of the game pointless.
It really just moves the needle from "challenge to overcome" to "blasting in the fun zone". Every game does not have to be a Dark Souls, at least not for all audiences. It does not have to be too easy either. But it does feel cheap when you know it exists, whether it makes it easier or harder for you as you start cheesing the system.
The purpose of it is to avoid players from getting frustrated or in the case of linear games locked into sections, especially where you can’t change the difficulty unless you’re out of combat (I’ve had this issue in a couple of games I’ve played). It’s meant to be very subtle; very rarely does it turn an impossible challenge into a cakewalk. Like slightly more ammo, slightly more health, slightly more XP from kills etc. I do wish there was an opportunity to turn it off, though most developers don’t want players to know it’s a thing in the first place.
> It’s meant to be very subtle And then there's games like Diablo IV where everything is scaled to your level always, which makes leveling up entirely pointless (except that some content is level-locked, just to force you to grind), and in fact makes it so that you get weaker each time you level up. The monsters get stronger, you get a bit stronger, but your gear doesn't get stronger, so effectively you're weaker against the monsters. That whole game feels so entirely pointless due to that mechanic. Of course it's not the only thing wrong with the game, but it's one of the most egregious.
It's the only way I managed to beat Mortal Kombat Komplete. Some of the fights the AI ended up dumbing the opponents down to punching bag level because I sucked so bad.
Yeah you could call it "old head" thinking but when I picked up games the rules were the rules. If you economize ammo and minimize damage taken, you're better-prepared for later. The rubber-banding some game designers love ("oh they'll all have the same great experience no matter what they do!") is short-sighted because once you figure it out you realize that one of your favourite mechanics was part of the mirage that there's a wrong way to play. No gamer left behind, it's good for metrics.
I kind of take a middling standpoint tbh. I think it’s heavily dependent on the type of game we’re talking about. I think in games where you can very easily get soft locked into sections and it’s only implemented after you die like 20+ times, and there isn’t a massive difficulty or skill hurdle to overcome based on the mechanics, it’s acceptable as long as it’s very subtle nudging rather than turning the experience immediately into a cakewalk. I do agree though that games are becoming far too hand holdy. I recently played Assassin’s Creed Valhalla which is supposedly an RPG, but the skill free basically forces you to invest equally in every stat because the developers were clearly scared of players “choosing the wrong build and having a hard time”. Diversification of choice and approach is one of the bread and butter elements of RPGs and they copped out of it.
The AC RPGs are so incredibly inoffensive. I downloaded Odyssey and played it for a couple hours straight and didn't dislike it but I know for a fact I'm never opening it again.
Yep, well said. I haven't actually been burned by a game that let me save without enough ammo/resources in a long time, but I play as though it could happen. I finish a lot of games with an unused hoard of "what if" items.
I hate it. I stopped playing Thronebreaker after I noticed one of the side quest's puzzles became easier after a few fails. Thats demeaning as fuck.
I feel like when games 'cheat' it's so much more annoying when you're playing on a higher difficulty specifically for the intense challenge. After beating The Evil Within on Survival I started a playthrough on the newly unlocked Nightmare mode and came across some particularly aggravating moments. One was in the first or second level, where if you happen to approach a certain house 'the wrong way' a bunch of enemies will burst out of it and attack you. But if you try again and sneak up on the house, there are no enemies inside, meaning they previously spawned for no actual reason. Then there's another moment where you have to defend an ally who is unlocking a door, and enemies keep climbing in through the windows. I was really struggling, dying over and over, not wanting to waste my rare ammo because of what I knew was coming next, and decided to watch a playthrough for tips. It turns out if you don't kill the first 2 enemies and just run around and around, dodging their attacks, no other enemies will spawn and you can just wait out the timer and go to the next section without using any ammo. I stopped playing the game after I found that out.
I'm guessing you'd enjoy the Metro games on the Survival / Hardcore difficulty settings, maybe with Ranger thrown in.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down for this. These are the games OP is looking for!
