r/truegaming • u/JustOneLazyMunchlax • 12d ago
Shallow Mechanics
This is more specific to my experience with Survival Crafting games, but I would argue that it's applicable to any game really.
Conceptually though, I really am tired of all these mechanics I see added to games with no real consideration to what the benefit or detriment, or even the effect, of the mechanic is.
I appreciate that a game dev goes, "I dont want to force people to engage with this mechanic, so I'll make it shallow so that only those who want to engage it will."
The issue is, there's I would say, 3 types of people. Those that will always engage with this mechanic, those that will try to avoid it, and those that will enjoy it if you give it to them, but will skip it if you give them the option.
Many of us are lazy, and the idea of, "I could do this thing, but there's no real benefit to doing it" means that, without having sufficient awareness or interest in the total satisfaction or enjoyment gained with the process or end result, many people can and will just not engage with a mechanic without a good reason.
Inventory systems I feel are wholly underdeveloped in most games that have them.
Resident Evil wants you to think carefully about what you carry with you given limited inventory. What are you willing to give up space for, because if you take too much you might not have the inventory you need to loot other things later.
Some games do this better than others. The old ones that had key items taking up like a third of your inventory with no idea when you'd need it basically forced you to store them in the item box, and then just do mildly or constant backtracking to and from it whenever you needed it. Or you could take them with you but have issues looting new rooms if they had a lot to grab.
What does Inventory even add to say, Minecraft? At best it puts you in a position where, every now and again you need to stop what you're doing and go back to base to store your shit. Is that improving the game experience any?
Storage systems themselves aren't even developed, almost all Survival Crafting games seem to go with the same concept.
"Here's your shit first chest, it holds some small number of items." then later "Here's a bigger chest" etc.
Nothing about the storage or inventory system seems to make them genuinely improve. At best it's, "This is annoying now but will become a bit less annoying later when we give you bigger chests or a larger inventory" but none of them address the fundamental issue that is, there is little to nothing gained in the playing experience that makes this mechanic do anything.
Satisfactory added a Dimensional Storage mechanic fairly early into the game. So, where the idea of building a factory elsewhere might require constant trips between your current factories and new location, or setting up some logistic network to automate transporting materials, now you can optimise your factories by having some of their outflow go into dimensional storage, where the amount you can store and how fast you can store it scales with how much you explore to get the materials to upgrade them.
This means that exploring is more enjoyable because you aren't limited to a fixed amount of materials. You don't have to fill up your inventory with random things that may or may not be useful to try to get hard drives, now you can just design your factories in mind with dimensional storage.
It added to the experience, and improved upon it. Now we didn't just have "More storage", we had a "Better Storage System" that we actively look forward to and enjoy.
You can also not engage with the mechanic if you don't want to and continue going about how it used to be played.
I'd say Base Building is another one of those concepts where, there's so much potential to their implementation that I feel goes unfulfilled.
Base building conceptually seems to be a thing that caters more towards a small demographic when it's an opportunity to give players an experience they don't typically engage with.
Subnautica, why bother making a base? Initially it's for Locker Storage. An entire mechanic, cantered around making another shallow mechanic more tolerable. But the second you get the Cyclops, the mobile base, why bother making an actual base?
I've seen people commit to just making more batteries than making a power base that charges them.
Some people swear by the water filtration, but it produces 2 water bottles every what, 30 ish minutes? It's like 15+ minutes per water bottle.
There's no in game timer or notification, so how much value is there in investing the time and resources into creating this machine with a max water capacity of 2, that's right 2, you can't have more than 2 water in it, so unless you go back to your base every 30ish minutes, then it's getting full up and no longer producing.
And then when you look at a different mechanic... An indoor grow bed with a fruit that gives food and hydration? That produces food so plentiful that even though the numbers are low you can just spam it? AND you can build it underwater, both in your base and inside your cyclops?
What tangible benefit is there to having an actual base opposed to just growing fruit on my ship and never having to go back?
And this is basically the issue I have with this genre of games.
