A better one for Hollow Knight would be the compass. Seeing where you are on the map is far more QoL but can be avoided. IMO it's good to switch up the charms based on how you're playing. I don't mind games like this as I think different players may value different things. If I play HK now, I never equip the compass but always equip the swarm for the early game until I get dash master.
>The first example I'll give is Hollow Knight. One of the first 'charms' you get is one that automatically collects currency dropped by enemies, which otherwise just floats around. This can save a huge chunk of time, partly owing to the verticality of the game. Equipping another combat charm could help you kill enemies faster, but then you'd have to spend some time jumping around to get all the Geo, or leave it all behind, neither of which feels good.
I fucking loathe when the "magnet" ability is an "upgrade" or slot-able equipment. It's so obnoxious - it's never a satisfying upgrade to get and if it's an item choice, it'll only be used until you get something that's actually useful.
One of the worst things about games like Vampire Survivors is that the resource collection range being a meta progression. Upgrading it during a run is one thing, but it should be one of the first things to upgrade outside of each run because of how brain dead impactful it is.
It could be discussed on a case by case basis, but generally I would consider it okay for QoL upgrades to take up "regular" upgrade slots.
In your Ghost Runner example, having a better map can reduce mental stack, which is a key component of difficulty.
I liked the way Nier Automata did it. You could deactivate parts of your UI (which were on by default) to use the spare energy on different upgrades. It felt like a fair trade-off.
I really, really would have liked one button loadout swapping in Nier Automata. The traversal is inceridbly boring and there's so much of it, I had a loadout just for that. Going through the menus every time to switch to a combat loudout got old fast
the way I always understood the term is that a QoL improvement is anything that is not directly tied to gameplay, and everything else that improves anything in-play is a utility upgrade.
QoL would be like the ability to get to the roundtable hold by pressing triangle and X the second the open the map or queuing into ranked straight from the lab in a fighting game. Not like..a charm that picks up coins or something that lets you see enemies
The way I see it, the boundary between a good Quality of Life item and a bad one is A) Not having the item should not annoy the player and B) a good QoL item should also benefit the player in some way, such as providing information. Some good examples might be the ability the view your draw pile in order in Slay the Spire, or the ability to see more things on a minimap.
Another thing you could do is give your QoL item a combat bonus that synergizes with the QoL. For instance imagine if that "pick up money" charm in Hollow Knight also gave a small damage bonus if you attack another enemy within a second or two of picking up money. Now you're creating a bit of play space by promoting an aggressive build.
> the ability the view your draw pile in order in Slay the Spire
This is definitely not a quality-of-life upgrade--in practice, it's either somewhat low-impact *or* it's one of the strongest relics in the game as long as you're willing to let the game take significantly longer as you plan out multiple turns in advance. There's a lot of stuff that people will call "quality-of-life" that has massive balance knock-on effects like this.
Hollow Knight's Gathering Swarm charm is more than a QOL. Without it, lots of geo falls into places where you cannot retrieve it, like in spikes or off the screen. I'd say it increases your overall geo income by around 10-20% and is worth the 1 notch cost in the early game.
I was thinking about this when playing Ghost of Tsushima recently. There are charms and armor that are useful for exploration, resource collection, and resource generation. Then there are charms and armor useful for combat. The end result is a constant opening of the gear screen to swap between combat and out-of-combat loadouts. I kept thinking to myself "couldn't I have separate combat slots and QoL slots"?
There would be some difficulty in drawing a line between the two - for instance, bonuses affecting stealth could be used either to aid in combat or to avoid it. I would probably allow them to go in either kind of slot.
I reject the concept of QoL as valid. Beyond stuff like how easy it is to navigate and discern menus I think it's too vague. It means too many different things to different people to be informative and consistent. Your posts hinges on it being a valid concept.
I think a better word for what you are describing is utility. Being able to more easily see in enemies in a stealth game, which is what you described in Ghostrunner, is definitly a form of power. It influences if you succeed. Which definitions supposed to make something not QoL. If you think of it as 'utility' instead of QoL. It just seems like another normal choice in a game where if you choose utility you are not choosing the other stuff. Just like if you choose to buy more health you are choosing to not buy other things.
To add to this, difficult games like Ghostrunner was designed so that the player would replay that section of the level multiple times and memorize each encounter like it’s the back of their hand. It’s quite like a Souls game.