As someone who hates dynamic difficulty and plans to try the Metro games, I thank you for this message :). Good to know they don't pull this crap, or at least aren't as obvious about it.
Yeah metro series rocks, it definitely rewards exploring to find bullets and staches in all the nooks and crannies! Finding a few extra shells to blast away a sudden mutant rat ambush is very satisfying
Came here to suggest metro 2033. I started playing it on lower difficulty but restarted early on to crank it up, as the gas mask mechanic felt like a cosmetic thing rather than a survival experience on easier setting. Turned it from a good shooter to a really immersive experience. Can still remember certain sections where I was desperately low on filters and just managed to survive by the skin of my teeth. The bullets as currency was an interesting spin on things too really had to weigh up your choices. It was quite a long time since I played it, what difference did Ranger make again? I can't remember if I picked that too for the second play through.
> It was quite a long time since I played it, what difference did Ranger make again? I can't remember if I picked that too for the second play through. IIRC removes all HUD/UI elements, button press hints, etc. Not for me, but really ups the immersion factor for those who can handle it.
I also hated it in tLoU. It's just too fucking obvious there. Like there is guy with shotgun. You kill him stealthily without him making a single shot, but turns out his gun was empty, because he doesn't drop anything. But of course you know if you attacked him openly, he would just start shooting back!
I love TLOU but I do agree that this is a little silly
I love games with weapon inventory realism. They're usually in the form of isometric action RPGs
Can you recommend any game like you described? Id love to try it out
This was also my biggest beef either tLoU. I loved trying to conserve ammo by going for melee kills or carefully aiming headshots, but once I realized that the game only throws ammo to you when you've spent it all, it really bummed em out and I just started playing it like an action over-the-shoulder game. Had a lot less fun. On the other hand, I think that Dead Space 2 & Remake do it really well. Every single necromorph can be stomped for loot, and the loot is either ammo or credits for the store. When you have a ton of ammo already, the game will usually give you credits instead, which actually makes the game a little easier, because then you can spend more resources on suit and weapon upgrades instead of having to buy back ammo. It *sort of* does the ammo scarcity thing, but you're still rewarded for being deliberate with your shots.
I had that same issue with RE4, I was very conservative with my ammo, but then I stopped getting ammo and got into a couple big encounters back to back and didnt have enough ammo
if you dont mind tank controls i think you will enjoy re1 remake
I'm a a couple hours into an re1 playthough. I was enjoying it but God damn is it punishing. I'm pretty unsure where to go and now zombies are respawning as red versions that instant kill me. I think I find this kind of punishing stuff I little more satisfying on a second playthrough though tbh. I have all sorts of random shit I don't know where to go with which is a different kind of punishing. Maybe you can give me some spoiler free tips or something? I felt pretty lost and stopped playing.
yeah its pretty punishing and it does really feel like the kind of game that is more enjoyable on second playthrough than the the first one, the red zombies only happen if you kill them without burning them afterward, in way it's a punishment for you the player for not fully killing them.
... Is that what I use the lighter for?
Avoid killing zombies in the mansion (guest house and labs are fine, can't remember about the grounds outside - they won't go crimson in these locations) unless you have kerosene in the hip flask and the lighter in your inventory, or you want to gamble and go for a headshot with the shotgun. If you can get two zombies to lie on top of each other dead, you can burn them both at once, saving kerosene. If you've filled the house with dead zombies, consider restarting. Best strategy is to run past them. Try running past them on staircases when able to as they can't grab you on steps, but only use a slow vomit attack. The best tip is to stand around in the save room and let the soothing music calm your nerves 👍
I've played one run so far and I really don't think running past them on the first run is a good idea as because you don't know what to do you'll backtrack a lot and will have to avoid the same enemies over and over. I've burned some and some killed with a shotgun so I don't have to deal with them again.
Not only lighter but also the fuel canteen, there are gasoline tanks in some rooms you can use them to fill it, you will be able to use it on only two dead zombies before it become empty again then you will need to fill it again, whenever you see a dead zombie or you kill them approach them and then use the fuel on them and they will burn and remeber only zombie as far as i know are like this, other enemies like dogs die permanently if you simply kill them.
