Time Limits Are a Fun Limiter

Today I started playing Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker for the Wii U and I am having a great time so far. Exploring and finding hidden junk is one of my favorite things to do in games when they are hiding in fun ways. Captain Toad is all about hiding stuff in interesting places. Its a real blast figuring out each and every puzzle and searching the map for ways to grab those eyeballed diamonds (dieballs?) and the best part is, the game wants the player to soak in the environments and really get a lay of the land. In another Nintendo game, Mario 3D World, the gamplay is honestly pretty similar except you are able to move around a lot faster and move vertically all on your very own. The design nearly maps 1:1 with Captain Toad. Of course Mario is getting more power ups and jumping around but he is just as much of a hoarder as Captain Toad, but Toad takes his sweet time while Mario is frantically running against the clock to find those worthless green "stars".

That was my one gripe with 3D World, on one hand the game has three green starts and one stamp on every level that you have to collect to see all the game has to offer (secret levels etc.) On the other hand the game wants you to get through the level under a time constraint for no other reason that I can figure out other than there were timers in the older games. The thing is though, Mario 64 changed everything. Mario 64 removed the timer in favor of absorbing your surroundings and choosing your own paths to get to the star. There are a bunch of shortcuts around each world that take some detective skills but are extremely rewarding to find. That's not to say finding the green stars in 3D World is boring but finding them and exploring the level under a time limit adds nothing to the game. In the 2D games a time limit works fine in a sense the art is mostly based off of a tile set and the music was only ever a 1-2 minute loop that was used multiple times per game. In the move to 3D the asset became view able from every angle and the music became bombastic orchestral tracks for the most part. The time limit just takes away what was so great about the previous 3D mario games. Doing a slow pan of your camera, hearing the oh so fitting music, and taking in the possibilities.

To be fair most levels in 3D World give you just enough time to grab all the collectibles and complete the level, but some of those green stars are hidden real deep in the bowels of those floating islands and I end up dying halfway through feeling like the game is fighting me and its own design. Nintendo all I want to do is savor your games like steak but you want me to chew it like slim jim. Let me savor you Nintendo...

Having a timer isn't always a bad thing though, timers work well for challenge levels like in Mario Galaxy and even on that one flag chasing level of 3D World. Timers work fantastically when the designer wants the player to kick it into gear when making as escape or waiting for rescue. Watching a clock tick down in situations like that can really get the players heart racing when used effectively. This is the same reason I believe we don't need the timer in Mario games anymore, this isn't the arcade, players don't need to be rushed through games for no reason anymore Nintendo.

The more I play Captain Toad the more I realize the vestigial nature of ever looming countdown clock inside of Mario games. The timer not only fights the 3D World the game but goes against the happy go lucky nature of Mario himself.

I'm definitely on the side of abolishing timers in games. I think it's fine if they're used extremely sparingly and smartly, but as a general rule I think they're bad game design.

That's not to say I'm against time limits in general though. In fact, some of my favorite games all all time are based around time limits (like Persona 4's day system, or Majora's Mask's 3 day cycle). I just think that when you put an unstoppable countdown to a failure state in a game, you're giving the player stress. This may be fine on rare occasion, but it doesn't make sense to make it a central feature in a game series about fun.

Well, they do their job of building tension. Spelunky would've been the slowest game in the world if that god damn ghost wasn't always in the back of your mind.

@csl316: The funny thing is Spelunky is probably my favorite game of all time. I agree the ghost adds tension but it also isn't a guaranteed failure when it arrives. Also the ghost brings its own benefits pretty much being the ultimate risk/reward in the game.

Like all things I think it's just how it's used that matters- as I think you're getting at as well.

There's a Riddler puzzle type in Arkham Knight where Riddler basically makes fun of the convention- he calls it a race admitting he's not even racing you and your just racing the clock assuming his best time is what the clock says it is.

It gave me a chuckle anyway. I personally hate timers, and I don't think Riddler making that joke made it ok. It still made me laugh that he was poking fun at his own bad game design inside a game that used it as a design convention for a side mission.

Fuck time limits. Time trails are where it's at.

I loved the timed nature of Dead Rising. It was designed from the core up with that timed tension. It served the game well, the timed nature made it a tense traversal through swarms of doughy fodder zombies, where the zombies would otherwise have been a bland funhouse of bonking things and losing interest within 20 minutes.

Timers can be great, but the game has to be designed with them in mind from the get-go and not many do it well.

Cool post @mogarth!

I agree that having a timer on modern Mario games goes against the idea of encouraging exploration. I imagine they want it to force you to run through each level a couple of times stopping at different places, so that you can't see it all on one run through. It offers some forward momentum.

I do think timers work great in some games though. It's essential to some games, like round based games. Splatoon hits the sweet spot with it's three minute rounds. For single player, I quite like escape sequences like in Metroid, if they are used sparingly.

Actually in Super Mario 3D Land there were a few levels where the timer was always really low and you had to keep collecting bonus time to make it through the level. I thought those were actually pretty great where it was incorporated into the mechanics.

Timers can be a real bummer when I'm trying to play 3D World with my 4 year old nephew, while being completely inconsequential for most of the rest of the game otherwise. I definetly agree that they should go.

Also, score. Fuck score. Unless your game is specifically built around score or S-ranks or what have you, don't have score in your game. Nobody ever cared about score in a Mario game. 3D Land did away with score in favor of just giving you coins. I was happy to see the change, and also disappointed when they brought it back for World. Maybe they thought it added to the Miiverse or something, I dunno.

Time limits are part of the challenge, remove the challenge and you remove the fun.

Dead Rising 1,2 and OTR are good examples where they are used very well.

@charlie_victor_bravo: While I agree a time limit can add a good challenge they don't really add anything to modern Mario games. I feel like at its core the 3D mario games are a combination of platforming and puzzles whereas the 2D games focus almost solely on precision platforming. The addition of the puzzle element clashes with the carrying over of the timer. It would be like if every puzzle in portal had the player complete it under a time limit. There is no more or less satisfaction if the player completes the puzzle with the time limit so why even include it. I feel like Majora's Mask is another Nintendo game that a time limit is introduced to the player and feels completely necessary to the core design of the game, with the needing to track all of the npcs' schedules and what not, similar to your examples of the Dead Rising games.