Obsoleted assets

Video game concept

As the story progresses, your old assets, such as underlings, tools, vehicles, skills, etc. become obsolete as you gain access to better.

147
games
21
platforms
Related: (by countering some of the arguments that cause things to become obsolete)
* Dynamic accuracy
* Skill synergy
* Equipment-based
* Ill-equipped
in general:
* Iron mace is more powerful than wooden club. More commonly: material change causes items to be more efficient, even when the material change wouldn't really make it more efficient.
... conversely, iron weapon being more powerful than bronze weapon makes no sense. Bronze is actually the superior for most things, but neither material would make the weapon cause more damage or be faster than the other.

In RPGs:
* Caused by overplaying the RPG part where the effectiveness of items is assigned arbitrary numbers, usually related to how big and cool they are.
* Sometimes even skills and spells get trampled by this, where earlier skills no longer have any purpose.
* Sword does more damage than dagger
... makes more sense, sword has longer reach and can penetrate farther. However, sword stab and dagger stab are about equally lethal, although it is much harder to recover from sword stab even if help arrives.
* Especially common in action-RPGS where the player has the ability to buy better equipment. The process of "upgrading" your equipment (switching to stuff with better stats) is repeated quite a few times.

In shooters:
* Taint from RPGs, weapons are given arbitrary values of effectiveness, usually related to how big and cool they are. Especially in games with limited capacity to carry weapons.
... This is sometimes quite valid, though, such as pump shotgun being obsoleted by auto shotgun. There may be no damage difference, but the latter has noticeably higher fire rate.
... Sometimes mitigated by ammo availability. Though counter-intuitively many weapons commonly share the same ammo.
* With firearms using same ammo type should have no differences in damage per shot as the projectile is what defines the effectiveness, not the weapon that triggers it. Weapons may contribute to how much noise they make (reduced noise/flash _does_ affect the projectile's damage potential negatively) or how accurate the projectile is (longer barrels and so forth).
* Immense differences in weapon accuracy, kickback and other features that have no perceivable cause.
... at extreme ranges accuracy differences may make sense, but rarely do you get to shoot at things at such ranges where it should matter. Kickback is different with weapons as well, but this is often overplayed.

In strategy:
* More powerful units gained later on, usually higher tech level units that completely annihilate anything of lower level.

The first Obsoleted assets video game was released in 1991.

2K Games, Capcom and THQ published most of these games.

Parent group

Inventory

Platforms

Windows 68
Linux 23
X360 14
PS3 7
MS-DOS 6
Mac OS X 4
PS4 4
PS2 4
PS 3
Xbox One 3
WinCE 1
Mobile 1
Internet Only 1
Flash 1
iOS 1
Amiga 1
3DO 1
Amiga AGA 1
PS Vita 1
Pandora 1
Xbox 1

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