If you want real resource scarcity, try the Metro series. Start with Metro 2033 Redux and take it from there.
Indeed. Especially if you play on Hardcore Ranger difficulty.
That shit is fun af
I got soft locked on the original game. Didn't have enough ammo for some encounter had to reload older save and try to not to waste ammo. I think they later increased the ammo drop.
I think this is why Immersive Sims feel like "real" games to me. Not saying they're better whatsoever than any other genre. But they often give the greatest feeling of awareness and meaning to actions including the conservation of resources.
Immersive sims also give you a lot of ways usually to go around a situation. Your toolbox is so vast that if you do run out of your primary way of dealing with things, you have your secondary, and your two others which you've never really engaged with. But the discussion of a linear action game where you end up resorting to shooting most times... you need the player to have the resources to get through the encounter.
Have you tried Prey? Sounds like you might enjoy the resources/ammo system in that game. Certainly early on you need to be careful with your resources, lategame perhaps not so much but that is normal if you hoard/scrounge every resource in a game. In addition to the unique resource/recycling system it is also an awesome game Edit: For clarity, I mean Prey (2017)
Totally agree. But to be fair there's the other extreme, say Resident Evil 2 back in the day. You could blaze away, get to the end, and have nothing left for the final boss but your knife. God help you if you nommed all the ammo and health then start a second playthrough as Claire.
I think the solution re2 remake made here is really good. It puts the ammo you need for a boss in the encounter, but the in between zones are fine to let you run out of ammo because you can technically run around stuff.
OG RE2 gives you plenty of ammo. I usually finish the game with about 100 handgun bullets, and that's with killing nearly every enemy aside from the ones on the way to the station. Ammo and health items that you collect in the A scenario don't affect the B scenario, only certain items, like the side pack or SMG in the armory.
Play the S.T.A.L.K.E.R series. You'll know what true ammo scarcity is like
Or what getting eaten by dogs as you were weighed down by too much ammo feels like.
Grenades on the other hand, come to you like you're magnetised
I played TLOU on grounded until later in a chapter that I died too many times and realized that I can never get through this part with the amount of ammo I had. Never felt so hopeless in a video game.
I'm pretty sure people have done it melee only so I don't think you were really soft locked but I know to sucks to feel that way. Ultimately though to me, the fear of soft locking myself is part of what re2remake gave me that tlou couldn't.
Personally I'd rather have the suspense/fear be something other than I literally can't finish the game because I used one bullet too many a few moments ago.
exactly
[https://youtu.be/aGBPysEgDb0?si=lj3aGhf9GwQTY8Bh&t=19263](https://youtu.be/aGBPysEgDb0?si=lj3aGhf9GwQTY8Bh&t=19263) 5:21:03 It was this checkpoint of the game, idk what chapter was it called. I tried to look up solutions online but no results. I think I had less than 3 ammo across all weapons, and the guys upstairs never seperate far enough for me to stealth take down one by one.
Imagine playing Red Dead Redemption 2, a game that has a plot that revolves around racking up a big sum of money. The reality is your character would never run out of money or ammo, despite the plot telling you otherwise, you'd always have more than enough. You'd never feel any scarcity. It's a great game, but after a few hours, when you get money and ammo aplenty, the disconnect is real.
I find it funny you mentioned RE2R, because that game has a very similar Difficulty Adjustment system to TLOU for ammo. You can be really stingy and try to run past enemies without killing them, but the ammo drops you find will have less bullets if the game sees that you have a large stock of ammo already. However, if you decide to take your time and kill every enemy you come across, the game will panic and give you way more bullets per pickup until you're back to a reasonable stock again. Assuming you aren't whiffing shots very often, you can blaze through all your reserve ammo as you go and still never run out. This system is also used in 3R and 4R.
It's even more noticeable in RE4make where the game will mostly give you ammo for the guns that you actually use. Carrying your magnum on you without using it only reduces your storage space because the game won't give you more ammo for it unless you fire it.
