Comment by snailmailman
1 day ago
This depends a lot on the game and the situation. If hidden well enough i suspect it can play well. I really enjoyed the difficulty of Half Life Alyx for instance. I was saving my resources carefully because they seemed very sparse.
But then I noticed that the loot was entirely dynamic. I forget the exact items, but if you only use one grenade it will only generate one refill hidden around the next area. If you use all your resources though, the upcoming loot gets massively increased and you can usually get almost all of it back right away. I learned this partway through and completely changed my playstyle and really broke the immersion to see the game difficulty change in realtime. I reloaded a save and played differently, and the next area was filled with loot instead of empty. But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
On the other hand, some Mario games now will essentially have a "you are dying a lot, here is a star power up to help you out, or heres luigi to play the level for you" mechanic. For a super casual game, such a mechanic is great. Its optional. If you want to lock-in and beat the hard level, you can just not grab the powerup, or say no to the prompt. But if you are getting frustrated, you can skip the hard parts and fly through to the next level and get right back to having fun.
The Alyx example is interesting, because I see that system as being designed to avoid breaking immersion. Specifically, to avoid entering an "unwinnable" state i.e. where the player restarts from a save/checkpoint. I do understand how noticing the underlying system can pull you out of the game though.
Intuitively, people want to save up ammo because they never know when there's gonna be a big fight, and they don't want to be caught low on ammo.
I had the same experience, I was trying to be very accurate with the guns and thought, wow, there's hardly any ammo to pick up in this game. Partway through I got tired of being stingy and started being less careful, having fun going rambo, and suddenly ammo was spawning everywhere.
I think it would be much better if the game just spawned enough to max out your pools fairly early, so you can focus less on inventory and more on combat. Then they can adjust the size of the ammo pools to tune how accurate they want you to be.
I think part of the issue is that Alyx doesn't really have any other options to fight besides guns that need ammo or however many grenades you're choosing to carry. They didn't have melee as a design decision, but it means they need to keep you topped up on ammo or you're defenseless.
> But when asking my friends what they thought, none of them noticed that the game was doing this, and they all thought it was well balanced.
Sounds like the design is working as intended?
The issue IMO is that there's a subset of gamers who really do not want games to try to balance things automatically, e.g. people who really hate skill-based matchmaking. Most people will enjoy the system, but this subset sees a balancing feedback loop as punishment for being "too good".