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ok_tides's avatar
ok_tides
Rising Novice
4 days ago

Redundant Gameplay Mechanics

One thing that's been bothering me lately is how redundant fast traveling between maps feels.

For example, you can fast travel to the dock that takes you to the Isle of Grom or to the entrance of Brickswich Stadium. The problem is that these fast travel points don't actually take you to the destination, they only take you to the teleport that takes you there. After fast traveling, you're immediately forced to fast travel again just to reach the area you actually selected.

After reading through chocolatekake​ 's thread, I realized they pointed out another great example of this. If you want to get from the Isle of Grom to Brickswich Stadium, the process looks like this:

  1. Fast travel to the ferry.
  2. Wait for it to load.
  3. Travel to the main map.
  4. Wait even longer for it to load.
  5. Fast travel to the stadium entrance.
  6. Wait for it to load.
  7. Enter the stadium.
  8. Wait even longer for it to load, again.

That's a lot of loading and menu navigation for what should be a simple trip between two locations.

In a perfect world, nothing would be level streaming/loading based at all. Every island and interior would be physically connected to the world so you could simply skate there naturally. I understand why the game is structed this way from a technical standpoint, but I still think the current implementation adds unnecessary steps.

Skate 1-3 handled this much more cleanly. If you wanted to go somewhere, you opened the pause menu, selected the location and the game loaded you directly there. There wasn't an extra layer of fast traveling just to reach another fast travel point. It was simple, straightforward and respected the player's time.

Realizing this made me start wondering about other parts of the game.

Are there other current gameplay mechanics that you think are unnecessarily redundant or could be streamlined? Are there any systems that people have gotten used to but could realistically be improved?

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1 Reply

  • MylezDheep's avatar
    MylezDheep
    New Scout
    23 hours ago

    I mean, the load times aren't very long unless you are playing from a PS4 or possibly low end PC. The game does the extra step after fast traveling to the Ferry or the Stadium because it loads a new instance and if u have a party, asks if u want to bring the party with u. Personally, this has never bothered me. To avoid the load times and waiting u could also skate to the Stadium after arriving in San Van via the Ferry to get some skate time in and not have to wait for a loading screen that normally only takes about 5seconds to load anyway. 

    This doesn't mean the game is without annoying mechanics. 

    One mechanic that I find annoying is how the game starts u on ur board when doing missions or challenges. I'd much rather start the missions or challenges off my board, but changing this would require reworking the start points of some challenges since they would have to take the extra possible steps into consideration. 

    Another mechanic is how the marker to start the Own the Spot challenges in the Stadium aren't located where u are standing after it is over. It's annoying having to go back to the marker to start the throwdown again after it's done. Those markers should be where ur skater is standing after the throwdown is over. 

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