Is anyone else tired of combat being the central gameplay focus in basically everything?

100%, in every CRPG I've played the combat has been shit, even when it's the main focus
even the Original Sin games get extremely tiresome; spending 30 minutes to even an hour in combat is a fucking waste of time

>tired of combat being the central gameplay focus
I'm not a low-test soiboi so no

Well yes, if the combat sucks.
Which it does in a lot of games.

But also yes in general. I mostly play games where combat ISN'T central to the gameplay, and luckily there are quite many of those.

>be thug
>see a a wealthy, solitary, defenseless old man walking down the streets of Sigil
>nah
>see heavily scared man, a Githyanki with a huge blade, a floating skull, a tiefling with daggers, a succubus, a modron cube, a walking suit of armour and a floating man on fucking fire walking down the streets of Sigil
>here we go

Isn't it odd how 99% of games have combat?
Books and films aren't even close to a fraction of this. Why are video games the only medium where nearly every game has some modicum of fighting?

Escapism and conflict is the easiest way to achieve that. Most people want to fight and hurt others but refrain from doing so due to laws, societal norms and morals. Video games allow for that without any permanent repercussions.

yeah

disco elysium

>Is anyone else tired of combat being the central gameplay focus in basically everything?
Not really. Considering that the games I've spend most time on in the last few years: Factorio, Pathologic 2, Kingdom Come, Satisfactory, Anno 1800, Prey, Transport Fever 2, Space Engineers and Talos Principle do not actually focus on combat at or at least not as a complete priority, I don't really see this as an issue.
There are more games that experiment with the formula and explore non-combat focused yet engaging gameplay today, than there were for the last 15 years.

>Isn't it odd how 99% of games have combat?
Less than that, but no, it's not odd. Because of the core ways that games communicate, violence is always going to be the easiest form of interaction to make engaging through the most basic game communication channels. There is nothing unnatural, weird or wrong about it.

the realities of demographics and cost benefit analysis. No matter how video games try to appeal to everyone, they're still mostly bought by young men who want a power fantasy of being the ultimate badass. And there's also the other side of that where anything that isn't combat can usually be done in reality unless it's some weird shit like a Burnout game. It also just kinda pans out best with the visceral, interactive nature of a video game. Not many things really get you there in the moment like being a dude who beats shit up. The interactivity doesn't necessarily enhance the scenario when it comes to other activities, at least not to the extent that it does for combat

>Most people want to fight and hurt others but refrain from doing so due to laws, societal norms and morals.
They really don't. Stop projecting your serious psychopathologies onto others.

i want to fight evil people and kill vicious monsters, but i can't do that in real life

Not that odd. Games have to have gameplay, and combat is the first thing you'll think of when thinking about how to design a game.
You don't have to worry about that when you're just writing a story.

Sure you don't user.

well said

Nothing close to 99% of games have combat though.

But you're probably right that the percentage is much higher than other mediums. It's likely do to combat being a pretty multi-functional and easily understandable setting to use for a game situation in which you can win or lose.

It comes complete with tension and ultimatum.
Cake baking is somewhat less serious to most who make and/or play video games.

No I don't.

I liked OS combat a lot but planescape torment for an example definitely didnt need any at all

“Reach out and touch someone (with your gun)”

Combat is the easiest way to make a world feel interactive in real-time.

I hope this isn't the same user.
If it is, user, you're not really making an effort to get your debate going anywhere.

You never know what you're getting into when you mug an old man in the Outer Planes. At least with that gang of weirdos you know what you're in for.

>walk through Hive
>suddenly this starts playing
youtube.com/watch?v=nf3Q9wfzvZE

>Combat is the easiest way to make a world feel interactive in real-time.

Really though?
The easiest?

For combat, you need enemies with readable visuals, reasonably clearly defined abilities, and rules for when they are defeated.

I'd say allowing players to open and close doors, and knock over some furniture or reposition a potted plant all seem considerably easier to achieve, if the goal is for the world to feel interactive.

Dude, I can assure that it is easier to make basic combat system, then it is to either develop and entire fucking PHYSICS engine, or manually script every single one of these interactions. And guess which one will remain engaging and entertaining on repeat, and which one is quickly going to lose it's luster?

Done.
I'm gone.
Alright.

Perhaps "easiest" was the wrong word he used... but it's definitely the most intuitive, considering that this is what most of the games focus on.

you're welcome to play some gay novel if you want

I can assure you you do not need a physics angine to knock over a chair or open a door.

Basic object interactivity did not require simulated physics for the first thirty years of video games and still don't.

Image a text adventure where you'd need a physics engine to write out a response to the command >KNOCK OVER CHAIR

Similarly, 3D games have used confined and/or preanimated interactivity since forever.

True story that.

"Or to manually script every single one of these interactions" you fucking mongoloid. Learn to fucking read.

There are games with no combat, but it does feel kinda excessive in a lot places where it does occur.

all human sports are just forms of sanitized combat.

>Listen, twerp. There're TWO types of video games in this world. Combat Centric, and Gay Novel. Now which is it?

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user.
You don't have to manually script every single interaction with an object just because you aren't writing your own physics engine. What in the world are you smoking?

I'll have to pull a Sakurai here and ask "have you ever made a game?"

In a meaningful way, yes. Maybe I should have specified. Combat is a meaningful form of interactivity because challenges can be overcome in the form of defeating foes.

It used to be the gag that nobody had figured out a way to make “talking it out” an engaging gameplay mechanic... I guess Undertale did, so that’s no longer strictly true, but the point still holds.

