Comment by qwery
18 hours ago
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.