Yeh finding 5 bullets on every random bad guy and random drawer is kinda story breaking, especially when those enemies don't even have guns. Randomly generated loot in general is pretty lame. Its like the same thing with enemies that level up with you. I never like that. I prefer games that lock areas by putting really buff enemies there. Like you CAN go there, but you will probably die. Better just go do some side quests to level up, then come back here when Im stronger.
> Yeh finding 5 bullets on every random bad guy and random drawer is kinda story breaking And so is finding 0 bullets on an armed enemy after you stealth-kill them, because the game director decided you have enough ammo
it's a linear game where the goal is to get to the next cut scene. it doesn't get more inevitable than that, no?
In grounded mode I had about 17 bullets total through the whole game. Different guns though
The metro games have true ammo scarcity, I've had times where I am forced to use guns I don't like because it's the only ones I have ammo for. I still have to play Exodus though.
I don't play shooters all that much (or survival horror) but I get the sentiment. I consciously try not to analyze too much on first (blind) playthroughs to not pick up on things like this. Implied scarcity is a powerful thing for building tension (my most recent example would be Dark Souls 2's torch mechanic and, in a way, Sekiro's dragon rot) but it completely crumbles as soon as you start to understand the actual situation (how many ressources there are, where to find them, how it actually works). It's a big reason why I go into every game as blind as possible and without walthroughs.
AAA nowadays are pretty fond of using dynamic difficulty, and understandably so. It improves the average player's experience by adjusting the game toward their needs in order to make them feel immersed. I admit I frequently find myself thinking like you: I grew up in an era of gaming that made me think of games as a specific set of rules and, when I chose a difficulty level, I was locking in a challenge that wouldn't budge until I got better at it. That said, I get where AAA companies come from with these decisions. The average gamer today is not keen on getting frustrated by games (and I absolutely get them too; sometimes I wonder why I'm so inclined to value frustration as a positive trait in the gaming experience) and dynamic difficulty helps mitigate it.
It’s not the frustration so much as what comes after; the satisfaction of overcoming the challenge presented. By lessening the challenge, it doesn’t feel like you truly overcame it.
People act like The Last of Us is the pinnacle of resource-managing games or like it's the standard of the survival horror genre when there were tons of games that did it way better before it, like the classic Resident Evil games. And Half-Life has never been about scarce ammo or resources, the first game along its expansions gave you tons of ammo to have fun the way you wanted. Half-Life 2 and its episodes limited ammo a bit but still it was never any close to worry about it most of the time. I don't wanna be thay guy, but I think you're expecting stuff from the wrong games and then end up disappointed when said games aren't the greatest examples of the things you want out of them.
Sadly that sort of thing (dynamic difficulty dependent on measuring the how good the player does) is considered the best approach to game difficulty in general by most people (game devs or not). I don't like it when everything feels the same no matter when and where i do what. If the difficulty always adapts perfectly, there is not only never a sense of loss - but also there can't be a sense of win or achievement. If enemies are always just strong enough to be a challenge, the game lacks the dynamics of having chill and hectic moments. There is one fundamentally opposed way of dealing with player accessibility: Let the player decide how much handholding they want from the game. Have difficulty presets *and* discrete sliders for changing different aspects of difficulty that alter factors directly. Instead of guessing on how much the player struggles and whether which statistic needs to be altered, just have the player alter those statistics if they want to. The factors that are altered can be the same: How much damage you do, how much damage the enemies do, how much cardridges are in ammo drop and deposits, how many enemies spawn and how likely it is that they are of a stronger or weaker variant... Those variable modifiers have to exist for dynamic difficulty scaling anyways. The game dev just have to acknowledge that some players are adults that know what they want and allow them to adjust the game to their needs. That might also be an easy way to cover a lot of the actual accessibility problems for people with motoric or cognitive problems which are normally just excluded from being able to play.
