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☑️Mini-Games

What's your stance on mini-games in RPGs?

  • Great all-around! A fun way to spice up the monotony of Loot & Level

  • Acceptable, but only if they are somewhat tied to character skill e.g. picking locks in new Fallouts

  • Only tolerable as (optional) side activities e.g. card games, racing etc.

  • Cancer! Precious Dev-time wasted. They deserve to die and I hope they burn in hell

  • My stance?! Life is nothing but a tedious mini-game bro (KC)


Results are only viewable after voting.

Carrion

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jun 30, 2011
Messages
3,648
Location
Lost in Necropolis
But lockpicking and hacking minigames? Just give me a simple skill check and be done with it. The lockpicking and hacking in New Vegas would be a lot more fun if having a high enough skill level to open a lock or hack a PC would automatically open the lock or hack the PC, rather than forcing you through a trivial minigame that gets old quickly. Minigames like that are kinda fun for the first five times or so, but then they just grow samey and tedious, especially in an open world game with potentially hundreds of locks to pick. The longer such a minigame is, the more tedious it can become: hacking in Fallout New Vegas is at least quick, but in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Way too long and involved, breaks the game flow when you're sneaking through vents and trying to infiltrate a heavily fortified research station. I don't wanna spend half a minute on a logic minigame to hack the security console when I'm dodging enemy patrols and exploring hallways.
I don't think New Vegas' hacking minigame adds anything to the game, and a simple skill check could've easily replaced it. The minigame itself isn't terrible, but it lessens the importance of character skill since there's practically no meaningful difference between a hacking skill of 25 and 49 — as long as you reach the required threshold, you will be able to hack anything despite whatever cosmetic differences your skill level might cause. It also makes the unfathomable yet very common mistake of freezing time, just like the lockpicking minigame does. I don't know why you'd do that, since 1) the tension that rises from the possiblity of getting caught is like the most obvious benefit for having such a minigame in the first place, and 2) making time a factor would've been a good way to differentiate between characters of different skill levels.

On the other hand Human Revolution's hacking is really well made, and the only real issue I have with it is that it's so overused. It makes good use of character skill, isn't unpleasant to play and adds a dimension to the game that goes beyond what a simple skill check can do.

I actually like mini-games. There are many done very poorly, this is true. That aside, I feel like they are the only way for cRPGs to move forward. They need to better simulate challenges outside of combat, and mini-games are the way to do that.
As long as they're called mini-games, i.e. can be separated from the "actual" game, they're not taking the genre forward in any shape or form.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
I love mini-games. Fallout's hacking system is fun, match the password game. Oblivion's lockpicking and speechcraft games are my favorite, especially speechcraft, and I'm prepared to die on that hill. Yes it was a really wild abstraction but the game itself was fun and satisfying, especially when you got the huge amount on their favorite reaction. I'm all for mini-games if they are still tied to your character sheet. Skyrim went a bit of the wrong direction with Master level locks being pickable at any level if you had enough lockpicks. i prefer something like Morrowind where the game would tell you "this chest is beyond your skill level" and you'd have to make a mental note of where it's at and come back later. Skyrim would need to hand place chests better to do that, though, no Master chests lying in the middle of a dungeon and what not. But I'm all for mini-games if they're fun. I also enjoyed mini-games in Final Fantasy 7 back in the day, and the fair in Chrono Trigger was good fun.
 

DraQ

Arcane
Joined
Oct 24, 2007
Messages
32,828
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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
The longer such a minigame is, the more tedious it can become: hacking in Fallout New Vegas is at least quick, but in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Way too long and involved, breaks the game flow when you're sneaking through vents and trying to infiltrate a heavily fortified research station. I don't wanna spend half a minute on a logic minigame to hack the security console when I'm dodging enemy patrols and exploring hallways.
I don't think New Vegas' hacking minigame adds anything to the game, and a simple skill check could've easily replaced it. The minigame itself isn't terrible, but it lessens the importance of character skill since there's practically no meaningful difference between a hacking skill of 25 and 49 — as long as you reach the required threshold, you will be able to hack anything despite whatever cosmetic differences your skill level might cause. It also makes the unfathomable yet very common mistake of freezing time, just like the lockpicking minigame does. I don't know why you'd do that, since 1) the tension that rises from the possiblity of getting caught is like the most obvious benefit for having such a minigame in the first place, and 2) making time a factor would've been a good way to differentiate between characters of different skill levels.

On the other hand Human Revolution's hacking is really well made, and the only real issue I have with it is that it's so overused. It makes good use of character skill, isn't unpleasant to play and adds a dimension to the game that goes beyond what a simple skill check can do.
This. Pretty much the only viable excuse you can make for even having a minigame in the first place is it being what I call an attention sink. DX:HR's hacking fits the bill perfectly as it's real time and there are no safeguards to prevent you from being discovered or killed while hacking, plus it does the theme right.

Any game with paused time minigame for anything that has skill responsible loses by default here.
 

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
The way this thread seems to be focusing almost exclusively on the real-time simulationist games seems a bit disingenuous to me. Of course, if the game's core loop is centered around narrative immersion and simulation, then minigames would be seen as a hindrance. But condemning minigames in general on the basis of that is a logical fallacy, because - what about more abstract, game-ist titles?

Let's consider a game that is the opposite of an immersive sim - Puzzle Quest 2. Puzzle Quest has all of its interactions - fighting, looting, searching, lockpicking, trap disarming - revolve around match-3 gameplay. So essentially everything in the game is a minigame, including combat, and relies on the same mechanics. Yet the way this mechanics is utilized is decidedly different from task to task: for example, in lockpicking you have to remove a few specific gems from the board in a limited number of turns; on the other hand, in trap disarming you need to collect a number of each type of gems while avoiding matching harmful gems.

So what I'm wondering is, whether this approach could be applied to a more traditional turn-based RPG formula - taking combat mechanics as a basis and putting some unique spins on it to adapt it to other, non-combat challenges? The only example I can think of are Matrix sequences in Shadowrun games. But the problem with them is that in SRR and DF it's too close mechanically to regular combat to feel much of a difference, while in HK they arguably moved in the right direction by making it more stealth-focused, but ruined it by making it real-time.
 

KeighnMcDeath

RPG Codex Boomer
Joined
Nov 23, 2016
Messages
12,865
Laser Slots were good in Mars Saga (and proftable... at a certain point id just put autofire on a joystick i had to autospin and win most of the time ending up with probably millions of credits after a day away from the computer). I'm not sure about mines of titan.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Oct 5, 2010
Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
I can't think of a mini-game I like. They're all shit. Some are worse than others I guess. I don't mind the Bethesda lockpick games much, though I'd still rather they go away (and mod them out nowadays, keeping the skill check). I didn't mind Bioshock 2's hacking thing. The Bioshock 1 pipe puzzle shit was annoying just because it took a while and was everywhere. The Alpha Protocol minigames I remember being fucking cancer.

Nuke them all from orbit, but some more than others.
 

Valky

Arcane
Manlet
Joined
Aug 22, 2016
Messages
2,418
Location
Trapped in a bioform
I have not had the pleasure of playing MM7 yet, but I have read that there is a very good mini game in it.
 

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