This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
My main issue with that series is that it made not respecting a player’s time a game mechanic. Make a hard boss? Cool, no problem. Make it so if I die against said boss I have to go farm healing materials? Go fuck yourself.
I find myself enjoying Armored Core 6 way more because it follows the conventional mission structure and if you die in a boss you just reload at a checkpoint with all your shit.
But even then, the game won’t let you save and quit at a checkpoint on PC, so fuck me if I’m at the boss check point and need to switch off the PC to run an errand.
Yeah I tried Elden Ring for a good 20 hours, but I see absolutely no reason for the mechanic of having to go back to your body to get the XP, and if you die along the way it’s all gone. What gameplay purpose does that serve?
If you’re actually curious: the purpose it serves is to instill a weight in and fear of death for the player. The goal is to make you more tense when pushing farther from your last checkpoint.
That’s the idea, at least.