I‘m curious what you guys think about puzzle games with timers.

I personally hate it to be pressured by the timer. And I hate it when the puzzle resets and I need to start from scratch because I ran out of time.
I prefer to take my time and think about the next move rather than rapid fire my moves by intuition and hoping to get lucky.

Yet so many puzzle games have timers. Is this just lazy design? Do you like timers? What do you think about this?

I'll go ahead && say - some people probably just like timers.

Kind of like Sonic The Hedgehog, that IIRC was created because some people really liked to do speedruns in Super Mario Bros.

...or something like that.

But yeah - I do hate the timers, too.

There are puzzle games with timers? Yea that sounds terrible.

One of my favorite indie puzzle games is Strata. It's very pretty, colorful and relaxing.

Once you get into it and figure it out, it's not too difficult to get perfect on every level. But I still found it fun and relaxing.

oh and also check out

https://hexcodle.com

That's a fun daily one.

I like timers but it depends on the game. They are good if they are used in some situations but stressful if they are there all the time.
For puzzles I can see it being annoying unless it is only for a specific game mode.

@ars1 I’ve bought Monster Hunter World a few months ago and the first mission was on a freaking timer. I made it in time but I also knew that every mission would be on a timer.

This doesn’t even make sense. "Hey kill those monsters but you have 30 minutes!" Why?!

Anyway, I refunded this shit right away.

So yeah, not only puzzle games.

@Lensflare in the case of MonHun, they usually give you 1 hour. It is usually more than enough, and usually you can finish the job within 15 minutes. However it has a few missions where you have a strict time limit and you must optimize.
I can see it pissing newcomers off though, because it feels like a very open ended world where you should be allowed to chill. That is what expeditions are for but they do not introduce them properly.

@ars1 Why do they use timers anyway? It doesn’t make sense from the story perspective and it also doesn’t make sense for the gameplay.

"Oh no, you ran out of time and now you have to repeat from the beginning!"
Who would consider this to be a fun mechanic and something that adds to the gameplay?

@Lensflare they need a losing condition, though generally the 3 knockouts is enough and it will cause people to fail much more than a timer will. It is easy to make broken setups and people usually speed run monsters in like 3 minutes.
For all I know the timer is a legacy mechanic. They can remove it from the main missions and nothing of value would be lost.

The only case where the timer made some sort of sense for me was with the last boss of the DLC. I can’t remember the name but it has so much health and the fight is so long that I failed it often due to a time out. Which forced me and my friend to improve our setup as much as possible. Making an efficient build to be able to beat a mission is probably its only real use case.

@Lensflare i found it quite nice, how factorio did it. They don't have timers, but there are achievements, when finishing certain things within an amount of time.

@thebiochemic yup, I consider Factorio to be one of the best games of all time. Can’t wait for the Expansion!

@ars1

Fatalis. Also known as "oh God I'm melting" PTSD.

Now then, the timers are there to introduce some element of challenge and competitiveness.

Don't play many puzzle games, but in the case of MH it is indeed kind of a legacy mechanic (confusing it's a game people played on the tube going to work and such).

In the case of world which is oh so much more newb-friendly, I don't think I failed a quest due to time ever. (I failed some of the bounties with like "kill these two tempered elders in 15 mins", but those aren't mandatory).

Then again I have like 800 hours on the game, at this point a regular hunt depends the most on where the monster spawns and how long it takes me to get there. The carnage that ensues is over in 2 minutes.

It's terrible for a few reasons.

1. Designers discount play testing enormously. Metrics make a game almost as much or more than design itself. Without metrics balancing is a blind process, it's luck and mere intuition.

2. Traditional puzzle players don't expect timers, it's not part of the expected genre mechanics, but it is starting to become part of the genre.

3. Timers go against the basic premise of puzzles entirely, because you're expected a little bit of leeway to play around, try moves or ideas, and backtrack. It's tension without a purpose.

Metrics and balancing would let designers see the quantiles of move counts for groups of players to finish a given puzzle, and the average time per move. Thats what testing is for.

Another option is looking at player performance, and adjusting timer allocation for the next puzzle of equal difficulty.

Although dynamic difficulty does tend to get cheesed at higher levels of play. But players will find the cheese regardless.