Mechanics you miss and don't miss in games

I miss getting to name all my party members. It made the group feel more special and personal, and it let me set up jokes for later (after playing the game once).

That said, I don't mind not getting to name my party members if said members are good characters and their names are important to the story.

I don't miss save points. Just let me save whenever I want, and automatically save before each boss but after the long dialogue proceeding the fight. Not before it.

Some games did get creative with save points, though, by making them part of the world building. Like the goddess statues in Lunar 2.

I'm with you in those likes and dislikes. I never liked when you couldn't name your characters in a rpg. That was one of my main features I had to make sure my game had early on in it's development. That was surprisingly harder to manage than I had expected.:smile: Way to many recrtuits hehe.

I had an aspect come up in a conversation lately that I have always really missed. I believe it was Civilization 1-3 they had a throne room/ temple scenes that you were able to gradually upgrade visually. There were a lot of options so you could put together some cool combinations.

Also I love the errand system from Final Fantasy Tactics. The part I thought was best with that system was how you could get random relics with cool pics of them. They did nothing but you still wanted to collect them all.:smile:

Sort of on the same point you mentioned, I miss character creation in general. Being able to choose my race, class, gender for each character. This will likely be the next plugin I make for this very reason. I also miss the Vancian magic system as well. I didn't like it much when I was younger but it really makes resource management much more important and allows you to make spells more powerful as opposed to just another skill. I also miss never knowing if the next battle was going to really hard, super easy or somewhere in between. Everything seems over balanced now.

I don't miss RPGs that don't give you any indication of what you're supposed to be doing. Or slow battles with characters that miss 50% of the time even when they're not hampered with status ailments. I don't really miss the first person view labyrinth RPGs all that much. I don't miss the insane amount of grinding you used to have to do. I like some grinding but not to the level that Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy used to require.

Man I'm alone in the fixed character name and fixed save point. I love JRPG and when I can name the character usualy becomes very generic. It's hard to think Yuri Lowell as "kevin". The name is part of the charm of the history. Naming is ok for openworld rpgs, but fixed names works better for history driven rpgs.

About saves. If you can save every second it becomes a cheat mechanic and kill part of the "fun". In games where you can die easily due unluck it's ok, but most balanced rpg's should'n allow save anywhere.

I think mechanics shold improve the type of game you're aiming to do. One mechanic I love in rpg's is:

1 - Relationship that affect history and/or ending. (Rune Factory, Persona, Growlanser...)
2 - Castle Management. Simple or Complex (Suikoden, Divinity 2: the dragon knight saga, DAI...)

I do hate:

1 - Buy a sword for 10.000 gold just to sell it back to the NPC for 10 gold and a "F you".
2 - Red colossal dragons that lower their levels just to get close to my party.

'Game Mechanics Design' is about, well, design. It is looking at aspects of game play at a conceptual level. Simply asking people for what they like and don't like doesn't fit that.

Neither is there a discussion so it doesn't belong in 'General Discussion' either.
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One way to fix so many recruits being nameable is to have an option at the beginning of the game asking the player if they wanna name recruits. I've never played Tactics, what's the errand system?


I miss being able to choose species, like in Oblivion. Man, making weird characters was so fun. I wish NPCs would react to stuff you made, though. Than again, that would require a lot of programming.

What's the Vancian magic system?

Speaking of battle balance, here's a video that goes over Mario RPG's battle mechanics:


You're not alone, I said fixed named and save points could work in certain games. RPGs should combine Pokemon and Earthbound's naming systems by both giving you a list of names to choose besides being able to type in a name AND giving the option "I don't care" for a random or default name.

Saving anywhere beats having to redo areas because you died right before the save point. Majora's Mask taught me that.

Relationship and caste management are always fun, but I wish more rpgs combined them. Maybe there's a game where you play as a prince and you gotta manage your castle and royal family?

What's worse is when you find that same sword in the next dungeon. I think Xenoblade had enemies like that red dragon?

Another mechanic I miss is mimics being non-treasure chests. It added to the exploration and wonder to not know whether or not the object you were inspecting was a mimic. Tree mimics in forests were great.

And another mechanic I don't miss is useless items that you have to do ridiculous tasks to get, like doing 1000 jump ropes to get a "king of jump ropes" card in Final Fantasy 9.

