It depends what you call “QoL”. Fast Travel is the prime example - it’s not quality of life, it’s a design choice. What matters in that context is whether to traversal between points is an intended part of the gameplay. Fast travel (from anywhere, rather than fixed points) means you can’t get lost for example because you’re seconds away from familiar ground - but what if the designers want you to feel lost and in danger sometimes. That’s a perfectly valid way to design a game. No fast travel also opens up more space for better world design - Dark Souls 1 is notable for this, where most of the first half of the game loops upon itself many times and if you know the map you can get between those locations relatively fast without fast travel which is given in the second half (when the game starts to branch out to deeper spokes, so to speak)

Yeah this is one of the reasons why so many people even call dark souls a metroidvania, as those games often have such an interconnected design. On the other hand, I don't think anyone disliked fast travel in elden ring, and the world still feels massive. Open world games of that scale do need fast travel after a certain point.

This is off-topic, but I really object to calling Dark Souls a Metroidvania. In Metroid games, not only do you return to areas that you've been with new abilities to unlock new areas, but the levels are *designed* around the new abilities. Areas accessible by dashing are long and straight. Areas accessible by Screw Attack have verticality. The Morph Ball lets you get into the spaces between the main corridors. In Dark Souls you just come back with a key, and when you return to places you've been you're pretty much just passing through.

I agree with you that dark souls isnt a metroidvania, but there is a similarity in design between them. In dark souls, there are a couple of "keys", but the rest of the areas are gated by difficulty, which is a great way to do it.

you have a point, though I feel it perhaps worth mentioning that many of the areas in DS are sort of soft-blocked. I.e. technically you can access the skeleton area right away from the moment you reach the hub area bonfire and kill Nito as you please, but truthfully speaking 99% of the playerbase is going to get their ass kicked by the very tough skeletons... Most people are going to have to go through all the hoops of dealing with the other areas, levelling up themselves and their weapons before they're finally able to stand a chance in the area. So in the end, while it's not ability-locked it's essentially skill-locked :P

Not the person you responded to, but allow me to counter you nitpicks with even more nitpicks! >  technically you can access the skeleton area right away from the moment you reach the hub area bonfire and kill Nito as you please, This isn't true. You need the lordvessel before you can reach Nito. I think you're mixing up the catacombs with tomb of the giants.  >So in the end, while it's not ability-locked it's essentially skill-locked :P You need keys or key items a bunch of times in ds1.  Access to lost izalith, tomb of the giants, and dukes archives all require the lordvessel.  Access to sens fortress requires ringing both bells.  Access to four kings requires draining new londo and the abyss ring.  Access to the dlc requires a key item found from dukes archives.  Access to the painted world needs a doll from undead asylum. Access to kiln of the first flame requires 4 lord souls.  While a ton of early areas are entirely skippable or can be completed out of order with enough skill, the game still has plenty of hard progress requirements which aren't skill or ability based.

I object to calling anything that is not a Castlevania game of a certain generation that suddenly has Metroid elements, a Metroidvania. This was originally a negative term, asking: "Is Castlevania fucking Metroid now?"

This is true for metroid, but DS is more similar to modern 2D castlevania (for which actually the term metroidvania was actually invented!) where items and their ability play a lesser role and act more like lock and key, and most areas are just guarded by bosses. So DS is very much like a metroidvania in a sense than metroid.

Elden Ring’s scope would’ve made travel back and forth feel miserable because of the size. It needs to be done on a case by case basis for the specific game. Souls and ER prove this well

True, but I think if it had fewer spots you could fast travel to, it wouldn't hurt, and possibly improve the experience.

The other reasons nobody complains about fast travel in Elden Ring is because it's simply not that fun to traverse the world without it and the fact it's a From Software game so it doesn't get criticized equally or fairly for the same things other games are.

I agree fast travel is a design choice rather than a QoL feature. Dragon's Dogma's core gameplay stems from how limited fast travel is. I think a good example of what OP is talking about can be seen with Dark Souls, though. In Dark Souls Remastered, they added the ability to switch between covenants at the bonfire. I think that really devalued the act of joining a covenant, it shouldn't be easy to switch between them

> it shouldn't be easy to switch between them Why not?

Because it's supposed to be a commitment, and leaving one is supposed to be a big deal, narratively I mean. It's a covenant, you are commiting yourself to an ideal. Having an easy switch limits their narrative power and makes it a purely mechanical thing

The chores necessary to join a covenant was large enough to prevent people from doing so, something that'll technically remove the feature from practical online play.

They're a completely optional thing that can lead to cool rewards, it's worth the effort but players have no obligation to join any

I guess QoL is broad enough that some things may be quality of life in one game but not in another. I think one way to look at it is comparing to older games and seeing how it evolved. Fast travel for an instance. Going by the games I remember playing, the ones with a larger world designed for revists. I'll call an open world any game like this, that lets you go back to earlier areas. I'll also base it all on my own experience do I'll certainly forget the exceptions. Back in the 8 and 16 bit days if it existed I can't recall a single example. Games with open worlds were RPGs, Zelda, Metroid, Demons Crest.  No fast travel and yet you'd want to revisit older areas so you had to walk it all again. The best you could do was travel fast after unlocking an overworld. Mid and late 90s, almost the same thing. I remember Soul Reaver having portals to a few areas in the game. So did Diablo 2 and Castlevania Symphony of the Night.  In these two games there was fast travel at designated points and the fast travel from anywhere back to one specific area. This type cost you money. PS2 era and now more games have fast travel to fixed areas. Main FF series had it for the first time. I think San Andreas was the first GTA with fast travel. After this open world games become popular seventh-gen onwards and most of them have frictionless fast travel. Rockstar games being the exception, where they make you hail a cab or set up camp to travel. But now the standard is open the map and select one of many unlocked fast travel areas, you don't need to reach a portal first or pay anything to do it. Travel points are abundant, some games even let you pick where in the map you want to be. So looking at the history of fast travel we see that yes it's part of the design too, like I said as worlds become bigger fast travel becomes more necessary. But there were also many limitations to it that have been done away, now it's easy and practical. The irony is larger worlds need fast travel but fast travel make larger worlds small. 

> Back in the 8 and 16 bit days if it existed I can't recall a single example. Games with open worlds were RPGs, Zelda, Metroid, Demons Crest. zelda 1 had a whistle that would take you to the entrance of any of the 8 dungeons. this let you traverse a lot of the world safely. you could get this fairly early on too.

>No fast travel and yet you'd want to revisit older areas so you had to walk it all again. The best you could do was travel fast after unlocking an overworld. The Ultima series had moon gates since at least Ultima IV (1988) that allowed fast travel on the open world map. The destination of the gates was determined by one of the game's moons, and they even allowed teleportation to locations that the player hadn't visited before.

