I would have enjoyed 'X' if 'Y'

[TheHeinousAnus]

Hello Guys,

The topic of this post is what would you have enjoyed more if it was a little bit different?

For example I would have adored Star Wars: The Old Republic if it was an epic single player RPG rather than an MMO because I find that it has great single player features but other than that its a WoW clone, Imagine:

8 Great story lines,
8 Different sets of great characters,
Thousands of weapons and armor,
etc,

Add in some more features from the earlier games like party based combat, crafting and character dialog it would be golden. I still think SWTOR is a good game I just feel focused too much on two opposing aspects.

 

[shrekfan246]

Yay, I get to rip on Final Fantasy XIII again. I haven't done that enough the past few days.

I would have enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII if it were still a Final Fantasy game.

Sorry, let me reign it in a bit.

If all of the pacing had been completely overhauled and the game hadn't been terrified of letting the player do cool stuff against enemies, I would've been able to put up with the extreme linearity, complete lack of world-building in the form of characters, NPCs, towns, cities, and side-quests, and the ham-fisted nature of the main character arcs (which was destroyed by the terrible pacing). Alternatively, if all of the latter stuff had been different, I would've been able to put up with the horrific pacing of the story and the game's over-reliance on using cutscenes to show the characters doing awesome stuff in what would've been normal combat encounters the player controlled themselves in any earlier Final Fantasy game.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

I would've enjoyed D3 if it would be more like PoE.
I would've enjoyed D3 more if there was no AH from the get go.
I would've enjoyed D3 if it would've been released in the state it currently is.

Yes, i'm still mad at Blizz for D3 and ruining my 2nd most beloved franchise after they killed my most beloved one.

 

[JayRPG]

I probably would have enjoyed Skyrim if:
It had a complete combat overhaul,
Character progression actually happened,
and pretty much the entire game was redesigned excluding the world map.

 

[Fat Hippo]

I would have enjoyed Far Cry 2, if those damn guard posts wouldn't have respawned and been fucking everywhere, and even more so if enemies hadn't had such absurd amounts of health. A headshot is a headshot, and in a shooter trying to seem "realistic" that should mean death.

 

[Ikasury]

i would have enjoyed Dishonored more if it weren't such a load of bullock's compared to what i thought it was supposed to be... and open-world 'do fun/crazy stuff' to assassinate people... instead it was just a long like of bi-linear gameplay, ending in either 'good' or 'evil' endings with basically all the same shenanigans only different dialogue -.- shame on you bethesda~

also, would'a been nice if it felt like i accomplished anything by doing that crap... which i didn't, hours of my life wasted... sigh... oh well, back to gamestop for you~ (one of the few games i ever returned)

 

[Smeatza]

I would have enjoyed Overlord 2 if I got it on PC instead of PS3.
That control scheme was built for a mouse and keyboard.

 

[DaWaffledude]

I would have enjoyed Mass Effect 2 if it hadn't mysteriously forgotten that the first game was an RPG/TPS hybrid and not just a generic cover shooter. Also, that Cerberus nonsense.

 

[Zhukov]

I would have enjoyed the Arkham games if they weren't about Batman.

Joyless, scowling, conversationally crippled prick, please get out of my game.

 

[SKBPinkie]

I would have enjoyed Bioshock:Infinite, The Last of Us, Gone Home, and GTA V if only they had better gameplay and good controls.

I would have enjoyed the Arkham games if they weren't about Batman.

Joyless, scowling, conversationally crippled prick, please get out of my game.

This as well.

The characters were boring, and they were badly written, IMO. Plus, the combat system was incrementally better than a QTE. I managed to get long combos, but it never felt satisfying.

 

[solemnwar]

I probably would enjoy Morrowind more if the combat wasn't fuck awful and you didn't move so damn slowly. And fast travel. They had fast travel in Daggerfall, dammit, and you didn't even have to have DISCOVERED the place first, like in Oblivion and Skyrim, FFS. "Oh but they have the silt striders and the boats and yadda yadda" yes but you still have to GET to them first and when you're in the middle of nowhere with that slow-as-fuck walk it gets really old really fast.

