A cognito hazard is something that just knowing about may cause a negative impact.
For example, how some games will create the illusion of ammo scarcity by keeping your ammo count low at all times, but artificially bumping up drop rates when you're close to running out. When you don't know, it really feels tense, but when you do, the whole charade becomes pretty much obselete.
I feel like all the survival horrors games that have come out in the past 10-20 years have you squeezing through a tight area or crawling through something to get to the next area. The vents in dead space 2 were everywhere
I feel like it’s a win-win I kinda like those moments as long as it isn’t overdone or samey everytime
Original Mass Effect did this best. We're on an elevator, obvious load screen, but depending on who's with you the convo changes. I may have purposely spent more time than necessary in those "hidden" load screens to try and tease out all the dialogue combos I could get 😊
Oh absolutely, Legendary Edition added the option to skip those in ME1 as the actual loading time was no longer necessary on any of today's systems
Never used that feature. The personality shown in those elevator rides across different companions add A LOT to the story and characters
Plus the elevator version of the theme music is great
Plus, sometimes you can puck up quest from news broadcast or they can give you "the official version" of what happened after completing some missions.
It’s funny because resident evil 4 did exactly what op mentioned too and if you were doing good it would give you less ammo and herbs to conflate the difficulty but when you where doing poor it would hold your hand a bit tighter. Survival horror rocks gotta be my favorite genre.
RE4, as far as I know, is the first use of this type of system. If that's not the case, it's certainly one of the earlier implementations.
I know the Remnant games do something similar. If you're using your primary, enemies will more likely drop ammo for your secondary and vice versa.
The newer Tomb Raider games are rife with right spaces you have to inch through
God of war and Jedi fallen order with the narrow crevices you squeeze through to the next section
In the original GOW trilogy, it was the reeeeeally long run to a distant place while the camera pulled back. Or climbing the reeeeeeally long chain to the top of the mountain.
Yeah that game at least gave you something to admire while loading.
As I understand it, just about every minicutscene in GOW is a loading animation. Rope climbs/drops, blade throws, etc.
What I heard is they chopped up almost anything they could so they could load super fast, but it’s still not instant, so they use the actions to hide it
And they do it well. You can play basically the whole game without seeing a camera cut. The whole thing seamlessly transitions from your camera control to a single camera take scene and back into gameplay from the same camera. It’s a thing of beauty.
Especially in Ragnarok with the transitions between Kratos and Atreus, and the dream sequences. Those were absolutely gorgeous.
Which reminds me of Batman: Arkham Asylum; Rocksteady siloed off/enclosed sections behind those stupid gates because iirc, the game couldn't load that many textures for a big area. I think this was a flaw of Unreal Engine 2/2.5.
So when Arkham City came out, Rocksteady had upgraded to UE3 and it was a nice big open-world without many loading screens or things to hide behind.
I like hidden loading screens when they’re done right though. It’s much nicer to hit a 3-5 sec cutscene of you transitioning up a wall or rope than it is to just pause things.
Some games did it well, like Mass Effect and the elevators and Tony Hawks American Skateland with the tunnels.
Mostly well for Mass Effect. The conversations were often entertaining, but then the elevator kept going for a while after that sometimes.
Legendary Edition with a moderately powerful PC meant the “skip” button would show up three words into the conversation.
Tbf IRL elevators are like this. Sometimes the conversation ends and you are just waiting for the thing to leave you at your floor.
I would think Mass Effect is a perfect example of what he means though.
It's an elegant way of doing it, but once you know you know.
takes me wayyyy out of it now! “oh look a narrow passageway, guess we are loading new assets” maybe also i’m just getting older and get more towards the side of seeing how the sausage is made
Or when you see that auto save icon when you’re about at a place where a boss makes sense, and you’re like - uh oh
A checkpoint, ammo boxes, and health potions all in one spot right in front of an unopened door?
I wonder what's behind it!
In Skies of Arcadia, for Dreamcast specifically, there was a very distinctive disc drive noise before any random battle. As annoying as the random battles in that game could already get, the sound was like broadcasting to you that you were about to get annoyed half a second before you the game actually showed you.
this was actually helpful if you wanted to avoid flights, because the encounter being prepared would reset and go away if you paused the game
I always forgot to heal after battles, and that drive access would remind me to heal. Never remembered it resetting the encounter though.
Core memory unlocked. I dreaded that sound.
Yes! A few other games, PSX ones as well, did the disc scan before unexpected FMVs or bosses. I can still hear that grindy whine. Such an amazing game, loved the on the fly damage type switching. It’s how it should be done.
Rubber-banding in racing games. The NPCs will always be catching up to you, even if you're driving much better than they are. They just get a speed boost to make the race seem like it's that much tighter of a race.
