More Titanfall > Destiny PvP Stuff I Noticed (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, December 07, 2016, 21:12 (2688 days ago) @ SonofMacPhisto

Titanfall isn't a shooter. It's a time based puzzle. Movement and shooting are the tools you use to solve the puzzle.

Discuss?

In one sense, all shooters work this way. In another sense, puzzles require you to be able to see the entire game board in order to solve the puzzle. At no point in time is Titanfall (or any other shooter I can think of) like that. An RTS could realistically be described as a puzzle, I suppose, and some MMO boss fights definitely are entirely puzzles (that you let someone else solve and post a video of for you to copy the next night.. grrr... where's the fun in that?), but FPS games are not really like that in the PvP landscape. Destiny's raids are also puzzles to be solved, but even when you know the solution to the puzzle, if you aren't high enough light level you still can't win, so there's a RPG leveling element as well that is semi-RNG based and out of your hands... Still puzzle-esque, imo.

Anyway, I'd agree that the slower an FPS game plays, the more it plays like a puzzle rather than a twitch shooter.

Then maybe I'll say it another way: to do well in Titanfall, you must be conscious of first the amount of time required to your next Titan and then once you have your Titan the amount of time until your next core. To win, you must always be doing things to achieve those goals. If you're not shooting something, even if you're not killing it, you're on your way to losing.

I mean, duh, right? But it feels focused in a way other games aren't. Maybe I don't play enough twitch shooters, like Korny said, because I remember kill streaks and stuff in MW2 kind of working this way.

But I dunno. It's just with Titanfall... something that stands out in my mind, screaming at me.

It's the positive reinforcement loop. You are rewarded for doing the thing you want to be doing: fighting.

I've actually spent an inordinate amount of time studying this phenomenon in video games. Like, way too much time. It all comes back to mana. Prepare for a crazy statement: Mana sucks as a game mechanic. It's a negative feedback loop. The entire point of a limited mana supply is to force players to think about what they will do with that resource. Do I use it all for one big fireball? Or cast Magic Missiles five times instead? Either way, once you're out of mana, you're done. Casting those big spells is fun, but now they've been cast and you're stuck with whatever crap you have when you're out of mana. A dagger? I dunno. Anyway, mana is a limited resource and, as such, it is a limiting resource when it comes to gameplay. The game becomes less about the actual goals of the game (shooting a thing) and more about managing your resource. It's just not fun.

Cue the positive reinforcement feedback loop mechanic. Instead of starting with a full bar of mana and draining it as you use your abilities, you start with an empty bar and fill it by using your abilities. The more effective you are in combat, the faster you fill your bar. Destiny does this with supers, Titanfall does it with Titans and Cores, and good old Diablo 2 did it with berserker rage. Playing the game to the hilt not only maximizes your damage, but also maximizes your rewards. It's awesome.

Now the actual result on gameplay is very similar. You get a fireball once every 10 seconds. But the difference is that with mana, you cast your fireball and then go hide for 10 seconds while you build more mana, and with positive reinforcement you cast a fireball and then continue whipping the living snot out of everyone for the next 10 seconds until - oh YES - you earn another fireball. It's just more fun, plain and simple.

If only more games focused on encouraging and rewarding players for doing what they want to do instead of forcing them to spend time in activities they don't want to do in order to get the things they need for the activity they want to do later.