The original post: /r/gaming by /u/brando-boy on 2024-05-22 23:27:27.

think of things like blood vials being limited in bloodborne and fast travel being limited in dragon’s dogma

for bloodborne, to this day (and in a thread that popped off in this sub recently), the idea that you need to “farm for blood vials” is brought up constantly as a huge negative and criticism for the game. “why would they ever decide to do this when they already perfected the formula with estus flasks that replenished on death or after resting?” because it’s a different game with a different design philosophy dude! in bloodborne they want you to play more aggressively than a lot of the previous souls games, and it is designed around that idea. the movement, the weapons, the rally system, and yes, even the finite blood vials, are made to incentivize a particular kind playstyle. if you back off and pop a vial every time you get instead instead of jumping back in and healing a little via rally, you’re probably going to run out of vials, but that’s your fault, not the game’s

i’m less familiar with dragon’s dogma but the devs explicitly stated that fast travel was intentionally limited to make the player slow down from just hopping straight from one objective point to another and actually engage with the world and the environments. if you don’t want to do that then maybe the game just isn’t for you, and that’s okay

and there are countless other examples that i could go on about all day, but that’s not the point

the broader point is that video games as a medium are NOT a scientific formula that needs to be fine-tuned and “objectively” perfected. things that are “inconvenient” for the player can be very intentional decisions made to emphasize specific point or ideas. fast travel is not an “objective” upgrade that every single open world-adjacent game NEEDS to have or else it is worse for it. not every soulslike NEEDS replenishing heals if the devs feel like doing so harms the design they want to encourage, etc etc

and obviously intentional decisions can still sometimes fail and be implemented bad yadda yadda you should get the idea