I used to like racing games until I started noticing this. Started testing it out, and realized it was 100% happening and I wasn't just being salty. The game was literally cheating. I don't play racing games anymore. I cannot stand shit like that.
Yeah, when I realized it was easier to win by deliberately driving slower through the first 80% of the map and only taking the lead at the very end…what’s the point in playing a game like that?
mario kart has item smuggling. good players can beat bad players with style by sandbagging for good items, catch up to the top, and use their broken items in/near first place for a massive advantage
it’s more fun with actual people though. with bot drivers it’s just kind of sad
Mario Kart is balanced for chaos over fairness. It's more a party game than a proper competitive one.
It's not even a game anymore at that point, just you fighting the dev's cheating algorithm.
There's the thing: "the dev's cheating algorithm" is so overwhelmingly what video games fundamentally are, especially single-player games. In general, they aren't simulating some kind of life situation; they're trying to produce an experience, and that has always involved misdirection and obfuscation, very often in favor of the player's success but also to hide seams in the game or to simulate competitiveness, tension, etc. In my opinion it's comparable to how movies use stunts and special effects to produce artificial emotions and excitement. Art forms, and all, I guess...
You said the emotions and excitement are artificial, but I suggest that if they are sincerely felt, the emotions are real. Kinda like how English teachers say that good fiction is the truth inside the lie. The truth being the things we feel and experience, and the lie being the made-up story in fiction, or the illusion of a game world.
That’s why I go back to Burnout Paradise. It’s path based with circumstantial AI changes.
Super Mario Kart doesn't even hide this. Since you see on the map covering half the screen. You'll pelt an opponent with green shells the entire race and you'll see them just breeze by everyone else to be right on you again. Getting hit once or bumping into a wall almost means you never get back into the race.
Man this shit is why, despite liking the story, I hated doing Claire's quest in Cyberpunk 2077. The game doesn't even try to hide how hard it Rubberbands the AI and Claire is basically useless 100% of the time. May as well have just made it a shitty rhythm game or quick time event for how piss easy it is to win the races simply by accelerating and avoiding obstacles. Obstacles which, of course, aren't a hindrance to the AI at all.
Fr I’m driving the fastest car in the game going up to 200 MPH and the rest of the cars are still on my ass very immersion breaking 🤦♂️
Playing it now is hilarious— use the “self-destruct” quickhack on all the opponents to wipe out the competition
Really noticeable in Jak X, you can be in front for the whole race, constantly setting traps that blow up the other racers cars, not dying a single time, and yet still the enemy racers can finish within the same second that you do.
Man I haven't heard about jak x in forever but it was my favorite game at the time. I wish I found more racing games with that vibe
You ever play Burnout 3 Takedown, now THAT was fun.
I’ve thrown a controller one time in my life and it was because of this in NFS: Undercover. Did the same race like 10 straight times and no matter how perfect I did the race, a car would rubber band past me on the final straightaway
One of the older V-Rally games was so evil that you'd be winning the race since start and then when you cross the finish line all the other cars are already there and you have placed last.
In the original Mass Effect, sprinting on the Citadel doesn't actually change your speed. The FOV is altered to make it seem faster, but the speed never changes
They did that in Dragon Age Inquisition as well.
Hitting sprint on your mount just zooms the camera out and adds speed lines to your horse to give the illusion that it's going faster, but it isn't.
I actually noticed this before the devs even confirmed it because the mounts are just so fucking slow and trying to give the illusion when it still takes fucking forever to get places stuck out to me.
I literally stopped using the immedietly because it was so obvious how slow they were.
OMG, I’d just realized, after 15 years, that you’ve pointed out the issue I had with the Citadel but didn’t know why.
Walk instead. You can also use the elevator :)
Or the taxi ships no one seems to realize are there
I’m Commander Shepard and this is my favorite psychological conditioning on the Citadel.
Sprinting outside of combat just looked so awkward in that game that I never did it anyway lol
I remember having a hunch about this and testing it, with start and end points and a timer.
...motherf- I KNEW IT!!
The first Hellblade lies to you when it tells you that each death will make the infection spread faster and that if you die enough times it will be game over. It's a way to get you to be really cognizant of how often you're dying, but the infection spreading just happens over the course of the story.
That, and all of the shenanigans going on under the hood with the AI in Alien: Isolation.
The first Hellblade lies to you when it tells you that each death will make the infection spread faster
Probably wouldn't have dropped the game if I knew that. I fell of a tree and died 3 times in a row and felt like my run was fucked so just quit.
Same, lol.
Hellblade gets a free pass because it fits in with Senua's schizophrenic delusion
I would love to hear more about the shenanigans
I linked an article that will give you a good overview but the general idea is that there are two AI. The alien and the director. The alien's job is to find you by using search patterns, sweeps, listening for sounds, etc. The alien can be tricked with things like loud noises. The alien cannot cheat. It never knows where you are unless it finds you.
