Terrible design choices in otherwise excellent games?

[Lovely Mixture]

Ok, I always have to post this cause it's never posted. Assassin's Creed I, the very first one, you were unable to skip the dialogue cutscenes...Even on a second playthrough. Want to show the game to friends? You have to wait a good ten minutes after beginning the game. I we had to switch between TV and the game.

Others that come to mind? Offering humanity in Dark Souls, they should have made it an "offer X humanity" instead of having to offer each one. Also give us the option of offering the humanity directly instead of having to use it every time.

 

[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?

I actually liked the den defence. It seems as though I'm the only one on this site who did.

I had no problem with the concept itself, but come on. This is a game where we're supposed to sneak in, kill a tyrant, and slip away unnoticed. Ezio doesn't wear a mask because master assassins don't need to. What part of this premise includes organising an armed force to defend against frequent raids by alarmingly well-equipped factions who're supposed to be as secret as the assassins?

 

[Ekit]

The decision to ruin Team Fortress 2 with constant content updates that clash with the art style and ruin the balance.

(Seriously? Laser guns? What the hell were you thinking, Valve?)

Wait what? Laser Guns? Since when?

I don't know how long it was since you last played but the Soldier, Engineer and Pyro all have futuristic laser weapons now.


According to Google they were added to the game in December 2011.

 

[Lovely Mixture]

I don't think the laser guns are completely out of place, but I agree 100% that Valve is trying way too hard to appease the fans with the updates.

-Wanting to give Classes new strategies? Fine.
-Giving Classes weapons that interfere with the jobs of the other classes? Dumb decision making.

The quality of Meet the Pyro is evidence of this all. Instead of actual humor it was just one overused joke.

 

[BarbaricGoose]

Seriously, if you don't know what I'm talking about, go play Evil Genius RIGHT NOW. Great game, despite this fellow's complete & utter incompetence.

 

[Neonsilver]

They did explain it though. They say that the overheating caused the guns to jam and become more unreliable. They also prevented soldiers using their weapons for constant supression, such as trying to keep an enemy in one plave while the rest of the squad flanks the target. That was the in-game universe explanation was for it. If you didn't like the mechanic, that's fine, but always remember to look at the codex pages/environmental hints etc that are in-game(this applies to any game) before outright saying the addition makes no sense universe wise.

To some degree you could also assume that Earth still occaisionally uses weapons which require clips of ammunition. But this is just an assumption so I can see where the unease comes from Shepard immeidietly knowing how to use the weapons after just waking up.

Just looked the explanation up, it's something about the geth calculating that in a battle the side that shoots more bullets has a higher chance of winning. I still think it's kind of shaky as an explanation.
If I take that explanation, I still have my doubts about using the clips for weapons like sniper rifles and that there is no special clip that works like the weapons in the first game.


On topic and something more about Mass Effect 2
the Hammerhead
- armored with paper and a homing gun that always aims in a different direction than you, which leads to not hitting anything.

 

[krazykidd]

Necessary grinding, in any JRPG that has it. When I have to go out of my way and spend an hour killing the same damn monsters over and over again just to keep the story going? Nope. I should be able to make it through the game and level up enough by just playing the main story. When I have to stop the narrative to grind, it's flow-breaking, tedious and aggravating.

"Quick! The Big Bad is about to use his super-weapon to take over the world! Spend an hour fighting your way to the top of his enormous castle and stop him!" "Damn, I'm not strong enough. Now I have to climb the fuck back down again, re-killing everything I passed on the way up, and spend a week stabbing goblins in the face before fighting all the way back up to try again."

Grinding in itself isn't a bad thing. Sometimes there's nothing better than just zoning out and punching monsters in the dick for hours. But I shouldn't have to grind to make it through the game. Just going from story beat to story beat should be enough to get me through it.

I agree that necessary grindig is annoying . But very few ( current )games actually requires "necessary" grinding . There are other factors that contribute to feeling you necessarily have to grind . Like , do you fight every battle , do you run away from battles . Your skills, your equipment , your character build ( when applicable ), your party members , etc... Sometimes the biggest problem is when giving players freedom, they can botch their characters and thus have to grind to get ahead . Other than some SMT games ( *cough*Nocturn*cough* , i never really felt i HAVE to grind. I usually just change my strategy to compensate and it will usually work . Basically , it's possible to play the game wrong .