And don't get me started on that fucking journal. If you honestly keep a journal that bad, the world doesn't deserve to be saved.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Yay, I get to rip on Final Fantasy XIII again. I haven't done that enough the past few days.

I would have enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII if it were still a Final Fantasy game.

Sorry, let me reign it in a bit.

If all of the pacing had been completely overhauled and the game hadn't been terrified of letting the player do cool stuff against enemies, I would've been able to put up with the extreme linearity, complete lack of world-building in the form of characters, NPCs, towns, cities, and side-quests, and the ham-fisted nature of the main character arcs (which was destroyed by the terrible pacing). Alternatively, if all of the latter stuff had been different, I would've been able to put up with the horrific pacing of the story and the game's over-reliance on using cutscenes to show the characters doing awesome stuff in what would've been normal combat encounters the player controlled themselves in any earlier Final Fantasy game.

I knew I wouldn't be the first to talk about FFXIII...Honestly, I would have liked Final Fantasy XIII if it had a traditional Final Fantasy fight system. I can forgive the linearity, the bad characters, the sexism, the lack of towns...I could have overlooked almost all of it (seriously incestuous, motorcycle, Shiva who only serves Snow?! WTF?!?) if the combat system was the same as or, similar to that of FFX or, IX or, VIII...

---

I would have liked Trinity Universe and, Ni No Kuni if not for the incredibly slow boil.

I would have liked Far Cry 2 a lot more if the stealth system was consistent...or rather, if there was a stealth system

I would have liked Justice League Heroes if you could play as any hero on any level

I would have liked Kid Icarus Uprising if it had better controls

 

[tippy2k2]

Option #1
Dark Souls
Reason: Technical issues

I got a few hours into it and was greatly enjoying getting my ass kicked. The game wasn't doing TOO bad, though the frame-rate suffered every once in a while. Until I got to this part where you had to cross a bridge with bad guys on it and a giant dragon swoops down and lights everything on fire.

The game chugged so badly there that I literally could not fight. The straw that broke the camels back for me and I never went back since. I have now found out how you're "supposed" to get past that part but I'm not about to try to get back into the game when these issues just keep presenting themselves. How you have a game fail that badly from a technical stand-point on a console still baffles me to this day...

Option #2
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Reason: Piss poor AI

I can't believe people loved this game so much. While I did eventually finish it because the story and characters were cool, the AI was incredibly stupid. All you had to do for the vast majority of fights is send Fredrick ahead to pull bad guys and then run away. A few bad guys would split from the group and the team would decimate them. Fredrick goes on ahead again, pulls more bad guys, rinse and repeat until everyone is dead. Not to mention that all enemies had a death wish, since many would attack Fredrick with a 0 possible damage attack while Frederick would murder them. It was pathetic.

The only challenge the game really posed was a bullshit tactic of ambushing. You couldn't prepare for it, they appeared wherever they wanted to, and they got to move right away. Basically the only deaths I ran into from that game wasn't from it outsmarting me; it was the game cheating by "ambushing" my back line with three bad guys.

 

[shrekfan246]

I knew I wouldn't be the first to talk about FFXIII...Honestly, I would have liked Final Fantasy XIII if it had a traditional Final Fantasy fight system. I can forgive the linearity, the bad characters, the sexism, the lack of towns...I could have overlooked almost all of it (seriously incestuous, motorcycle, Shiva who only serves Snow?! WTF?!?) if the combat system was the same as or, similar to that of FFX or, IX or, VIII...

Well, that is part of what I meant about the game being afraid of letting the player do anything.

I've even seen defenders say that the combat system is excused because it was supposed to be about the Paradigm system, so the fact that you could just mash Auto-Battle for forty hours was fine, occasionally pressing... what was it, R1 or something? I don't remember the way you switched anymore, but I know it was barely necessary for the twelve hours of the game I played, and was obnoxious for the four or five fights where it was required because they artificially inflated the difficulty of the bosses by making them essentially invulnerable to damage if they weren't Staggered.