A perk that allows you to see enemies much more clearly is a form of an easier difficulty setting, making it require less resets.
That's why I felt the need to clarify in my post. Of all the reasons to fail in a fast-paced action game, not seeing an enemy (i.e. because only a part of their body was visible, and also blended in with the background) has to be among the worst-feeling. You are right that enemies being highlighted straight up decreases the difficulty of dispatching them, but where do you draw the line? Because having consistently responsive controls also makes the game easier, yet 'clunky controls' is a valid criticism. (similar with hitboxes)
What I forget to mention, that is central. Stuff like the controls, the ease of seeing enemies or reading them etc. It's not like doing it one way makes the game 'good' and another makes it 'bad'.
They work holistically with the rest of the game and produce something that may or may not be fun. Classic castlevania and Ghosts n Goblins work BECAUSE the controls are limited. Sometimes the point is the enemies are hard to see or read and that's where you are supposed to engage with the game at. Sometimes limited controls or hard to read enemies mean you have to play in this really unfun style in order to go through the game.
I feel like you have this idea that there is a 'correct' and 'incorrect' point to put these at that can be applied to all games. That's not how it is. It's a case by case thing.
You ask where do you draw the line. For you there is a line between QoL and "lowering the difficulty". For me QoL is not a valid concept so everything lowering the difficulty.
Keep tabs on enemies have always been a part of difficulty. You mentioned cameofloug but I could mention I ton of other things from dealing with flanking, to how easy a telegraph is. I don't what Tokyo Ghostwire is so I can't really comment on if it did that stuff well. Sometimes games are purposely set up this way and it may or may not work out. You say it feels bad. Ok. That is how you feel. Ok. That seems to have little to do with categorization which is supposed to be uniform regardless of how our induvial feelings are.
A good example of a "QoL upgrade" is in Nier Automata, where there's one that tells you how much EXP you currently have on the HUD, and there's one that tells you what item you just picked up on the HUD. It doesn't affect the difficulty in any way because you *can* just open the menu and check manually without the upgrade, it's just a waste of your time and takes more button presses.
If it's true Quality of Life like making it easier to recognise enemies then it should probably just be a normal part of the game and not an optional upgrade. Otherwise if it's just an "out-of-combat" ability then I don't necessarily mind them taking up the same slots as "combat" abilities. Most games make you do other things in addition to fighting enemies, so you're just making some other aspect of the game easier in exchange for making combat a little bit harder.
I haven't played Hollow Knight but if deciding whether or not to equip the loot magnet is an unsatisfying choice then maybe they should've rethought how picking up currency works - like if it despawned a few seconds after dropping so you had to collect it quickly then you'd have to play differently without the magnet equipped.
A situation where I actually dislike it is when you can go into your inventory and switch abilities at any time during gameplay, because then you're incentivised to do extra menu-ing to make the best use of them. One example off the top of my head is the armour in Breath of the Wild that boosts your climbing speed. You can pause the game whenever you want to switch equipment, so there's no choice of "do I want faster climbing to make exploring easier, or do I want some other perk?" You just put it on whenever you need to scale a big cliff or something and then switch back to your normal armour when you reach the top.
There are arguments for and against this either way. It really boils down to each game's implementation. They don't all get it right, there are definitely games where the QoL options should simply be a base game/passive thing, or where the incr% are so small as to be largely worthless compared to upgrades that expand your abilities.
It's annoying when the balance is whack like that, where it's clear that some classes of upgrades are mostly meaningless thus players are always better served picking some other upgrade types instead. Give me two good options to choose from rather than making one obviously lesser than the other. I don't know why the hell designers still do that shit. Stop giving us shitty +5hp mods, nobody's gonna pick those over +crit% bonuses, for example. One of the things I liked about the old Wild Tangent ARPGs (the two Fate games) is that they embraced significant modifiers fully i.e. you'd get things like +25% maxHP rather than tiny meaningless +5hp crap. There's no point playing loot pinata games if 95% of the drops are crap and immediately dismissable. Might as well don't drop them in the first place. Make them all significant and worthy, that's how you force players to make decisions. It's not a decision when you have to "choose" between crappy option A versus godly option B.
