I was having a conversation with someone about alternatives to mana mechanics a while ago. You can do some really interesting things to mana with a little tweaking, but sadly very few bother.

I think it boils down to two things:

1. Does the limitation add fun and complexity?
2. Is there a way to fundamentally bypass the limitation?

You want the answer to be yes, and no respectively.

I think something like Diablo 2 fails on both parts. If you are a sorceress, you magic is basically the only way to damage the enemy, and so essentially functions like your attack. Run out of mana, and you have no options. Thus it fails number 1. It can be bypassed as well. Mana potions are cheap and plentiful (after the 1.10 patch), and most players use mana steal or mana on kill items. You reach the point where you never think about your mana because you can just always use a spell.

Sadly most 'mana' in games functions the same way.

Your meter depletes when you:
Dash
Dodge
Enter 'bullet time'
Perform a melee attack

The meter also recharges fairly quickly, on the level of your shields in Halo.

It works tremendously well because each move is very useful and very powerful, but you become more vulnerable when you use them. In particular, your melee attack is extremely effective, but it instantly drains your meter and automatically overheats your suit. So using it is risk / reward. You can use your melee attack, but can no longer dash out of harms way for example, and you are temporarily very weak. If you could use these moves with no limitation, and no downside, then combat would be far less interesting.

'Mana' can rule.

We don't actually talk about general game design theory in this forum too often, which is a shame, because I have a healthy obsession with it.

Fixed that for you. I enjoy your posts very much.

It's the positive reinforcement loop. You are rewarded for doing the thing you want to be doing: fighting.

That's the rub; Titanfall's must massage my brain just so.

Plus, if there is a gun in Titanfall 2 that you really want to use, you can unlock it at any time with in-game credits, bypassing the entire level-up climb.

Implying that you don't have to grind for credits too...

On your first playthrough, you can't avoid the walled off gear. Sure, you can earn enough Credits to unlock one or two pieces of gear before you level up enough to unlock things through level grinding, but you still have to put the time in just for that opportunity.

Yes, you need to put in *some* time. But Titanfall is on a completely different scale than Destiny in this regard. You earn credits constantly for playing any game mode, credits are plentiful, and unlocks are cheap. I've earned 350 credits in less than a week on Xbox... Unlocking Tone cost 15 credits, I think?
And as I said in my reply to Raga's post, I jumped into my very first game on equal footing with players who have everything unlocked. They have more options at their disposal, yes. But the starting gear is every bit as strong and effective as the unlocks at the end of the progression.
It's not remotely compatible to Destiny in this regard.

Nice try at being slick by offering the cheapest item in the game to sell your narrative, man. ;)

Around a week of playing to get 350c huh?

Okay, well, say you want a better kit than the useless "Kill Report". That's going to set you back 225c.
Want a different Primary? 100c.

Well, a week of grinding, and you can only afford two Unlocks (And Tone, if for whatever reason you magically haven't hit Rank 11 to unlock it after a week). Wow, you're right, no grinding needed at all! You'll have things unlocked in no time!

Want a more useful grenade? 220c.
A different Tactical? 180c.
Huh, how about just a different shader for your pilot? 150c
An execution animation? 300c, and one can't be bought, you have to grind for it (30 successful executions).

But, but Cruel said that unlocks are cheap!

Uhhh... Well, a Pistol is only 50c! Only a few hours of grinding! "But I don't want a pistol." Then get back out there and Grind!

I've put 20 hours into the game, and I only have 548c, and the only thing that I spent credits on was the Archer, because otherwise I'd have to grind until I was level 43(!) to unlock it normally. The fact that I can do well with a Charge rifle is irrelevant. I don't like the default Charge rifle, but I have no choice but to grind just to be able to buy the gun that I do want.

For folks who aren't hardcore players at the top of the scoreboard, that grind is going to be even longer, since the speed at which you level is directly tied to your performance. So yeh, not much different than Destiny, where you're grinding for Legendary marks to buy stuff from Factions and Vendors.

Unlike Destiny with no killcams so you can't see the amazing shot through seven walls and around a corner to kill you in the toe.

