If you could improve any game by changing one thing, what would it be?

[Scarim Coral]

Xenoblade Chronicle- Make the quest giver/ marker/ related npc red point on the map ALOT BIGGER! Also adding the specific location on where the quest npc in the quest menu is also welcome too (like showing what time the npc show up).

Seriously that was the only flaws it had for a grea game!

 

[spartan231490]

I would fix all of modern fps gaming by going back to the first game with jelly on the screen bullshit and removing that bullshit.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I would have made Space Marine more 40k. It was severely lacking in that grim and dark. I mean we have inquisitor Thaddeus believing Titus was corrupted latent psyker and that Lieutenant Mira was an accomplice who shielded him. So what does Thaddeus do? Arrest Titus and let Mira go....

Time was Titus and Mira would have been killed on the spot, Garia would be virus bombed, the Ultramarines would be heavily investigated for lax screening, and Mira's entire family would be purged.
That's the grim dark I know and love!

 

[immortalfrieza]

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Cinematic Movie
Add the actual battles that happened in the DS game! HOW DARE YOU JUST FADE TO BLACK ON THAT SHIT!!

(rant) Seriously, you took out the only good thing that made people actually tolerate playing through it (especially when, this time, we get to see it instead of actually playing it) and you replaced it with these "fade to black" jump-cuts... Even someone who will never play the DS version would wonder why the fuck you didn't try to animate those "off-camera" battle sequences, let alone a "screenshot slideshow" with sound effects playing in the background to signal a battle taking place...

I mean... DA FUCK, Squeenix?! (/rant)
In the mortal words of Larry Wilmore: "That's right ************, I haven't forgotten about you!"

Yes. it's incredibly ironic that 358/2 Days and ReCoded, the two games that could have used the HD treatment more than any other game in the series by a long shot are the ones SquareEnix decided to half ass. EVERY other game in the collections were remastered well but barely added to at all after it was all said and done, but if 358/2 Days and ReCoded were also remastered both would have been enough on their own to justify buying the HD collections even for people that already bought and played every one of the games just for the significant improvement in graphics alone, not to mention any number of other things they could have done. This is especially painful because the really poor graphics were the only real issues either of those games had that the other games up to their creation didn't.

I'd turn SWTOR into a single-player offline game. I hate playing with other people, and you need other people to run flash points and stay in level parameters with the story. It's not the best game, but it kept me entertained and I found it to be a bit like KOTOR 2.5.

Seconded. SWTOR could have been an absolutely amazing and probably even now unsurpassed single-player experience. I mean, 8 highly customizable player characters from both sides of a war with multiple effective companions and significant NPCs? HELL YES! However, due to the monotonous gameplay and immersion breaking inherent to MMOs it really really hurt what could have been incredible and instead is just meh.

Xenosaga, the characters and their art. I'd have kept to the idea of Jr becoming an adult in the second game, Had Momo and her fellow androids look about sixteen instead of six, and generally made the designs cooler (Chaos looks like a gonk, Ziggy just looks badly designed with those stupid legs, KOS MOS was ok but Shion could have used some work too). Pretty much everyone except Jr and Shion would have had a radical costume redesign too.

If the characters had been more appealing i wouldn't have had to struggle to enjoy the game so much

I really hate Xenosaga's shift in art style after the first game, not only for the jarring effect it had but the fact that it went straight into uncanny valley especially with the freaking eyes, ugh. Aside from that, the change of several voice voice actors with terrible ones, the bad sound work for those voice actors that made them even worse than they really were, and the godawful new combat system just made everything all around bad after the gem that was the first Xenosaga game. I don't know whether most of these issues were fixed with the third game since I didn't want to struggle through the second to get to it as I unfortunately usually feel compulsively obligated to do when playing a series but the damage to the series was done either way.