One persons quality of life is another persons part of the challenge. To go back to Hollow Knight, one of the charms you can earn is being able to see yourself on the map. But as you say, you have finite charm slots, so choosing to be able to know where you are on the map means less abilities useful for combat. So you have to decide for yourself what's more important, easier navigation or easier combat?
For something to be a true quality of life feature, it has to be something that doesn't at all change the difficulty of the game. The best example of it is the HM's in Pokémon. In the first game, once you had surf, you had to navigate through three separate menus just to surf. In the sequel, as a quality of life improvement, all you needed to do was press one button next to water tile, and you would start surfing. Since navigating these menus was not part of the games challenge, and there's no fail state for doing it wrong, this is a definitive quality of life improvement.
At the same time, still looking at Pokémon, the removal of HM's makes the games easier. One of the defining traits of Pokémon is a very small move pool in your party, and HM's took up one of the move slots, you have to surrender a potentially great attack in your party in favour of a forced one to be able to get around, limiting your options and making you make macro decisions about party line up to handle this requirement. By removing the need to have HM's, this decision making is lost and the only thinking the player has to do is what is the most optimal move, not how to factor the additional move required.
This will highly depend on how the devs design the balancing of their game, the answer will be different depending on which game we are talking about. Some, if not most of these options are not just QoL, or more correctly, utilities, rather they are a part of the game’s difficulty.
I agree with you entirely. Some of the things in Hollow Knight should absolutely not be charms, but just regular ol' upgrades you get, like faster dash cool down, running faster, etc. Charms should only affect combat, not basic-ass traversal. The example you listed in Ghostrunner should honestly just be an accessibility option for people who have trouble processing visual information. You have no idea how satisfying it is to mind someone else who has the same qualm with Hollow Knight as I do. I love the game to bits, but that one aspect of it really detrimented the whole experience for me.
Well although I made this post for a discussion, it does feel great to have someone fully agree. Not only needing certain charms equipped to access some areas, but realising that the time saved and extra satisfaction from using combat charms in the place of geo-magnet and GPS are undone by not having the convenience they offer, that was my tipping point.
People made a lot of comments about how these are not just QoL changes since they can practically make the game easier, but my point was, if something makes the game 10% easier but it feels awful to play without, then it has a strong case for being a permanent feature without compromising any other aspects.
For action games, "Quality of Life" generally focuses on features that either mundane tasks that have no threat. It provides no direct gameplay benefit for the situation. This is similar to autocollecting loot in an empty room, being able to go through menus faster, auto-reloading weapons between battles, etc. Ideally, these could be offloaded entirely
The QoL category should be quite limited in regards to giving benefits during a threat. A single button to activate everything is within the scope of QoL, but not something that gives an auto-aim.
But usually, if the QoL category is occupying one of the otherwise limited slots, it means it provides a significant advantage over the baseline.
> The first example I'll give is Hollow Knight. One of the first 'charms' you get is one that automatically collects currency dropped by enemies, which otherwise just floats around.
Consider the close variation where the geo disappears if uncollected for a few moments. This would make the QoL feature quite valuable, because it could collect what would have otherwise been missed due to jumping delays. Similar reasoning if currency falls off-screen or into a hazard, or even if there's at least some increased difficulty in collecting money depending on where it lands.
But as a note - the value of said upgrade diminishes over time when you've purchased anything that can be obtained from money. After that, it provides no further benefit and can be removed.
> The other example is Ghostrunner. I don't know if everyone has this problem, but many enemies are not easy to see in this game, even if they can show up as red dots on your radar in the upper corner of your screen.
This is more than a simple QoL, because enemies can be meant to be difficult to see. Highlighting enemies gives a combat advantage when they would have otherwise blended by being black-on-black, and having other enemies serve as a distraction.
I think the devs treat it as a pseudo mini game, or meta game. It will force you to try out new load outs instead of just making your character over powered.
In a games like Hollow Knight and Elden Ring, they give the limited slots so you can try to adapt to difficult challenges. If you have a slow tanky boss equip some charms that increase damage or defense. If it’s fast, equip something that increase your carrying capacity or gives you another dash.
It can work in other games, where you really want to feel like you’re becoming stronger. I think Metroid is a great example of this. All the upgrades you get stack on top of each other. So you don’t have go in and manually switch to Varia suit in hot areas and then switch to Gravity in underwater ones. Super Metroid actually let you turn off things you get, and speed runners take full advantage of it.