Traditional spell slots like in D&D where you have X number of spells per day per spell level. The only real reason why it forces you to manage your resources better is because recovering slotted spells is always more difficult than downing a half a dozen elixirs. The person who created this system (or at least it was named after) was named Jack Vance which is where the name comes from.

The trend has heavily shifted towards everyone having magic or special abilities that have magic-like effects which tends to dilute what should be the awesome power of magic itself. Now we often times see one of the things I forgot to mention earlier that I'm not particularly fond of: skill cool downs. The thing I don't really like about this is that it let's you use your most powerful abilities every battle, sometimes more than once, so if the game is balanced, they can't really be all that powerful.

Things I don't miss:
-Being constantly lost in games due to having no idea what to do next. There's a fine line between let the player explore and figure it out and giving them nothing at all to go on. I still remember the day I spent the entire day wandering aimlessly in Wizardry 8 as I had no idea what to do next, and by the end of the day I still had no idea what to do next, I was just more powerful.
-Battles of miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, miss, especially when you can do little to influence the outcome but just have to sit there and pray you finally hit that goblin that has 1 HP so you can move on from that battle.
-Random battles that would make you fight an entire army each and every time (Bard's Tale loved to do this, though some Wizardry games were big offenders of this as well).

Things I do miss:
-Games not being afraid to let you explore areas you can't handle. Nowadays we either level scale it or just block it off, but in the past if you happened to stumble into the Pit of Doom as a level 1 character, the game wouldn't stop you, nor would it hold back on the battles either. The intent was the hard battles were supposed to clue you in that maybe you should go somewhere else instead.
-More games where the goal is to explore and figure out the world and what is going on. Nowadays we just give players shiny maps or compasses to tell them what to do, but I still remember games like Outcast and such where you were on an unknown world and had to figure out how to get off. Of course, the problem is, if it is done poorly, it turns into #1 from the things I don't miss, so it's a fine line.

Oh yeah, I forgot early rpgs used DnD rules. That system would annoy me as a kid, too, because I'd want to use magic everywhere. But now I think only some characters should have magic; rest should have other abilities, like shielding or attacking or escaping. Although I like the way The Immortal limited magic, it definitely added to the strategy and helped you get used to combat.


Myst really rides the line between exploration and being lost. Link to the Past got it right, though. Exploratory games need to tell you at the start what your objective is, or where to go, so you don't get lost. Also make the game fun to explore so you don't feel lost in it.

Battle systems should either include simple mechanics - fire beats water, etc. - or well-down mechanics - Mario RPG, Pokemon, early Final Fantasy - so you don't miss so much because the damage percentage is all wrong.

Things I don't miss:

- I didn't like the being lost either. I actually do like that nowadays you have quest markers, etc. I think it can be improved to be less hand-holding and even more helpful, but I understand that this isn't an easy task. And if you already have a 100-hours RPG with 1000 side-quests, it kinda goes without saying that it's quantity over quality. So a system that does the thinking for you is a good thing in this case and the problem lies with the quest design, not with the quest journal system. All that being said, ain't nobody got time for that so I think it's better than being utterly lost. xD

- Obligatory grinding. Sure, as a kid it was fun to grind to level 99, because as a kid you don't really have anything else to do and you really enjoy the game. But I rarely agree to grinding in games these days. I played Diablo 3 up to Paragon level 200 and some change, but only because I wanted to put one specific set together. The Skinner Box was the only thing that kept me playing and it actually left such a bitter aftertaste in my mouth that whenever I think about picking it up again and playing a bit, I kinda don't want to. I actually never finished Diablo 2, because of this. Another more classic example of grinding is FF9 with killing those Yan enemies on the little island for a few hours. It's just tedious and no fun at all. I replayed FF7 recently as well and obviously I cheated my way to upgrade my Materia. No way was I going to grind for 20 hours. In any case, I think games nowadays try to reduce grinding and it's a good thing. IDK, obligatory grinding makes games just less fun.

- Unskippable cutscenes. Oh wait, those still exist. xD

- Bad voice acting. Seriously, sometimes it was just so horrible. It's better they never made it in the first place.

Things I do miss:

- I agree with the open exploration thing with areas you can't handle. I played Breath of the Wild and I loved how I could do that. Sure, after a while my curiosity was satisfied and I'd return to the laid out path, but it was great that I could just wander off and get brutally murdered, because I didn't pay attention. I definitely think that too many games either are too linear in that manner or don't let the player know in a good way that they're going to get their asses kicked. Well, neither did BOTW, but at least you didn't lose much progress if you died and that's good design in my eyes.