The director, on the other hand, knows everything. It knows where you are and where the alien is and it monitors the situation with a system called "menace". Basically, the menace gauge is a stress meter. If it puts you in stressful situations, it backs off. If you've been safe for too long, it puts the pressure on. It gives the alien tasks with varying degrees of importance. Some of them are "drop everything you're doing" and some are "when you get to it" and everything in between.
Its job is to keep you on edge by feeding the alien enough information that it is never away from you too long so you don't get bored but it doesn't want you to get frustrated either so it backs off when appropriate.
Many people say it is one of the most perfect examples of how enemies in games should behave. It is a good system.
Personally, I can't play it. I'm freaked out by games super easily. But I've read a ton about this one and it's just so incredibly well designed.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-perfect-organism-the-ai-of-alien-isolation#close-modal
I had heard that the AI for the xenomorph was impressive, but I had no idea how it actually works. Thanks for sharing this!
In Bioshock enemies always miss their first shot against you.
Likewise in Jak 2 and 3, at least for the guards.
Most shooters do this. AI in those games has perfect accuracy and knows where you're at constantly. Unless there's a huge tell about the ai pointing a gun at you and shooting (ie lasers and giant red circles) the first shot of any ai will miss you to let you know youre being shot at. Destiny and the CODs are blatantly obvious about this.
Huh, never noticed this but honestly, thanks devs, I appreciate it.
Same in Uncharted I believe. I guess a gunshot sound is the almost the same thing as hearing battle music start and the screen shattering in a jrpg
A loooot of games do this
Halo 2: Legendary is NOT one of them lol
If I recall correctly, in the opening mission of Mass Effect 3, the Normandy was hard coded so that it wouldn't swoop in to save you until you were nearly out of ammo. Didn't matter if you fired all your shots at the drones or at the ground, it wouldn't appear until you were dry.
Huh. This explains why my charge-nova-melee-repeat build had the prologue last for-fucking-ever.
There is also a concussive shot build that puts it on a sun 1 second CD, and it is infinite ammo that curve around cover. I sat there killing enemies for 15 minutes and wondered when the drop ship was coming.
Now I just empty my ammo into the floor early.
Daaaamn. That stings a little.
If I correctly understood the term, it's the theory ( but basically a fact) that npc cars will purposefully crash into you in GTA V
I feel like it became more of a thing in an update like a year ago? I've got like 1000 hours in the game, and now they'll just swerve right in front of you for absolutely no reason ALL THE TIME.
I stopped playing 8 years ago and it was a known thing then.
I saw a massive uptick after they added the update with the ceo chop shop where you have to deliver the cars. Npcs will swerve from oncoming traffic three lanes away to hit you to devalue the car before delivery completion.
Absolutely, before that uptick, npcs swerving were easily explained by bad AI trying to predict your driving, so if you were going relatively fast, it tries to predict your driving path and the AI often thinks you're going to crash into them and they try to avoid it but they just end up swerving into you.
Now it's turned up, and npcs will drive into you even after just coming from a stop like wtf.
Yo wtf… I’m losing my shit right now. I remember those stupid quests and could never deliver one in mint condition because of some bs crash. I thought it was me just being reckless driving…
It was always a thing, yeah. But they made the decision to actively make it worse.
I played through the GTAV story recently and the cars definitely swerve in front of you all the time and it seems like they do it more when you're trying to run from the cops
Yeah, but knowing that helps to see that coming and avoid crashes. Any time I see a truck or a bus on a cross street at an intersection with a red light, I'm ready to miss them from behind because I know they're gonna be in the intersection as I'm going through. Cars always fly into the left turn lane out of nowhere, so I'm always keeping an eye on the oncoming lanes or the far right side, especially if GPS is telling me to go straight and the left turn lane is empty
Your health bar in various games isn't always 1:1. The last 10% of your bar may represent the last 20% of your health, for example. This increases your sense of danger for longer. You may see this in fighting games, but other games do it too.
Similarly, in God of War 2018 and GOW Ragnarok some boss health bars heavily misrepresent how damaged they are, like Sigrun in 2018, when her health is halfway down on the bar, she's actually only lost about a quarter of her health or something like that.
That's evil
Damn... that really makes me think back of all the times when I'd get 90% of the way... then nerves would pick up... you can only keep up that rotation of Rune, combo, weapon change, other Rune, combo, Atreus, Rage, and repeat for so long, all the while watching what counter you needed to use...
and to think it wasn't nerves that ruined it... I actually got through the first part faster than I thought, and took longer on the end.
