Terrible design choices in otherwise excellent games?

[Furbyz]

I'm gonna go with the Fade in Dragon Age: Origins. I get that they wanted to change things up a bit, but good god, did they make a bad decision with that place. It was excruciatingly boring and time consuming. In my opinion, dangling a carrot in front of us with a few permanent stat bonuses and maybe some character development are simply not worth the giant amount of back tracking.

I didn't like the Fade on my first play through. I absolutely hated it on the second.

 

[Lt._nefarious]

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor.

The design flaw? It was a Kinect game. Oh, it would have been so good, I love the atmosphere it conveys, the characters, the interaction, the perma-death, the aesthetic design, the story, the gore, everything about it. Even on paper the way you use the Kinect to play is brilliant...

So really the game is well designed and original and brilliant but the Kinect is the flawed component...

So it's not even the game? Christ, I wish Kinect didn't suck or at the very least Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor was fully playable with a controller or massive peripheral...

 

[Boggelz]

In Grand Theft Auto 4 I can't stand that you have to drive back to the mission after you die. I still have never completed it because of that

 

[Danceofmasks]

While I agree with you both on that point, throwing 3 points into the Typhoon(just 2 might work as well, just getting the basic version), makes the 3 first bosses and absolute joke. With 3 points invested, every boss takes 3 Typhoon hits and they go down. I didn't even die once, on my second playthrough, even though I went all stealth/no kills route. Also, I'd like to think that Eidos Montreal learned a thing or two from fan responses, since you were able to defeat The Missing Link boss relying entirely on stealth.

Don't you think putting in an "I win" button is, in and of itself, a bad thing?

 

[Shuguard]

I think in general(games and mmo's) RNG needs to go, no one really likes the fact 1 guy can get it first time, and other may need 99 tries to get it.

How would you solve loot in MMOs if not with RNG, then?

A very elaborate meter that if you don't get something valuable for a few runs your chances are increased each time. It is a possible solution, but might be impractical. Token systems solve it, but have a few set backs. Large amount of loot at once rather than just a few pieces. It's a complex question.

 

[shrekfan246]

So I was playing through Persona 3 Portable and noticing a lot of the 'thematic but kind of anti-game' stuff from its original version(s) had been removed, while still keeping the game overall the same...except, it still suffers from the 'protagonist dies, game immidiately ends', despite this being a multi member party with revival items readily available. This becomes a serious problem when there are enemies who have instant death attacks. Later on, you get a 'team bonus' where allies will 'take the hit' for you, but you're without this for the first third of the game, which can make it...frustrating to approach. And yes, I know *WHY* the game ends if he dies, don't spoil it for people, and it makes sense in context...but it still makes for a bad design choice in a great game...

Off-topic question: After having just played through Persona 4 Golden for the Vita, I'm considering getting Persona 3 Portable to download to my Vita despite owning Persona 3 FES. Would you say the changes (most specifically for me, being able to control the entire party during combat) make it worth it?

On-topic: Funnily enough, Persona 4. Specifically, the dungeon design. The aesthetics are really good, particularly in the latter half of the game, but it suffers from the same thing most dungeon-crawler-y games do, in that the actual layout of the maps are fairly simplistic and boring. The extra dungeon put in for Golden is what I would consider to be the highlight for map design, personally, as it was more intricate and stressful than every other dungeon in the game.

Also, my go-to answer for this question: Halo's "The Library". Abysmal level design, just absolutely horrible, when the rest of the game had been built on rather large and relatively open levels. Then you have one of the best levels in the entire game, the introduction of the Flood, immediately followed by an endless corridor section with identical looking corridors that have identical enemy-spawning locations and identical artificial lengthening every time you reach another elevator. Just awful.

 

[Sp3ratus]

While I agree with you both on that point, throwing 3 points into the Typhoon(just 2 might work as well, just getting the basic version), makes the 3 first bosses and absolute joke. With 3 points invested, every boss takes 3 Typhoon hits and they go down. I didn't even die once, on my second playthrough, even though I went all stealth/no kills route. Also, I'd like to think that Eidos Montreal learned a thing or two from fan responses, since you were able to defeat The Missing Link boss relying entirely on stealth.

Don't you think putting in an "I win" button is, in and of itself, a bad thing?

Definitely, and as I said, I agree that the bosses were terribly done in the game and that they shouldn't have been outsourced. I'm just saying there's a way around it, since I know they infuriated me the first time I played it.

 

[Slayer_2]

The Freebird part in Spec Ops: The Line. Anyone who has played it on FUBAR difficulty knows what I mean. To sum it up for those who don't, you're told to run as a helicopter attacks you, the classic "run for your life", but if you immediately run, you will be killed. You have to delay a second or three then run to make it. Also, the helicopters bullets phase (not penetrate, but ghost) right through anything, up to and including solid concrete walls and other assorted cover. Also, the damage isn't even synced with the bullets meaning you can be ten feet away from the impact points and still die.

 

[axlryder]

Since I'm primarily interested in visuals, I felt that Resonance of Fate was just too drab all around. I realize that's the aesthetic choice they went with, and it's all rather subjective, but I just couldn't get past the constant use of gray. Oh, and the world map was just horribly boring to traverse. I think there was merit in the hexagon system, but the way it was implemented made it feel like a chore.