In all seriousness, what if killcams could be implemented in such a way that they showed the way things actually looked to the other player? Would be interesting for people to see what those "magic" lag shots looked like from the other side.

This is a big reason why I'd like to see them. I want to know what the other player saw.

No one should be killable before they're controllable.

This isn't just a Destiny problem, either. One of the biggest frustrations with Mass Effect 3's co-op multiplayer is that sometimes when a fallen player is revived, they can be insta-killed before they've actually gotten up and regained control of their movement.

Note: despite its many flaws, that game is outstanding, and I'm glad it's back for a while.

ME3's multiplayer is some of the best video gaming I've ever experienced in my entire life. Love, love, LOVE it.

I am excited for SRL's return though. Last time around it was glorious, and I enjoyed it even when losing (which I always did because one of my friends is like top 100 in the world or some nonsense. How he finishes 8 seconds faster than me with the same bike is beyond my ken).

It's all about the lines.

I'm so damn excited.

Then maybe I'll say it another way: to do well in Titanfall, you must be conscious of first the amount of time required to your next Titan and then once you have your Titan the amount of time until your next core. To win, you must always be doing things to achieve those goals. If you're not shooting something, even if you're not killing it, you're on your way to losing.

I mean, duh, right? But it feels focused in a way other games aren't. Maybe I don't play enough twitch shooters, like Korny said, because I remember kill streaks and stuff in MW2 kind of working this way.

But I dunno. It's just with Titanfall... something that stands out in my mind, screaming at me.

I know what you're talking about.

In a typical twitch shooter, there are a number of goals that you work towards within each match.

Let's use Black Ops 3 as an example.

If you do well in one Life, you can earn Scorestreaks. You get up to three (of increasing point requirements), and earning them is not specifically tied to kills. Playing the Objective (say, a Flag Capture) will usually net you one instantly. The points you get for using it help you work towards the next one, but if you die, progress resets.

If you do well over a period of time (dying is fine), you earn a Specialist ability (think Destiny's Supers). A Specialist ability can be either a unique gameplay effect (i.e. deploying a number of decoy holograms), or a character-specific weapon (an arm-mounted Gatling Gun). Using these special abilities successfully grants you plenty of points for your next Scorestreak, which in turn can grant you points for your next Specialist ability.

You're always working towards something, and that's half the fun, so even if you're not the best at killing with guns, you've got other things to focus on that help you have fun.

Titanfall does this well, too, although there's not much reward for doing well in a single life, which helps reduce the stress of feeling like you can't afford to die, which might be too much for some folks and tends to lead to more conservative gameplay, rather than focusing on getting into the fray.

Titanfall isn't a shooter. It's a time based puzzle. Movement and shooting are the tools you use to solve the puzzle.

Discuss?

In one sense, all shooters work this way. In another sense, puzzles require you to be able to see the entire game board in order to solve the puzzle. At no point in time is Titanfall (or any other shooter I can think of) like that. An RTS could realistically be described as a puzzle, I suppose, and some MMO boss fights definitely are entirely puzzles (that you let someone else solve and post a video of for you to copy the next night.. grrr... where's the fun in that?), but FPS games are not really like that in the PvP landscape. Destiny's raids are also puzzles to be solved, but even when you know the solution to the puzzle, if you aren't high enough light level you still can't win, so there's a RPG leveling element as well that is semi-RNG based and out of your hands... Still puzzle-esque, imo.

Anyway, I'd agree that the slower an FPS game plays, the more it plays like a puzzle rather than a twitch shooter.

Then maybe I'll say it another way: to do well in Titanfall, you must be conscious of first the amount of time required to your next Titan and then once you have your Titan the amount of time until your next core. To win, you must always be doing things to achieve those goals. If you're not shooting something, even if you're not killing it, you're on your way to losing.

I mean, duh, right? But it feels focused in a way other games aren't. Maybe I don't play enough twitch shooters, like Korny said, because I remember kill streaks and stuff in MW2 kind of working this way.

But I dunno. It's just with Titanfall... something that stands out in my mind, screaming at me.

It's the positive reinforcement loop. You are rewarded for doing the thing you want to be doing: fighting.