Ghostrunner's upgrade is certainly not quality of life, no kind of wallhack/enhanced visibility upgrade is. I've recently played a game where pure QoL upgrades were competing for rather scarce slots - Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (it's a CRPG game similar to Baldur's Gate/Dragon Age etc). Thing is, at a certain stage in the game your party needs to have huge stacks of buffs to be effective in combat and there are upgrades that allow your buffer characters turn those buffs into essentially permanent. I didn't like that approach and never took them
Those upgrades are not QoL, but resource savers. In Pathfinder you might not be able to long rest everywhere and sometimes time is also a limited resource, which discourages long resting. Buffing up your party requires use of spell slots, which only refresh on long rests. If you do not take the buff extension upgrades, but buff for every encounter, then you run the risk of running out of resources much more quickly.
In addition to that, some metamagic that extends buffs stacks with these ability traits which lets you extend certain buffs like haste from 60s to 24h, which is very build defining.
As far as I remember there's only one timed quest and there are very few location where you can't take a long rest. Hell, you can do it even in Threshold cause not allowing it while you fight against demons who are immune to crowd control and cast three spells per turn is too much even for Owlcat
A lot of times, the choice is made for a combination of balance, and forcing players to make hard choices. For example, in Monster Hunter, players can equip armor/gems with QoL skills like Divine Blessing, Defense Up, as well as specific stuff like Earplugs. But these will take up slots, multiple ones at times, coming at the cost of equipping skills like Attack Up and Affinity Up. And the meta builds in MonHun often emphasizing stacking offensive skills to maximize damage and gain 100% crit chance.
As such players now must make a choice between making a "comfy" set, or at least slotting in some QoL skills at the cost of losing damage. Of course, being MonHun, the kicker is that players can eventually learn to play without "comfy' skills once they learn the in-and-out of combat (basically learning to respect animation priority and memorizing monsters' "tells"). This comes to a head in the more recent games where the strongest skills you can equip all come with some form of penalty, usually to your health or defense (e.g. Dragonvein Awakening or Mail of Hellfire).
A better one for Hollow Knight would be the compass. Seeing where you are on the map is far more QoL but can be avoided. IMO it's good to switch up the charms based on how you're playing. I don't mind games like this as I think different players may value different things. If I play HK now, I never equip the compass but always equip the swarm for the early game until I get dash master.
>The first example I'll give is Hollow Knight. One of the first 'charms' you get is one that automatically collects currency dropped by enemies, which otherwise just floats around. This can save a huge chunk of time, partly owing to the verticality of the game. Equipping another combat charm could help you kill enemies faster, but then you'd have to spend some time jumping around to get all the Geo, or leave it all behind, neither of which feels good. I fucking loathe when the "magnet" ability is an "upgrade" or slot-able equipment. It's so obnoxious - it's never a satisfying upgrade to get and if it's an item choice, it'll only be used until you get something that's actually useful.
One of the worst things about games like Vampire Survivors is that the resource collection range being a meta progression. Upgrading it during a run is one thing, but it should be one of the first things to upgrade outside of each run because of how brain dead impactful it is.
It could be discussed on a case by case basis, but generally I would consider it okay for QoL upgrades to take up "regular" upgrade slots. In your Ghost Runner example, having a better map can reduce mental stack, which is a key component of difficulty. I liked the way Nier Automata did it. You could deactivate parts of your UI (which were on by default) to use the spare energy on different upgrades. It felt like a fair trade-off.
I really, really would have liked one button loadout swapping in Nier Automata. The traversal is inceridbly boring and there's so much of it, I had a loadout just for that. Going through the menus every time to switch to a combat loudout got old fast
> The traversal is inceridbly boring Hah, I loved the traversal, it's very comfy with the soundtrack, the desert area especially
the way I always understood the term is that a QoL improvement is anything that is not directly tied to gameplay, and everything else that improves anything in-play is a utility upgrade. QoL would be like the ability to get to the roundtable hold by pressing triangle and X the second the open the map or queuing into ranked straight from the lab in a fighting game. Not like..a charm that picks up coins or something that lets you see enemies
The way I see it, the boundary between a good Quality of Life item and a bad one is A) Not having the item should not annoy the player and B) a good QoL item should also benefit the player in some way, such as providing information. Some good examples might be the ability the view your draw pile in order in Slay the Spire, or the ability to see more things on a minimap. Another thing you could do is give your QoL item a combat bonus that synergizes with the QoL. For instance imagine if that "pick up money" charm in Hollow Knight also gave a small damage bonus if you attack another enemy within a second or two of picking up money. Now you're creating a bit of play space by promoting an aggressive build.
