Exploding barrels. Sick of it.
Oh, and shoving in a stealth level in a single player FPS that was otherwise a solid shooter.
Oh, and shoving in a stealth level in a single player FPS that was otherwise a solid shooter.
Sins of Game Design
- Thread starter defcon 1
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Even just reading that made my eyes bleed. Escort quests should be doomed to hell for eternity. I was playing Oblivion and when I had to do an escort quest I was so annoyed i just killed the person I was meant to escort. That'll teach them to be helpless.Kellerb said:
I found a six year old boy playing Resistance 2 and I targeted him and only him with my sniper rifle until he was cussing like a sailor...HT_Black said:
But anyway Respawning enemies is pure evil and that should be one of Gaming's deadly sins.
Also any form of forced gameplay mechanic that you haven't used prior and so now it'll make a last ditch effort to staple its "selling point" on.
The top one: UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENES!!! There's literally nothing worse than having to sit through something you saw 5 minutes ago just because you took a wrong step and died, and it's probably my biggest pet hate.
It's not that they can't do it, it's that they don't want to. Dynamic saves are harder to program in a game than save spots. They can't really do it consequence-free on the PC because we PC gamers tend to have higher standards; we've always been used to saving whenever we like, and if you take it away we tend to do annoying things like, y'know, not buying your game (yes, Hitman, I'm looking at you). But console gamers have always had save spots, they've grown used to them, they don't complain, and so they always get them.chimpzy said:
My personal list of cardinal sins:
Retarded conversions. Wanna make a game multiplatform? Great, develop for all the platforms, don't just develop for one and then half-assedly adapt to the others, especially not when one of them is a lot more versatile. *scowls at GTA IV*
On this subject: making a game for all platforms BUT the PC. I get it that consoles have the priority for certain games, and I'm fine with not developing, I dunno, Mortal Kombat 43 on the PC. But don't distribute a universally-working game on everything including mobile phones, but not the PC. You cannot tell me that PC users buy less games than mobile phone users, piracy or no piracy. *scowls at Force Unleashed*
Quicktime events. Whoever thought they would be fun deserves to be hanged, shot and burned all at the same time. I'd scowl at something, but there's so many games that do this nowadays that it'd leave me with a permanent scowl on my face.
Minigames. Everybody hates minigames! You expend resources for developing games-within-games that will always be too small to provide any significant gameplay values, instead of using said resources to improve the ONE game you should be concentrating on. How does anyone find this a good idea?!
Anti-copy protections. I don't think I need to say anything about this.
Edit: oh yes, almost forgot: mods are good. There is not ONE good reason to prevent people from modding your game. This is so freaking obvious when looking at games like Oblivion, Half-life and all the others whose mods have had enormous success that I cannot for the life of me understand what pushes developers to close everything as tight as they can.
And above everything, the number one cardinal sin of gaming: making a casual game that requires more than a browser and flash to play. *takes aim at a Wii with a .50 BMG rifle*
Everyone's pretty much covered the main ones but there's one that got me recently.
I was playing PoP: Warrior Within and there's an area where you coax a monster that is throwing exploding dogs at you to throw those at breakable walls. As I neared the breakable wall a mini cutscene panned the camera to that wall; you cannot fucking move during these cutscenes (I could have spotted the wall for myself, thanks) I ended up getting hit by enemies and a flying exploding dog. In the same room you must hang off a counterweight which, when hit by an exploding dog, will split the counterweight in two, causing the upper level to ascend to a point where you can climb up. Unfortunately this action activates one of those mini cutscenes, and I got caught by the edge of the dog's explosion and fell to my death. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem because I would have just rewound time and moved out of the way, but because you can't activate any commands during these godforsaken camera pans I ended up not being able to rewind time and getting a big fat game over. Fuck you, Warrior Within, you emo ****.
To summarise: Thou shalt not have cutscenes in real-time when one cannot move one's character.
I was playing PoP: Warrior Within and there's an area where you coax a monster that is throwing exploding dogs at you to throw those at breakable walls. As I neared the breakable wall a mini cutscene panned the camera to that wall; you cannot fucking move during these cutscenes (I could have spotted the wall for myself, thanks) I ended up getting hit by enemies and a flying exploding dog. In the same room you must hang off a counterweight which, when hit by an exploding dog, will split the counterweight in two, causing the upper level to ascend to a point where you can climb up. Unfortunately this action activates one of those mini cutscenes, and I got caught by the edge of the dog's explosion and fell to my death. Normally this wouldn't have been a problem because I would have just rewound time and moved out of the way, but because you can't activate any commands during these godforsaken camera pans I ended up not being able to rewind time and getting a big fat game over. Fuck you, Warrior Within, you emo ****.
To summarise: Thou shalt not have cutscenes in real-time when one cannot move one's character.
Though a lesser sin, I'll have to say: button mapping. Is it that hard to program? I just want to be able to feel comfortable playing.
...happysock said:
That didn't have any relevance to what we were saying. We were talking about why games that focus on the online side still have crappy single player, rather than being online only.
Enemies that level with you. Just make different more powerful enemeis. I'm looking at you bethesda.
I would say it looks exactly like like No More Heroes:defcon 1 said:
1 Quick Time Events - proof of a lazy and unimaginative developer
2 Boring Open World - Not every game needs a Sandbox
3 Pointless/Tedious Minigames - Minigames like Mowing the Lawn and Pumping Gas
4 Reeks of Pretentiousness - forgivable if the game is fun but even worse when it isn't
And I actually like open-world/sandboxes and minigames but only when they're done well and have a point to them.
I'm honestly surprised that no one's mentioned this one, so here we go. One of the worst sins of game design is one which Bungie is guilty of committing time and time again: outright lazy level design.
This is not to say that the level design is bad; it's just to say that it seems like very little effort went into it, and this is abundantly clear in the Halo games. I could never shake the feeling that Bungie's principal tool in developing those games was Copy-Paste, because, while each separate level looked distinct and interesting, the levels themselves were stunningly repetitive. The Library is particularly guilty of this, since it was effectively the same level played through four times.
And it gets worse: not only did they re-use the same areas far too many times in individual levels, they re-used the levels themselves. The last three levels of Halo 1 are all just re-treads of earlier ones; ok, you go through them differently, but the map is still the same. It just strikes me as being very, very lazy.
This is not to say that the level design is bad; it's just to say that it seems like very little effort went into it, and this is abundantly clear in the Halo games. I could never shake the feeling that Bungie's principal tool in developing those games was Copy-Paste, because, while each separate level looked distinct and interesting, the levels themselves were stunningly repetitive. The Library is particularly guilty of this, since it was effectively the same level played through four times.
And it gets worse: not only did they re-use the same areas far too many times in individual levels, they re-used the levels themselves. The last three levels of Halo 1 are all just re-treads of earlier ones; ok, you go through them differently, but the map is still the same. It just strikes me as being very, very lazy.