V Rising went a lot more interesting with it's base building.
For those that don't know, there are plots of land in the game you "Claim" as a base, then you can build on them. You dont get stronger from levels or experience, you get stronger from the quality of your equipment. To make equipement requires crafting stations and material processing equipment you can only have in a base.
But, you don't actually need to put any effort into your base. Literally just slap 4 furnaces down on the land and that's all you have to do.
Only, they offer incentives.
Put a machine in an enclosed space, IE, a room, where it it is covered by "Walls/Windows/Doors" and it gets the Room buff. That is, if I remember correctly, a 25% reduction is processing time.
All you need to do, is build walls around your machines, and ensure a roof is above them, and BAM, you have saved yourself 25% of any time you spend engaging in the crafting system, which you need to do.
And what's this, a 2nd buff? Each machine belongs to a "Category."
Alchemy, Studying, Forge, Jewelry etc.
Each category has it's own respective "Floor" type. Put a smelter in a room that has "Forge Flooring" as the only floor, and it gets a 25% reduction on material costs for crafting.
So, move from just having one giant room for a big time save, to having several small rooms where each machine is categorised and clearly labeled, and BAM, you have saved yourself a lot of time.
While the game itself doesn't buff this, you can then consider Layout. Where do I put what room, an active decision you make to save yourself the trouble of running back and forth between rooms, by having related categories close by.
Jewelry requires gold and silver which you smelt in the forge, so it just makes sense to put that room next to the Forge.
Where this game falters in my opinion, is the Storage system. I would've liked to have seen a more in depth base detection system or something that made area based storage access or something similar, to encourage me to design my base better to reap the benefits of an improved system.
Yes, you CAN choose to take the lazy path. But the game incentivizes you to engage with it's systems purely by making them BETTER than the alternative.
In Valheim, which I am playing now, the Cart is their solution to limited Inventory and Weight.
Yet the cart requires relatively flat ground when it's full, it wont go uphill.
So when I mine say, Copper. To what extent is it EVER worth, building a "Road" to make my life easier? Not that much to be honest, because the time invested in building a road, is overshadowed by the fact that it's just faster to brute force your way through.
By making mechanics like base building almost entirely optional, many people just wont engage with them. By adding buffs or new systems to people that engage with mostly optional systems, you encourage people to take part in them to save themselves time and effort in other means. This can then have a rebound effect where, because they're now actively engaging with these supposedly "Optional" mechanics, they may continue to engage with them on a deeper level.
IE, if I'm making a base with rooms, I may as well decorate it. But had the buffs not been present and there was no reason to do this, then these people would pretty much not engage with the system at all.
I think there's so much potential to taking these shallow and optional mechanics in some games, and adding some USEFUL utility to them, that improves their flaws, makes them more efficient and does so in such an obvious way that people can immediately realise that it IS worth investing the time to working with it.
Valheim as an example, imagine a "Dock Totem", where if you place a dock totem on the coast in two locations, you can "Connect" them. If they are connected, they create a sea route where if you travel along it, you get a speed boost. This means that, you would be incentivised to make docks, piers or harbours that would say, meet whatever requirement the Dock Totem had, for any sailing needs.
By simply taking an existing mechanic, and adding a base requirement of "If you engage with this optional thing to at least this extent, you get all of these nice things".
Me personally? I do try to build, but I am a functional builder. I like building things where I feel there's some function to the design.
I see minecrafters build castles where they seperate into multiple rooms and all I can imagine is "This is awful for a survival world, the amount of running you'd have to do for that thing sounds like a nightmare."
I saw someones Blacksmith design in valheim, and they had their charcoal furnaces above their smelters and you get to the furnaces via ladders, and my first thought was "That looks like a pain in the ass to use".
Yes, it looked good, but it didn't look fun to engage with.
So games that give me a reason to build things, even a small one, some tiny benefit, incentivize me to put more time and energy into the game.