I guess it motivated me to finish, by seeing that I got so close. But man... that always felt like I was just fucking up the ending.
Lol, good old Breath of Fire on SNES was the most insane version of this. You'd deplete a boss health bar then it'd "hang on" with visually 1 hp like a pokemon with focus sash. But then it'd take tons and tons more damage to actually die, sometimes most its health was hidden behind that last slice of the bar.
Some games did basically same with damage with weapons requiring reload, last bullet or few in mag does more damage, to give those 'barely got that enemy down before needing to reload.
Sort of similar, in the arkham series, the last enemy standing in a fight is always an instant knockout including tougher enemies, i guess its to wrap up the fight in a more satisfying way but once you realise its quite easy to play around it by leaving big dude alive till last so you take him out instantly.
The lore reason for that is that Batman isn't distracted by other enemies and can fully focus on the right amount of damage to knock out without killing.
Gears of War did this to give a secret boost to players that didn’t bother with trying the perfect reloads or didn’t reload before running out of ammo, because they assumed they were new or inexperienced players. When a player shot their entire clip and either didn’t try for a perfect reload or failed trying it a lot (can’t remember), their last few bullets in the clip would do much more damage.
In Dante’s Inferno, because of a programming mistake, health upgrades don’t actually do anything, and the devs decided never to fix that
Wait, what? Were they hard to get? Was it automatic upgrades?
Early Assassin's Creed did this
In Destiny your health bar is like 80% shield and 20% health. That last 20% feels like 50% of your total health. At least on D1 in 2016 or so. I swear i took less damage when i had no shield. So this theory holds in my mind.
Games like Fire Emblem and XCOM are lying to you about accuracy percentage. No, not against you, but actually in your favour.
Most people are okay with a 50% attack missing, but expect an 80% attack to land. An 80% attack actually misses more than what people would expect, so to meet those expectations they fudge the numbers up a bit behind the scenes. 80% goes to 87%, etc.
Still, even with the number fudging, it still won't stop your soldier from missing that crucial 95% chance to hit shot lol.
Its even more actually. Its slightly different in the games, but the general rule i believe was doublerolls in the players favor in both cases.
Your 80% would be rollled twice, with the best chosen. Enemy hits would do the same, but the worst of the two was picked instead. All under the hood ofc, as it looks the same to the player and feels more tense.
The fire emblem games with double RNG weren't definitionally in a player's favor- they favored high hit rates and punished low rates. Thing is the player is MUCH more likely to have higher numbers (you aren't throwing an axe user against a swordsman as often as the AI does), so it is basically working in the player's favor. But it will help bosses with higher hit rates!
Some games only kick double RNG on for higher hit rates, which I think is a better system. A 10% displayed rate is like 2% if you're using two RNG
I had a friend complaining about missing 95%s all the time. I pointed out how often he rolls Natural 1s while playing DnD. Just shit luck forever, lol
Game enemies are less aggressive when they're off-screen, because getting hit by something outside your field of vision feels unfair. You can abuse this by not looking at them.
I’ve played DMC5, IIRC enemies don’t attack at all when not on your screen. Just look at a wall and spam judgement cut with Vergil.
The “storeroom” before a boss.
Oh, you’re allowing me to save and stock up, boss is behind that door, right?
The FF7 Remake was hilarious with where you’d find a random bench and vending machine.
Living in Japan, I can believe there’s a vending machine at the top of a mountain that somebody is actually restocking.
I also appreciate that in Rebirth they had those mystical stones replacing vending machines in areas people couldn’t possibly be present.
Unless you play a From Software title...
Elden Ring actually makes it more explicit.
Oh, is that a Stake of Marika, beside a narrow arch, leading into a big wide open room?
Or if there isn't, you might be in the dark and you see the ominous glow of yellow up ahead.
Which is an intentional QOL improvement design choice apparently, play the Dark souls series and you know you have to deal with the backtrack of shame everytime you die on a boss fight and it can get pretty annoying
Much of the difficulty at the start of Kingdom Come depends on how long you want to fuck around leveling your attributes in Skalitz where time doesn't pass. Its basically a boredom tax to cheese the game.
Also in Bioshock on medium difficulty you can't be one-shot by an attack. It will drop you to one health instead and either you heal or the next hit kills you.
Same with Star Ocean 2, you have a laser gun that breaks after you leave the town, so you can gain like 10 levels, makes the rest of the game bearable.
Honestly you can break the game early on anyways so those 10 levels aren't too beneficial
I noticed the 1 hp endurance effect in Prey Mooncrash as well. Since the DLC is kind of a rogue-lite I guess they didn't want the deaths to feel cheap.
Same thing in Borderlands where you can't be 1 shotted. It's a well known strategy known as health-gating and it's a lot of fun.
