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.
Dylan James
i hate timers, fuck that shit.
Colton Roberts
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.
Charles Price
Final fantasy 13 lightning returns Fallout 1 Any text adventure with a time limit Star control 2
Jason Martinez
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.
Jonathan Wright
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.
>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.
Brody Nguyen
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.
