Games@lemmy.worldby58008@lemmy.world
3 hours

I've had enough shimmying along ledges and squeezing through cracks sideways to last me a lifetime

English

Is anyone else completely over this tedious shite?

I understand the cases where it’s used to hide the fact that the game is loading in the next section of the level, but surely there are better solutions to that non-issue. Like a loading screen.

Regardless, it’s almost never the case that these shimmy squeezes have anything to do with slowing the player down for under-the-hood reasons (think of games like Sekiro, Hitman, Assassin’s Creed or Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order). They’re apparently there to provide the player with ‘gameplay’, I guess because they’re free gamey gameplay shit that you can just pepper into a level randomly to embloaten the experience a little.

It’s like a dog bowl with lots of nooks and crannies in it, designed to make the dog eat slower, but is presented as “enrichment”. I’m not a colicky dog and the rest of the game is providing ample enrichment, thanks. It would be even more enriching if you’d stop interrupting me to make me walk sideways through a fucking bookcase.

#CancelShimmySqueezes

7
    • mrfriki@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15 minutes

      I see your squeezing through cracks and raise a long press a button to do an action. Jesus, if the action needs a certain amount of time to complete, and 99% of times it doesn’t, just make a freaking animation while at it instead of making me press a damn button for 2 seconds.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9 minutes

        It can be overused, but that one’s useful for avoiding a thousand different “are you sure?” prompts.

    • arctanthrope@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1 hour

      what pissed me off about Jedi fallen order was when they would put in an elevator to hide a loading screen, and then when you got to the end it would still stutter for a couple seconds to finish loading. don’t make the elevator a real fixed distance dumbass, just make it a looping animation that continues arbitrarily until the loading is completely done

    • Zahille7@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      I like that Dunkey’s running joke is if it has some cave you need to squeeze into then that’s how you know it’s a AAA game

    • Katana314@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      Besides masking loading, I think these are put in to break the pace in games. If all you’re doing is going from one fight to the next, your mind is a bit too locked in. Climbing is less effort on your mind, without making you pay attention to story.

      I also found in games like Expedition 33, they help make the world feel more alive if you’re clambering through low caverns and climbing up cliffs. The way the verticality lends to better vistas is itself pretty valuable.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 hours

      Walking sideways through a bookcase, crack in the wall, crevasse, is often to mask a load screen, as you suspect. I forget who coined it, but someone online observed that these are literally “load-bearing walls”, and I’ve been calling them that ever since. In the case of Assassin’s Creed, there used to be sort of a puzzle of “how do I get from here to there with only those observable handholds?” Perhaps that eroded over time as the series went on. The last one I finished was Unity, and I sampled Odyssey, but that wasn’t a very vertical climbing game. Assassin’s Creed came from Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell roots, one of which retains that traversal puzzle, and the other is a stealth game, where you have to get from one place to other either without touching the ground or without being in the light. I would argue Hitman’s ledge-climbing fits the same bill that stealth games always have, so it’s not out of place there. I can’t speak to Sekiro or Jedi.