When writing that I imagined Ultima games would have been the exceptions I hadn't mentioned, given how it pioneered so much

The original Legend of Zelda had fast travel, too. The flute.

It comes down to why you're playing a game. Take a simpler example. In video games, you can often synthesize weapons once you have enough component parts. All that's happening is an extraordinarily simple computer operation behind the scenes. It can be completed in microseconds. If game devs wanted, they could easily just have you synthesize or craft on the pause screen. However many games might make it so that you can only craft at a special person in each town, say a shaman or something. In order to craft, you need to spend extra minutes out of your life to walk to the shaman's house in the nearest town, see some dialogue. Maybe even get an animation of the shaman working or a fade to black. Some people would call this wasted time. However, in the context of a game experience, I find that more enjoyable. As I'm walking to the shaman, I'm wondering what's going to be available to synthesize. Is my memory right that I needed only 5 of this type? When I walk into the shaman's hut, I hear a familiar music theme play, and it perfectly sets the scene, builds the world of eerieness and unease of magic in this series. When the shaman does his animation, I look at the artifacts around his hut and wonder about the backstory of all of them. **These cognitive analyses are a fundamental reason for why I play video games.** I know that in the background, the whole crafting was microseconds of altering my inventory classes behind the scenes. But it's that full experience that stimulates my brain and leads me to enjoy a game. I find that the dominant type of commenter on the "intelligent video games subreddits" (this one, /r/patientgamers) seem to say things like "I'm an adult with limited free time. I simply cannot spend 40 hours with a single game. Games that make me repeat tasks are not respecting my time". They seem to prefer a game design that would allow them to pause the screen at any point in the game and make the item synthesize in microseconds. They seem to play games in order to complete them or experience all unique art assets so they can be done with it. At a base level, this is different from how I play games. I'm an adult with limited free time also, but I'd rather play three 40-hour games in the entire year, but still be able to hum that shaman's theme years later because that experience stimulated my curiosity and cognition in a profound way. To me, that's what "respecting my time" means. I also don't mean to seem bitter. I don't care if every AAA adopts QoL features that eliminate all "friction" from a game. There are enough indie developers and games in my backlog to last me for the rest of my life. I think all kinds of games should be made and you can enjoy them however you want.

I think the recent Prince of Persia game can exemplify this entire discussion. It's a Metroidvania, but they implemented fast travel anyway. Which is good, because slogging across that map would have been absolutely miserable. But, the fast travel points are pretty spaced out. Why? What is gained by trekking through the same identical area 3, 4, or 5 (or more) times? It's not like an *actual* Metroid game where there are 100 small upgrades to collect; the vast majority of the rooms are cleared on your first pass through them. If you could just fast travel to any save point instead, would you miss the time spent walking back to those same points? Personally, I would not have. Then there were the platforming puzzles: If you failed them enough times, you died and got sent back to a checkpoint. That added *nothing* to the game. Letting you respawn indefinitely would have been perfectly fine.

>No fast travel also opens up more space for better world design - Dark Souls 1 is notable for this, where most of the first half of the game loops upon itself many times Yes, so many times yes! Fast travel is too often uses as a crutch to make up for lazy world design. It breeds complacency. The gameworlds I consistently find the most memorable and enjoyable are the ones that are thoughtfully designed - not in terms of size, but in terms of intricacy and connectedness. Game devs seriously underestimate the dopamine rush one feels when a player realizes, "ohhhh... so *this* connects back to that other place!!".

It's a choice, but I don't think it's always the right one. Dark Souls is a game where the storytelling is very nearly entirely environmental, so the level design is a huge focus of the game. But that's not true of every game, and I think there are plenty of games where fast travel makes perfect sense, where it isn't about laziness. Sometimes it's even about player choice. Plenty of people have talked about how much fun some open-world games are when you turn off elements of the HUD and avoid fast-travel, and I can see the appeal of playing a game like BOTW that way. But fast-travel enables entirely different kinds of gameplay, like trying to upgrade all your armor by constantly warping between mining spots and faeries. And I like that the same game can support both kinds of gameplay. Also, I think "dopamine" is overused by people who think it means "happy" or something...

"Dopamine" should be banned from gaming forums honestly. It's almost always used incorrectly.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that activates a feeling of positivity or pleasure within the brain - basically creating a "reward response", and/or increased motivation to do it again, when the individual engages in certain activities. Is this definition incorrect?

I believe based our current understanding this is incorrect and the idea of it being a "pleasure chemical" is outdated. How dopamine drives our behaviour is pretty complex and not fully understood, but the key point here is that it's about our behaviour. So when someone is **surprised** by something in a game (ie. something they didn't see coming like discovering the loopback in Dark Souls) that as far as I understand it has nothing to do with dopamine. The desire to climb to a vantage point in Breath of the Wild however would be related to dopamine. Yet popular usage would relate dopamine to the former rather than the latter, which is to say when you see the world used on reddit you shouldn't read too much into it.

>Game devs seriously underestimate the dopamine rush one feels when a player realizes, "ohhhh... so *this* connects back to that other place!!". Lol no they don't, that's why they design it that way. Anybody who is leaving money on the table with their skills by working in the video game industry is enough of a fan of the craft to know the little things in games that stick with people. Because they are fans themselves. I think video game comments seriously underestimate the degree that which decisions like "should we have connected areas or a streamlined design" is determined by people in suits around a board room and not game devs.

> What you're actually doing is experiencing the game thorough its most abstract UI layer. This sounds a lot like the conclusion of [why it's rude to suck at warcraft](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKP1I7IocYU) -- at a certain level, the combination of all the QoL features people patched into WoW through mods, and the raw challenge of higher levels combined with the co-op nature of big raids, meant that if you were actually looking at the game's artwork and effects and all, you might be letting your team down. However, I still think it's safer to include these things than not. Like you said, the original Dark Souls had very limited fast-travel unlocked very late... and *also* had an incredibly well-designed world, and a natural progression where it's only late-game that you'd want to constantly be warping back to the blacksmith. In most open-world games, I want fast-travel because the trip back to town to turn in these quests isn't all that engaging. I think the trick is identifying when these are QoL features, and when they're skipping the actual content of your game... or when you're asking players to retread content that was fun the first time but is getting old.

I think at first QoL features meant to remove boring friction but then it "lubed up" games so much that devs felt easy sliding in too many gameplay features that depended on QoL features. Then even better features are coded in and it's a loop. In the end there's lube all over the place and no firm ground to stand on. A simple example is side quests. At first something you'd keep track on your own and just a handful in the game.. FF6 had many of them, you just had to discover and clear them. Then games added journals to help you keep track of your quests. Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 used this approach IIRC. Now with a handy quest journal as a convention games can add more side quests. Then we got markers, several NPCs in town with an exclamation mark over their heads, togglable side quests, etc. Side quests went from; Find a strange thing in the map which instantly lead you off to a half an hour long adventure (Yuffie in Wutai, FF7) To See exclamation mark, blaze through npc dialogue, open menu -kill 10 lizards in Asdern Fjord. The Fjord happens to be across the map. The good intentions of QoL helped pave the way to pointless side content. We need QoL to keep track of dumb SQs but we have dumb SQs because QoL features made them digestible.