In order for a game world to feel significant, you have to be able to meaningfully interact with it. Fighting with threats is a pretty easy way of doing that and making it work. The other way is avoiding threats/danger (platforming and stealth games, among others) and you see plenty of those too.

There isn’t a whole lot else you can do without having to spend a ton of time making the geometry of the world itself highly interactive which takes a shitload of resources and development time to make functional in real-time.

no. if i wanted to spend all day talking about retarded shit I'd be a woman

I feel things like javelin throw, bowling, and darts are more in the vein of friendly strength/precision demonstrations from the past, like caper toss or rock skipping.

These might of course be considered a sanitized form of combat in the first place, if you want to go that route.

You do you fucking mongoloid. Do you know ANYTHING about game development what so ever? You think the game will magically do things for you when you did not script it in? What the fuck are YOU smoking?

I think calling those “sanitized combat” is seeing what you want to see. You’re not playing against an enemy that is playing against you. Unless you want to say “all competition is combat” (it isn’t) games like that are, as you say, primarily showcases of skill.

American football is sanitized combat. Some sports are. But not all of them.

I think I diagree that there aren't a whole lot else you can do, without having more work than combat would be.

Combat often means a focus on interactivity with some quite specific objects in the world.
As you say, avoiding things is another way to design, but consider placing things as well.

Sim City has no combat, and you're not avoiding anything, nor are you talking it out. But the environment is highly interactive, and the interactivity is crucial to the gameplay.

There are also simpler games about placement than SimCity of course, if we're talking about what's easy to do.

Now, take a game like Gone Home. I don't think it's much of a game, but you can't really argue that the world doens't feel interactive. I get to pull out a drawer in a small dresser in the hall of somebody's home, and fine a handwritten note from their mom, then turn it around to find some advancement-relevant sketch or number on the backside.

Your original statement didn't specify the the interactivity of the world had to feel relevant to the game objective, which is why I objected, but if if it has, there might be simpler ways than combat, depending on the game you're trying to make, of course.

You can reuse a script for repositioning a piece of graphic, user. No matter which object it might symbolize.

A class like MovableFurniture might stipulate that things need a weight, to determine if the player is strong enough to move it, a collisionbox derived from the model, and an animation to play if you do interact with it.

The animation could default to rotating the object 90 degrees around a pivot on the ground, if nothing else was specified.

Child classes like Chair, Table, Sofa need very little to fit in to that system, and you can copy them all over the game world afterwards.

I'm not saying this becomes a real game. But it's an interactive environment. And at least I would personally have a much easier time coding that than designing and coding combat.

I'm tired of combat being repetitive point and click, why can't we have combat that's at least mount and blade tire?

>You can reuse a script for repositioning a piece of graphic, user. No matter which object it might symbolize.
Which still means you are manually scripting each object, you idiot. Reusing script does not mean it's not a manual scripting. And again, see the rest of the post. Guess which one makes for actually an engaging gameplayloop.

Technically, you can use the same approach for designing and coding combat as you have described. Will it lead to a good and engaging combat system? Not quite. But neither does your approach for interacting with the environment.

Were were not talking about designing and coding an engaging gameplay loop. We were talking about making an environment feel interactive.

And you're using the terminology a little outside of th enorm, if you think "manually scripting each object" is applicable to the basic object hierarchy I described, where an object could be instantiated limitlessly. That would be the same as claiming 5 enemies had to be manually scripted, when someone says they'd want three red gnomes and then two blue gnomes that are slightly stronger.

But my approach makes the environment considerably more interactive than does inserting three types of poorly coded enemies.

Is it really gonna be considerably more interactive being able to move differently sized and shaped furniture in the same manner over and over again compared to being able to kill differently sized and shaped enemies in the same manner over and over again?

I doubt it. If anything, both would be boring as fuck.

A certain amount of physical conflict with a game centered around a human avatar is hard to avoid. I do wish that conflict would be doled out more sparingly in certain cases with more focus on exploration/puzzlesolving/immersive sim type interaction. I played control recently and thought it's premise would have been better served by a few unique SCP entities you occasionally have to deal with(not just by hiding) than a shooting gallery of generic mooks every five minutes.

Most people praise the writing, but not so much the setting itself. I mean, Sigil is beautiful in a sense. Its architecture, its people, its weirdness makes me wonder what can I find inside every building.

Is there any other game like planescape torment in terms of setting?

Also, how much comes from the dnd campaign and how much was invented for the game?

Good answer

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I didn't think we were talking about whether it was boring or not.

The original statement in was "Combat is the easiest way to make a world feel interactive in real-time."

I just don't think that's true.

That was the original statement, yes, but I was responding to your claim in . So, would pushing furniture the same way over and over again be more interactive than killing enemies the same way over and over again?

Oddworld, Caves of Qud, Morrowind, Zeno Clash, Kenshi and Beautiful Desolation, those games have similar settings and are all pretty unique

A good bit of the architecture and most(?) of the cosmology is described in the setting, as far as I know, but I think the artists still had and wanted to do massive amounts of research and design work.

Not combat per se, but constant trash combat with lots of domb enemies. Give me rare, but really dangerous encounters.

I realize the word was "world" and not "environment", which is of course a diffent focus completely.

So while it might NOT be more interactive, it sure would be easier. Designing meaningful win conditions for rotating furniture surely wouldn't be, however, compared to "kill all the approaching blue orbs.
That's undeniably true.

But the orbs wouldn't need to be enemies that need to be defeated. It could be pineapples you had to catch. Making it effectively not combat, but the same design.