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Vapourware What is "degenerate" gameplay afterall?

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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Dead State Divinity: Original Sin
Degenerate? Choosin Elf at character creation, also heretical an sick.
Sometimes it's the only legit way to see an Altmer High Mage being gangbanged by orc rape trains.
Not that I've done that. No sir.
I'm clean.

Anyway, samples of degenerate gameplay.


 

Delbaeth

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No Man's Sky has a generate gameplay.

Other games have degenerate gameplay.

Simple, isn't it?

:cool:
 

mondblut

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It's when the designer expects you to "have fun" in a very specific and constricted way he has envisioned, but fails to sufficiently restrict and railroad you, and you manage to do something he didn't want you to do and worst of it all, enjoy it.

Example: you are told "hurry and save the puppy, before the wolves eat him", you agree, go grind on dragons for 5 game years, then pick up the puppy and return it to the grateful owner. Every time you do that, Sawyer weeps and cuts his hands.

I.e. "degenerate gameplay" = best gameplay. And more often than not, THE gameplay.

Not sure if I agree.

That's what Josh "Fun Is Degenerate" Sawyer meant.
 

Alienman

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Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Codex Year of the Donut Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Achievement hunting feels pretty degenerate. I don't mind them, I actually find them interesting at times - to see what you accomplished and what you missed in games. But for some, especially if you have some kind of completionist OCD it will steer how you play just because you want that achievement. I must admit I have been there a couple of times. Less of an issue now though since my brain finally realized that it is a pointless thing and ruins RPGs especially.
 

Mustawd

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But for some, especially if you have some kind of completionist OCD it will steer how you play just because you want that achievement. I must admit I have been there a couple of times. Less of an issue now though since my brain finally realized that it is a pointless thing and ruins RPGs especially.

I think it just depends on the game. If the achievements are interesting and change gameplay, then I think it's usually a good thing. This might sound autistic to some, but Torchlight has an achievement for fishing that I've been working on. IOs it mindless grinding? Sure, of course. Kind of the same mindless grinding I used to do in UO, where I'd fish, mine, etc. In this case the fishing is an interesting achievement, and it gives me a reason to go to different zones, seeing what kinds of items I can fish out. Plus, it also helps to gain gold, and unique fishes can give your pets cool transformations.

One can argue that it's degenerate because I probably would not have played this way without them, but I'd counter argue that it gives you a little nudge to think about playing differently. It gives you a small reward beyond just replaying the game. Of course, it doesn't stand by itself, and the game must be able to stand on its own.

Now, if you're not having fun, then that theory goes out the window. Achievements for things like speed runs do nothing for me. The same applies for achievements for shit games.
 

Skittles

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People are using the term too loosely; Excidium II got it right.

Jagged Alliance 2 has a train through use system. You can increase dexterity and throwing by throwing knives, strength and healthy by carrying lots of gear and hitting things, and explosives and wisdom by setting and disarming explosives, among other things. However, it's clear that you can safely raise those stats by throwing knives at random birds, punching vehicles until your mercs pass out, and by setting and disarming the same dynamite ad nauseum, which people would do. That's degenerate gameplay, not so much because it exploits oversights in the system, but because people are doing something extremely tedious for hours--they're barely playing in any sense of the word--in order to give themselves an edge later. It's no fun.

Using that defnition, I consider games that force you to grind for XP or drops to be degenerate, those social media games that use IRL timers to be rather degenerate, etc., but because my definition uses "fun" to define degenerate, YMMV. Thus the lack of clarity surrounding the term.
 

pippin

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For me it's the problem made apparent by dominant strategies, and particularly when the developer kinda knows the player will only use one method to play the game, so any other choice is awfully incomplete and/or out of place.
 
Self-Ejected

vivec

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To give an example, you could play dragon age in two ways; play it with a cone of cold (whatever it is called) or play it without. If you did it the earlier way, you cheesed through the game and if you did it without you would suffer a very tedious "hit it until drops " gameplay.

*In my opinion,* that is a succinct example of what playing a degenerately designed game is. The game is tedious if you do NOT cheese through it. And it is repetitive if you do. Now I would like people here to be honest and admit that this was not very different in IE games either unless hard counters were involved. PoE simply got rid of those hard counters and removed any non-degeneracy that was left in the IE games. We all love IE games and without drawing too much controversy, we can safely say that PoE is perfectly passable game. But this aspect of the game, i.e. using same or similar tactics over and over is one of the chief constituents of the term degenerate.
 
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Examples of degenerate gameplay:

- savescumming
- dropping items in Dota while you regen
- giving your bottle to someone tping in from fountain in Dota
 

Sykar

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Signs for degenerate gameplay:

1.) Handholding for retards which is impossible to skip: "Press W to move forward" You don't say!
2.) Questmarkers because retards were too stupid to find Caius Cosades back in the day
3.) No chance to fail any task
4.) Hard to almost impossible to die, even if you play like a mongo with half of his remaining braincell removed
5.) Massive exposition necessary because your story is so shit that you cannot show it ingame
6.) Everything revolves around YOU and YOU alone. Look at Derblo 3 for reference.
7.) "Awesome" buttons
8.) PC language and :incloosive: characters for the sake of being :incloosive:
9.) Shit retarded and cringy romances, which almost all of them have been so far in "modern" gaming


This list just from the top of my head
 
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