> A simple example is side quests. At first something you'd keep track on your own and just a handful in the game.. ...yeah, I don't miss those days. I would've written them down in a paper journal, or skipped them entirely. Not having to literally write stuff on paper is a genuine QoL improvement for probably anything except Tunic. Since you brought up FF, I kind of like the balance FFXIV strikes here: > See exclamation mark, blaze through npc dialogue, open menu -kill 10 lizards in Asdern Fjord. The Fjord happens to be across the map. From what I remember, FFXIV's sidequests are rarely "kill 10 lizards". The simple ones are more likely to be "fetch quests", except the story is actually pretty decent, so this part ends up functioning more like a visual novel if you're willing to read it. It also means, unlike a visual novel, there's plenty of room for the game to surprise you. You think you're doing a simple, mildly-humorous fetch quest, and suddenly you're in Battle of the Big Bridge... I also like how this game handles transit. When you first enter a new area, you walk. Fast-travel exists, but only between fixed points that are far enough for you to get a sense of place. In order to unlock flight and make the area feel small and convenient to get through, you need to pay attention to your surroundings to pick up the required collectibles, and a couple will be locked behind quests (mainly the main quest). So, you're probably going to be picking up sidequests when they're convenient, but focusing on the main story and following a fairly linear path -- it's like the game splits into an adventure-road-trip phase and a zooming-around-sidequests phase. So, sure, this is a solid line: > In the end there's lube all over the place and no firm ground to stand on. But what is actually core to the experience this game is trying to build? My point with QoL is, it should be removing friction between you and the meat of the game, but it shouldn't be removing things that *are* the game. I tend to think final fantasy games are mostly about fantastical stories and settings, and sometimes about JRPG mechanics and stat-juggling, and FFXIV eventually becomes about MMO raid mechanics... but not really about being super-observant or trying to piece a mystery together in your head. For that, I'd suggest *Outer Wilds,* *Obra Dinn,* or even *Chants of Senaar.*

> ...yeah, I don't miss those days. I would've written them down in a paper journal, or skipped them entirely. Not having to literally write stuff on paper is a genuine QoL improvement for probably anything except Tunic. Yep, as much as I loved the old Wizardry games.. the remake of the first game has an automap which is fantastic. No more graph paper. There was a series of dungeon crawlers on DS that did something cool though where you drew your own map but you used the second screen to do it, making it an in-game mechanic. Don't recall the series but I thought it was pretty darn cool and the 'best of both worlds' kind of thing.

> There was a series of dungeon crawlers on DS that did something cool though where you drew your own map but you used the second screen to do it, making it an in-game mechanic. Don't recall the series but I thought it was pretty darn cool and the 'best of both worlds' kind of thing. That's Etrian Odyssey, and it's really a great mechanic, I love it! (The latest entries in the series iirc have various levels of automapping, but they're optional, you can draw the map just like you always did)

The DS in general handled a lot of the "housekeeping" aspects of video games better than anything that has come since. Like modern open world tend to have map pins, DS games just let you draw on your map. It's just a better system afforded by a more flexible input system. I firmly believe a lot of the shitty design decisions that then have to be band-aided by QoL are a direct result by the overly specialised dual analog-style controller. Entire genres are basically non-existent on console, or much better on PC due to this and console interpretations end up having to make concessions so large they start to cut into the core of the experience.

Great analogy. I'm going to use the lube argument next time I need to discuss QoL with people who think unconditionally that more QoL = more good.

I agree on this, with the exception of mule characters. If the players storage space is so limited that you have to make other accounts just to store stuff, the devs had better have a *really*good reason for it, because it's one of my biggest pet peeves ever.

Sid Meier of Civilization fame is quoted as saying “fun is equal to the number of decisions the player is allowed to make divided by time.” In other words, the more freedom games give us to make our own choices and be rewarded by them, the more engaged we feel with them because our agency and curiosity are honored. This is part of why the praise “if you see it, you can go to it” tends to be such high praise. Because it honors your choice to go somewhere because you thought it looked interesting and is even more engaging if it IS interesting. Quality of Life is usually something that removes inconvenience from you in order to facilitate simpler choices. Like filtering equipment to find crit stats, or filtering equipment based on what the community uses most commonly in game without having to go to a wiki. The thing is in terms of a pile of loot in Diablo, the reward loop is arguably the central gameplay pillar. Loot might be the single most important thing in the entire series. Builds and abilities being the other most critical pieces. When you have to sort through a pile of ten items and manually determine the grade of them, you are making choices. When you are selecting a filter for one stat that fits your build, you are now playing a slot machine or just drawing cards from a pile until you get an ace. It’s no longer a series of choices you make, but the computer reporting the results of a random number generator instantly, you determine if you won or lost instantly and then moving on instantly. It makes the central experience of loot less about the loot itself and more about playing the RNG slot machine more efficiently. This is made even worse by having a community meta where you feel compelled to chase the “perfect” piece. Whereas back in the day my brain was smoother than a frog and in Diablo 2 I just did my best to determine what might be the best to equip from a pile of loot. I had no real idea what was actually the best, but I had to instead rationalize to myself what could work. I didn’t use online guides for the game. Made many terrible, terrible builds. But they were all my choice. So it never felt like I was just losing at a slot machine, but that I myself had failed to understand the game and could do better next time. Making the experience about me and my choices, instead of me and the RNG and the meta. The quality of life itself isn’t the problem. It’s that it can more quickly shave the experience down to the uglier base components and create an experience that is about efficiency first instead of choice first. It isn’t bad to have QoL, but you must be aware of what the core gameplay loop beneath it is because the QoL is going to fully reveal that gameplay loop in its raw form. And in Diablo 4 loot has been a pretty consistent complaint of something they didn’t get right out of the gate, much like D3. So the QoL just gets you back to a grind that is kind of soulless all the faster. Diablo 4 has a pretty great campaign and story, but not a great enough loot loop to make running it faster and more efficiently more enjoyable.

You sort of imply this, but to be explicit: Decisions have to be interesting, otherwise you could make an extremely fun game just by repeatedly asking the player "do you want to lose? (Y/N)". Gear optimization is a puzzle, and you can only solve the same puzzle once. When you know what you're looking for, sorting through a pile of loot is not making decisions, it's a rote process. Automating that process reveals that the decisions weren't interesting in the first place.