Holy shit, the number of times I literally shouted "holy fuck that was close!" It wasn't really close at all.
Dude so much of kingdom come seems like such a blast, but everytime I get into it run into a seemingly different wall. Lock picking on a console feels impossible, combat at the start hurts, everything is just rough
It took me a few tries but once things clicked it really came together. The game became kind of a second life for me for a while where I was just sort of living in the world. Get up, poach some game, go see captain Bernard and spar for a bit, explore a bit more of the map, come home hit the laundromat and play farkle before turning in. Lots of quests can be solved by talking to people - like when the miller wants you to prove yourself by stealing from the executioner you can just go to the executioner and ask him for the ring and he will give it to you since its worthless. Lockpicking on a controller does suck, no suggestions there.
Holy shit I didn’t know I could ask him!! Yall have convinced me to give the game another try
Every mechanic in outer wilds is a cognito hazard, by design
A real one would be that to avoid floating point errors, every time the player appears to move, it's actually the world moving in the opposite direction, like the ship from Futurama.
It looks exactly the same, but feels wrong in a game that's dedicated to making a world that feels like it doesn't revolve around the player.
https://x.com/Pentadact/status/1654224129594384384?lang=en
Adding helicopters near the start of game dev:
"A Helicopter is a Vehicle."
Adding helicopters late in game dev:
"When you think about it, a Helicopter is just a very advanced type of Door."
Bethesda: "Trains are basically just guys with a big hat, am I right?"
That's some Fallout reasoning.
People are inherently bad at sensing what probability should feel like. Most games with probability lie to you about those probabilities. Even XCom, famous for missing at 95% to hit isn't totally honest, as it uses a form of pity timer to give you a hit every now and again, to avoid big streaks of misses that real RNG would result in some of the time.
Me and XCOM must have a different definition of what a "big streak of misses" is.
Sincerely, a person who has missed 8 shots in a row (equivalent to two full turns of firing). Infuriating.
IIRC XCOM doesn't use use the pure odds unless you're on hard. On the hardest difficulty it starts cheating the odds again, this time against you.
Fire Emblem has had different odds from the displayed number since the the GBA games. There have been a couple of systems used, but generally if the Hit is higher than 50%, it gets inflated by up to around 10%. If it is lower than 50%, it is either unaltered or lower by up to 10%, depending on the game.
The exceptions are critical chance and status staff hit chance (at least in the GBA game). The displayed chance is accurate, so you really did get wrecked by a 1% crit.
The first 5 FEs had unaltered hit chances, and you really feel it when you miss 90% hit attacks more often. And no, Binding Blade's RNG is not bugged; your hit rates are just worse and the enemies' are just better.
For Elden Ring it's knowing what stuff you want and where to find it. The first playthrough is incredibly dense and filled with exploration, but on subsequent playthroughs I can't force myself to do every single cave knowing that most of them have rewards that my build won't ever use.
its why randomizer runs are so fun lol. everything is random. first boss? a herb. that random grave site? radahn's boots.
I wish I could experience games like Elden Ring and Morrowind for the first time again.
Morrowind is the bigger example for me, since I’ve been playing it on and off for 20 years.
Most loot isn’t random in that game, and most that is random is “random Glass(really good) weapon” rather than a leveled chest or something like that.
The first couple of play throughs, you find so much cool stuff by just exploring. But, now it’s like, “I want this super powerful mystical artifact and I know exactly where and how to get it,” and I just can’t stop myself from doing it indefinitely
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
I actually thought I could get a secret ending for finishing the game without ever dying. I somehow managed first try. Made the final fight all the more impactful.
GTA IV uses the “dolly zoom” effect to make it feel like you’re driving faster than you really are.
Breath of the Wild and TOTK always have arrows in wood crates, so you can never run out. Every wood crate you see lift it up with the ultrahand and drop it, so it brakes, free arrows.
Then how come I've broken crates and got nothing? Or is it exclusively with Ultrahand ?
I thought I read somewhere that when your arrows go above a certain amount, they will stop dropping and then drop again when your under that amount (this also works with shops, they wont restock arrows when you're above that limit) and there is a random chance it for it to drop, just like things like fruit. So it could also be bad RNG
this actually happens in *most* Zelda games if im right. Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are good examples: some pots drop a specific item, and when you have enough of it it switches to either drop rupees or nothing at all. very common in resource-management games.
It even happened in Link to the Past. Out of bombs? Destroy some stuff and you’ll get some.
Bioshock Infinite
Some of the harder hitting guns had low ammo pools and ammo was hard to come by. But you could manipulate the Ai in Elizabeth, so she was just constantly throwing powerful guns that she "found" at my face during firefights.
Care to explain?
I'm guessing keeping all your ammo stores full except the weapon you're using, so she only grabs the ammo you can actually take.
