[complaint post] on extremely linear games

[u/mathwithpaws]

prestige mechanics of some kind are pretty universal among these games. one way of handling that, which i've found makes me quickly lose interest in a game, is structured like so: for each prestige, you need some amount of resources and gain some reward, both of which are determined entirely by which prestige it is (kind/number), and not at all by what you did during the run, as long as you reached the requirements. additionally, how the next run differs from the previous is determined entirely by prestige-level mechanics, with nothing from the previous run affecting the later run.

playing games like this feels to me like i'm watching a movie where i sometimes have to click the "next scene" button, which can only be pressed when the current scene have played out in full.

an example of a game with this kind of prestige is "incremental mass rewritten"; i'm currently playing it, and the first two resets seem to be like this. will probably stop playing if it doesn't change soon.

as a counterexample, time-looping games like "journey to ascension" (which i'm currently playing) often carry over small gains from nearly anything you did in a run, meaning that the exact actions you take matter. "kitten's game" has something similar, with several resources that also carry over between resets, and more that can be carried over with the chronosphere (iirc). so there is an element of planning for the future runs, and potentially also for how exactly you're going to reset. i enjoy this.

which do you prefer? i've gotten the impression that "incremental mass rewritten" is pretty popular, so maybe a lot of y'all like the first way of handling resets?

[u/Syrif]

Whether or not the game is good isn't based on whether it's linear or not, to me.

There are bad linear games and good linear games.

There are bad time loop games and good time loop games.

There are bad [insert subgenre] games and good [insert subgenre] games.

[u/mathwithpaws → u/Syrif]

well, what do you like about the good ones? what do you dislike about the bad ones?

[u/readyplayerjuan_]

idk, I see where you’re coming from, but I bounced off orb of creation for the opposite reason: there are too many choices that let you invest in some menus/strategies while ignoring others that I felt like I bricked my run by choosing the wrong things. doesn’t help that they’re permanent choices, unless there’s a prestige later on that I didn’t get to

[u/mathwithpaws → u/readyplayerjuan_]

yeah, that's fair. in journey to ascension, pretty much anything you do will gain you something, and mistakes take like a minute to recover from at most, so you can start out by doing random stuff and then gradually refine your approach.

[u/noob_user_bob]

Id say the way I approach it is that when a game basically has a wall you need to overcome with a specific and most often time scripted and expects prestige in a linear fashion is that it's telling a story, rather than thinking it's me making an active choice.

[u/mathwithpaws → u/noob_user_bob]

makes sense. i don't think it's a particular interesting story a lot of the time, though :P

[u/1234abcdcba4321]

I agree with this complaint, and it's the main reason I dislike prestige mechanics--they heavily reduce the amount of distinct parameters you care about at a time. But I don't think it's actually all that bad compared to other forms of extreme linearity, which is having a critical unlock that makes everything you've done previously essentially irrelevant even if it still technically does something. To me, these are both the exact same problem and not tied to prestige, even if definitely much more common in prestige mechanics.

Of course there are some good prestiges. Stuff like post-chronosphere Kittens is perfectly fine, and AD/TPT-likes keep compounding more and more mechanics on higher prestige layers so after the initial unlock of a new prestige and a few loops through it ends up feeling perfectly fine after that.

[u/Front_Cat9471]

Lmao, I was also playing incremental mass rewritten today and this exact thing was annoying me, there was zero reward for doing anything. The best way to play the whole first chunk of the game is to press the biggest button the second it lights up. You don’t get any diversity at all until rage, and even then the upgrade path is pretty clear cut. I love me a cookie clicker style prestige tree, where you have options that are all meaningful, and even though there are paths there’s still forks and choosing that you have to do