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Game design choices that completely ruin the game?


Razzie.P

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10 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

The driving test you had to pass to prove yourself at the start of Driver on the Playstation and the final mission, both very frustrating. 

 

I politely disagree with this. Perhaps the last mission was 2 h4rdc0r3 (I remember I only was able to beat it thanks to some bug, there were so many police cars crashing against my car that I started flying through the streets and somehow managed to escape and get to the end), but the driving test was a cool way to start the game and more fun than most of the missions.

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3 hours ago, IntelliMission said:

 

I politely disagree with this. Perhaps the last mission was 2 h4rdc0r3 (I remember I only was able to beat it thanks to some bug, there were so many police cars crashing against my car that I started flying through the streets and somehow managed to escape and get to the end), but the driving test was a cool way to start the game and more fun than most of the missions.

I welcome your polite disagreement. 

 

Be a boring place if we all agreed with each other. 

 

I bought Driver as whilst i loathe driving in real life, i love iconic car chases in Hollywood movies, so i was looking for escapism, having to pass a test, rather than just get behind the wheel and mess about on the open road soured the initial experience for me and a mate and myself spent hours trying to crack last mission. 

 

The only bigger annoyance in a game, where realism brought me crashing back down to my real life affairs, Fork Lift driving in Shen Mue, DC. 

 

Had to drive one for work at the time, hated it, hated the job, was not pleased i had to do it in the game. 

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8 hours ago, jhd said:

 

That title also appeared on the PS 2 in North America. It was described as having RPG elements, so that is why I bought it. I played once or twice, but the AI cheated so badly that I just gave-up. 

 

What really frustrates me are mandatory action sequences in RPG games. I do not care for action games, or I would play that genre. Final Fantasy VII has such a sequence (must jump over rolling barrels; requires precise timing), as does Breath of Fire IV (I do not recall the specific details anymore). I used a Gameshark to get through the former, and I just abandoned the latter.  

 

Yes it cheated pretty heavily so we ended up using some wii cheats to beat it.


Same thing with action sequences in say…a turn based game, I'll throw on some cheats and just get past it.   


Speaking of action sequences why do they put collectible stuff in an action sequence when you clearly don't have a lot of time to pick them up? I think this happened in one of the Mass Effect games, everything is going to shit, you have a thousand rounds of enemy fire firing at you, the ship is gonna explode in 30 seconds and look there's all this collectible stuff laying around! A lot of players say ‘well snag it on your next playthrough’ well guess what I'm not playing it again. 


QTE’s are another piece of garbage but it depends on the game, Resident Evil 6 is a good example of crap design although they added an option to turn those off, still the game was crap imo. 
 

Edited by cimerians
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I'll generally echo everyone's thoughts by saying I wish games weren't made to be so difficult, and would always allow Konami-code-like options. This especially goes for earlier games, such as ones on the Nintendo Entertainment System. Never understood that design model. Maybe the thought was no one would ever play to the end on most games, and the system wouldn't have a long lifespan? 

 

And I have to say, sorry to hear about that ruined Mario Party game, especially since it was a family event...that's supposed to be the WiiU's expertise. 

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It's usually got to be something really major in a title i had previously been putting the hours in on, to kill it for me. 

 

 

I recently went back and finished Wasteland (after abandoning it for months) and Mass Effect Andromeda on PS4, despite having a pile of shame games to play on it and other systems. 

 

 

Did the same for Soma, but in that case only after a patch was released where you couldn't die. 

 

Made the game so much more enjoyable for me and would never of returned to it if no fix had been made available. 

 

 

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2018/02/new_soma_ps4_update_adds_safe_mode

 

 

I'd welcome such a move by developers on so many modern titles. 

Edited by Lost Dragon
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- Timed sequences in graphic adventures

 

- The dull, super-long overhead 2D stages in the 1993 Jurassic Park game for MS-DOS, which must be played in order to reach the awesome Doom style sections (there is a workaround for this: changing the name of the file "JP3D.EXE" to "JP2D.EXE", but that also removes the story elements from the game). The 3D stages are really cool: you don't have enough bullets and can't kill every raptor, so you end up just running away from them as if it was a survival horror.