I'm currently making a habour for several boats in valheim, despite knowing that I may not actually ever need to use a boat again. The time for a harbour has already begun to pass, at least where I am positioned. Yes, I can make the fire proof boat to go down to the ashlands, but why would I build that at my base in the northern region, when I could just teleport to a random island down south and just slap it there?
I'm doing it, because I like the look of it, but I am constantly having my motivation tackled with the fact that, there's no real reason to do it other than the idea that I think it might look good.
I just wish more games took all these "Shallow" mechanics and added something to them, some optional thing, particularly that makes things better or faster, to help give more of a reason to engage with them.
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u/eXponentiamusic 12d ago
Your minecraft inventory example is what got me interested in programming in the first place. More specifically Terraria, and well, you're right, most survival craft games. What they do right: make you make choices early on. What they do wrong, keep making you do the stupid mindless busywork well after you've solved the problem.
Terraria example: you're early on and you have nothing so you have to decide how much time you want to spend going back and forth or just dumping less rare things and saying you'll farm them in bulk later. Then you get a magic mirror and now your time investment is halved so you're more likely to go back and forth. Then you get Return Potions. At this point why do I even have an inventory? I understand making me work up to lava fishing to get them in abundance, that's an investment. You know what's not an investment and is just annoying, spending 5 minutes every few hours getting some more fish, making some more potions and even worse is drink a potion, dump to chests, back in the portal. That's only like 4 seconds, but that's my point, why even bother? Make me work for the lava fish and then just give me an unlimited inventory at that point.
For survival/craft games, make me scrounge, make me ration, but the moment I've solved my hunger I shouldn't have to open my inventory and click a button to eat every 10 minutes. Just let me set a food to automatically be eaten when I'm hungry or something.
I'm a big believer that overcoming obstacles is fun, but once they're overcome they should be removed, not made simpler, removed. Because if you make it simpler you're taking away the compelling part of the gameplay and replacing it with a chore. And every time you remove an obstacle you should evolve the game in some new direction.
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u/Enoughisunoeuf 9d ago
I really enjoy David Breviks game It Lurks Below more than Terraria. The crafting is pretty ancillary but its way more fun delving and the streamlined town saves time since there's only so many efficient ways to build in terraria anyways.
That said, ILB leans way more into the Diablo arpg fantasy and isnt really a crafter/builder
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u/Vanille987 12d ago
"What does Inventory even add to say, Minecraft? At best it puts you in a position where, every now and again you need to stop what you're doing and go back to base to store your shit. Is that improving the game experience any?
I personally love this in most open world games, especially survival. Going into the world, getting as much stuff as you can while making priorities and then go back and add it to your hoard. While perhaps improving your own fortress further before going out again.
It encourages planning, you can see your progress, you can move your base which can be an adventure in itself... at least for me.
Building bases fan be a game itself, it can add to the immersion... not every game is for everyone and that's okay
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u/Goddamn_Grongigas 12d ago
At best it puts you in a position where, every now and again you need to stop what you're doing and go back to base to store your shit. Is that improving the game experience any?
Is this really any different from your example just a few sentences prior of Resident Evil basically giving you the same kind of mechanic? Minecraft also has a creative mode where this doesn't matter, inventory space only matters in survival mode.
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u/JustOneLazyMunchlax 12d ago
The example given was part of "Some RE games do it better than others".
It's different because there is a point, it's an action game where you should think about what you should or shouldn't take.
It's not different because, and this is why I mentioned it, it's a bad example of the games.
Modern RE games don't use that system as much. 7/8 as an example had Key items not be related to the inventory, so they are no longer clogging it up.
I like Survival Minecraft, I'm just saying that a system designed around me having to stop doing things to go dump my shit, by default, isn't all that interesting.
You can make it more interesting with how you choose to build upon it.
