I'm sure we've all been perplexed at one time or another by the choices game designers make. You start playing a game, and depending on the type you expect to be able to do a certain thing, and you're very surprised when you can't. Some things shoud just be in certain types of games. Now, I'm not saying that all games should be the same, and of course not every mechanic applies to every game. And it goes without saying that this is more opinion than anything. At any rate, here are a few things I think should be standard by now, barring system limitations or barriers inherent to a games design. Of couse creating a good game comes first, but if these things can be fit in place without breaking the game, then they should be. Again, just my opinion.
New Game + Not every game will benefit from it like Chrono Trigger, but I find games lacking a new game + in this day and age, especially RPGs, to be a little absurd. Sure, you can't always have a prefect transfer of all stats and items like in Chrono Trigger, but that's okay. You can have limitations on your New Game +, like not transferring special items and such. The first Mana Khemia, which is an item creation JRPG, allowed you to transfer only stats so you wouldn't have the items you weren't supposed to have ahead of time. Mana Khemia 2 ammended this by allowing you to transfer items, but if you had to make a certain one at a certain time as required by the story, then you still had to actually make it at least once, even if you had the item in your inventory. If there are more available characters to recruit than can fit in your party I still don't think it would cost too much memory to save the stats of the characters you used, even if you don't recruit them again. I'm thinking of Star Ocean with that comment. I feel almost defeated by those games (at least the first 2, not sure about the others) not having a New Game + because aside from the main ending you also get character specific endings, and having more characters than you can recruit in one playthrough means multiple playthroughs. Now, if anyone has played a TriAce game, you know what an endeavor that would be. And of course action games could benefit as well, allowing you to play through with upgraded abilities and equipment and such. Any story limitaions, like a boss you're not supposed to be able to beat, can be handled in multiple ways. I've played games that even when I win they just act like I lost, or they could get creative and have you win, but have some circumstance provide the same outcome. There are many ways around any potential problems caused by having a new game + that I think any game with any kind of upgrading or stat growth would at least add some replay value by adding in a the feature. Perhaps not right for all games, but worth considering for a lot of games that come out now.
Local Multiplayer I may have said I'm not huge into multiplayer, but that's not entirely true. I just prefer to be in the same room as the person I'm playing with. I sort of feel like there was a while there where game designers just up and forgot that people used to actually bother to be in the same room when playing together. Thankfully it feels like we're coming out of that phase, slowly and surely. Now this is no knock against online multiplayer, and some multiplayer games just aren't set up to be played locally, but I have seen a few that would work well in split screen but were online multiplayer only. And speaking of split screen, doesn't the advent of wide screen TVs being the norm mean that side by side split screen is at least worth looking into? I don't know, maybe it just doesn't quite work right. I know I wasn't a fan of the sort of offset side by side thing FEAR 3 did, but then again, I've never felt like the top and bottom split screen was exactly comfortable. Still, it never stopped me from having fun while shooting at things with friends. Now maybe some engines just don't work for it, and maybe they just don't have time on the dev schedule to implement it, but if it can be done, it's worth doing. I mean, I'm not trying to be rediculous here. These things just feel like common sense to me. And speaking of common sense...
Let me see the effect a new piece of equipment will have before I buy it Certainly this one is rare, but all the more infuriating on the rare occasions I do run into it. And usually when I do I just have to hit a button to bring up the details. Of course, designers normally add a "Hit X for more details" box somewhere when that's the case. I write this for when they either don't have the option, or have it but don't tell you. I mean, come one. Hey, cool sword. Its expensive. That could mean its better than the one I have. Sure wish I could tell. Yeah, there's just no excuse for this one.
Multiple save slots Two of my best friends are married, and share a lot of their handheld games. Unless of course the game only has one save slot. Why? Well, who knows. Maybe they don't want you sharing, because then you buy more copies. Or, you know, you just pass on the game. Okay, I didn't mean this post to sound so negative. These last two just chap my hide. You'd have to have some really unique mechanics to really justify having only one save slot to me.
Multiple Save Profiles I've played a few games (Wet, Dragon's Dogma) where starting a new game deletes your saved information. Why can't I just have multiple profiles? There was no problem doing this before the current generation, so why is there one now? Maybe I want to experiment with multiple characters or classes. Or maybe I just got a game and I want to lug it over to my friends' house and show the opening. Having multiple profiles for saving would be an easy fix to a problem that shouldn't really exist.
Okay. That ended up being more of a complaint fest than I intended. I was actually just going for a positive topic to just discuss what mechanics we feel should be normal in relevant games by now. Some of those are just bothers I guess I had to get off my chest. I'm sure I have more, but I don't want to whine any more than I already have. And like I said before, I'm sure that some of the time there are good reasons for why these things aren't done. I don't claim to know how game engines work or what kind of deadlines the development teams are under, and I know that sometimes things just don't work, but I'm sure there are plenty of times things could be implemented and just aren't.
Anyway, just wondering what else you think should be normal mechanics for games (at least where the mechanic applies), or when you've ran into a game that perplexed you by lacking a mechanic that is already considered normal.
