Timers are one of the most underrated gameplay mechanics in video games and the fact that there's such a stigma against...

I don't hate timers but I understand why people do. Timers are an abstract fail state, it's hard to quantify whether or not you're making good pace or not unless you've done it before. Maybe the timed sections was actually much shorter than you thought, and you rushing meant you missed out on something you shouldn't have. Or maybe a time section is huge and failing it once means redoing a lot. Sometimes you feel pressured by a timer only to find out that it was pointless unless you spent days idling. In most cases there's no penalties over time either, you're either fine or you immediately fail.

Timers work best when they fit into the game, like The Glow in Fallout 1. You can mitigate the radiation effect with certain items, but you still have a limited time. The timer is not abstract but is tied to a game mechanic. The radiation doesn't immediately kill you, but gives you more and more severe debuffs. The same is true for blowing up the mutant base in F1, there's numerous factors involved and it fits the game well.

i hate timers, fuck that shit.

Both resident evil remakes have done some unique things with "time", such as in RE1make being unsure if a zombie has turned into a crimson head because you took too long to burn their corpse, and RE2make giving their ticking timer a pair of big stompy boots so that you can't stay in one place too long.

Final fantasy 13 lightning returns
Fallout 1
Any text adventure with a time limit
Star control 2

Time limits in FPS games(first team to 100 kills/objective points OR 10 minutes, for example). Any game that has a "SURVIVE!" mission that's timed where enemies pour onto you. Timed quests in MMO's. Timed greater rifts in Diablo 3. Just to name a few off the top of my head.

The 72 hour time limit in Dead Rising 1 is absolutely fucking brilliant and completely recontextualizes the entire game.

It's perfectly justified within the story: You're a journalist going in by helicopter to investigate the zombie outbreak and you're staying for 3 days. The beginning of the game shows you a bunch of survivors that you can't save no matter what, to establish that you shouldn't try to do everything. The clock also completely changes the purpose of the zombies themselves, suddenly they're no longer enemies but more like obstacles in the way of your objectives. A little XP is given for killing zombies but massive XP is given for completing objectives, basically telling you that killing zombies is ultimately a secondary concern. And if you somehow manage to fuck up a playthrough it's not really a huge deal because the game is ultimately designed around replayability and Frank will get stronger and more capable of doing more tasks in a single run.

The shitty Canuck sequels that downplayed the timer more and more shows that the devs had no idea of what made the original Dead Rising click in the first place.

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TICKING AWAY

>Any game that has a "SURVIVE!" mission that's timed where enemies pour onto you.
Yes and no. When it's just "survive for 30 mins" or something arbitrary like that, yeah, I agree with you, but just changing one line of dialogue into "evac is 30 minutes out, hold out until then" never actually showing you a timer and then having the evac actually show up in 33 minutes or something like that works.

My favorite missions on RTS's are "Turtle for 30 minutes and survive this onslaught". Bonus points if there are optional objectives you can achieve by moving out of the area your supposed to defend between waves.

I agree that the timer in Majora's Mask isn't actually that big of a deal but just the mere presence of it creates this dreadful atmosphere of incoming doom.

Honestly context is everything for a timer. Even Breath of Fire Dragon Quarter doesn't start the game off with its timer, but once you get it, the entire rest of the adventure is hounded by either retrying the game or certain sections repeatedly for improving your party so the next run through will be smoother, or carefully abusing your overpowered advantages to optimize a route to the end at the cost of the timer going up. The D-Counter timer is the main reason why people avoid the game, beyond art and combat changes from prior BoF titles, but in a way it's like a linear JRPG proto-Dead Rising in that sense.

>I don't hate timers but I understand why people do. Timers are an abstract fail state

IMO the best timers are the global ones like in Dead Rising. Once time is up is when the game ends and you're greeted with an ending. It might be a shitty one if it was a bad run, but it's still the end of the game.

Metro is really good at giving you a "shitty" experience. The uncomfortable gasmasks with limited filters really drives home how hostile the world is.

The timer in MM feels like it serves multiple purposes with a lot of the game being based around NPC schedules and isn't really trying to limit the player as much.

>Honestly context is everything for a timer.

Yeah, I think people often react very negatively/postively depending simply on how its presented. But that can be said for all game design things really. Simply the idea that the timer isn't a doomsclock but rather just a "self-imposed" time limit for how long you'll be active changes people's feelings on it I think.

Based post

Timers can make sense and add - but some games like exploration games that reward the player for extra stuff shouldmt have a timer - and I think thats what most people are against. Imo I think the best option is to just have it be part of the difficulty setting

It's not hard to fuck up putting a timer in a game but it's easy to make it feel pointless as shit.

Probably for some people it is fun but I don't even care if I sound like a casual I just wanna walk around casually with my Pikmin and collect stuff

Or in Lightning Returns where the game gives you way too much time to the point where you're basically doing nothing just waiting for the timer to run out so you can fight the last boss.

It stresses me the fuck out, it's just not fun for me. I like to explore at my own pace.

the game isn't for your kind casual

Yup, timers get a lot of bad rap for nothing. To be fair, I don’t like too tight timers (=even optimal completion leaves little time left) myself either, but there’s nothing wrong with a proper kind of timer-induces hurry that makes you consider your choices and makes it so that you can’t just do everything in one run.