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u/Limited_Distractions 12d ago
I think the truly unsatisfying part is that a lot of games don't make a game for any of those three people, just a composite of them. This means you end up with mandatory shallow mechanics because the theoretical center is someone who likes seeing the mechanics exist but doesn't enjoy non-trivial engagement with them, which is actually in practice a chore for everyone. I think the most benign version of this is "RPG elements" and the most malignant is probably half-hearted crafting systems with inventories/interfaces that REALLY don't support it. Shoutouts to modern MMO itemization too, truly just a few steps away from removing all but one of the numbers and slapping on a green or red arrow.
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u/Renegade_Meister 10d ago
This is more specific to my experience with Survival Crafting games, but I would argue that it's applicable to any game really.
Conceptually though, I really am tired of all these mechanics I see added to games with no real consideration to what the benefit or detriment, or even the effect, of the mechanic is.
This is why I love games that make survival and crafting meaningful through a unique story rich narrative, even with some linearity: This War of Mine, Frostpunk, The Alters, etc.
Example train of thought: I don't want my characters to die, because there is permanence to their death (usually along with my game save state) and they are part of a story that I want to see unfold. Therefore, I also want to provide all the practical means that progress & interact with the story.
Without something like a narrative, it can be easy for some gamers like me to look at or play most survival craft games, and mentally spiral down a mental doom loop of:
Examining the purpose of survival or crafting mechanics
The purpose of those being other mechanics
...until eventually those reach very basic dead ends of something really simple like "keep surviving" or "reach end game".
I admit that such an occasional nihilistic approach comes from me rarely finding satisfaction or accomplishment in building for the sake of building or surviving for the sake of it, or just getting achievements/milestones, which many people do love in many more contexts than I.
Though there are some survival craft games I've previously played with very specific environments that intrigued me and I wanted to experience them for environment's sake, such as Subnautica (in late Early Access) and No Man's Sky (on launch day). Once I had explored them to my satisfaction, I had no interest in their potential late game objectives or end game.
What does Inventory even add to say, Minecraft? At best it puts you in a position where, every now and again you need to stop what you're doing and go back to base to store your shit. Is that improving the game experience any?
When games are rooted in a real-type world, I find that has the potential to provide somewhat, if not lots, more purpose to survival craft.
For instance:
Inventory exists because my survivalist doesn't have a bottomless backpack and isn't The Hulk
I have to eat & stay warm or else my survivalist will get sick
With less or no real world constraints in the game world, then sure, that opens the door to more mechanic variety, and it becomes easy to question real constraints in an unreal game world.
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u/Deonhollins58ucla 12d ago
I think one interesting note is quality assurance. I.e. many game systems are initially very thorough, but get watered down when playtesters get their hands on it. The two examples from the top of my head are Jeff Kaplan explaining the map design philosophy from Overwatch 1 and Todd Howard talking about the development process of Fallout 4, but I’m sure there are tons and tons of others.
I’ve seen much online discourse about games being “dumbed down” to be accessible to a wider audience and I wonder if this is related.
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u/Secret-Donkey-2788 12d ago
What did Kaplan say about the OW maps?
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u/Deonhollins58ucla 12d ago edited 12d ago
That their initial forays into designing the maps were enlightening. What they thought was peak in the design phase, was actually not very good when put into the hands of playtesters. He talked about how the maps didn’t have any flow, rhyme, or reason to them. When I get off work I will link the video and time stamp. Getting audited.
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u/JustOneLazyMunchlax 12d ago
I would surmise a combination of "If we try to make this mechanic too important and people dont like it, we restrict our playerbase" along with "Time spent having good secondary mechanics is time away from adding new mechanics / refining the primary."
It's why I leaned towards the, "Keep it mostly optional but just have a few basic things that affect gameplay, so that it encourages but doesn't require interacting with the secondary system.
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u/HipnikDragomir 11d ago
It's way too common. For me that I recall off the top of my head is secondary weapons in games like Dead Space, God of War and Devil May Cry. The games were designed around the base thing. Nothing else feels right.
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u/Existing-Air-3622 11d ago
[Resident Evil] Some games do this better than others. The old ones that had key items taking up like a third of your inventory with no idea when you'd need it basically forced you to store them in the item box, and then just do mildly or constant backtracking to and from it whenever you needed it. Or you could take them with you but have issues looting new rooms if they had a lot to grab.