Games when you get a boss or enemy down to 1 hp and no matter what they won’t be defeated, meaning a scripted event or new gameplay mechanic tutorial is supposed to play but you were too fast in lowering their hp.
I would say knowing about EVs, IVs, optimal natures and abilities in Pokémon games can ruin the fun if you're just trying to play casually. Especially because of how unfun it can be to grind for these things to get your team more optimised. This could really apply to any minmaxxing element in any game such as RNG manipulation, optimal leveling (Oblivion) etc.
As a casual Pokémon gamer, I can confirm. Everything I’ve learned about IVs, natures and abilities has been a terrible addition to my overall experience. I have never heard of EVs before, and I don’t plan on learning any further. Battling is my absolute least favorite part of the games.
Coyote time: In many platformers, there is a grace period where you can still jump after you run off of a ledge
That’s not really a negative thing though, just a help mechanic to not annoy players, like how Mario games have Keypress Buffering or what so you don’t have to press the jump frame perfectl
Yeah that's just a quality of life thing, it doesn't ruin the game once you know about it.
The one that ruins it for me is finding a busted mechanic in a game and always having it in your back pocket if you get bored or want to rush things.
There’s a reason that everyone jokes about becoming a stealth archer in Skyrim. The first time I read the perk about the 32x(or something like that) damage multiplier for a stealth attack with a bow I was blown away. Now that I know about it, it’s hard not to get it and whip it out if I ever want to fly through a dungeon. It kind of takes away the gritty dungeon grind that forces you to play your cards just right so you can survive until the end.
In Fallout 4, if you don't know which quests are procedural, which ones are useless side quests, and which ones are main plot, it's a lot more fun.
Once you start to think of procedural quests as just useless busy-work, they stop feeling like they matter.
Great point. They try to bury the lede a bit in a few cases, too, like with unlocking armored clothing on the second or third Railroad radiant quest.
The size of doors in first person shooter games.
You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that most FPS doors are about 10 feet tall and 5 feet wide, but it’s true.
0451 is a famous pin code that was used in RPGs, but there's one game out there (Selaco, I think) that literally shocks you and reduces your health if you try it too many times.
So basically that pin code is great if you remember it off the top of your head and know that the game won't mess around with you. Otherwise, it's a cognito hazard.
Used in a lot of Immersive Sims, actually. The Selaco devs even put in a fun little easter egg where if you use the code enough, you’ll get an in-game email from the dev team that basically just says “this isn’t an immersive sim, stop using that code you dummy.”
A lot of games. Youre standing on a ledge and in front of you is a drop into a huge square or circle room. You know its a "point of no return".
You can mainly find these in TLOU1 and 2 and resident evil games
This is a technique known as "Push Gameplay"
Essentially ensuring the player moves forward and cannot return to certain areas (allowing them to be unloaded to save on memory and performance)
Dropping down a short ledge that you can't climb back up again is one approach.
Another is to simply close and lock a door behind the player as they go.
Or use an elevator or tram to deliver them to where they need to be (without providing a return button)
Its reverse is called Pull-Gameplay, where the player is guided by landmarks visible at a distance.
An intriguing reality of games is that if you give a player in an open-world environment a bearing/distance to where you want them to be, even if they explicitly are ignoring it they will trend on average to wander towards it
The unconscious bias of having a specific consistent direction presented to them will influence otherwise random movements in the open-world until they dither their way to where you want them to be.
I experience this personally in games like Horizon Zero Dawn in particular.
More explicitly, having a major landmark visible in the skybox acts to orient the player and if you prime them with the right narrative, they will tend to assume that towards it is where they want to go.
Half Life 2 makes heavy use of both Push and Pull gameplay at various points.
For example, for most of the latter half of the game, the Citadel tower is visible in the skybox and whenever you're not wholly sure where to be going, just turn to face it and try going in that direction and you'll probably be on the right track.
Once you get there, you climb the tower. The Pull-gameplay is simply that "Up is good", and the Push-gameplay is that most of your traversal is via one-way elevator platforms. So it's a series of corridor-shooter levels connected by elevators.
I don't know if this counts, but once you realize that's all there is, there's really nothing more.
I recently played Mad Max. Decent game, worth a play. But I realized pretty early on that, even though they may try to lead you into believing there are some unknown horrors in the game with dark environments, enemy ambushes, etc. you'll never encounter something that isn't a regular humanoid. So that whole bit with the buzzards kinda missed me. I know I'm supposed to take it slow and be cautious, but if you've beaten one enemy, you've beaten them all, so there's no need for any of that. Dark tunnel? Meh, run through. Might get jumped, but it's not like Mr. X is waiting around the corner, or a necromorph is chasing me. Absolutely nothing to be afraid of at any point.
