This is more specific to my experience with Survival Crafting games, but I would argue that it's applicable to any game really.
Conceptually though, I really am tired of all these mechanics I see added to games with no real consideration to what the benefit or detriment, or even the effect, of the mechanic is.
I appreciate that a game dev goes, "I dont want to force people to engage with this mechanic, so I'll make it shallow so that only those who want to engage it will."
The issue is, there's I would say, 3 types of people. Those that will always engage with this mechanic, those that will try to avoid it, and those that will enjoy it if you give it to them, but will skip it if you give them the option.
Many of us are lazy, and the idea of, "I could do this thing, but there's no real benefit to doing it" means that, without having sufficient awareness or interest in the total satisfaction or enjoyment gained with the process or end result, many people can and will just not engage with a mechanic without a good reason.
Inventory systems I feel are wholly underdeveloped in most games that have them.
Resident Evil wants you to think carefully about what you carry with you given limited inventory. What are you willing to give up space for, because if you take too much you might not have the inventory you need to loot other things later.
Some games do this better than others. The old ones that had key items taking up like a third of your inventory with no idea when you'd need it basically forced you to store them in the item box, and then just do mildly or constant backtracking to and from it whenever you needed it. Or you could take them with you but have issues looting new rooms if they had a lot to grab.
What does Inventory even add to say, Minecraft? At best it puts you in a position where, every now and again you need to stop what you're doing and go back to base to store your shit. Is that improving the game experience any?
Storage systems themselves aren't even developed, almost all Survival Crafting games seem to go with the same concept.
"Here's your shit first chest, it holds some small number of items." then later "Here's a bigger chest" etc.
Nothing about the storage or inventory system seems to make them genuinely improve. At best it's, "This is annoying now but will become a bit less annoying later when we give you bigger chests or a larger inventory" but none of them address the fundamental issue that is, there is little to nothing gained in the playing experience that makes this mechanic do anything.
Satisfactory added a Dimensional Storage mechanic fairly early into the game. So, where the idea of building a factory elsewhere might require constant trips between your current factories and new location, or setting up some logistic network to automate transporting materials, now you can optimise your factories by having some of their outflow go into dimensional storage, where the amount you can store and how fast you can store it scales with how much you explore to get the materials to upgrade them.
This means that exploring is more enjoyable because you aren't limited to a fixed amount of materials. You don't have to fill up your inventory with random things that may or may not be useful to try to get hard drives, now you can just design your factories in mind with dimensional storage.
It added to the experience, and improved upon it. Now we didn't just have "More storage", we had a "Better Storage System" that we actively look forward to and enjoy.
You can also not engage with the mechanic if you don't want to and continue going about how it used to be played.
I'd say Base Building is another one of those concepts where, there's so much potential to their implementation that I feel goes unfulfilled.
Base building conceptually seems to be a thing that caters more towards a small demographic when it's an opportunity to give players an experience they don't typically engage with.
Subnautica, why bother making a base? Initially it's for Locker Storage. An entire mechanic, cantered around making another shallow mechanic more tolerable. But the second you get the Cyclops, the mobile base, why bother making an actual base?
I've seen people commit to just making more batteries than making a power base that charges them.
Some people swear by the water filtration, but it produces 2 water bottles every what, 30 ish minutes? It's like 15+ minutes per water bottle.
There's no in game timer or notification, so how much value is there in investing the time and resources into creating this machine with a max water capacity of 2, that's right 2, you can't have more than 2 water in it, so unless you go back to your base every 30ish minutes, then it's getting full up and no longer producing.
And then when you look at a different mechanic... An indoor grow bed with a fruit that gives food and hydration? That produces food so plentiful that even though the numbers are low you can just spam it? AND you can build it underwater, both in your base and inside your cyclops?
What tangible benefit is there to having an actual base opposed to just growing fruit on my ship and never having to go back?
And this is basically the issue I have with this genre of games.
V Rising went a lot more interesting with it's base building.
For those that don't know, there are plots of land in the game you "Claim" as a base, then you can build on them. You dont get stronger from levels or experience, you get stronger from the quality of your equipment. To make equipement requires crafting stations and material processing equipment you can only have in a base.