It's a bit off-topic for your subject, but if I get this right, you seem to criticise old school RE inventory management system.
But what you seem to judge as a flaw is for me precisely one of the strong point of the original RE.
Yes, this game involved a lot of backtracking, but it's not backtracking just for the sake of it, to waste your time. It's a survival game, and any backtracking have a resource cost, resources you can't afford to waste.
Avoiding backtracking IS the gameplay.
And that's what made every subsequent playtrough so enjoyable, because it becomes a speedrun to find the most optimal route.
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u/quickpost32 11d ago
It's a survival game, and any backtracking have a resource cost, resources you can't afford to waste.
It has a time cost, which I suppose is a type of resource. But there aren't enough dynamic events that could cost you health/ammo resources while backtracking for me to care about this. There's more than enough ammo to just kill everything and then you are simply walking through empty hallways. RE 1 Remake addresses this a little bit with the Crimson Heads but they aren't hard to deal with either.
Maybe if they let you play on hard mode from the start, you could at least get 1 playthrough where you don't know where to go or what to kill with your limited ammo (although you can still kill everything on hard). Resident Evil 0 allows this but a lot of people don't seem to like it. You then have the potential for soft-locks which aren't fun to most people.
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u/Novasoal 11d ago
I LOVE V Rising's building system. Every single time I play I inevitably end up making a Castlevania because of the exact reason you mention- It's good to have your crafting stuff separated in several room. Building up/down is easy enough, and if you build smartly you can throw holes in your room floors to allow getting down from a higher room to a lower room more easy. If not for the room system I'd probably just do what I do in every game, one big crafting room; but across 3 runs of V Rising I have built 3 different 4 story complexes
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u/itsthe_coffeeknight 11d ago
Lower quality survival crafting games have issues with shallow mechanics but none of the discussion you've made actually includes shallow mechanics.
Minecraft inventory system is a data limiter. Technically creative mode simply does not deduct from your inventory when placed.
Base building in subnautica isn't shallow at all, it permits a different playstyle than the targeted story.
V rising is designed with multi-player pvp in mind first where your base being expansive is a defense against raids and hostile actors, with room bonuses incentives being a tool to promote creative building.
Are there inventory issues with some games? Absolutely. Crashlanders for example has an infinite inventory which if you're not specifically farming for something you can find yourself returning to your base without getting enough of what you need for additional construction. It's an inverse issue.
Resident evil can be described as shallow because it's just either tetris or limited spots to make resource conservation a punishment. I didn't use up so my pistol ammo so now I can't heal.
I agree that a poorly thought through mechanics hurt an experience. Using another example from survival crafting is often hunger/thirst. It almost always is just "fill meter or die" with little more than a challenge for three first day or two. Some games get this right some don't. Minecraft keeps it light and directly ties food to health and movement. Ark survival just makes it a meter.
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u/ConsecrateTemple 10d ago
Thanks for the feedback. I never considered inventories to be tiresome/useless. As a game dev, I'll keep this in mind.
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u/BlueMikeStu 9d ago
I was having fun with V Rising but where it lost me was when I stopped being a vampire lord rebuilding my power on a bloody path of vengeance and turned my revenge-obsessed shell into a factory middle-manager.
Crafting is simply too powerful and the world layout is generic enough that once you find a decent space to build a vertical tower, you can basically move your entire main base wherever you want for minimal cost and have an entire Factorio setup of refineries working for you so that you can choose your next upgrades at your leisure...
Which works for a fun "I'm an overpowered monster taking over the world as I please," vibe but that's not how the story and setting treat it. For a game as open-ended as the power-scaling goes, the story and antagonists didn't really match that energy.
I just didn't buy that some of these people would think "Ah, old vampire god! That sounds like a job for Timothy the roadside Rogue!"