- A very specific thing from the Mass Effect series. I loved that the first game didn't have ammo, but cool-down (the weapon literally had to cool down). It gave you an additional layer of depth on how to plan your attacks and whether you want to risk overheating and being vulnerable for a short period of time. They added an ammo system in ME2 and I hated that.

- Bad voice acting. xD Because sometimes you could tell the voice actors had fun recording it and even if it didn't turn out good, it had a certain charm to it.

I don't miss Training in D&D. If you don't know, in the old games when you got enough experience to level up, you didn't actually level up. You had to find a place that trained characters in their specific class and pay them money to level up. Some towns only had training for one or two classes so the rest of your 6 character party had to make due at their current level until you happened upon a town that could train them. Super annoying and completely unnecessary.

I will never miss when games made themselves longer through sheer difficulty. There is a limit to what some players can do and games once went well beyond that limit on a regular basis. So yeah, I hate most arcade games for that reason. This is also why I see games such as SimCity on SNES as being so great. They proved that a game need not be difficult to be fun and sell well.

What I do miss:
- Focus on singleplayer story in FPS games. As great as online multiplayer can be, it has IMO ruined many FPS game campaigns.

This is in Pokemon
A mechanic that I do miss is everything from BW2
A mechanic THAT SHOULD BURN IN THE DEPTHS OF THE DISTORTION WORLD are HMs. But knowing GF, they will just bring them back in the next game, which is sad.

Hmm, which games let you name all party members other than Earthbound?

Most of the Pre-PS2 FFs do.

Voice acting is really the reason they stopped doing that.

Chrono Trigger, Pokemon

I miss games with hidden content. And by content I mean something significant, not a bit of out of the way loot. Most games are so eager to display every drop of the hard work that has gone into them that a little 'Mew is under the SS Anne truck' possibility and wonder is missing in consequence. And the thing is, its totally possible to have the best of both worlds with some clever design. Which I'll spoiler just in case. Because, y'know, its hidden content.
So yeah, make games fun to explore and people will actually explore them. You don'thave to go full on emergent gameplay to provide some interesting interactions with the world either. And if you do these things, devs, then none of your work is going to be missed; instead, every area is going to be painstakingly analysed looking for that next possibility.

Things I miss:
Basically everything about the golden era of RPG's. Story driven games with incredible combat systems that weren't just hack and slash and hold your hand.

Final Fantasy VIII. lol. I mean, a HD update would suffice at this point.

Things I don't miss:
Bad graphics that made mechanics in games harder to understand.

Eh, while there are a lot of good RPGs that came out in what people tend to call the "Golden Age of RPGs" (which is generally the SNES/PSX era), I also think this is a bit of rose colored glasses combined with forgetting how long of a time period we are talking about. That is a 10-12 year period of games. Of course there are going to be a lot of gems in 12 years of games. There were also a lot of gems in the last 12 years of games as well, we just remember more of the mediocre games because they are recent and still in our memories.

Also, a lot of those games we remember fondly have mediocre battle systems that you can beat by holding down attack and occasionally casting heal spells.

Also, a lot of those games have stories that are not really as good as our nostalgia/memories tell us they are, and the translations of the JP games were generally at best mediocre.

Hell, the only game from that era I would put on the same level as Nier/Nier Automata from a story perspective is Xenogears, and that game's second disc is garbage rushed and badly executed, both gameplay and story.

I suppose it's all opinion anyway. I'm not a fan of the games, mechanics, or most of the stories in the new era of video games. I tried to play Nier Automata just a few weeks ago and I literally couldn't even bother to play past 30 minutes. It wasn't fun. While on the other hand, I can go back and play Final Fantasy VIII or X or just about any of my favorite old school RPGs and have almost as much fun playing them as I used to back when they were new. Of course this is just my opinion, and obviously I'm in the minority seeing as how most games are not catered to the way of old anymore.

Final Fantasy XV, in my opinion, was by far the worst game in the series, and I personally have a hard time even calling it a Final Fantasy game. The story was awful, the characters were bland and boring, the battle system was fun for like, 5 minutes, and then I got bored. The only real thing I enjoyed about that game was the graphics. They were incredible. Once again, all opinion.