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12 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Any game that requires any grinding at all is badly designed.

Nah, grinding is only bad when the activity involved is badly designed. So for example a RPG with awful combat will be a chore if a lot of its is required, otherwise it works just great.

 

Overall, if this thread was about to descend into complaining about excessive difficulty then I would have ti politely disagree. For me it's the other way around: modern games are very often ruined by excessive dumbing down and near-paranoiac worry that players will quit when faced with anything ever remotely challenging.

 

These GTA V nearly-indestructible cars I mentioned earlier are one example. I also remember Mass Effect 2 being so easy it was nearly farcical - I played it on the next-to-hardest level and think only died like 2 times in the whole game (more because of boredom than actual challenge) even though I stopped upgrading anything halfway through (because it was all the same anyway).

 

This is one of the main reasons I play retro games, and why the Souls series has been such a hit, which is quite paradoxical if you think about it.

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18 minutes ago, youxia said:

Nah, grinding is only bad when the activity involved is badly designed. So for example a RPG with awful combat will be a chore if a lot of its is required, otherwise it works just great.

Grinding is bad because it means that the devs didn't bother to/attempted and failed to create an appropriate level of EXP gain = bad game design. You should never be forced to do it at all in order to progress naturally through the game, because if you have to, that means it's not natural progression but something you must go out of your way to do. If the player wants to do it in a game, whether it has good design or not, that's fine, but it should never be something that is required.

 

This does depend on difficulty setting to some degree, I suppose (Tales of the Abyss Unknown difficulty, especially in the Japanese PS2 version, comes to mind), but I have seen RPGs that give higher EXP on higher difficulties than on lower difficulties in an attempt to try to balance the game. Of course, at least in one instance this apparently breaks the game in reverse, where the EXP gain on easy is actually not enough, so...

Edited by Steven Pendleton
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Any game that has a system/mechanic with your equipment breaking/degrading with use.

 

I don't want to waste time buying another sword because I used my old one 20 times and now its broken.

 

 

I also absolutely despised the healing system in Metal Gear Solid 3 where you had to navigate multiple menus to heal a wound instead of just eating a ration like in the older ones.

 

You still had to eat a ration, but now you need to go through several other menus to select the suture or bandage or whatever to keep your health from continuing to degrade.

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33 minutes ago, T.A.P. said:

Any game that has a system/mechanic with your equipment breaking/degrading with use.

 

I don't want to waste time buying another sword because I used my old one 20 times and now its broken.

 

 

I also absolutely despised the healing system in Metal Gear Solid 3 where you had to navigate multiple menus to heal a wound instead of just eating a ration like in the older ones.

 

You still had to eat a ration, but now you need to go through several other menus to select the suture or bandage or whatever to keep your health from continuing to degrade.

Weapon breakage has been an annoyance,but thankfully hasn't occurred in enough titles to really bug me, guess i have been lucky. 

 

The wound healing mechanic in MGS III was labourous though, great shout. 

 

I'd add Forbidden Siren on Playstation 2 as well, similarly labourous sequence just to put a key in a lock, unlock and open a door. 

 

 

Nightmare when you were being pursued by a foe or group of foes. 

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1 hour ago, T.A.P. said:

Any game that has a system/mechanic with your equipment breaking/degrading with use.

 

I don't want to waste time buying another sword because I used my old one 20 times and now its broken.

 

 

Yeah, that one single mechanic killed Breath of the Wild for me.  Bought it at launch, was super excited to play a new Zelda game, but after a few hours, I was done.  I've promised myself I'll give it another shot, though, so hoping it clicks.  But that "breaking" crap... jeez

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5 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

I'd add Forbidden Siren on Playstation 2 as well, similarly labourous sequence just to put a key in a lock, unlock and open a door. 

Nightmare when you were being pursued by a foe or group of foes.

To be fair that's usually the point of a survival horror game. ? It's a actually a genre in which design errors (unpractical camera angles, confusing UI, limited inventory, etc.) are made on purpose.

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7 hours ago, Razzie.P said:

 

Yeah, that one single mechanic killed Breath of the Wild for me.  Bought it at launch, was super excited to play a new Zelda game, but after a few hours, I was done.  I've promised myself I'll give it another shot, though, so hoping it clicks.  But that "breaking" crap... jeez

 

Yeah, Breath of the Wild was another one of those games that just did absolutely nothing for me.

