Tying important things in the game to hardware limitations

Myrmidon

This is really, really, annoying for when you want to emulate or play HD versions of games. Apparently there's a puzzle in one of the Space Quest games that is now impossible on modern computers due to processing speeds, and in the HD remake of Shadow of the Colossus, faster frame rate totally fucked up the AI on each colossus and made some impossible on harder difficulties without exploits.

Icalasari

If they absolutely have to tie it to hardware limitations, then they could at LEAST put a hard limit on it

Alkthash

So you're asking designers to design for emulators and future systems that don't exist yet?

Myrmidon

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying.

Alkthash

I mean I get that the stuff you are running into is annoying, but I can't really think of an easy way for designers to avoid this stuff.

Icalasari

^ By not, say, making a puzzle get harder the faster a computer runs?

ClockworkUniverse

^If they're designing for one specific device, that isn't going to cause problems, though. If it then gets ported without correcting for that, that isn't the original designer's fault.

delta534

If it is for the PC then yes, they should not tie things like physics, game logic and AI to the fps. 

Nyktos

@ClockworkUniverse: The thing is a lot of these hacks aren't really necessary or better even if you're guaranteed to only ever be used on one type of hardware. Like that 7th Guest puzzle that is impossibly hard on modern processors because the game decided to allocate a certain amount of wall time for the AI to build a search tree instead of just setting a maximum depth. Why would you even do that?

Saigyouji

SotC HD only has a higher framerate by virtue of having a consistent one. It's 30 FPS, and just doesn't suffer from the drops of the PS2 version.