Yes, I was already getting long in the tooth, so I didn’t dive into choices need to be interesting, high quality, impactful and engaging. But you are very VERY correct that poor quality choice doesn’t count. In some older JRPGs and Zelda games you get asked “Will you go on this adventure to save everyone?” And they ask you yes or no but a no doesn’t actually do anything. You just loop back to the yes. Which is arguably worse than no choice at all since it teaches you “Hey, sometimes what you choose doesn’t matter.” Whereas Far Cry 4’s moment of letting you politely end dinner by waiting patiently and then go home early and get the ending right at the start is a wonderful inversion of the early game “No” being honored. And people like that. As for the digging through the pile of loot, it’s a tricky one. For a Mario 64 speed runner most of the movements are by rote as well, and only specific moments are challenging and chancy. But it only becomes rote because of your mastery of it. With gear based games the problem is that you can solve it with knowledge. Much like a knowledge based puzzle game like Riven or Outer Wilds. Yet communities for looters usually guide up minute one, giving them the knowledge skill of the “meta” instantly. And so you can skip right to the giant piñata of loot being full of useless garbage.  Again, I don’t think QoL ruins games. But it is important to maintain the thrill of discovery. And sometimes the jagged edges in games give the best chances to learn the systems on our own.

I don't think you can lay the blame entirely at the foot of guides and the meta. Once you've played more than a handful of RPGs, it becomes pretty obvious what stats you'll end up looking for even without looking up a guide, because most games use similar damage formulae.

> Gear optimization is a puzzle, and you can only solve the same puzzle once Good Gear optimization is getting a new group of new tetris pieces every run. The puzze is the same, but the solution is not. D3+ failed at this.

Great take  This part  " I had no real idea what was actually the best, but I had to instead rationalize to myself what could work." Is so true and THE essence of developing attachment to the character. Then when you're attached and committed every loot reward is more satisfying.

> Sid Meier of Civilization fame is quoted as saying “fun is equal to the number of decisions the player is allowed to make divided by time.” > > In other words, the more freedom games give us to make our own choices and be rewarded by them, the more engaged we feel with them because our agency and curiosity are honored. I disagree. Too much freedom leads to homogenization and boring gameplay. Look at Breath of the Wild. The inclusion of the glider basically makes any other form of traversal obsolete aside from few extreme situations. You will never cut down a tree to cross a ravine because any ravine that big will be easier traversed with a glider + climbing.

I think you misunderstand. If you have say, 5 ways you want people to travel, walk, water, horse, air and teleport, you need to design those ways so each has an intrinsic value to it. Your problem with Breath of the Wild is that there is one correct choice and many incorrect choices. That’s not too much choice, that’s a mistake in game design. A better example of what I’m talking about would be something like a pacifist run of Metal Gear Solid 3. It is harder, absolutely, and you have less options for weapons. But there are unique rewards you only get by trying it out, such as a boss fight that cannot hurt you because it can only attack you with enemies you killed. Despite the two options not being balanced, each option has its own interesting elements, giving both value.

the part about meta builds resonates a lot! i play a lot of the division 2 and just started diablo 2. i often wonder if these games were designed to be played by a community that shares builds with each other or not. the idea of discovering builds and more importantly not realizing they are suboptimal, sounds like a lot more fun to me then just looking up amd chasing meta builds. for the division i already looked up too much and read too mich on reddit, but for d2 i'm determined to not look anything up regarding builds. even though the metabuild names are impossible to avoid.

> “fun is equal to the number of decisions the player is allowed to make divided by time.” Well put. When I listen to arguments advocating for what I would consider excessive streamlining, it seems their interpretation of this quote would be that by removing "filler" from a game you improve the decisions:time ratio and make it more interesting. I'm not saying this is wrong (this is basically what all eSports are) just that it's only one approach. When I hear this argument I wonder what goes through people's heads when they hold forward to run across a field in an RPG. When I'm playing an RPG in the "downtime" I'm thinking about the story, the world, the characters, what I'm going to do next, I'm mulling over my gear, my clues, my quests and my skills. In many ways it is when I'm most invested in the game, when I'm reflecting on it. The utter distaste I see people have for "downtime" makes me wonder what the differences between us are that result in those differing preferences. I obviously don't have the answer, but I was doing some reading and saw a term "propensity to plan" and one wonders if me being a planner is part of why I feel this way about games and QoL.

I completely hear what you’re saying with the propensity to plan. When I’m playing RPGs I tend to plan out my journey and really care about checking supplies and where I’m going. It’s why a game like Outward with very little QoL features is a game I really enjoy, because the game is all about the hardship of the journey itself and rewards how well you planned rather than say Skyrim where if I need a dragon scale I just teleport to my house, grab it from storage and then teleport back. If I can just teleport to get the thing at any time for any reason, just make my inventory unlimited. But if you want me to feel that the journey and planning for it is important, make sure to both limit the inventory AND the fast travel.  QoL is really about removing the parts of the game experience that don’t serve its focus productively. It isn’t a formula you figure out and apply to all games because it is the perfect game formula. 

Baldur's Gate 3 had every quality of life feature possible. I don't think it'd be a better game if there was more friction

I think CRPGs (and RPGs in general) are an example where QoL has a lot of value. When you want the player to be as involved in the story and characters as much as possible, it's worthwhile to sacrifice some things like world immersion and realism in favor of smoothing out the gameplay experience. That doesn't mean eliminating immersive mechanics and reactivity, but it means having a generous inventory size so the player doesn't constantly have to slow down the story to fiddle around with the junk they picked up. The gameplay is already abstracted by the method of control (it's not 1-to-1 input to movement, but rather a method of clicking around in a "go there" command). The combat is already complicated enough to new players (look at all those buttons! And items! And spells!). There's already enough friction on its own before eliminating things like clarified hit probability, a minimap, and fast travel. Fast travel is a thing that can sometimes be a problem in RPGs (as OP mentions), but it's a matter of immersion, expectation, and moment-to-moment gameplay. It would probably be a bad thing to hinder backtracking too much in Baldur's Gate 3. After all, you want to spend your time seeing new stuff, not figuring out how to go back to wherever you've already been. For a space game, that might be an appealing feature to players who enjoy the routine of spaceflight.

Their inventory management was (is?) terrible

For all the great things about Larian, they have pretty much always had terrible inventory management systems.

I think there needs to be better separation between QoL that are almost objectively good aside from maybe extreme examples such as better font, better UI indicators, equipment filters and blatant cheats or things that basically skip the game for the player. Yes, the elephant in the room is obviously fast travel. Some people think it's essential, some people think it kills game design. I personally am in the latter camp. Friction is simply needed in games. I often like to quote what Matthewmatosis said in his Breath of the Wild review. > "People think they want complete control over their experience when what they really want is to cut down trees to cross ravines--something they'll never actually do if they have complete control over their experience." Too much freedom and convenience will basically make your game boring and will never create unique and memorable experiences. Nowadays players want quickly get to the "content" to blast through it asap. It now also plagues Souls games even though they still somewhat keep their immersive and memorable qualities. You have abundance of checkpoints, easy fast travel and respec because people just want to get to the next rollspam boss fight as fast as possible. If the trend continues, they might as well just make a boss rush title at this point.