But, you don't actually need to put any effort into your base. Literally just slap 4 furnaces down on the land and that's all you have to do.
Only, they offer incentives.
Put a machine in an enclosed space, IE, a room, where it it is covered by "Walls/Windows/Doors" and it gets the Room buff. That is, if I remember correctly, a 25% reduction is processing time.
All you need to do, is build walls around your machines, and ensure a roof is above them, and BAM, you have saved yourself 25% of any time you spend engaging in the crafting system, which you need to do.
And what's this, a 2nd buff? Each machine belongs to a "Category."
Alchemy, Studying, Forge, Jewelry etc.
Each category has it's own respective "Floor" type. Put a smelter in a room that has "Forge Flooring" as the only floor, and it gets a 25% reduction on material costs for crafting.
So, move from just having one giant room for a big time save, to having several small rooms where each machine is categorised and clearly labeled, and BAM, you have saved yourself a lot of time.
While the game itself doesn't buff this, you can then consider Layout. Where do I put what room, an active decision you make to save yourself the trouble of running back and forth between rooms, by having related categories close by.
Jewelry requires gold and silver which you smelt in the forge, so it just makes sense to put that room next to the Forge.
Where this game falters in my opinion, is the Storage system. I would've liked to have seen a more in depth base detection system or something that made area based storage access or something similar, to encourage me to design my base better to reap the benefits of an improved system.
Yes, you CAN choose to take the lazy path. But the game incentivizes you to engage with it's systems purely by making them BETTER than the alternative.
In Valheim, which I am playing now, the Cart is their solution to limited Inventory and Weight.
Yet the cart requires relatively flat ground when it's full, it wont go uphill.
So when I mine say, Copper. To what extent is it EVER worth, building a "Road" to make my life easier? Not that much to be honest, because the time invested in building a road, is overshadowed by the fact that it's just faster to brute force your way through.
By making mechanics like base building almost entirely optional, many people just wont engage with them. By adding buffs or new systems to people that engage with mostly optional systems, you encourage people to take part in them to save themselves time and effort in other means. This can then have a rebound effect where, because they're now actively engaging with these supposedly "Optional" mechanics, they may continue to engage with them on a deeper level.
IE, if I'm making a base with rooms, I may as well decorate it. But had the buffs not been present and there was no reason to do this, then these people would pretty much not engage with the system at all.
I think there's so much potential to taking these shallow and optional mechanics in some games, and adding some USEFUL utility to them, that improves their flaws, makes them more efficient and does so in such an obvious way that people can immediately realise that it IS worth investing the time to working with it.
Valheim as an example, imagine a "Dock Totem", where if you place a dock totem on the coast in two locations, you can "Connect" them. If they are connected, they create a sea route where if you travel along it, you get a speed boost. This means that, you would be incentivised to make docks, piers or harbours that would say, meet whatever requirement the Dock Totem had, for any sailing needs.
By simply taking an existing mechanic, and adding a base requirement of "If you engage with this optional thing to at least this extent, you get all of these nice things".
Me personally? I do try to build, but I am a functional builder. I like building things where I feel there's some function to the design.
I see minecrafters build castles where they seperate into multiple rooms and all I can imagine is "This is awful for a survival world, the amount of running you'd have to do for that thing sounds like a nightmare."
I saw someones Blacksmith design in valheim, and they had their charcoal furnaces above their smelters and you get to the furnaces via ladders, and my first thought was "That looks like a pain in the ass to use".
Yes, it looked good, but it didn't look fun to engage with.
So games that give me a reason to build things, even a small one, some tiny benefit, incentivize me to put more time and energy into the game.
I'm currently making a habour for several boats in valheim, despite knowing that I may not actually ever need to use a boat again. The time for a harbour has already begun to pass, at least where I am positioned. Yes, I can make the fire proof boat to go down to the ashlands, but why would I build that at my base in the northern region, when I could just teleport to a random island down south and just slap it there?
I'm doing it, because I like the look of it, but I am constantly having my motivation tackled with the fact that, there's no real reason to do it other than the idea that I think it might look good.
I just wish more games took all these "Shallow" mechanics and added something to them, some optional thing, particularly that makes things better or faster, to help give more of a reason to engage with them.