OT: One of my own is FF8's entire magic junctioning system was downright terrible. Even the fastest ways of getting more magic for junctioning was incredibly boring, tedious, and too far longer to accomplish the EXACT same thing a classic experience to improve stats leveling system could have done just as well with the tiny fraction of the tedium involved. The card system was a symptom of this, in FF9 you could ignore it pretty much entirely if you wanted to but in FF8 it's relation to the junctioning and weapon upgrade systems meant that it was all but mandatory to take part in it.

Another, is the entire leveling system of the Elder Scrolls games. I really feel that this series would work much better with the leveling to increase skills system that Fallout uses or rather used to use. Sure, it's seems like it would be more realistic to have to actually work at something to get better at it, but in practice it's far far too easy to exploit said system and max out everything without ever having to finish any quests other than the few required to be able to access the open world or really do much of anything. It's much better to go with a experience based leveling system because it requires the player to actually play the game to get good at it, even if it's just finding more and more monsters to kill, and it makes doing quests themselves more practical.

 

[Quellist]

Xenosaga, the characters and their art. I'd have kept to the idea of Jr becoming an adult in the second game, Had Momo and her fellow androids look about sixteen instead of six, and generally made the designs cooler (Chaos looks like a gonk, Ziggy just looks badly designed with those stupid legs, KOS MOS was ok but Shion could have used some work too). Pretty much everyone except Jr and Shion would have had a radical costume redesign too.

If the characters had been more appealing i wouldn't have had to struggle to enjoy the game so much

I really hate Xenosaga's shift in art style after the first game, not only for the jarring effect it had but the fact that it went straight into uncanny valley especially with the freaking eyes, ugh. Aside from that, the change of several voice voice actors with terrible ones, the bad sound work for those voice actors that made them even worse than they really were, and the godawful new combat system just made everything all around bad after the gem that was the first Xenosaga game. I don't know whether most of these issues were fixed with the third game since I didn't want to struggle through the second to get to it as I unfortunately usually feel compulsively obligated to do when playing a series but the damage to the series was done either way.

The combat improves more than you would possibly believe for the 3rd game. Though the art is better than 2 its still not great but if you like the story the 3rd game is worth checking out. I didn't go near it for ages until i got convinced but truly its a big improvement on #2

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Skyrim: Replace the combat system.

...With God Hand's combat system.

While we're at it, also replace the Skyrim theme song with the GodHand song:

 

[mistercheese]

GTA online. Remove insurance and just respawn personal vehicles. Explosives are the only chance low levels have against a lvl200 in a t20 or kuruma.

The game in general needs to recognize cases of self defense much better.

 

[Ryallen]

Borderlands 1-2, if I didn't have to bend over to pick up ammo and power-ups, then it would make the game so much quicker and fluid. (Actually a lot of games seem to have this problem where they make picking up base loot take too long.)

In Borderlands 2, you automatically pick up ammo and health by walking over it. Trust me, I've played the game for over 100 hours. Ammo and health are yours if you just walk or run over it.

OT: Dragon's Dogma was one of the better action RPGs in recent memory, but I had a few qualms with it. Otherwise it's a very good game and I recommend it wholeheartedly. First, all of the side missions required so much of my time that it was insane. Normally, I could live with that, I like exploring areas in games, but one of the biggest obstacles in the game was that there was no rhyme or reason to enemy placement based on level. Basically, on a side quest that was within your level range, as if that was a thing, you could easily run into a bandit squad who tank your strongest attacks like butterfly kisses and can double suplex you to death within 30 seconds. The game says that you can run from fights, but I don't think that justifies the fact that there are incredibly high level enemies in areas that are explored early in the game.

Second, there needed to be a better fast travel system. I can live with the fact that you have to buy the stones used to fast travel. That's fine, it's not that rare a thing. What I DO hate, however, is that there are two places that you can fast travel unless you happen to have a specific item that allows you to place a fast travel location at one point once before you have to move it. I hated that.

 

[ccggenius12]

I'd improve the Ace Attorney series by either ditching the unnecessary Americanizations, or at least making sure that Capcom doesn't cherry-pick which ones come stateside. Us Americans can handle a game not being set in the US, and aren't dumb enough to think that a bento box is a spaghetti dinner (at least I hope we aren't...) Also still waiting on that Investigations 2 release guys... I've been buying everything that comes after chronologically out of scarcity concerns, but have held back on playing them for continuities sake. It's maddening I tells ya.