 

Although that's reminded me of a few other design elements that usually get me to swear off a game:

 

'Roguelike' - A term I already disliked, but so many games in that genre just use it as an excuse for sloppy level design, cheap deaths, and unfair difficulty spikes. "The player expects to die sometimes, so we don't have to work as hard on testing to make sure things are balanced!"

 

'Crafting system' - Why have the player look the item he needs to progress when we can make him collect 20 different items that he then has to combine into the item he needs to progress? That way he'll have to play twice as long to accomplish an easy task. It's another crappy way to pad out a game's run time.

 

'Open World' - An excuse to make a big, giant empty map with nothing to do in it so the designers don't have to bother with designing fun, unique, memorable levels. "Just copy paste the same few trees and houses, and then do that 20 more times. Bam! We got our game's 8 exciting (empty) cities for the player to explore (and do nothing in)!"

Edited by T.A.P.
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3 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

To be fair that's usually the point of a survival horror game. ? It's a actually a genre in which design errors (unpractical camera angles, confusing UI, limited inventory, etc.) are made on purpose.

It didn't work though. 

 

Rather than create a sense of say blind panic, your hands shaking with fear (they could of used the rumble to good effect here), it just felt clunky, drawn out and poorly implemented. 

 

If my memory serves, it was addressed somewhat on the PS3 version, maybe due to feedback?. 

 

But been years since I played it. 

 

I could appreciate the clumsy combat in Silent Hill, you weren't supposed to be proficient in use of firearms and blunt weapons, unlike your STARS characters in Resident Evil, you were just an average guy caught up in a nightmare. 

 

But with Forbidden Siren, it just felt like poor game mechanics. 

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Far Cry II and it's flawed health system. 

 

Start the game and your immediately stricken with malaria. 

 

The  disease creates a dependence on medicine, but treatment can't simply be found in the environment, ohh no, instead, medicine can only be bought from civilians. 

 

Don't treat it, you'll pass out during firefights etc.. 

 

Your weapons can jam, because of the dusty environment...

 

You can break your hand if you get injured too badly...

 

Add that the fires spreading out of control, foes constantly spawning from roadblock check points and then see how much freedom you have to roam an open world. 

Edited by Lost Dragon
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7 hours ago, Lost Dragon said:

It didn't work though. 

 

Rather than create a sense of say blind panic, your hands shaking with fear (they could of used the rumble to good effect here), it just felt clunky, drawn out and poorly implemented. 

 

If my memory serves, it was addressed somewhat on the PS3 version, maybe due to feedback?. 

 

But been years since I played it. 

 

I could appreciate the clumsy combat in Silent Hill, you weren't supposed to be proficient in use of firearms and blunt weapons, unlike your STARS characters in Resident Evil, you were just an average guy caught up in a nightmare. 

 

But with Forbidden Siren, it just felt like poor game mechanics. 

OK, I have never played Forbidden Siren, so I don't know. It's quite difficult to draw the line actually.

For instance, in Resident Evil games until the 4th one, you have to pause to watch your life meter, which is just a vague pulse. It's clever because you don't actually know how many hits you can take before dying (and also how much life the plants restore precisely), so each attack is scary - when they threw away that idea, they kept the chainsaw guys that kill you in one hit to keep it tense.

In Silent Hill 2, they used a similar system but even more frustrating imho. Your life is basically a photograph that becomes more and more red, so it's really difficult to know how much more red it can turn. So you tend to use your items too soon... ? What upset me even more was a confrontation with Pyramid Head in which you're just supposed to wait for him to go away, but attacks slow him down for some reason (it almost looks like a glitch) so I used a lot of ammo for nothing, which made the rest of the game even harder. :( I know some prefer Silent Hill games because they find Resident Evil games too action-oriented, but to me the Resident Evil games find a better balance with these "voluntary design errors", while other games - and Forbidden Siren might be one of them - are just frustrating.

That being said, SOMA is one of my favorite games in recent years. :)

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8 hours ago, T.A.P. said:

Although that's reminded me of a few other design elements that usually get me to swear off a game:

Same here, and I would add "physics based" (which usually sounds like a good idea until you realize it's completely broken).

