Game Core Mechanics

It occurred to me that CoH's main gameplay can be little more than hitting buttons at the right time. When the power lights up because it's ready for use, you hit the button to use it. There is a lot of strategy involved in creating a character, and deciding how to use it, but once that's done, the actual use of the character, tends to not be very deep. The bit about hitting the button when it says it's ready, reminds me of DDR.

Another thing that occurred to me, is that the common boss design in action games, where there's a visible animation before a big attack that needs to be either dodged or blocked, is in many ways similar to a quicktime event, in that it's just hitting the right button when the onscreen cue tells you to. Though quicktime events tend to be more straight forward (making them easier) and often involve having the character do feats not normally possible in the game mechanics.

With regard to the block when told mechanic. One varient I thought was neat was something I encountered in Skies of Arcadia. In the ship to ship battles, there would be a colour code to each segment of time in battle. The colour told you how dangerous a given moment would be. This generally encouraged you to block during the most dangrous ones. However, the most dangerous segments were often the ones in which you could do the most damage too. So there was a choice there between blocking, or gunning, and the different weapon types actually offered more than two ways of handling it.

I really don't know if these things I've observed are good things or bad things. I do know, that I often wish things were different, but I don't know what I'd want it to be. I'm reminded of how I love building decks for Magic The Gathering, but don't have much interest in playing the game. However, if I don't play, I can't learn how well my decks work. So the gameplay becomes a kind of chore I have to get through to do what I like. I find I have similar sentiments about most games that I play, and don't know how to fix it. I fear that even if I did find a game that did things in a way I really liked, I'd probably finish it too quickly due to it not being feasable to produce enough quality content to really keep me interested a long time. Sorta like how I can read books far faster than their authors can write.

Written on 20090710 (yyyymmdd)