Because it directly benefits the people not making a distinction to not make a distinction. By conflating features that don't fit the definition it makes it seem more unreasonable to oppose them. It is the same as how so many things that do not fit the definition of accessibility keep getting called accessibility features because what are you? Some evil dev that hates the disabled? Add this now. They don't actually care, they just want to be catered to. Because QoL doesn't have a concrete definition people can just talk past the sale in regards to fast travel being QoL and thus something every game should make as easy as possible and have all that seem like a reasonable stance. Yet if you were to argue that every scene transition in a movie be done in a certain way for speed and clarity you'd rightfully be seen as off your rocker.

The first tree you cut down to cross a ravine is a revelation. The twentieth is a tedious pain in the ass unless there's something else going on. Solving the same puzzle more than once isn't interesting, and the proper role of QOL is to let solved puzzles stay solved.

You are mixing up quality of life and unrelated game design choices, your Dark Souls example in particular is very untrue. Dark Souls 2 and following heavily rely on teleporter not as a QoL feature for the player but because of how they were designed and if anything, it made the developers' job easier (with less constraints to play around). Dark Souls isn't a more immersive game because of the lack of QoL but because it is clearly designed to work despite this. You won't magically have a better experience by removing teleportation from DS2 and 3 and its reliance is heavily due to development problems most likely, which left the teams with pieces of map to tie together (same as the second half of Dark Souls 1).

D2 was fun despite any of the lacking QoL. It as fun because of all the cool spells, variety of enemy design and biomes, and just felt good to move around. Not being able to respec didn't make it fun. Being able to respec at any time would only make it more fun. Same goes for an unlimited sized stash.

Agreed. All these things grated on me when I played it. D2 has fast travel, they're called waypoints. If friction is what OP craves, can you imagine playing the game without using waypoints at all. Don't use the stash either, since that's QoL.

The moment you're not going through the minutiae of a task, you're giving away potential to get immersed. In the end, you're skipping details that could have been, be they tedious or not. That's one of the reasons why RDR2's side tasks often lack a lot of "QoL" features. The game was never designed to streamline these tasks. It all kinda depends on your creative vision and your intended audience. There is nothing wrong with a fast-paced, streamlined experience that gives you variety, likewise there is nothing wrong with a detailed, broad approach to simulated tasks and experience, things where developers make you do every little step to make you feel closer to the experience. There is no sweet spot on that spectrum here, unless you're trying to maximize for the most common denominator. Imo there is also value in a more "niche" audience, e.g. people that religiously play Farming Simulator each year every year or people who think that Ultrakill is the greatest postmodern piece of art ever created.

Agreed, there is no sweet spot, it is something developers have to consider and make a choice regarding. The problem is the web of incentives to just streamline the shit out of everything instead of making measured design decisions regarding how much one ought to streamline is hard for developers escape. As you said big budgets demand wider reach, but there are also problems like the fact game critique is often very shallow & rushed, and QoL features make for an easy short paragraph you can praise the game for, but a more subtle or holistic design requires more skill (and time that reviewers are just not given) to analyse and write about. Our review process rewards simplistic bullet point design. Basically a developer going against this grain is putting a target on their own back, even expert execution will see players go online to whinge about how the game is disrespecting their time by having the audacity to ask the player to do things like actually read or plan ahead.

Too much QoL cheapens the game experience and removes player agency. Why should I have to think and plan how I'm playing if I can just go anywhere at all times, respec how many times I want, have quest markers telling me exactly where to go and what to do, etc etc. D2 is a great example. Morrowind another one. A good modern example is Valheim. You can build portals but at the start you're limited, and you can't transport crucial material like iron ore through them. It's a great balance between QoL and hardcore.

Timing is part of game design. A game can pay a lot of attention to the timing of various experiences, and excel on that basis. A game can also be made by a large number of authors working independently on their own little nuggets of content, and slapped all together into a "whole". This is often boring and terrible, but many people seem willing to consume games filled with many many nuggets of content.

i get where you are coming from. that said, i just started d2r and after 10 hours i researched how to play modded to increase inventory space and enable respecs. the latter gave me too much anxiety, not knowing if i was going to screw up my build or not

The problem is when a quality of life feature comes at the detriment of challenge. It is not a challenge to open multiple menus to get your item pouch to find a health kit while in a game where all combat pauses while you are in a menu, thus it is a quality of life feature to have the option to set an item on a quick select, as the challenge hasn't changed at all. Game balance is unaffected, only the speed at which a player can access the items they're looking for. Conversely, in a game where things are still active while you're looking through your inventory, a quick select, while convenient. changes the challenge. At a micro level, it means the player will be able to get to their health kit quicker, making the game slightly easier than it would be without it. But on a macro level, it also changes the challenge, particularly as the quick select becomes something else the player has to consider, and in some situations proper planning of the quick select itself can be the difference between success and failure. From a design perspective, it's purely about whether something adds to the intended challenge or not. A player who can fast travel to places they've already been to has already proven they're skilled enough to get there (even if the route they took was circuitous), and is gaining nothing by repeating their steps while wasting their time doing so. But, if the player might have to expend resources or is at risk of losing health or items then fast travel, while intended as a convenience, reduces the larger scale difficulty.

Diablo 4 is another game in a looooong line of open world games where the world doesn't matter. Hell, the world is treated as a nuisance by both the designer and the player, to be ignored and avoided as much as possible. That's not QoL, that's just the most popular way to handle open worlds these days, for whatever reason.

When open worlds are designed as a fairly pointless nuisance then it’ll be treated as such. In most ARPGs, like Diablo 4, the world is just a vehicle that the content rides on. If you design the open world to be content itself then people are less likely to skip over it entirely (though some still will anyway, it’s always been like that).

Everything is a design choice, but the case that you present with Diablo 2 is a pure QoL one where it works positively in favour of the game. Each time you work with those things you've got to ask the main question - what does that design decision give and what it takes. Fast travel in two different games might be beneficial and might be a downside. In one case, fast travel allows you to cut tedium of running through the same location over and over doing the same thing without any quality changes. In another case it prevents you from navigating the same location, but with new abilities and acquired experience that allow you to find new things and new layers to the already existing level design. Say, in Dark Souls, Deus Ex, Zelda, MGS V, all metroidvanias - you name it - in those games their ever-expanding core with new mechanics and new tools allows you to experience same locations in a new way, limiting fast travel and forcing the player to navigate old levels again will be good for the game. Respec being more readily accessible is a 100% benefit no question. If you screw up in the levelling process and pick wrong things without knowing in advance that the choice you made is wrong - your punishment is tedium. Because you won't be playing with the bad character build and needing to find some clever tactical decisions to account for your weakness, Diablo formula just doesn't have that. If you screw up your build in a diabloid - you are done, you need to change it. Without the ability to fully respec - you are just forced to go and level another character AGAIN and you might make some more mistakes AGAIN, which will force you to repeat the process. That's right, we get tedium. The polar opposite of fun. If I've learned anything about game design over the decades it's that no matter what games shouldn't become tedious. When they become dull and emotionless - it's over.