Personally, one of my most recent annoyances with the lack of timers is Hitman 2016 and its sequel, the world just feels so static when most NPC-related events only happen if you somehow initiate them. There’s one subversion to it, an assassination during an ongoing race, and it is glorious just because it feels more ”real” than your usual trigger-a-script-yourself scenes. It’s not even that the timers need to be a fail state or anything, just have it so that there’s some one-time event on each map playthrough and then the targets just start loitering normally.

Dead Rising never got better than that original game. Despite quality of life improvements and some neat innovative ideas 2/of the record just never hooked me the same way. Never bothered with 3.

In Dead Rising you get that by playing the first playthrough without worrying too much about the story completion, just deal with it when you can’t keep up with the main plot and then just fuck around. You get lay of the land and some levels while doing that, meaning that the next proper playthrough doesn’t feel nearly as stressful.

Timers work in something like Monster Hunter because it's telling you to stop dicking around all day and do your job as a hunter, and it forces players to consider balancing offence and defence. Persona games have "timers" in terms of days left until you gameover, which is clearly telegraphed and asks you to properly balance secondary and primary goals.

That's in a set format that any player can understand, if a timer emerges in a completely new context, it's impossible to know what that actually means and it just leads to frustration or fake "tension" that doesn't matter.

This, the beauty of Dead Rising is that you can totally ignore the timer and ignore quests and do whatever the fuck you want. You'll get a bad ending but it doesn't really matter because you keep your XP and levels when you replay it.

Excellent example of a timer pressuring a player while not being overly punishing.

youtube.com/watch?v=dyw6kQ5O-YA

There was a part in OFF that was sick. you gotta kill some ghosts before they kill everyone in town. It's actually pretty easy to do but since you don't know the exact number you need to kill it's still tense.

I feel that the biggest reason why people were unfairly harsh against Dead Rising is exactly because most people expected that they should be able to complete the story in one go, leading to all sorts of desperate shit and frustration with reloads, trying to futilely fight against the timer. Sure, it’s possible, but the game flows so much better if you just get that one prep playthrough before actually attempting the story seriously, Frank is just so much stronger when levelled up.

Too autistic to enjoy that shit sorry. Id rather take my time and explore.

Wizardry 4 had a finite amount of keypresses allowed that even subtracted when saving/loading or pressing a key that did nothing. It also had the ghost of trebor who chased you down in real time even though the entire game was turn based with finite keypresses.

I think it works with Dead Rising pretty well because you can die if you fuck the timer up and restart with the XP you had when you died. You're not losing everything you did in your 'failed' run.

this. its just annoying, make the player feel pressure through a good soundtrack and challenging (not tedious) gameplay

Fucking excellent post.

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100%ing the game from a fresh save is also a really fun challenge run.

Reminder that you don't even need an actual timer to add a sense of tension to your game. 999 is the perfect example, you're told you have 9 hours, you'll never take 9 hours to beat the game, it doesn't even count the time, but occasionally you'll get messages about how there's only X hours left to remind you that your survival is based on time.

In contrast, the sequel removed this whole aspect, and was utterly soulless because of it.

The one downside to that mechanic was that you'd have moments where you're waiting around doing nothing until the next case starts. It gets even worse if you're damn good at the game.

Dead Rising made you learn your spaces super well. Anyone who's played that game can sketch out that mall pretty accurately. It was a tight experience. 2 onward kept getting looser and looser with mechanics, level design, and story. It sucks, but Dead Rising is still fondly remembered for a reason.

The Desolate Hope does this too. You have 30 days to solve the mystery before the space station runs out of power, but if you're really so fucking incompetent that you can't finish the game within 4 in-game weeks, the game will start dripfeeding you opportunities to find powerups on the last few days to buy you more time. Almost anybody with a brain will finish the game before day 21, but turbocasuals still get an opportunity to jump into a safety net if they need it.

casuals don't like timers

Reminds me of Pikmin. Shame they took that out in the sequels, 30 days was way too long anyway, but it adds tension and fun.

I disagree with all you fags.

I don't like timers unless they make sense, like a bomb is about to go off or something. Let me explore at my own pace.

>I don't like timers unless they make sense

timers always makes sense user, you only have a couple thousand days left to live, maybe.

I'm already depressed because a friend of my died in a fire today, don't fuckin remind me of my personal timer.

This is top level design

Now reccomend good timed vidya

Like Fuckin Pathologic

Yup.

Kingmaker gave you plenty of time to do everything. You're under very, very light time constraints, but it works wonderfully to stop the "Just rest after every encounter" cheese most cRPGs suffer from.

Yet it's constantly whined about.

The time limit in Pathologic 1/2 is pretty much the sole reason why it's so stressful, it wouldn't be the same without it.
The game forces you to prioritize what needs to be done for each day, but you could pretty much play it however you liked, trying to save every important character, or just keeping yourself alive until the final day

I'm not opposed to the idea, but in implementation it makes me feel rushed when I want to take my time exploring an area in depth. I'm sure it can be implemented correctly though.

I agree on you.
Dead Rising was great fun. Majora's Mask was pure atmospheric ludokino. Lighting Returns criminally underrated gem.

How the fuck does the Fallout 1 timer filter so many morons?

ikr?
like what are they even wasting their time on? are they doing loops in the worldmap?

2 will always be my favorite DR game. Except the final act where they killed off the vastly superior girl.