 

[Lightspeaker]

Final Fantasy XII. Remove that godawful "open world" combat system and actually put in a solid, traditional, turn-based system. Just rip out FFX's system, that was excellent.

I'm going to pre-emptively say the exact same thing for Final Fantasy XV as well. Because everything I've seen makes it look like yet another stupid action-type thing. Give us back our damn turn-based combat, Squeenix!

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

Borderlands 1-2, if I didn't have to bend over to pick up ammo and power-ups, then it would make the game so much quicker and fluid. (Actually a lot of games seem to have this problem where they make picking up base loot take too long.)

In Borderlands 2, you automatically pick up ammo and health by walking over it. Trust me, I've played the game for over 100 hours. Ammo and health are yours if you just walk or run over it.

OT: Dragon's Dogma was one of the better action RPGs in recent memory, but I had a few qualms with it. Otherwise it's a very good game and I recommend it wholeheartedly. First, all of the side missions required so much of my time that it was insane. Normally, I could live with that, I like exploring areas in games, but one of the biggest obstacles in the game was that there was no rhyme or reason to enemy placement based on level. Basically, on a side quest that was within your level range, as if that was a thing, you could easily run into a bandit squad who tank your strongest attacks like butterfly kisses and can double suplex you to death within 30 seconds. The game says that you can run from fights, but I don't think that justifies the fact that there are incredibly high level enemies in areas that are explored early in the game.

Second, there needed to be a better fast travel system. I can live with the fact that you have to buy the stones used to fast travel. That's fine, it's not that rare a thing. What I DO hate, however, is that there are two places that you can fast travel unless you happen to have a specific item that allows you to place a fast travel location at one point once before you have to move it. I hated that.

Ammo maybe, I am not sure if it was really consistent on that aspect. Some times you would pick it up other times not. Power up didn't get picked up automatically though. That made the dropping shields kind of annoying to use.

Oh dragons dogma. Loved that game. I think the game would have been better if they just dropped the open world. You would teleport right from the city to the dungeon, A system like that would help lesson the time it takes to get into the game or get things done. It might also support better maps as you don't have to waste your time on the nonsense filler place. The expansion kind of showed this. It's nothing but a big dungeon, and plays so much better then the main game. (Level scaling can be wonky in it though. I think it had a issue with number scaling.)

 

[Ryallen]

Borderlands 1-2, if I didn't have to bend over to pick up ammo and power-ups, then it would make the game so much quicker and fluid. (Actually a lot of games seem to have this problem where they make picking up base loot take too long.)

In Borderlands 2, you automatically pick up ammo and health by walking over it. Trust me, I've played the game for over 100 hours. Ammo and health are yours if you just walk or run over it.

OT: Dragon's Dogma was one of the better action RPGs in recent memory, but I had a few qualms with it. Otherwise it's a very good game and I recommend it wholeheartedly. First, all of the side missions required so much of my time that it was insane. Normally, I could live with that, I like exploring areas in games, but one of the biggest obstacles in the game was that there was no rhyme or reason to enemy placement based on level. Basically, on a side quest that was within your level range, as if that was a thing, you could easily run into a bandit squad who tank your strongest attacks like butterfly kisses and can double suplex you to death within 30 seconds. The game says that you can run from fights, but I don't think that justifies the fact that there are incredibly high level enemies in areas that are explored early in the game.

Second, there needed to be a better fast travel system. I can live with the fact that you have to buy the stones used to fast travel. That's fine, it's not that rare a thing. What I DO hate, however, is that there are two places that you can fast travel unless you happen to have a specific item that allows you to place a fast travel location at one point once before you have to move it. I hated that.

Ammo maybe, I am not sure if it was really consistent on that aspect. Some times you would pick it up other times not. Power up didn't get picked up automatically though. That made the dropping shields kind of annoying to use.

