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tbh, every time I see people complain about people complaining about timers I do a quick search and I thinks that they aren’t THAT universally despised; it’s just that the people who hate them are very loud.

I don't mind a timer but I dislike things that force you forward. I do a lot of challenge run stuff in games and those builds generally end up a lot weaker than average builds and cannot push at the same pace. Timer where the reward goes up over time always felt good.

literally so in Lies of P

I really felt this playing Metaphor, where ostensibly the game is all about managing your discrete limited time slots but in practise it's so forgiving that a casual blind playthrough can easily complete all the social links. They're afraid of people missing anything!

I... wait, what year is this?

One or two of the attributes match up, but (permitting that I haven't played this one and am going off Wikipedia) it sounds like it's moreso about raising your rank through repeat playthroughs to unlock new content, which is kind of like Dead Rising + Fire Emblem for minor unlockables but-

Escort missions are more hated I think. Thankfully. But not by much. Even sound minds like Gerstmann have been led astry by timer derangement

It worked alright in Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter

I think you gotta do it right and a lot of games just don't see atelier totori giving you like seven years but you go grab some pinecones just outside the town and then back, which took you several days and then you make them into magic bombs and then sleep for two weeks

Prince of Persia fans rise up

i guess like of "develop tools to convince yourself that you've definitely made the optimal play" vs. "develop heuristics to generate pretty good plays in a short amount of time" i think the latter is more engaging

i just mean thinking about a move for hours is strictly better than thinking about it for a couple minutes. there's no reason not to do that except it's boring to play that way

Timed rounds change which words you even see. Under pressure everyone suddenly becomes a four-letter poet.

I never have enough time to spend on games to make that an overpowered strategy. Same reason I don't generally like timers in my games. My life is already constantly governed by timers other people set. I don't bloody want more of that.

the coolest thing about ff8 is the seed exam rewarding you not for how quickly you complete the mission but for how accurate you are in your prediction for how long it takes. no other game was brave enough to do something so shite.

Timers were why the Whisper of the Worm and Zero Hour missions in destiny were so special. The pressure that applied to the platforming mazes and to the design of the combat sections made them so compelling

Timers are best at 10 minutes or less, I think. But theyre underappreciated

Counterpoint: it would be better if the timer (each timer involved) was visible - and thus, no longer arbitrary. In Stars and Time - the only game to make ATB work - does that, and adds an automatic pause whenever a timer reaches the end.

theyre also the easiest mechanic to fuck up and so many ps2 era games are plagued with timers that require you to be absolutely perfect or you cant clear them

You REALLY need to nail it. Often what I like the least are hidden or obscured timers that aren't clearly told to you, the player, or when they are only in existence for a sidequest or two in a game with loads of non-timed quests. The games that get it right are VERY clear about the timer existing.

we NEED another dead rising that's actually good. long-term timers are such a good mechanic that enables true masterpieces of gaming.

given it was riddled with bugs I understand why fallout 2 just decided to pretend to have a timer instead lmfao

best part of xcom 2 was the game not letting you just overwatch creep your way through every level

Driver is basically just get from point A to B with a timer and it slaps

those aren't timers, they're schedules. COMPLETELY different

I will stand by XCom 2 turn timers til the day I die.

No one enjoys a good risky play here or there now they all want to optimize for future events 🙃🙄

I don’t generally mind timed segments, but when the game challenges me to do something within a tight time limit that seems borderline impossible to pull off, that’s when it pisses me off

i love timers so much and the fact that gamers get mad when you game over for hitting a timer makes me upset

The first Fallout was great because of the timer. Helped sell that your Vault really could die. And you can accidentally shorten it with the caravans so The Unity finds it faster.

I think there's definitely a design space where they're great, but the fail case is so disastrous that as a developer you have to be locked tf in Very similar to level scaling or restrictive saves, although people don't seem to hate those as much

Without timers we never could’ve had the Shenmue Endurance Run on Giantbomb. Ergo, timers are one of the most valuable mechanics to the entire form imo.

Most of the audience has a shallow view of these things and are subject to placebo. You can instead do the Berzerk thing where there is no visible timer, but you just have some unkillable entity or obstacle show up if you take too long to beat the stage. Some games do a mix of the two like Zelda MM.

I've become such a sicko that I even think Warframe's timers are genuinely good for the gameplay flow

Unsighted is easily one of the best indies of the last decade but a lot of gamers switch to easy and lose out on the (fairly lenient!) doomsday timer experience

You would love Metroid

Playing thru the first Ratchet & Clank, first level where the game finds its footing and the action comes together has a sequence where you escape an exploding ship under a 1 minute timer and it was peeaak.

I suffer pain because I am both a completionist and also a timer-lover, especially time loops

Also often these games don't give you enough penalties for fucking up, by taking active time away from you. I wish Lightning Returnes denied you access for certain things as a penalty, if you failed a task or something. Let me regret it!