A complaint often imposed upon Final Fantasy XII was that the combat played itself too much, but the thing about that is that the player actually has to set up the AI in the first place, and can micromanage as much or as little as they want. In XIII, the player literally has no agency in the combat beyond determining what set of abilities the characters are using at a particular time. Sure, you can manually select the abilities you want one character to use, but there's no point because the Auto-Battle will automatically choose the "optimal" selections, except for maybe the buff/debuff Paradigms. But if the AI could determine when to switch Paradigms, the player would basically have no reason to even participate. And considering how little you do outside of the combat to interact with the world, it means that the player just has nothing to do. And in a forty+ hour video game, that's an insult.

 

[SnakeTrousers]

I would have enjoyed Borderlands 1/2 if the guns had a little heft or kick. That's far from my only complaint about Borderlands, but it's probably the most obvious issue in a game that's all about its weaponry.

 

[RealRT]

I would play the HELL out of Burnout Paradise if the menus in that game weren't so fucking horrible. NFS: Hot Pursuit 2010 was basically the same but without the shitty, so I played the hell out of that.

 

[immortalfrieza]

Snip

If you can autobattle your way through the game, it means that the party AI is really good, too good. If the computer is so competent that the player isn't really needed that's a problem, however I personally can't bring myself to fault SE for that, not after playing so many games where the party AI is blindly stupid and gets you killed over and over again, to the point where fights are more luck based than anything else. Truth is the only problem I personally had with 13's combat is the absolutely annoying "if the leader dies it's over" thing that not only makes no sense but has never worked in any game ever.

OT: I would have enjoyed Final Fantasy 12 much more if the combat had decided to go in one direction or another instead of trying to halfway it. The combat was an odd and rather boring merge between real time combat and turn based, and while 13 did something similar the combat was much more fast paced and interesting to give it a pass, while 12's combat was slow and ponderous. After seeing actual real time combat in games like the Tales series seeing something that pretends to be real time while actually being turned based doesn't sit well.

 

[immortalfrieza]

OT: I would of enjoyed Skyrim more if...
It had actual choice making decisions when you joined up with either the Stormcloaks or Imperials...

Or more in general. Most of the quests in the game lack anything resembling a choice involved, it's either do the quest the way they want you to or don't do it. This is especially noticeable for some of the more morally inclined quests, most of which lack any way for the player to avoid either being a saint or a complete psychopath and still complete them. This makes the player character seem rather insane if the player like to do everything since they go from saving a town to randomly murdering people at the drop of a hat.

About the Imperials and Stormcloaks, I found myself wishing there was a way to either mediate between the 2 groups to form a peace or just kick everybody's asses and make them have peace.

 

[shrekfan246]

Snip

If you can autobattle your way through the game, it means that the party AI is really good, too good. If the computer is so competent that the player isn't really needed that's a problem, however I personally can't bring myself to fault SE for that, not after playing so many games where the party AI is blindly stupid and gets you killed over and over again, to the point where fights are more luck based than anything else. Truth is the only problem I personally had with 13's combat is the absolutely annoying "if the leader dies it's over" thing that not only makes no sense but has never worked in any game ever.

See, I can fault Square Enix for that, because it's not about how good or bad the AI is. It's about the fact that the AI completely removes the need for player input. In a video game, that's criminal. You should absolutely never, under any circumstances, remove all player agency from the gameplay of your game. And it was never a problem in previous Final Fantasy games, because the player chose all actions for the entire party, and it worked.

I get exactly what they were going for with the new system, but the problem is that I don't think it was a positive step for the franchise. When I play a turn-based or pseudo-turn-based JRPG, I want to feel like I'm actually making tactical decisions in combat, or at least like there's some stake I have in the encounter. Final Fantasy XIII didn't have that.