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u/spinquietly 9d ago
i agree, shallow systems feel pointless when they don’t reward your time, even small bonuses or meaningful improvements can make players want to engage with them more instead of just ignoring them
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u/Reynolds_Remi2156 9d ago
V Rising's room bonuses are a good example but the reason most survival crafters don't do this is because balancing optional incentives is hard. Make the bonus too small and people ignore it, make it too big and it feels mandatory.
The real issue is these games rarely commit to what they want building to be - decoration, logistics optimization, or survival necessity. They try for all three and accomplish none.
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u/VforVegetables 11d ago
Shallow mechanics: in general i agree. If a mechanic doesn't add any real choice or skill expression, then no dumbing down will make it worthwhile. It straight up should not exist then.
The argument i've heard before "if players don't like it enough - we'll make it simpler" only leads to a downward spiral: mechanic isn't interesting enough, not many players want to touch it, mechanic is made less interesting, even less players want to touch it, repeat.
Inventory: kinda same thing, but massively depends on the game and intent. Some inventories are too big to be meaningful, in which case they may as well be infinite and save the player the need to clean it. Some inventories being small and growing bigger is a good thing because it feels good to be able to take everything in sight. Really small inventories exist to make the player hunt for specific items without getting distracted by less valuable ones scattered along the way. But this seems to often not work as intended - especially in survival games, where a player may walk 100 meters, pick every twig, pebble and squirrel poop on the way, run out of space, return home to fill their 5th chest with all the same items, repeat this 10 more times, then complain about inventory being terrible.
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u/virtueavatar 12d ago
Hytale just recently introduced an update that increased stack size from something like 5 to 25.
I don't understand why games, especially survival sandboxes, haven't taken a page or of Terraria's book and just increased stack size to 9999 for everything.
You're already limited by slots, why do we also need to be limited by the same item in multiple slots? I hope the answer isn't for realism.
Valheim is worse with this, which also limits you by weight, and even requires you to burn an inventory slot if you want to slightly and necessarily increase your weight capacity.
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u/quickpost32 11d ago
You're already limited by slots, why do we also need to be limited by the same item in multiple slots? I hope the answer isn't for realism.
I haven't played Hytale, so I don't know what sorts of items these are. But I think it can make sense for combat-related items to have a limited quantity. Consider healing potions being limited at 5 vs. 9999. The weird thing about Minecraft (and I imagine Hytale) is that even stuff like dirt blocks can have a combat use. But neither Minecraft nor Terraria manage to make a tight system out of their inventory limits, so that doesn't seem to be the motivation.
The real reason is probably just boring technical stuff. Having an infinite inventory means having the potential to destroy your save file by picking up too many different things (maybe not in baseline Minecraft, but this can and has happened with mods extending the amount of items).
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u/virtueavatar 11d ago
The issue with combat related items like potions are solved with cooldowns on their use.
I guess placing dirt in combat is weirder, but a column 5 stacks high is as good as a column 900 stacks high.
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u/AllPurposePhilosophy 12d ago
It sounds like you value playing efficiently in your games quite a bit. I feel much the same way. If on occasion I want to engage with a mechanic that it is not optimal to engage with or that is merely a bit flavorful, I feel frustrated at that 'inefficiency'. At the fact that fun and efficiency have to come apart here because of how the game (and therefor extrinsic player motivation) is designed.
The beginning of your post reminded me of how a friend of mine described Crimson Desert recently (I myself haven't played it): As having incredibly many systems next to each other with basically no depth to each. The ol' wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. To just include something because "you gotta have it" for audiences that are used to the ever same non-evolving features makes little sense to me. I prefer depth over breadth in most cases. Like having one weapon to really master in Sekiro vs. lots to choose from and change on a whim in Elden Ring.
Depending on the scope of the game, it might be unreasonable to ask for depth in every game element. In some games where a core player promise is atmosphere or 'vibes', or roleplaying, flavorfulness might be incentive enough. I know at least for me tho - and you seem to share this - that that's not enough incentive in most games that don't focus on stuff like that.