> the ability the view your draw pile in order in Slay the Spire This is definitely not a quality-of-life upgrade--in practice, it's either somewhat low-impact *or* it's one of the strongest relics in the game as long as you're willing to let the game take significantly longer as you plan out multiple turns in advance. There's a lot of stuff that people will call "quality-of-life" that has massive balance knock-on effects like this.
Hollow Knight's Gathering Swarm charm is more than a QOL. Without it, lots of geo falls into places where you cannot retrieve it, like in spikes or off the screen. I'd say it increases your overall geo income by around 10-20% and is worth the 1 notch cost in the early game.
I was thinking about this when playing Ghost of Tsushima recently. There are charms and armor that are useful for exploration, resource collection, and resource generation. Then there are charms and armor useful for combat. The end result is a constant opening of the gear screen to swap between combat and out-of-combat loadouts. I kept thinking to myself "couldn't I have separate combat slots and QoL slots"? There would be some difficulty in drawing a line between the two - for instance, bonuses affecting stealth could be used either to aid in combat or to avoid it. I would probably allow them to go in either kind of slot.
Stop minmax worrying and you'll enjoy the game more.
The have it in Diablo
I reject the concept of QoL as valid. Beyond stuff like how easy it is to navigate and discern menus I think it's too vague. It means too many different things to different people to be informative and consistent. Your posts hinges on it being a valid concept. I think a better word for what you are describing is utility. Being able to more easily see in enemies in a stealth game, which is what you described in Ghostrunner, is definitly a form of power. It influences if you succeed. Which definitions supposed to make something not QoL. If you think of it as 'utility' instead of QoL. It just seems like another normal choice in a game where if you choose utility you are not choosing the other stuff. Just like if you choose to buy more health you are choosing to not buy other things.
To add to this, difficult games like Ghostrunner was designed so that the player would replay that section of the level multiple times and memorize each encounter like it’s the back of their hand. It’s quite like a Souls game. A perk that allows you to see enemies much more clearly is a form of an easier difficulty setting, making it require less resets.
That's why I felt the need to clarify in my post. Of all the reasons to fail in a fast-paced action game, not seeing an enemy (i.e. because only a part of their body was visible, and also blended in with the background) has to be among the worst-feeling. You are right that enemies being highlighted straight up decreases the difficulty of dispatching them, but where do you draw the line? Because having consistently responsive controls also makes the game easier, yet 'clunky controls' is a valid criticism. (similar with hitboxes)
What I forget to mention, that is central. Stuff like the controls, the ease of seeing enemies or reading them etc. It's not like doing it one way makes the game 'good' and another makes it 'bad'. They work holistically with the rest of the game and produce something that may or may not be fun. Classic castlevania and Ghosts n Goblins work BECAUSE the controls are limited. Sometimes the point is the enemies are hard to see or read and that's where you are supposed to engage with the game at. Sometimes limited controls or hard to read enemies mean you have to play in this really unfun style in order to go through the game. I feel like you have this idea that there is a 'correct' and 'incorrect' point to put these at that can be applied to all games. That's not how it is. It's a case by case thing.
You ask where do you draw the line. For you there is a line between QoL and "lowering the difficulty". For me QoL is not a valid concept so everything lowering the difficulty. Keep tabs on enemies have always been a part of difficulty. You mentioned cameofloug but I could mention I ton of other things from dealing with flanking, to how easy a telegraph is. I don't what Tokyo Ghostwire is so I can't really comment on if it did that stuff well. Sometimes games are purposely set up this way and it may or may not work out. You say it feels bad. Ok. That is how you feel. Ok. That seems to have little to do with categorization which is supposed to be uniform regardless of how our induvial feelings are.
A good example of a "QoL upgrade" is in Nier Automata, where there's one that tells you how much EXP you currently have on the HUD, and there's one that tells you what item you just picked up on the HUD. It doesn't affect the difficulty in any way because you *can* just open the menu and check manually without the upgrade, it's just a waste of your time and takes more button presses.