OT: Games that are too damn long . I get you ( developpers) want to tell a story , but sometimes it just feels padded . I'm currently playing Tales of grace f , and honestly it just too damn long . The pacing is terrible . They could have easily cut a few things out and it would still have been great . You see , i like jrpgs , but something developpers should learn to do ,is make a medium size game ( 20-30 hours ) and detailed and engaging side quests to places you may never have been for the main story. Let us discover our party memebers origins , learn of some cult that is terrorizing a continent , some optional bosses and dungeons . For those who want some more action during or after completing the game . Don't make a 50-70 hour story mode , that's way too fucking long .

The Wild arms seriesdoes this amazingly , the games are of medium length , they don't feel like they have overstayed their welcome , but there is SO MUCH EXTRA CONTENT, it's like a extra game inside the game , for those who want to do it .

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Mass Effect 2 Thermal Clips. Who in their fucking mind would retro fit a 5000 round magazine of solid metal and heatsink with a thermal heatsink that limits the number of times you can fire your weapon to that of conventional weapons?! No one! I played the game on the hardest difficulty and loved it! The only issue was... I always fucking ran out of ammo in the first minutes of combat. I will take the damage to fire rate to heat dissipation ratio of ME1 any day over what ME2 offered.

I concur, esp. since it didn't make any goddamn sense in universe either.

They did explain it though. They say that the overheating caused the guns to jam and become more unreliable. They also prevented soldiers using their weapons for constant supression, such as trying to keep an enemy in one plave while the rest of the squad flanks the target. That was the in-game universe explanation was for it. If you didn't like the mechanic, that's fine, but always remember to look at the codex pages/environmental hints etc that are in-game(this applies to any game) before outright saying the addition makes no sense universe wise.

To some degree you could also assume that Earth still occaisionally uses weapons which require clips of ammunition. But this is just an assumption so I can see where the unease comes from Shepard immeidietly knowing how to use the weapons after just waking up.

That's not good enough! None of the characters explain any of this and certainly no one explains any of this to Shepard who, as previously mentioned was out of the loop for 2 years with a severe case of dead.
Besides, that's a pretty flimsy explanation at best since I don't recall the guns ever jamming in ME1, they just overheated which was much less inconvenient than running out of frickin' ammo in the middle of pitched battle.

 

[ztara]

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

I agree with the drainpipes bit, but i thought the combat (especially the guns) were intentionally clunky so you evaded combat as much as you could. Concentration on maintaining your movement.

 

[hermes]

Some of the boss battles in Arkahm Asylum where awfully designed... The worst in my mind is the one against Killer Croc, although the one with the Joker makes thematically little sense even when its fairly standard as a boss fight.

 

[scorptatious]

Well, in the PAL version and the Team ICO collection version of ICO, there was this one area which contained some kind of... piston? I'm not sure what it was. But anyway, when you activated it, you had to stand on it and wait for the exact right moment to jump so it propels you upward to the next ledge. I still haven't really figured out the timing on that thing.

After that, you had to jump on top of a water wheel and then hop off of it to grab onto a ledge that brings you to the switch that shuts off the water flow preventing you from proceeding to the next area. The time between getting on the thing and jumping to the ledge was really short. You have to either be really good or really lucky to get that jump on your first try.

I guess I wouldn't say they were "terrible" design choices. But apparently, they were annoying enough to the point in which they were both taken out of the North American version in favor of a pole you had to shimmy across and a ladder respectively.

They were not taken out. Unfortunately, the North American version was rushed for a much earlier release. The game was really incomplete, without some extras like the readable subtitles and the alternative ending. Fumito Ueda and Kenji Kaido talked about that in a interview.

Really? I knew the stuff you mentioned was missing in the NA version, but I didn't think it was because it was rushed.

 

[babinro]

Diablo 3
- Set items have such a low drop rate that they can't realistically be completed through farming. Casual players will probably never experience this part of the game.

- There are dozens of skills that are clearly worthless. Why take the time to make something that will only see play through brief player experimentation and then collect dust?