I've actually spent an inordinate amount of time studying this phenomenon in video games. Like, way too much time. It all comes back to mana. Prepare for a crazy statement: Mana sucks as a game mechanic. It's a negative feedback loop. The entire point of a limited mana supply is to force players to think about what they will do with that resource. Do I use it all for one big fireball? Or cast Magic Missiles five times instead? Either way, once you're out of mana, you're done. Casting those big spells is fun, but now they've been cast and you're stuck with whatever crap you have when you're out of mana. A dagger? I dunno. Anyway, mana is a limited resource and, as such, it is a limiting resource when it comes to gameplay. The game becomes less about the actual goals of the game (shooting a thing) and more about managing your resource. It's just not fun.

Cue the positive reinforcement feedback loop mechanic. Instead of starting with a full bar of mana and draining it as you use your abilities, you start with an empty bar and fill it by using your abilities. The more effective you are in combat, the faster you fill your bar. Destiny does this with supers, Titanfall does it with Titans and Cores, and good old Diablo 2 did it with berserker rage. Playing the game to the hilt not only maximizes your damage, but also maximizes your rewards. It's awesome.

Now the actual result on gameplay is very similar. You get a fireball once every 10 seconds. But the difference is that with mana, you cast your fireball and then go hide for 10 seconds while you build more mana, and with positive reinforcement you cast a fireball and then continue whipping the living snot out of everyone for the next 10 seconds until - oh YES - you earn another fireball. It's just more fun, plain and simple.

If only more games focused on encouraging and rewarding players for doing what they want to do instead of forcing them to spend time in activities they don't want to do in order to get the things they need for the activity they want to do later.

Titanfall is still one of the only games where "Oh what the hell" turns into "HOLY SHIT THAT WORKED" on such a consistent basis.

You think it, you can do it. Never seen anything like it in any game ever.

That phenomenon is a big part of what made me love Halo so much. Using a grenade to flip a warthog over a rock and splatter the shotgun-camper hiding on the other side was not an everyday occurrence, but it felt incredible when it worked :D

Another game that had a similar dynamic (in a very different way) was Spies vs Mercs in Splinter Cell Blacklist. Not so much in terms of the physics engine, but little tactical details that make you go "hmmm... I wonder...", and then totally end up working out the way you'd hoped it would. For example, one of the gadgets the mercenaries could deploy was a land mine that would detonate and kill any spy that walked over them. The spies could equip a countermeasure though: an EMP burst that would detonate any land mines within range.
One day, I was hiding up in the rafters, watching an enemy merc patrol the hallway below me. He planted a land mine, and I noticed something during the animation: he pulled the mine out of a satchel, then pressed a button to arm it before throwing it at the wall. According to the animation, there was a split second where the mine was live while still in the merc's hands. "I wonder...", I thought to myself.
I continued to watch the merc walk around. He started to move towards a doorway that looked to me like a good spot to plant another mine. Anticipating his next move, I fired my EMP. It's not an instant attack. There's a brief charge, and then the shockwave radiates out from my character. Just as my EMP is charging, I see the merc reach back into his satchel bag. My EMP shockwave bursts out of my suit and is rushing towards him just as his finger is coming down on the button to arm the mine. He presses the button the moment before my EMP blast hits him. The mine explodes in his hands, killing him. And the 2nd merc who had just walked up beside him. :D

That's freaking sexy as hell.

The lack of any visible indication of sprint cooldown always has been, and still is, my number one complaint about Destiny. I'm at a loss as to how it is STILL in the same state. Does no one at Bungie realize how irritating it is to have to guess when you'll be able to sprint again? Do they not sit there mashing their thumbstick in frustrated confusion like me?

Right??

And then in titanfall, you have (a) infinite, on-demand sprint that you can actually set to just always be on, and for abilities with cooldowns, you have icons just like destiny's grenades that show you when the ability is ready and how far along it's cooldown it is. The dimension jump ability, for example, is a lot like blink. It stores two jumps, and has a cooldown to recharge each one, but it displays this on the screen so there's no guessing as to when you'll be able to do it again. So great!

Don't forget audio cues. Literally everything has that, too.