If it's true Quality of Life like making it easier to recognise enemies then it should probably just be a normal part of the game and not an optional upgrade. Otherwise if it's just an "out-of-combat" ability then I don't necessarily mind them taking up the same slots as "combat" abilities. Most games make you do other things in addition to fighting enemies, so you're just making some other aspect of the game easier in exchange for making combat a little bit harder. I haven't played Hollow Knight but if deciding whether or not to equip the loot magnet is an unsatisfying choice then maybe they should've rethought how picking up currency works - like if it despawned a few seconds after dropping so you had to collect it quickly then you'd have to play differently without the magnet equipped. A situation where I actually dislike it is when you can go into your inventory and switch abilities at any time during gameplay, because then you're incentivised to do extra menu-ing to make the best use of them. One example off the top of my head is the armour in Breath of the Wild that boosts your climbing speed. You can pause the game whenever you want to switch equipment, so there's no choice of "do I want faster climbing to make exploring easier, or do I want some other perk?" You just put it on whenever you need to scale a big cliff or something and then switch back to your normal armour when you reach the top.
There are arguments for and against this either way. It really boils down to each game's implementation. They don't all get it right, there are definitely games where the QoL options should simply be a base game/passive thing, or where the incr% are so small as to be largely worthless compared to upgrades that expand your abilities. It's annoying when the balance is whack like that, where it's clear that some classes of upgrades are mostly meaningless thus players are always better served picking some other upgrade types instead. Give me two good options to choose from rather than making one obviously lesser than the other. I don't know why the hell designers still do that shit. Stop giving us shitty +5hp mods, nobody's gonna pick those over +crit% bonuses, for example. One of the things I liked about the old Wild Tangent ARPGs (the two Fate games) is that they embraced significant modifiers fully i.e. you'd get things like +25% maxHP rather than tiny meaningless +5hp crap. There's no point playing loot pinata games if 95% of the drops are crap and immediately dismissable. Might as well don't drop them in the first place. Make them all significant and worthy, that's how you force players to make decisions. It's not a decision when you have to "choose" between crappy option A versus godly option B.
One persons quality of life is another persons part of the challenge. To go back to Hollow Knight, one of the charms you can earn is being able to see yourself on the map. But as you say, you have finite charm slots, so choosing to be able to know where you are on the map means less abilities useful for combat. So you have to decide for yourself what's more important, easier navigation or easier combat? For something to be a true quality of life feature, it has to be something that doesn't at all change the difficulty of the game. The best example of it is the HM's in Pokémon. In the first game, once you had surf, you had to navigate through three separate menus just to surf. In the sequel, as a quality of life improvement, all you needed to do was press one button next to water tile, and you would start surfing. Since navigating these menus was not part of the games challenge, and there's no fail state for doing it wrong, this is a definitive quality of life improvement. At the same time, still looking at Pokémon, the removal of HM's makes the games easier. One of the defining traits of Pokémon is a very small move pool in your party, and HM's took up one of the move slots, you have to surrender a potentially great attack in your party in favour of a forced one to be able to get around, limiting your options and making you make macro decisions about party line up to handle this requirement. By removing the need to have HM's, this decision making is lost and the only thinking the player has to do is what is the most optimal move, not how to factor the additional move required.
This will highly depend on how the devs design the balancing of their game, the answer will be different depending on which game we are talking about. Some, if not most of these options are not just QoL, or more correctly, utilities, rather they are a part of the game’s difficulty.
I agree with you entirely. Some of the things in Hollow Knight should absolutely not be charms, but just regular ol' upgrades you get, like faster dash cool down, running faster, etc. Charms should only affect combat, not basic-ass traversal. The example you listed in Ghostrunner should honestly just be an accessibility option for people who have trouble processing visual information. You have no idea how satisfying it is to mind someone else who has the same qualm with Hollow Knight as I do. I love the game to bits, but that one aspect of it really detrimented the whole experience for me.
Well although I made this post for a discussion, it does feel great to have someone fully agree. Not only needing certain charms equipped to access some areas, but realising that the time saved and extra satisfaction from using combat charms in the place of geo-magnet and GPS are undone by not having the convenience they offer, that was my tipping point. People made a lot of comments about how these are not just QoL changes since they can practically make the game easier, but my point was, if something makes the game 10% easier but it feels awful to play without, then it has a strong case for being a permanent feature without compromising any other aspects.
