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[buckbytes]

Resource Management F*cking Sucks

You'll have to excuse the sloppy writing but you have to understand, dear reader, that this post comes from a place of deep hatred. Let me explain.

Now I play games for the same reason I believe most people do, which is to enjoy themselves; even if that involves frantically running about an abandoned insane asylum being chased by unimaginable horrors. But the one consistency that has continued to annoy the hell out of me across seemingly every genre is resource management.

Of course I understand why it's such an integral part of so many developer's game design. After all, I don't think so many horror games would be nearly as terrifying if the player was granted an unlimited number of big 'fuck-off' grenades as they liked to ward off The Big Bad, but still, so many games seem to utilise this feature wrong, or they make it a chore to maintain to the point that the player is put off by the actually fun parts of the game.

I highly doubt any player's favourite aspect of any game is the fact that they have to constantly scrounge for supplies because the only reason we do this is so that we can be adequately prepared for, y'know, the actually fun parts like shooting or breaking stuff or even just having the tools to mess with an intuitive open world (BOTW/TOTK especially).

So you can see that my absolute hatred for this topic comes from those many moments when you'll be deeply immersed in perhaps a combat scenario where you're fighting off dozens off enemies using the many weapons that the game has, up til now, freely let you experiment with, only to force you along a much more linear and dull line of just using whatever basic weapons the enemies around you drop. This is why I love Doom Eternal's balance between combat and resource management, it gives you the full ability to use whichever weapons you feel best with while also having some enemies be weaker to particular choices, and the only downside is when the carnage has to die down a little so you can chainsaw a single enemy who (for some reason) drops all the ammo you may need so that you can almost seamlessly delve back into the dopamine factory that is its combat.

Compare this to so many more games like those that lean much more into horror. For example, I recently replayed my way through Alan Wake Remastered, and although I was thoroughly engrossed in so many aspects of it, there were a couple odd moments when I realised that I simply wasn't having fun because I was seemingly forced into just running through segments of levels due to my complete lack of resources to fight back. It didn't feel like I was surviving a close call, more like I had just cheated the game. Admittedly this could be chalked up to me playing on a slightly increased difficulty level (yes that's a boast bc I'm a pro gamer), but shouldn't you always at least be able to win, instead of slowly being dragged into a losing state because you chose to use one too many of whatever feature was freely at your disposal a moment ago?

Lastly, I just want to have one final rant about cozy games, because even they can irritate me with this. They're not exactly fast-paced games which is why I tend to play them, to slow down and unwind, but I feel like that gets ruined slightly when that one thing you need is on the other side of town because 'you weren't watching your supplies', and the game punishes you with a long, snail's-pace walk across a beautifully crafted town that you can't even explore right now because the shop closes at 5. I've nothing more to add to this bit, I just wanted to talk about Stardew Valley. :)