 

[WanderingFool]

2 weapon limitin most FPS games. Even games like COD... I understand the idea of realism in that nobody but the PC in Borderlands, Serious Sam, and the Doom Guy can carry more than 2 weapons without being wieghed down by it, but I can even carry a fucking pistol with me? I actually have to drop the pistol to carry that shotgun and assault rifle?

Going to a specific game, Bioshock Infinite, as I recall, you are limited to two weapons now... the fuck?

 

[Nannernade]

The comic book style artwork designs for The Darkness 2, the game was really great when it was dark and gritty because that's what the Darkness was, dark, gritty and evil.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

As for my own contribution, I'd say not putting more effort into AI design in Civ games. I assume good AI programming is very difficult, but it's silly that something like a diplomatic victory in Civ5 can only be won by allying yourself with all the city states instead of actually building a strong bond with other civilizations over time. I get that the AI is trying to win, but the way it works now is just utterly broken.

Yeah the Dip victory is broken and, honestly, not worth pursuing. In part I think it's got to do with the victory conditions but mostly I think it's because the Civ games have never really had good diplomacy mechanics... admittedly not as bad as 'who will betray who first' diplomacy mechanics of the Total War games but severely lacking when compared to Paradox's grand strategy games (EU, HoI, etc).

 

[Hero in a half shell]

The corridor design in the original Halo, and having tendancy to spend a level travelling down into a huge dungeon to access something, and the next stage is returning the exact way you came. I think that one cavern at the Control room was in three different levels.

 

[Lugbzurg]

Donkey Kong 64. Remember the "Beavers" minigame? Ugh! So unfinished!

Halo: Combat Evolved. Just after fighting the Flood (the mushroom zombie things), I ended up walking back and forth through the same three rooms or so for about half an hour, trying so hard to figure out where I was supposed to go. Ultimately, I discovered that they threw in a barely-visible pile of boxes for a completely out-of-place small platforming section to this first-person shooter that you could easily miss. That was a pretty stupid idea on the level designer's part. You do not train the player to play to a specific way and then throw them off with something like that.

Sonic Adventure. Big's fishing gameplay. It seems that originally, Big was supposed to go through large levels of exploration to find Froggy. But since Sega wanted to show off how well the DreamCast could process water effects (haven't you noticed how much water is that that game by now?), they switched that out for a gameplay style that would have you staring at pools of water for long periods of time: Fishing. The story still works very well, though. People whine that if you take Big's story out of the game, it changes nothing. That's the point! Big existed to show an "Average Joe" perspective of the events in the game. Now, if only they had picked a better gameplay style, it would have been able to shine much better.

 

[Alcaste]

Chapter 12 in Hotline Miami.

Spoiler

Really? A stealth segment that takes away everything that makes the game good (snappy controls, speed, murdermurdermurder) just to prove a point? I can respect it up to a point... but the frustration of having no idea what to do or what path to take just made it worse. The patrols are completely stoic, so there wasn't even any excitement to doing it over and over. It was boring and didn't make sense to put it in the way it was put in.

And don't give me anything about Jacket having a soft spot for cops or something. The next level sort of proves that I shouldn't have had a problem strangling the police with my IV or something.

Whew.

I'm going to have to also second the Jedi Outcast one. Kyle Katarn is my absolute most favorite Star Wars character ever. I think it falls within a similar vein.

 

[charge52]

Croc 1 and 2's camera. It's decent most of the time, but it's automatic, and it locks to behind the character, which can be problematic at times.

 

[Woodsey]

- The combat and drainpipes in Mirror's Edge. Both took the speed and rhythm out of it.

Worse than that: I could never work out why they made you piss about with valves to turn off steam pipes. Did nothing except stop you dead in your tracks.

 

[Thyunda]

Surprised the tower defence in Assassin's Creed: Revelations hasn't been mentioned. That was the most ridiculously out of place addition I've ever seen. But, then I'm a console gamer and I don't get out much. But seriously. Why. Why do it. What, did these assassins just lie down and take it whenever people attacked till Ezio showed up?

 

[EmperorSubcutaneous]

I'm having a lot of trouble answering this question, but here's what I can come up with...

*The Walking Dead - the fixed camera angles. So frustrating, being uncertain how far your range of movement actually extends. I know this is how it is in old school adventure games, but I'd really rather not see it anymore.
*Silent Hill 2 - the puzzles. The majority of them make no sense, either within the game or symbolically. This is the only problem I have with this game that actually feels like a problem for me--with the exception of Laura's voice acting, I guess. (I had no problems with the fixed camera angles in this game, oddly enough, since they felt like a good way of portraying that unexplainable fear of moving forward that you sometimes get in scary situations in real life.)
*Aquaria - the way the camera zooms in if you hold still for too long, like if you're hanging out and shooting enemies at range. So annoying.

Everything else I can think of seems less like a bad decision and more like bad implementation of a decision that could have been fine (like Yorda's AI in Ico).

And if we're including story decisions, I'd say:
*GW1 - Kormir
*GW2 - Trahearne

Stop that, ArenaNet. Just stop.

 

[Xdeser2]

I love KOTOR to death

However the turret sections left me wondering why the hell they were in there in the first place...