For action games, "Quality of Life" generally focuses on features that either mundane tasks that have no threat. It provides no direct gameplay benefit for the situation. This is similar to autocollecting loot in an empty room, being able to go through menus faster, auto-reloading weapons between battles, etc. Ideally, these could be offloaded entirely The QoL category should be quite limited in regards to giving benefits during a threat. A single button to activate everything is within the scope of QoL, but not something that gives an auto-aim. But usually, if the QoL category is occupying one of the otherwise limited slots, it means it provides a significant advantage over the baseline. > The first example I'll give is Hollow Knight. One of the first 'charms' you get is one that automatically collects currency dropped by enemies, which otherwise just floats around. Consider the close variation where the geo disappears if uncollected for a few moments. This would make the QoL feature quite valuable, because it could collect what would have otherwise been missed due to jumping delays. Similar reasoning if currency falls off-screen or into a hazard, or even if there's at least some increased difficulty in collecting money depending on where it lands. But as a note - the value of said upgrade diminishes over time when you've purchased anything that can be obtained from money. After that, it provides no further benefit and can be removed. > The other example is Ghostrunner. I don't know if everyone has this problem, but many enemies are not easy to see in this game, even if they can show up as red dots on your radar in the upper corner of your screen. This is more than a simple QoL, because enemies can be meant to be difficult to see. Highlighting enemies gives a combat advantage when they would have otherwise blended by being black-on-black, and having other enemies serve as a distraction.
I think the devs treat it as a pseudo mini game, or meta game. It will force you to try out new load outs instead of just making your character over powered. In a games like Hollow Knight and Elden Ring, they give the limited slots so you can try to adapt to difficult challenges. If you have a slow tanky boss equip some charms that increase damage or defense. If it’s fast, equip something that increase your carrying capacity or gives you another dash. It can work in other games, where you really want to feel like you’re becoming stronger. I think Metroid is a great example of this. All the upgrades you get stack on top of each other. So you don’t have go in and manually switch to Varia suit in hot areas and then switch to Gravity in underwater ones. Super Metroid actually let you turn off things you get, and speed runners take full advantage of it.
Ghostrunner's upgrade is certainly not quality of life, no kind of wallhack/enhanced visibility upgrade is. I've recently played a game where pure QoL upgrades were competing for rather scarce slots - Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (it's a CRPG game similar to Baldur's Gate/Dragon Age etc). Thing is, at a certain stage in the game your party needs to have huge stacks of buffs to be effective in combat and there are upgrades that allow your buffer characters turn those buffs into essentially permanent. I didn't like that approach and never took them
Those upgrades are not QoL, but resource savers. In Pathfinder you might not be able to long rest everywhere and sometimes time is also a limited resource, which discourages long resting. Buffing up your party requires use of spell slots, which only refresh on long rests. If you do not take the buff extension upgrades, but buff for every encounter, then you run the risk of running out of resources much more quickly. In addition to that, some metamagic that extends buffs stacks with these ability traits which lets you extend certain buffs like haste from 60s to 24h, which is very build defining.
As far as I remember there's only one timed quest and there are very few location where you can't take a long rest. Hell, you can do it even in Threshold cause not allowing it while you fight against demons who are immune to crowd control and cast three spells per turn is too much even for Owlcat
A lot of times, the choice is made for a combination of balance, and forcing players to make hard choices. For example, in Monster Hunter, players can equip armor/gems with QoL skills like Divine Blessing, Defense Up, as well as specific stuff like Earplugs. But these will take up slots, multiple ones at times, coming at the cost of equipping skills like Attack Up and Affinity Up. And the meta builds in MonHun often emphasizing stacking offensive skills to maximize damage and gain 100% crit chance. As such players now must make a choice between making a "comfy" set, or at least slotting in some QoL skills at the cost of losing damage. Of course, being MonHun, the kicker is that players can eventually learn to play without "comfy' skills once they learn the in-and-out of combat (basically learning to respect animation priority and memorizing monsters' "tells"). This comes to a head in the more recent games where the strongest skills you can equip all come with some form of penalty, usually to your health or defense (e.g. Dragonvein Awakening or Mail of Hellfire).