- Crafting: Who was this made for? It's progression lags far behind your players progression. The Auction House is always a cheaper alternative and I've never seen a legendary crafting plan despite over 1000 hours of play. If the game had an offline mode, crafting would act as a makeshift AH replacement in terms of being a gold sink. In it's current form crafting is almost worthless.

 

[IrenIvy]

I always thought it might work if an advanced crafting mechanic was used instead. For example, you kill the massive end-game boss, and instead of having 5 possible items it can drop, each with varying probabilities, it always drops a component.

Something like that partially in place in LotRO: raid bosses rather drop crafting components for best end-game weapon/armor and sometimes the end-game stuff in addition to it. Not 100% chance but still close to your concept as I see it.

 

[Muspelheim]

It's not out yet, but I've got one massive gripe with ArmA 3 that makes me rather uncertain I'll actually buy it.

What was the big idea to use the tired old SGWW-game plot about World War 3? Exactly how, and more importantly why, did Iran and Russia link arms and invade half the world? Have they allied themselves with the Burning Legion or something?

The Operation Flashpoint (the proper one) and Armed Assault series have always had very believable conflicts in the past, and that's one of the main things that sets the tone of those fantastic games. It feels like a situation that could happen. Hell, Chernarus of ArmA 2-fame felt like a real place to me. So why did Bohemia throw all that to the wind and take note from the CoD story department, of all things?

The Armed Assault series have always stood out to me because it felt like a counterpoint to the tired old formula of modern military shooters, both in gameplay as well as overall tone. It all felt believeable and absorbing. But ArmA 3 doesn't look very promising at all in comparison... I can't for the life of me understand who thought this was a good idea.

 

[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.

Token system mixed with a little RNG would be fine. Anything you could get via the tokens associated with whatever dungeon/raid/etc. you were running would have a small chance to drop in said dungeon/raid/etc.

Generally this solves most of the problem. But i've seen a few mmo's only having a certain item obtainable through RNG only or token only. Right now gw2 is having a bit of trouble with ascended rings being only RNG-able. While all exotics(end tier or 2nd last tier) from dungeons are only from the token system. They said part of this was a mistake.
In short quite a few AAA mmo's i've played haven't exactly done both systems correctly.

 

[Username Redacted]

Long ago at double fine:
"So we're working on the last level and we want to come up with something challenging"
"How about we have a timed jumping puzzle... we haven't done that yet, and lets add in difficult moves that the player has never had to do before!"
"Ugh, isn't that kind of a big spike in difficulty and kind of confusing?"
"Nah, it'll be fine... DOUBLE fine!"
and thus the Meat Circus was born!

And this is why I haven't finished the game. I'm not really sure how one is supposed to manage the level of precision platforming that the game asks of you on a PC with the shitty ass camera that it sticks you with.

Outside of craptastic menu design that most games are guilty of I've been most annoyed lately by games that have overlapping contextual commands. Sometimes the button makes me climb a ladder. Sometimes it makes me take cover. If there happens to be a ladder adjacent to a nice juicy chest high wall then by god it's like I've divided by zero.

I am also annoyed by overlapping commands in fighting games. Now I understand that to some degree this is a necessary evil in 2-D fighters. An example would be that the difference between a fireball (down -> down-forward -> forward) and an uppercut (forward -> down -> down-forward) is simply the order in which the directions are hit and that's fine. To a large degree that's a skill testing aspect of the game but by God if you're going to have that in your game would it kill you to make sure that your engine is capable of handling this; i.e. whatever system you use has specific priorities such that it can be counted on one way or another to behave the same way every time.

 

[Proverbial Jon]

The lack of control options in Star Fox Adventures. That game had such a useless aiming system and about a million puzzles which relied on perfectly timed, precision aiming against the clock. I don't appreciate forced inverted controls without an option to change them.

The driving sections in Half Life 2. Seriously, what the hell?

Oblivion's rotten level scaling.

The current objective ALWAYS visible in Alan Wake. Less screen furniture please, it really ruins the atmosphere.

The new Warthog engine sound in Halo 4. Damn thing sounds like a tractor.

Hold on... I'm getting petty now...

 

[saintdane05]

Think that's bad? I once had to do one of those with NO MOUSE. Trackpad only. On a PC that barely handels Half Life 2.