There was a time I would vote a lot on Steam Greenlight, and many games seemed to be described as "Open world MMO physics based procedurally generated roguelike RPG with a crafting system" and I'm not exaggerating that much. ? Of course these very ambitious games were developed by only one or two guys. Most of the time, they expected the physics and procedurally generated stuff would "create" the gameplay and level design on their own... A bit like the first Halo that relied too much imho on AI and physics and had a terrible level design, which was particularly apparent in the library level in which the enemy AI is far more basic.

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18 hours ago, Steven Pendleton said:

Grinding is bad because it means that the devs didn't bother to/attempted and failed to create an appropriate level of EXP gain = bad game design. You should never be forced to do it at all in order to progress naturally through the game, because if you have to, that means it's not natural progression but something you must go out of your way to do. If the player wants to do it in a game, whether it has good design or not, that's fine, but it should never be something that is required.

 

That's only possible in a scenario where you have enough exploration/story/whatever content to justify "natural progression". Of course such content is not easy to manufacture, and games could be very short if that was the case so naturally some sort of grinding is used.

 

Secondly, there are many people, myself included, who actually enjoy this side of RPGs - character building through experience, which is mainly gained via combat. So we don't have a problem with there being a lot of it, as long as it's well designed and balanced.

 

Making absolute statements about game design is a risky business :)

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1 hour ago, roots.genoa said:

OK, I have never played Forbidden Siren, so I don't know. It's quite difficult to draw the line actually.

For instance, in Resident Evil games until the 4th one, you have to pause to watch your life meter, which is just a vague pulse. It's clever because you don't actually know how many hits you can take before dying (and also how much life the plants restore precisely), so each attack is scary - when they threw away that idea, they kept the chainsaw guys that kill you in one hit to keep it tense.

In Silent Hill 2, they used a similar system but even more frustrating imho. Your life is basically a photograph that becomes more and more red, so it's really difficult to know how much more red it can turn. So you tend to use your items too soon... ? What upset me even more was a confrontation with Pyramid Head in which you're just supposed to wait for him to go away, but attacks slow him down for some reason (it almost looks like a glitch) so I used a lot of ammo for nothing, which made the rest of the game even harder. :( I know some prefer Silent Hill games because they find Resident Evil games too action-oriented, but to me the Resident Evil games find a better balance with these "voluntary design errors", while other games - and Forbidden Siren might be one of them - are just frustrating.

That being said, SOMA is one of my favorite games in recent years. :)

I'm a big horror game fan and can excuse a lot of flaws-Fatal Frame/Project Zero could frustrate when you were confined to a narrow area by wooden rails, but the ghosts could have free movement to attack from all angles, atmosphere in game was so good, especially with a Dolby 5.1 surround sound set up ?

 

Design chances-Silent Hill 3 just wasn't for me, Team Silent said they put in stronger guns as you encountered far bigger, more powerful creatures, but it just felt off to myself. 

 

A lot of folk hated Doom III torch and gun mechanics, but i loved them, same with Resident Evil 4 stand and shoot mechanics. 

 

 

How to accurately portray diminishing health has been a stumbling block for survival horror titles, having to call up a pause screen breaks the immersion, which is why i loved the DC VMU being used as a heart monitor, worked far better than say the light on the PS4 controller changing colour. 

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Later stages of Metroud Prime on the Game Cube, you'd be hit by electric bolts from the space pirates weaponry, so your character instinctively puts her arm up in front of her face to shield it, fine, but when you'd been holding down buttons to lock-on and charge your own weapon and now lost both... 

 

 

Abandoned it at that point, i had already been struggling with it's checkpoint system on boss fights. 

 

Die on boss fight and respawn not back in heart of the battle, but outside the arena and you'd have to trek back to the area and go through the motions again. 

 

 

Think i gave up on Darksiders early on for a similar reason, early boss fight had a tedious lock - on system you had to use during the fight. 

 

 

Nearly gave up on Soul Reaver PS1 when it committed the hideous crime of spawning goes when you were busy trying to do a tedious block shifting puzzle. 

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