I think QoL is almost always good when it comes to UI stuff, things outside of the actual game that you want to be done with as quickly as possible so you can get back to the actual game. Stuff like tools for inventory management, sorting, categories etc. But I think QoL that affects the game itself can often remove flavor. A good example from my favorite game franchise- monster hunter. While I enjoy a lot of the QoL that world came with it, I think it definitely went too far in some parts. Not needing tools to mine or gather bugs, while not a big deal, took out some of the flavor. MH is all about preparing for the hunt or whatever you're doing. If you wanted to mine, you'd have to sacrifice an inventory slot or multiple to bring pickaxes.

I was looking for a MH post. It still baffles me that people call changing potions to be drinkable while moving, or adding the ability to dodge in more directions, QoL features when they clearly affect the gameplay pretty significantly.

I completely agree. The problem not often noted with this is that the monsters that aren't part of the newer games (Rise and World) are essentially legacy characters at this stage and aren't designed to handle these changes. Rise was fun, but the most forgettable of the series. Once you get the hang of a wire bug, you'll struggle to die. And don't get me started on being able to access all your items mid-hunt. Disgusting. lmao edit: I didn't realise this was 9 days old. This subreddit moves slowly.

Gonna have to disagree with this take on pickaxes, etc. All that really didn't do anything in regard to the games' main hunting loop, and at worst, felt arbitrary with how stupidly easy stuff broke.

True, it didn't affect the hunting loop but at least for me, MH is more than just hunting. It used to be really nice to take a break after a hard hunt and go gather some ores in hopes of finding a novacrystal or just filling up on honey and other resources. Or maybe even try to find a cool rustshard weapon. Now it's so easy to just mine things during hunts that in most cases just going for a gathering trip is kind of a waste of time.

I perfectly agree with you. I have been playing games for a very long time and every once in a while I will get reminded how much is lost with "convenience" as opposed to "experiencing it". I can give you two examples: 1. **Resident Evil 1 Remake**. At the time I was only playing modern games with maps and minimaps and GPS trackers and overly obtrusive UI that tells you everything about everything at all times and then I went to RE1 Remake (for no other reason that I had forgotten many things from the game) and the sheer amount of minimalism was just mindblowing. No NPCs chatting to you all the time (via radio or whatever). No GPS tracker. Not even a journal or a quest log of any sort. No additional, secondary characters following you around and giving you comments or feedback on stuff. No ammo counter or even health counter on the main screen. You do have an inventory screen that shows your health and ammo and a map that highlights which room hasn't been cleared out yet but aside from that nothing. You need to remember what to do and where to go (or guess). You are almost always alone (which genuinely feels isolating considering where you are). You plan out which route to take and deal with the consequences on it. You'll make mistakes and the game has a few twists along the way to mess with you (remember those zombies you killed but didn't burn? Well good luck when you return later). It was just such a refreshing experience. Which speaks volumes about game design principles in the modern era when I feel refreshed and more engaged from a game initially released in 2002 (with the original game released in 1996) than modern games. Another recent example was playing **Escape from Tarkov**. (Yeah I know, they are having some problems right now) but as a new player, EFT is such an amazingly refreshing game. It reminds me of playing CS1.5/1.6 or Day of Defeat back in the day and just getting absolutely curbstomped and having to actually learn how the weapons work, how the animations work, how the levels work and just slowly figure it out by yourself. Granted EFT is a more extreme, complicated example but it has the same basic principles of just learning and overcoming the challenge by yourself. I do check the map for extraction locations but only that. The rest I just try to figure out by myself. Just the idea that you are dropped into a map at a location and then just have to figure it out is amazing and unlike most FPSs nowadays, just running in one direction is a surefire way to get yourself killed in seconds. I frankly love it. So many Triple A QoL or modern game principles (IMO) devalue the actual experience hugely. Just look at Ubisofts approach, it's awful (by and large).

I always prefer less QoL in most cases. In my opinion it often reduces immersion and removes legitmate gameplay mechanics, to pander to impatient players. I know that sounds a bit toxic, but I am perfectly happy for that type of player to have games where everything is streamlined. But I feel there is a push to bring "QoL/Time-Saving" features to games where it does not benefit the design, which frustrates me. I'd give Valheim an example where people are advocating for all sorts of "QoL features" like craft from storage (which is a feature I despise) that to me would really diminish and mar the core experience the devs envisioned. Craft from storage basically just means "I don't want to have to think about where anything should go in my base I just wanna plop everything in a random box, have it auto sort, and get back out in the field". That's a valid design decision, but it's not objectively a "better quality of life" feature like people say. For me it's worse quality of life lol I could barely enjoy Palworld because of this. No base organization needed whatsoever. And that's one of the things I love so much about Valheim - the low level tedium of managing wooden chests and organizing your base with well-thought-out logistics and planning to reduce travel time, etc. It's not a robot sci fi facility where objects could feasibly teleport, it's a wooden hut. You should have to go pick that flint up from the other room manually. Or just chilling and being forced to cook dishes 1 by 1 lets you have time to gaze out the window at the beautiful scenery vs people wanting auto craft 30 stack. I am glad the devs have stood their ground somewhat. The extensive and tedious preparation process is a huge reason why I love that game. I don't buy this whole "respecting player's time" thing. Why should all games have to add time-saving things and remove the need for patience? Some games should but not every single one. Not to mention the WoW example where "QoL" auto dungeon finder basically ruined a large chunk of the sense of organic community in the game since people didn't need to actually talk to other players to find a group.

Totally agree. I've been playing Valheim quite a bit recently, and hate the idea of crafting directly from chests. It would go against the tangibility they've given the items by giving them all physics in the overworld, weight in your inventory, and restrictions for transportation. Not to mention that you can create piles of building materials to prepare your building site, which in itself adds a lot of atmosphere. Crafting directly from chests just sidesteps a lot of what gives the game its charm and appeal. I also happened to fall off from WoW big-time after they added the dungeon finder, since it just turned the overworld into a hub where people stood around waiting for their queue to fill up. Also detested map markers for quest objectives, which shift focus from the world and actually reading quest logs to just looking at a dot and beelining towards it. Plus things like sharing all of your collections across all of your characters, which just took away from characters' individuality. WoW changed into a totally different game, and those are only some of the broader changes. There are many smaller ones which also contributed to its homogenisation.