Why when I enter a room and there's a bunch of health packs laying around, I know I'm in for an Oh Shit moment.
It did not feel great to begin with, but when you realize how game dev tycoon really works it is literally infuriating and unplayable. It was kind of loosely based on a mobile game in the same vein.
You make games, researching and developing more technolgies and qualities to put into your games. When the games are released they get "reviews" generated for them... based on the "existing market" and a fair bit of RNG.
To make a 5 star game your game had to be ~15-20 percent more "score" than the best game on the market prior. 5 star also IIRC was really the money maker.
So anyways... the mobile game had a 25-30 year timeline including fake versions of pretty much every gaming system you can think of. Fan expectations would rise over time and you definitely had to keep progressing to do well, but it always just felt "fair" somehow.
So game dev tycoon... that game market? It is the games you make, and only the games you make. You can't make a 3 part series with nearly identical tech, you can't really vary stuff up, it winds up feeling like this strange sisyphean thing where you have to get X amount more score each and every game.
Really though, the worst part was the RNG tied to the good review. You literally have a limited number of attempts to get 5 star games, because there is only so many new features and such you can add to make it "revolutionary" and I swear even with the optimal score it was maaaaybe a 50/50 shot of getting the good reviews.
You do not recognise the bodies in the water
OP is definitely an SCP fan lol.
Tbf recently Alan Wake 2 did this as well
Remedy explicitly based Control and the federal bureau of control on the SCP concept, so it all kinda loops around.
just finished half life 2 and ep 1 and 2 recently and man it hits different on the recent play thrus knowing that the story isnt going to be concluded with ep 2 or.... ever. Negative impact being that the story was slightly less enjoyable then the first time around.
The fact that HL Alyx exists and contributes to the story, and (spoilers) gives me hope that Half Life 3 will eventually happen at some point.
Yes, your grandkids will love it.
Only if they can pull themselves off the newly released Silksong
The true cognito hazard is thst after episode 2 released and everyone loved it fans began to write fan fiction and predictions for half-life episode 3. After a number of years and silence it came to public attention that the developers lost interest in the original plot line when a writer guessed the complete story best for beat and it got super popular in most half-life forums and communities.
They scrapped the entire plan and story and wrote it again from scratch and it just came out worse with many praising the fan fiction and upset that they didn't just stick to their guns.
The negative response and backlash pushed the developers even further away from the community and now we will never get half-life 3...
"Holy gosh! I've been running low on ammo and health for a while now, and I've just found a massive cache of both!
My luck is finally cha....why do I hear boss music?"
Kingdom hearts and the bullshit damage ceilings and floors for bosses. Removes the mysteries of overlevelling and it becomes a number crunching game.
You don’t actually sprint in Dragon Age Inquisition or Mass Effect 1. Your FOV is expanded and wind lines are added.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Your sanity level does nothing in terms of actual gameplay impact, even though you’re warned at the start of the game to pay careful mind to it. The environment will look a bit more horrific at times and your screen will be a bit wobbly, but that’s it.
Diving into making games is a cognitio hazard for a time.
There's a curve where you learn how the sausage is made, you demystify and lose the magic for them for a while since you can't turn off that knowledge, and eventually it wraps back around to enjoying them again and accepting them for what they are.
ANKLE LEVEL OBSTACLES.
They kill me more than the AI
Spoilers for BG3
In Baldurs Gate 3 you are told that you are going to morph into a mindflayer thrall because you have a ticking time bomb parasite in your head, so you need to hunt for a cure ASAP. But you need to long rest (and end the day) to restore HP and spell slots. This led to most people on their first playthrough trying to go as long as possible without long resting, which significantly gimps your combat power if you have no other sources of healing/reset.
In reality you won’t turn because you are being protected by the Artifact, so you could long rest as much as you want (camp supplies willing).
Hell, if you skip long rests in Act I, you end up losing a lot of companion stuff that would happen.
I had your exact problem in Alan Wake 2 as you described, OP.
I was making every shot count, practicing my dodge skills to save health, monitoring my flashlight batteries like a hawk. I squirreled away a couple bullets and health items in my stash at every save point.
I realized about half of the way through that the game dumps items on you till you reach a hidden cap, then item containers will start being empty. If you stash the stuff to get under the cap, you'll find more out in the world. But if you actually withdraw from your stash over the cap the game stops dropping items, so you haven't really changed anything. I made a game of exploiting the system and ended with hundreds of ammo and enough healing items to stock a Walgreens in my stash.
Another one in looter games is one I call the self-frustrating goal. It's saved me a lot of time on addictive looter games. It's when you grind stuff at a high level and realize there isn't anything you actually need the loot for. You're already doing the highest level content, grinding it over and over in fact, you don't need to grind that again once you get the prized drop. And you don't need it to spank lower level content.