Plus, if there is a gun in Titanfall 2 that you really want to use, you can unlock it at any time with in-game credits, bypassing the entire level-up climb.

Implying that you don't have to grind for credits too...

On your first playthrough, you can't avoid the walled off gear. Sure, you can earn enough Credits to unlock one or two pieces of gear before you level up enough to unlock things through level grinding, but you still have to put the time in just for that opportunity.

Yes, you need to put in *some* time. But Titanfall is on a completely different scale than Destiny in this regard. You earn credits constantly for playing any game mode, credits are plentiful, and unlocks are cheap. I've earned 350 credits in less than a week on Xbox... Unlocking Tone cost 15 credits, I think?
And as I said in my reply to Raga's post, I jumped into my very first game on equal footing with players who have everything unlocked. They have more options at their disposal, yes. But the starting gear is every bit as strong and effective as the unlocks at the end of the progression.
It's not remotely compatible to Destiny in this regard.

Absolutely true. The R201, .45 Autopistol, and Charge Rifle are all default and all wreck shop. The fact that Cruel is great at Titanfall and could jump into the XBOX with zero unlocks and kick ass with the default weapons settles the argument in his favor utterly and completely.

If you're not doing well with the default weapons, it's your overall skill in the game that needs improving, not unlocking better gear.

Titanfall isn't a shooter. It's a time based puzzle. Movement and shooting are the tools you use to solve the puzzle.

Discuss?

In one sense, all shooters work this way. In another sense, puzzles require you to be able to see the entire game board in order to solve the puzzle. At no point in time is Titanfall (or any other shooter I can think of) like that. An RTS could realistically be described as a puzzle, I suppose, and some MMO boss fights definitely are entirely puzzles (that you let someone else solve and post a video of for you to copy the next night.. grrr... where's the fun in that?), but FPS games are not really like that in the PvP landscape. Destiny's raids are also puzzles to be solved, but even when you know the solution to the puzzle, if you aren't high enough light level you still can't win, so there's a RPG leveling element as well that is semi-RNG based and out of your hands... Still puzzle-esque, imo.

Anyway, I'd agree that the slower an FPS game plays, the more it plays like a puzzle rather than a twitch shooter.

Then maybe I'll say it another way: to do well in Titanfall, you must be conscious of first the amount of time required to your next Titan and then once you have your Titan the amount of time until your next core. To win, you must always be doing things to achieve those goals. If you're not shooting something, even if you're not killing it, you're on your way to losing.

I mean, duh, right? But it feels focused in a way other games aren't. Maybe I don't play enough twitch shooters, like Korny said, because I remember kill streaks and stuff in MW2 kind of working this way.

But I dunno. It's just with Titanfall... something that stands out in my mind, screaming at me.

You must not play a lot of twitch shooters.

Fair enough.

Read the rest of your post too. I'll take Titanfall's handicaps over Destiny's any day because what really makes Titanfall great is the movement of the pilots and the Titans in general. That escalation of battle, and the time game you play to get there are the thing. Discussing its guns like this are utterly missing the forest for some trees.

It's a shooter, but let's not discuss the shooting aspect of it, because it's not that type of game...

okay then...

Don't be silly. I'm not saying you can't discuss the shooting. C'mon now. But if you talk about shooting in exclusion of everything else, you're missing it.

Unlike Destiny with no killcams so you can't see the amazing shot through seven walls and around a corner to kill you in the toe.

In all seriousness, what if killcams could be implemented in such a way that they showed the way things actually looked to the other player? Would be interesting for people to see what those "magic" lag shots looked like from the other side.

No one should be killable before they're controllable.

This isn't just a Destiny problem, either. One of the biggest frustrations with Mass Effect 3's co-op multiplayer is that sometimes when a fallen player is revived, they can be insta-killed before they've actually gotten up and regained control of their movement.

Note: despite its many flaws, that game is outstanding, and I'm glad it's back for a while.

I am excited for SRL's return though. Last time around it was glorious, and I enjoyed it even when losing (which I always did because one of my friends is like top 100 in the world or some nonsense. How he finishes 8 seconds faster than me with the same bike is beyond my ken).

It's all about the lines.