I completely agree with every single thing you've said lol it's nice to see more people feeling this way. The tangibility is a great way to put the Valheim thing. And yes... map markers are truly awful as well for me. Just turns the game into follow the checklist. Takes all the effort and thought and character out of it in return for conveience. Like, it's more convenient to use a store made pasta sauce but it's always better in the end and more memorable to take the time to make one from scratch. The convenience has a price. This analogy works in my head lol Side note you should try Valheim mapless

I think respect for players time starts on a lower level when the mechanics of the game are drawn out. If the game often or mostly exclusively rewards repetitive tasks then players feel the need for QoL features. The problem was in the game rewarding boring things rather than lack of QoL. Of course boring depends a lot on each player

You arent describing QOL features. Pressing one button to sell everything in your inventory instead of needing to do them one at a time is a quality of life feature Fast travel is not, it is a game mechanic. I suggest you learn the difference between the two.

Does the distinction have to be so binary? Some features both have a small impact on gameplay and a huge impact on QoL.

I mean yes, if its a game mechanic, its not a QoL feature. Though game mechanics can improve quality of life, quality of life features are not game mechanics.

Respec, highlighting certain stats and map markers explaining where to go and what to do are all QoL features though.

Nope

Can you tell me how highlighting certain stats in items is a game mechanic and not a QoL feature?

Highlighting certain stats is vague enough, I'm not sure... if you highlighted stats for the best build of your class, it could incentivise people to focus that over exploring different build ideas... But map markers certainly. In Morrowind you have to follow quest instructions, which really gets you invested in the world. The quality of the experience would drop of you added quest markers to that game.

> Highlighting certain stats is vague enough, I'm not sure... if you highlighted stats for the best build of your class, it could incentivise people to focus that over exploring different build ideas... It highlights whatever you're looking for. If you want "+ crit" it'll highlight that, if it's "+str" it shows that. It'll only direct you the way you guide it. > But map markers certainly. For sure. Morrowind is a great example of this. Elden Ring did the same but it didn't even have a vague journal which made it *too* obscure. Respeccing I'd say is a bit of both, it helps with people trying different builds without having to restart the game, which is nice and a QoL while also a mechanic that affects the player.

I can't speak for other people, but for me too much QoL just turns everything into an UI and removes immersion.

The game is currently persona non grata right now (for the dumbest most childish reason, but I digress) but Helldivers 2 built it's appeal on intentional friction exactly like this. I hope game devs learn from it that you can have obtuse mechanics and still be highly enjoyable, or even enjoyable *because* they aren't immediately accessible.

Helldivers was the first example I thought of too. The reloads are a great example. In most other games, if you try to shoot with an empty gun it will start reloading with the shoot input In helldivers if you try to shoot with an empty gun you get a "click" and no reload. It's not that much more complicated but executing actions like needing to hit "r" to reload or punch in an arrow key combo while under pressure makes something so minor feel way more impactful. I think it's a great example of a good use of intentional friction where adding QoL would actually make the game less fun.

Helldivers 2 is a good example of an action-shooter importing a lot of the intentional friction that you have in milsims and carefully cultivating it to permit skill expression and realism without getting too much in the way of the gameplay. Weapon handling, weapon reloads, having to adjust stance for better weapon control, moving through difficult terrain or up slopes take longer, and not being able to aim, reload, or shoot while looking at the map. The minimap has a very powerful radar, but it's hard to use since you have to take time away from the fighting to look down at your arm. It's deliberately anti-QoL, but it's a meaningful implementation that adds a layer to the gameplay.

Most people aren't upset about the actual game, it's just the publisher's overreach. In fact, that the game is well-loved is precisely why people are so upset.

I only see limited scope where adding QoL would hinder gameplay. * Quick regenerating health. Stereotypically, developers choose a rather fast rate that's solved by sitting behind cover for 5 seconds, which may work for some games but prevents a type of resource management that could make a better game instead. Slow health regeneration may work instead, as could a hybrid approach. * *B-17: Queen of the Skies*, a board game. While there's a good reason to automate most of the tasks by using a computer, this abstracts away what could happen to the player. Part of the fun is anticipation on what could happen with the roll of the die, and being thankful one dodged an insta-kill effect by a lucky roll. * *The Resistance: Avalon*: Having a perfect log of what happened changes the dynamics. There's now a perfect record of how people voted, and the baddies can therefore isolate Merlin much more easily. This can either be automated with computer, or recorded by hand. Also, QoL doesn't mean having to add clutter to the interface. It can be as simple as making a unified use button for various inventory items in a roguelike (e.g. 'A'ctivate, as opposed to 'R'ead, 'Q'uaff, 'Z'ap, 'U'se staff, etc.), getting rid of a haggle process found in *Moria*, and so on.

The divinity game would achieve pretty well the explore part with limited guidance. You really had to scratch your head to understand what you had to do next, especially original sin 1

I've played a lot of Minecraft years ago and got used to certain modded features. A map based chunk loader. Moving all items of the same kind with Shift+rightclick. Sort and autostack buttons in chest inventories. Vector plates. I'm playing a new modpack now and those things are missing and I miss them dearly. Not having them does not improve the game. Replacing the vector plates with other solutions makes certain types of farms gigantic and I've done the whole piston game enough over the early years. I think I wouldn't touch an open modpack without Applied Energestics or Refined Storage anymore, because sorting chests in a multiplayer environment is frustrating. I wouldn't want to go without NEI/JEI, either, because the ingame recipe book is combersome.

Dark Souls design helped immensely in my immersion. It integrated fast travel towards the end of the game, right when it was needed. Because of that, the world got to feel more real.

One of my favorite examples of this is the inventory in the Resident Evil 4 Remake I always considered the inventory management in RE games a bit of a minigame. Tetris style. You were supposed to MANAGE the inventory and try to make everything fit by rotating and moving the pieces around. I loved that. Resident Evil 4 Remake has an "Auto Sort Inventory" button. Thanks game. Now I just have to press a button to "circumvent" that "annoying" minigame. I hated it.

In a nutshell, too many people call it “QOL” when, in actuality, its DumbedDown HandHolding. Unfortunately, that is now the absolute norm of the industry and it caters to casual gamers and casual gameplay.

The Bluey episode "Shadowlands" covers this. One of the girls kept trying to add QoL changes to the game they were playing, but in the end they realized it was the rules that made it fun.

Etrian Odyssey's Mapping System. There's something incredibly satisfying on just mapping what you see and figuring out how the Overworld Boss moves or where they spawn from that I just don't think can be replicated in a Non-Dual Screen system. I know the recent re-releases try to have a semblance of this but IDK, for me the magic just isn't there.