Oh dragons dogma. Loved that game. I think the game would have been better if they just dropped the open world. You would teleport right from the city to the dungeon, A system like that would help lesson the time it takes to get into the game or get things done. It might also support better maps as you don't have to waste your time on the nonsense filler place. The expansion kind of showed this. It's nothing but a big dungeon, and plays so much better then the main game. (Level scaling can be wonky in it though. I think it had a issue with number scaling.)

Actually, according to the game, it was intentional. The game WANTED you to fight that overpowered as hell bandit squad on the way to help Quina in that one side quest when she wandered off into Giant Spider Face Eater and Frozen Yogurt Emporium.

 

[Fox12]

This:

Spoiler

minus this

This:

Spoiler

Plus THIS

Seriously, Ash is made for that job.

 

[Dalisclock]

Saints Row 4: Gat out of Hell: Make it so the president has to rescue Johnny Gat from Hell, instead of the other way around.
Kind of mind-boggling that the game goes as far as importing my customized character/voice actor/costume, but uses it for less than 5 minutes. Instead choosing to focus the gameplay on one of the least interesting characters in the whole franchise, while removing everything that has to do with customization and costumes.

Yeah, Gat out of hell felt so much like a missed opportunity. No soundtrack(come on guys, there's a ton of Hell-themed songs out there), most of the mini-games were recolors of mini-games from 3 and 4 and You make Gat and Kinzie the PC's, yet can't bother to flesh out their characters at all(I played an entire game as Johnny Gat and I still don't know any more about him then I did in SR2).

Not to mention the fact that, well, you're in hell. There could have been a mini-game where you chase Hitler around and torture him in various amusing ways(spiked bat, super soaker full of acid, sack of angry honey-badgers,etc), you could have been hanging out characters from previous games(like Oleg and Carlos), you could have been teaming up with the gang leaders from 1, 2 and 3 to take down Satan, building an unholy alliance of bad guys to kill a bigger bad guy, instead.....we got 4 as a Hell map and Blackbeard giving you quests. Sure, it was fun but really should have been SR5 and not SR 4.2.

Speaking of Blackbeard.....Assassins Creed IVirates. Enough with the fricking tailing and eavesdropping missions. They're okay once in a while but seriously, it's like you guys had a shit qouta forced upon you from the Ubisoft Upper-management and you decided to stick in a bunch of badly balanced tailing and eavesdropping missions to satisfy it.

 

[FPLOON]

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days Cinematic Movie
Add the actual battles that happened in the DS game! HOW DARE YOU JUST FADE TO BLACK ON THAT SHIT!!

(rant) Seriously, you took out the only good thing that made people actually tolerate playing through it (especially when, this time, we get to see it instead of actually playing it) and you replaced it with these "fade to black" jump-cuts... Even someone who will never play the DS version would wonder why the fuck you didn't try to animate those "off-camera" battle sequences, let alone a "screenshot slideshow" with sound effects playing in the background to signal a battle taking place...

I mean... DA FUCK, Squeenix?! (/rant)

In the mortal words of Larry Wilmore: "That's right ************, I haven't forgotten about you!"

Yes. it's incredibly ironic that 358/2 Days and ReCoded, the two games that could have used the HD treatment more than any other game in the series by a long shot are the ones SquareEnix decided to half ass. EVERY other game in the collections were remastered well but barely added to at all after it was all said and done, but if 358/2 Days and ReCoded were also remastered both would have been enough on their own to justify buying the HD collections even for people that already bought and played every one of the games just for the significant improvement in graphics alone, not to mention any number of other things they could have done. This is especially painful because the really poor graphics were the only real issues either of those games had that the other games up to their creation didn't.

On top of all that, since they're doing another cinematic movie (only unlike the last 2, this one's being build from the ground-up, basically), I fear that if there's going to be "combat" in it and they talk about it instead of actually showing it, it's going to feel more half-ass than the last two cinematic movies and their text-based moments... (Seriously, after really thinking about it, the text-based moments would be the thing I would "fix" about the Re:Coded cinematic, even if they were voice-acted, so that my friends wouldn't feel bored while watching it... )

 

[votemarvel]

Add a separate melee button to the first Mass Effect.