In many free roaming fighting games the enemies attack you one at a time so you have a chance to survive and pull off moves(and keep devs sane).
Done well you hardly notice but done badly it just removes all sense of danger from coming across big groups.
Assassins Creed games do it to very varying degrees.
League of Legends intentionally matches you with bad teammates frequently and auto fills you to unfamiliar roles to give you crushing losses, then puts you into a few games with better player balance to make the wins feel much better when you break a loss streak. It conditions an ebb and flow of dopamine to keep you addicted, and supplements that with rewards to keep you coming back.
The only ways out are to either play exclusively in 5 man squads or uninstall.
This 100% happens in apex. When I used to play with my buds - if we went without a win for awhile - we counted how many days without playing it would take for us to get a win on the first game of the night. Turns out it’s five. If you haven’t played in five days - the chance of a win dramatically increases your first game back. Only explanation is it drops you to a lower MMR to feel the rush.
I thought one of the Devs even admitted to this
It's in their matchmaking blog. Your mmr decays when you don't play.
Was it Call of Duty series where they also had some documentation leaked or so about at least supposedly testing in some beta or so system where:
After player buys cosmetic item with real money, they get matched agaist players who like to use same weapon that player got cosmetic for, and have it in one of their loadouts, but are also judged by game's stat system to be worse at using that weapon, so that ge can give 'this weapon got better when I got this paid cosmetic' feeling to player, then after while they return from doing that, all to keep players hopefully returning to buy more cosmetics with real money... supposedly worked very well in their own stats..
Well activision also has a patent on gameplay systems where bloom and damage can scale according to however they deem necessary so this isn’t surprising.
To be honest, all current replies (including my own) under this main comment (and main comment itself) are kind of revese of cognito hazards, sure they might lessen one's enjoyment on that game in one way, but knowing definitely has very good potential on improving one's enjoyment on life, by knowing not to let themselves get worked over by this, by knowing some matches just are unfair to begin with, or(/and) just stopping playing (too much of) those games.
Knowing lets you be manipulated by corporation, for their own profit, little less.
Regularly see this with Blizzard games like Overwatch2, but it hits different when there's an actual ranking system in place.
When one "gold 2" team feels drastically different from another "gold 2" team it might make you keep playing, but it also makes you lose a lot of faith that the ranking system is meaningful whatsoever.
Eternal Darkness' "Sanity effects". They advertised them, which hurt the game. When you know what they are going in, not a single one ends up fooling you, ruining the intended effect. Thank you, advertisers!
I remember playing tons of Starcraft (the original one) in the mid and late 90s on just an average old 486 or Pentium computer with no special graphics or processing acceleration.
You'd be frantically building up your army and improving your resources and tech when suddenly, for only a split second, the game would freeze. And that's when you knew the enemy AI had just performed a path searching algorithm and an attacking force will arrive in a few seconds. That's when you quickly arranged your units in a defensive layout and gave your troops the pre battle pep talk.
Escape From Tarkov's first 15 levels give you an artificial sense of scarcity, resulting in Gear Fear, suboptimal gameplay, and unnecessary stockpiling of resources.
Skimp on Guns/Ammo: Lose fights against PMCs Skimp on Armor: Lose fights to Scavs Skimp on Meds: Lose fights to lack of preparation Skimp on Backpack: Lower your potential for profit but a lot
Like you can sell a Found-In-Raid Salewa med kit for close to 40k on the flea market, but you can buy one from a trader for like 18k with barters, yet I see people with loads of the things sitting in their stash. Free money just sitting there. The same guys will run a Kedr to save money. They don't understand. They could have real kits AND real med kits.
Like the losses suck but the wins can be so big you only need to make it out alive less than half of the time to stay afloat and still make money.
Oh right. Forgot the actual cognitohazard. The sense of scarcity and "it means something when I die" is what makes the game meaningful. Salewa hoarder guy is having a fundamentally different and more emotionally engaging experience than me. The knowledge has diluted or dulled my experience.
Also knowing about Escape From Tarkov is probably a cognitohazard.
In Elden ring once you know where all the upgrade materials are and where a specific certain dragon is and kill it with a certain type of weapon with a certain type of passive effect on it you can level up everything quickly and cheese the first half of the game and be way over leveled for it all.
The hit rates in Fire Emblem games lie to you. While some of the older ones just straight up roll a number and you hit or miss depending on what was rolled, most roll 2 and take the average of those, and a few use a hybrid system with a formula that I don't know.
They do this just so the results line up with what you expect better.
EDIT: Misremembered how it works. It averages the two numbers, not just takes one. That's more extreme than I remembered lol.
Once you learn to see the hidden loading screens, you will never unsee them.