I don't like them but then again my media consumption is now mainly shaped by the fact that I'm doing most of it at 11 PM while basically asleep.

like escort quests they're harder to design around than A Hallway so a lot of exposure to them is by designers who did not do a good job (likely due to time constraints, management meddling, inexperience, etc)

Heaven fucking forbid these people have some replay in their expensive video game

I simply don't care to be rushed like that. I much prefer 'fake timers' like personas, disco elysium etc where Doing Stuff costs time and not your actual ambulating from place to place

Yes I like Pikmin 1 much more than 2 because of the timer

i think that fundamentally people who can't handle games that stress you out on purpose have weak bloodlines and will not survive the winter

I’ll admit, I was initially put off when I heard about the time limit in Dawnwalker, but the way they described it on the Triple Click podcast — not punishing, just making you choose actions deliberately — really sold me on it.

prey hacking has a timer and it kinda sucks because the difficulty of the task increases the time length and because of the way this is set up difficulty 2/4 is the hardest, giving you arguably the worst time:difficulty ratio

I played Seance of Blake Manor recently and the time mechanic definitely made me play it thoughtfully, as opposed to a regular detective game where I would just stop and check everything all the time and waste a bunch of time. By the end I had plenty left but I don’t feel like I missed anything.

I know I bounced off XCOM 2 because of it, but I also think the timer in that game makes it significantly more interesting, and does a good job at forcing you to make tough decisions.

I'm not against timers at all! But a poor implementation of em I can imagine really sour people's perception of the mechanic as a whole much like escort missions or QTEs

usually minigames in crusty-ass games are the patient zero of this mindset. remember no more heroes

Timers make people anxious, and yes, that's the point, but people don't want to feel anxious when they are relaxing. "Just don't be anxious by the inexorable passage of time" is not a solution for those people.

Every time I've encountered a timers bad person their experience basically amounted to playing Majora's Mask for half an hour and giving up because the timer was too stressful, so seems to mostly be a psychological thing in my experience

i actually quite like the bomb missions in spider-man ps4 where you have to make it to and destroy the bombs in time before they all blow up its very fun

I’m a big fan of Pikmin 4 almost managing to do it all lol

The Atelier games definitely lost something when they got rid of the time limit

Yes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we live in upside down world

Everyone loves timers, jackson Just look at my dailies and weeklies

Depends on how it’s implemented. If devs just throw it in there as a late development afterthought just to please the sickos then I’d say the assignment is failed.

Majora’s Mask represent!

I think the NES version has 3 elevators and if you pick the wrong one it just goes up infinitely

everytime someone complains about the water chip timer in fallout 1 I wince. the countdown is what makes that quest so much fun!

Can't agree. Timers are the reason I never bothered even trying Metal Gear Rising's VR challenges. If they want to challenge the player to get an S rank, they should do something better than 'finish the gauntlet of all enemies in less than literally 5 seconds.'

It's the same level of "widely controversial and I hated it at first and thought it ruined the game but then later realized it's actually essential to the game being great" as Mr. X in RE2 Remake.

Everybody hates timers till The Death That I Deservioli starts.

Need to play PS3 era Atelier games. I've heard nothing but great things about time mgmt usage in those games (barring a few)

I hated timers as a young kid, but like I appreciate them so much as I got older. Something I really like is that they contextualize like, what's possible and what's expected of the player. So now instead of it being a restriction for me, it's "I can do it. The question is how."

That only works if there's a limit to the number of days, otherwise it's just a periodic ugly filter that you may as well wait out.

I haven't played unsighted in forever, but what, that's a thing you can do? How would that game even work without the timer?

I like timers AND stealth games. born to suffer

I love jet set radio future more than the first jet set radio cuz it doesnt have a timer all the time

Idk if this is exactly what this post is talking about but I think the escape sequences in wario land 4 are one of the coolest parts of that game and that also goes for the games that have clearly taken inspiration from it.

the thing about that that really fucks with me is the timer in fallout is too long to actually matter for 99.99% of players

Personal anecdote: buying a game and scared you're not "seeing everything." I get a time limit is supposed to mean "play it more than once" I think a lot of people only play thru once (that isn't sports or a multiplayer esport) and time limits feel like "put in 15 hours and then a SECOND 15 hours."

Oh! Sorry, I must've misread the overall post. I wrote it based on the "great DESPITE of the time limit"... So... Sorry, the Nah was against that notion. :v

Persona QED timers are actually the only thing that makes it a game at all

Doing things while being timed makes it harder. and a lot of games look fun and the turn out not to be because of sudden difficulty spikes, like for example being expected to do what you were doing at your own pace at much quicker one.

It depends. What tends to trip people up is the "micro" part when you can often beat people at beginner and intermediate levels by focusing more on macro (base building, workers: the "having more stuff" part). This is especially true in starcraft 2 in particular.

Timers are fine you just gotta disguise them as calendars

bsky.app/profile/fish...

perhaps ironically, i find games that track the passage of time without having a time limit more stressful? like someone is sitting nearby with a stopwatch. feels like i'm doing something wrong

people reject timers as a memento mori because they fear death

only tangentially related but i've always been fascinated by doom in ff. not because it's a compelling mechanic or anything (i can't think of the last time it was actually relevant in a fight) but just because having an ominous number ticking down over a character's head makes me go "fuckfuckfuck"

The THPS chads on the Tony Hawk Reddit keep trying to explain the concept of risk/reward and how urgency creates excitement to the THUGcels, to no avail

Unsighted has a timer for almost every character, and you can give items for them to last a bit longer.

if you have all three it should count as an ADHD diagnosis on the spot

Doom Enternal technically doesn’t have a timer but it’s one of those “stand still and you die in 2 seconds” games and every play session gave me a damn headache afterwards. I still beat the game, enjoyed it fine but not in the mood to replay the whole thing. Heard the DLC was worse so fuck that.

The fact that they used to be like. The defining feature of Atelier games gameplay but then fans complained so much that they took them out and they instantly went from sorta niche and unique to massively popular but super generic RPGs makes me so sad…

Any farming sim. Literally. You couldn't do anything without timers.