Drove me mad how it was distance sensitive. You'd have a Krogan in your face and instead of shooting it with the shotgun with explosive rounds, Shepard would flail madly at it with the butt of the weapon.

Honestly, it was the only part of the combat that I didn't like in the first game.

 

[Strazdas]

This apples to almost every game:

Create destructible enviroments in similar fashion to what Red Faction: Guerilla did, but also add a way to effect ground (like minecraft but smaller blocks and just destruction, no need for everything else). The options this would add to great many games from shooters to RTSes to space dramas is astonishing.

Of course the reason it is not done is for 3 reasons. ill list them in what i think is order of importence.

1. This requires everything to be built by blocks and an engine to support destruction of those blocks. This of course means a lot of additional work to the developer team, so its quite understandable they are reluctant to do it. I think with advance of prodecurically generated buildings and the like it may be much more possible soon.

2. Simulation of those physics takes a lot of processing power. This varies greatly from Red Faction doing it and still running even on low end machines of the time to building destruction demo that supposedly simulated realistic physics, 5 minutes per frame on a 970 GTX. There is of course much to discuss whether to simplify physics or wait for faster hardware, but eventually this will be overcome by simply getting more and more powerful processors for it.

3. It does not always apply to games story. this reason is in my opinion bullshit. if your game only works as long as you artificially restrict people by making indestructuble buildings and the like, then you made a bad game.

 

[hermes]

Borderlands 1-2, if I didn't have to bend over to pick up ammo and power-ups, then it would make the game so much quicker and fluid. (Actually a lot of games seem to have this problem where they make picking up base loot take too long.)

In Borderlands 2, you automatically pick up ammo and health by walking over it. Trust me, I've played the game for over 100 hours. Ammo and health are yours if you just walk or run over it.

Ammo maybe, I am not sure if it was really consistent on that aspect. Some times you would pick it up other times not. Power up didn't get picked up automatically though. That made the dropping shields kind of annoying to use.

I have played Borderlands the Pre-Sequel and I can confirm you ammo does not get picked up automatically. At least, not consistently. The ammo that you loot is never picked up.

I would include more fast travel points in the maps. Some of them are relatively large, and having to traverse them just to talk to someone in the other corner gets annoying really fast. I would also remove timed missions; they are the bane of mission design in Borderlands. The equivalent of eavesdropping and escorting missions in that series. I often wait for playing with people in different corners of a map and being overleveled to complete them, which, at that point, becomes pointless.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

Destiny.

Move the website features to the actual game. The Grimoire, clan recruiting and management, and just overall finding people to play with are all functions that have no in-game way to accomplish.

I've always hated having to quit the game in order to play the game.

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

Final Fantasy XIII and I would make it open world, like in Chapter 11 (I believe it's the right chapter; please correct me if I'm wrong).

I loved being able to ride Chocobos, find little treasures from time to time, AVOIDING enemy encounters, grinding powerful enemies when I wanted, completing side missions with great rewards, and generally being able to enjoy and explore the world that I stumbled into.

Why Square Enix did not go with this from the get-go, I will never know. I honestly didn't want to continue the story because I was having TOO MUCH FUN in this area alone.

I only watched a LP of FFXIII and didn't play it, but many people told me that the battle system is extremely restrictive and shitty. Revamping that would probably help a lot.

While I'll agree that the battle system definitely left a lot to be desired, this didn't necessarily make the game simple or easy to complete. This was probably true for the first few chapters; afterwards, the game shifts gears and becomes difficult to win battles by simply auto-attacking. I like the potential that the paradigm system had, as it allowed you to prepare different battle formations ahead of time, switch strategies in mid combat, and effectively use whatever party members you wanted, allowing you to focus on them rather than having other characters play catch-up (I freakin' hate Vanille and Snow).