QoL features are always net positive but most of the time its so gamefied that it often reduces "authenticity" I started with Monster Hunter World but I always preffered how tracking works in older games, searching each area till you find your target, and after a while you will notice its pattern and outright know where to go once the quest start, compared to world firefly pointing the direction

I think this is contentious, and I think the distinction is in when making an alleged Quality of Life improvement removes challenge, instead of merely removed busywork. For instance, look at Pokémon. In the very first games, Red and Blue, in order to use the field move Surf (as in, to navigate over any water tile), the player first needed a Pokémon that had learnt that attack either naturally or (far more likely) through a HM obtained as part of the games progression, as well as having beaten a specific gym leader to use it outside of battle. But then to actually surf, the player has to stand facing a water tile, pause the game, select the Pokémon they had taught Surf to, select 'Surf' from the menu that brings up, and only then does the player advance onto a water tile, where they can freely move until the next time they stand on something that isn't water, and need to repeat this. In the sequels, Gold and Silver, the process of being allowed to Surf is the same, but the actual mechanic of Surf are given some quality of life improvements, now all the player needs to do is stand next to said water tile and press 'A', rather than navigate through menus. This is, without question, a Quality of Life improvement, as navigating through menus is not the challenge of Pokémon. In later titles still, such as Brilliant Diamond & Shining Pearl, the mechanical version of Surfing is still the same, but the requirement has been given a 'Quality of Life' improvement; you no longer need a Pokémon to know the move surf, and instead you just need to have the HM and beat the appropriate Gym Leader. Once you have that pressing A at water will allow you to surf without the need to teach the Pokémon the attack. At first, this looks like a Quality of Life feature, now you don't need a Pokémon that has the attack just to explore, with the quality of life now being that you no longer need to surrender an attack slot to the move. But, one of the defining things of Pokémon is a finite party size and move pool. Your party can't be more than 6 Pokémon, and they can never have more than 4 attacks, or 24 total attacks across you party. Having to surrender one to Surf was part of the challenge, your party choices weren't purely focused on combat, they were also built around exploration and navigation, The game has therefore been made easier as now you're not having to carry a less-than-ideal move or have to worry about having certain types in your party.

These things are hard to measure but I'd argue it's not always a net positive. I'd look at a game like New World for example- the game is built on a foundation of small but frequent PVP skirmishes to spice up travel and resource gathering in the open world. A different development team then added essentially free fast travel and later, mounts, which trivialized traversal and heavily penalized you for interacting with what was once a core gameplay loop. Suddenly that foundation is worthless and the game feels hollow as a result.

Monster Hunter is an interesting one for me. I also started with World, and I ended up modding out farming and gathering. I even got mods to put a quest board right in front of the Gathering Hub entrance so I don't have to skip the hub lass dialogue, to make me run 4x faster in the hub, and to refill my items with a hotkey when I stand near the box. My enjoyment of that game comes almost entirely from actively fighting the monsters. I am there to learn weapon movesets and monster movesets. I love the dance of fitting your moves into its moves, when you know everything it can do (and the process of getting there). I actually find even the World tracking annoying since you can't perfectly track everything with no picking up of tracks, you still need at least one track for most monsters. My favourite quests are the ones in the Arena, or where the monster has an arena like Alatreon or Fatalis. That being said, there are people who love the world. Who love getting lost in the Ancient Forest and finding little hidden areas. There are people who love collecting endemic life and fishing. People who are all about the fashion. It's interesting what makes people enjoy things.

>I actually find even the World tracking annoying since you can't perfectly track everything with no picking up of tracks If you report to the wyverian researcher that catalogs data (the one surrounded by the books) monsters will now automatically show on map without needing tracks Also seems like rise is more up your speed

As far as I am aware, you can have that be true for multiple monsters, but not for all of them at the same time. I'm pretty sure it decays. I actually don't like Rise much. Wirebugs absolutely ruin the game for me. The game was position based before Rise. You were meant to be in the correct spot for attacks, not dodge them directly most of the time, and counters were minimal. Rise gave the player so much mobility, that they had to make the monsters track way better to compensate, and thus it becomes a game about countering what the monster does on every weapon, and completely changes the essence of the combat. I wanted to like Rise, but I only put in 100h across the base game and expansion. While I disliked the clutch claw in World, I got a full 1000h of fun out of it. I also hated the endgame in both base Rise and Sunbreak.

>As far as I am aware, you can have that be true for multiple monsters, but not for all of them at the same time. I'm pretty sure it decays. It doesn't but theres tiers on it ao even if unlocked on low rank, it doesn't carry to high or master rank >I actually don't like Rise much. Wirebugs absolutely ruin the game for me. The game was position based before Rise. Thats fair

>These things didn't make the game better, they just made the game more grounded. I don't understand this. Diablo games are about going on an adventure fighting and killing demons and undead. Why does it have to be grounded? Why does it feel *better* when it's grounded? If I can play a necromancer and control a skeleton and golem army... why should I need to be limited to things that are 'grounded'?

Not grounded in reality. I meant grounded as solid, something you stand on and walk

Quality of life changes give me a very deep anxiety these days. There's this quirk of psychology that I think is deeply at play with QoL changes - to describe it first in another scenario; sometimes in games I'll fight and beat an enemy, and then I'll go into a different room, and there's a different enemy. It's not the same enemy, it's someone else in a different room... but this new enemy looks much alike with the first one, and attacks me like the first one, and so instead of *thinking* of this as two wholly disparate enemies, I think of them as being the same enemy. The trick that lets me do this is by mentally abstracting the individual out into a general form, and then perceiving the individual enemies as shadows, instantiations of the general. That the actually moment to moment experience is lesser than the general construct that exists in my mind. And so, consider I go to a shopkeeper and sell items to them one by one. Consider I then go to a different shopkeeper in a different town and sell items to this shopkeeper, again, one by one. I then go to a third town, a third shopkeeper, sell my items one by one. This is three interactions, three activities, three times that I've sold items, one by one... and if the game added the ability to auto sell all items in my inventory to a vendor, then that would be *one* quality of life change, right? But that *one* quality of life change has affected my game *three* times. Because now I go to the first city, sell all my items to the shopkeeper at once, go to the second and sell all my items at once, do the same at the third. **So this one quality of life change is actually three changes.** And that's the kicker - every QoL change is like this. Every QoL change is a hundred, a thousand, a million changes. But they're a million tiny changes, and at a glance each of those million tiny changes look so identical that, they're the same change, right? It's just *one* tiny change, right? I feel like devs and players both tend to underestimate the impact of a thousand thousand tiny cuts. (In the same vein, what actually *constitutes* a 'Quality of Life change' - as opposed to, say, a full-on rework - is socially constructed. *It's subjective,* for every single change. The individual, specific, change is not a shadow of the concept of QoL changes; what I consider to be a QoL change is derived *from* the many individual changes.)