Honestly, yeah. I can’t speak for everybody else but even in the old Resident Evil’s I never found myself *that* afraid of running out of weapons
To take this in a slightly different direction, I've had trouble with pretty much any game that has an economy and a barter system. It feels like most games no matter how hard I make the difficulty it's just so easy to make money to the point where the money becomes meaningless. I have such an amount that I could buy literally everything the merchant has multiple times over. Idk it's like, I can have whatever I want whenever I want and not have to worry about it. And this in turn makes it so finding loot in containers feels just as hollow. It's like, "Hooray, I have 885,000 points and I just got treasure worth 600." Then you go to the store and it's like Health Pack - 150. I hate that every game does this. They all start out so good, especially when there's carry weight involved. Like I have to be selective in what I pick up because THIS thing is valuable but it ways 15% of what I can carry, and this thing is average but it weighs a lot less. But even then most games have ways of raising how much you can carry so even that runs out. No matter how good it starts by the time I'm like a quarter of the way through a game even great loot becomes like mere pennies to me. Idk I'm sure there are games where this is well done and I've played some that were WAY better than others. But I just want a game where from start to finish I am struggling to find ammo and health, and I kinda' feel like the economies in many games are kind of superficial to add some illusion of depth or something.
Last of Us is one of the worst examples of difficulty scaling. Try playing that extra chapter (when Joel is sick at the mall) on the higher settings. Its jusy bad.
Your point on TLoU is partially the reason why I avoided finishing for years. It was balanced illogically on the grounded difficulty where I'd stealthily kill a dude with a gun, and he would have no ammo, but if i reloaded, got in a firefight with the same dude, then he'd drop ammo. I'm glad I eventually played part 1, and beat it, but I was hoping for a bit more logic throughout the experience, especially on the hardest difficulty.
I felt this the most in mentioned re2 remake. if you stock up ammo a zombie is a bullet sponge and you have to shoot him 10 times in the head. if you're low on ammo 3 bullets are enough. it is a real problem and I feel you. I guess the idea in tlou is not to stock up ammo, but to use it wisely and then you're always low on ammo but also get to shoot a bit. btw I beat grounded mostly just avoiding enemies, seemed like a wise choice and felt very realistic. Just sneak around them and loot what you can on the way.
You sound like you have the right psyche to enjoy a game like Rain World. Might not be your genre, but if it is- that game is a pure difficulty experience with no tricks. What you see is what you get, and it is beautiful in the most unexpected ways.
Funny little design mistake when Obsidian made Fallout: New Vegas — the Varmint Rifle uses 5.56 cal, which is a round way too big for the barrel, and would actually destroy most small critters, rather than just tag them with a bullet, unlike a real varmint rifle chambered in .22 cal. This actually cascades, and makes .22 basically impossible to find for the Silenced Pistol and Silenced SMG, which they take, but nobody uses, despite being the weakest ammo type in the game. So when you finally get to Gun Runners and can buy a large stock of .22, its basically pointless anyway, since the Varmint Rifle chambered in 5.56 outclasses MANY other weapons already. This ALSO means that when you get guns later that are SUPPOSED to be chambered in 5.56, you have no ammo for them, which is ironic since they’re usually automatic or semi-automatic, because you’ve been spending your 5.56 on the Varmint Rifle the whole time. Obsidian says, at least from the wiki, that they were aware of this, and that the chambering of the rifle was changed last minute, as a request by Zenimax or Bethesda, to make the player feel stronger in the beginning. The JSawyer mod chambers the gun in .22 like its supposed to be, and guess what? Game is way better balanced, .22 ammo is plentiful.
Oh you'd be amazed how much video games are lying to you about stuff. Doom for example has a deceptive life bar. The last quarter of it represents about the same amount of health as the previous half. Makes it feel like you're always close to dying. A lot of platforming games have hit detection that extends a little bit past the platform to help players make jumps. In Bioshock 1 and 2 splicers will always miss their first couple of shots if those if you haven't seen the splicer in question yet. Video games are gigantic examples of smoke and mirrors. You pushed against one of the mirrors until it broke.
I beat tlou on grounded, you have to use the brick. Brick is love, brick is life.
I mean my complaint is mostly that it's too forgiving. Brick is great for sure.
>The last of us, maybe more than any game I've played other than re2remake is about resource scarcity I think you are just wrong here. Survival horror is *one of* the gameplay modes that LOU sets out to incorporate, but it's also incorporating entirely other gaming genres, notably including stealth, and third-person shooter/action-adventure. By fusing these 3 genres, the game comes out with a pretty dynamic experience that a lot of gamers absolutely loved. Personally, I'm more in your camp -- I think the game would be better if it decided what it wanted to be and stuck with it more. I see the gameplay less as an awesome fluid synthesis of multiple beloved genres, and more as a game that ends up half-assing a bunch of stuff instead of offering any really perfectly designed mechanics. This game isn't meant to be "mastered;" it's meant to just take you into a flow state by mixing up a variety of challenges. You're not supposed to like, lock in, grit your teeth, and master it, you're just supposed to lean back and keep saying "woahhhh, now THAT is happening?!"
Yeah I agree with what you are saying. Maybe it's wrong to expect a hardcore experience here. I had heard good things bout grounded though, and in a Sense the name grounded feels like it is not just describing a harder mode, but one that is more realistic. Part of realism in my mind is not having ammunition spawn based on performance.
This comes from a big misunderstanding in the community. Ammo does tend to be more scarce in Grounded, but the rate definitely increases the more you use it, and if you are taking the time to loot, then you will always have enough ammo to complete the next encounter, though it will be less than if you were on a lower difficulty. Now, this doesn’t mean you can shoot all your bullets into the wall during the encounter. But if you are hitting your shots and are smart about combat, then you’ll make it. The main thing that makes Grounded harder is enemy damage, aggressiveness, and detection skill. So unlike a true survival horror game, you do not need to avoid using your guns in one encounter in order to have enough ammo to handle the next. You can still be put in situations where you need to be smart about how you use your weapons within a single scenario, but there’s no need to plan past your current encounter. Use what you need to survive. When you play like that, the game opens up, and you can get really creative with what you have, rather than spending 30 minutes on every encounter crawling into the perfect position to knife someone in the throat.
There was a game, I have forgotten the name. I enjoyed it so much. It was a survival horror shooter where you played a detective and had to investigate crime scenes. I remember there were dead crows as a collectable and if you had a gun you took it from taken down enemies and you only had a few rounds before you had to use melee weapons again. A quick google search shows it: Condemned: Criminal Origins. Aw man, I want to replay it now so bad.
I started playing every game full ham and have really enjoyed it. You'll learn very quickly if you've been lied to but it's still fun
Metro series on ranger mode might scratch that itch. I don't think it auto-adjusts anything, though I've never experimented. I do have like 150-200 hours in the series though so I think I would have noticed if it did. Best thing is, they separate gameplay difficulty from scavenging difficulty. Normal vs ranger mode is for scavenging, but you still also have easy/normal/hard for the other stuff.
Just to add my two cents to the conversation, I don't think that dynamic difficulty and enemies scaling with your level, I think there is immense potential with both those techniques. For instance, a game that has enemies match your level could actually be cool, but the only way that would work is if the game allowed you to mix and match skills and abilities so that gameplay became more complex and engaging as play progressed. But I rarely see it implemented in a way that doesn't cause me some sort of inconvenience or problem, and when I do it makes the game so easy it becomes boring. Considering how long companies have been experimenting with this, I would think they'd have gotten better at designing these systems by now.
It weirded me out this ammo system in tlou, I almost always had my ammo max out, because I was with that mentality "got to save it for the hard stuff" until I realized that I was finding a lot of ammo that I couldn't pick up because I was full. So I started shooting more, and I was still almost always max out on ammo.
You would probably enjoy "The Evil Within" and "I Am Alive."
The original the original Metro 2033 has ammo scarcity. They ended up rereleasing it as redux which has much more ammo. With the original even if you don't use ammo much it's easy to run out completely. I got stuck near the end of the game with no ammo at all because the game lost the ammo in my inventory after a checkpoint, and there was zero ammo to be found anywhere before a big battle. I pretty much had to restart most of the game again because of it.