That one reoccurring game design flaw!

[Dirty Hipsters]

Games that have preset control schemes instead of allowing you to completely remap all the buttons how you see fit. This most happens on consoles, but it's still always annoying. Why do the developers think that they know better than me how I want my controls set up?

This actually made inFamous and Red Dead Redemption unplayable for me. You can slightly remap the controls, but not enough so that I could get used to it. I played a game for 8 consecutive years where in third-person the camera was inverted and in first-person the camera was normal, and in both of those games you can only have it where BOTH are inverted or BOTH are normal, and I just couldn't get used to it.

At all times I was either incapable of moving or incapable of attacking because the games decided that you shouldn't be allowed to augment each view individually. I own both games. I paid for both games. But I haven't played more than 30 minutes into either. :/

...Red Dead Redemption and inFamous don't have first person camera angles...?

 

[thejackyl]

Encouraging exploration and dicking around but including a time limit...

O HAI Dead Rising 2

Yeah, I really thought the game would be a lot more enjoyable if the "Time Limit" thing was like this:

Game Starts:
You are given the main quest
You can explore "freely" (Different times might open up different paths, or as you progress you unlock paths)
Plot advances time by X hours
Once you advance the plot you permanently miss all of those available side quests.

Mainly to solve my two complaints about the game:
One:
Too many objectives, too little time
Two:
You stop caring about side quests (I did by the second day), but now have to wait for time to pass

Oh, and of course the whole: two objectives, at the polar opposites of the map. Both have the same time limit. Guess how long each quest take /trollface.

The snipers came out and by than I just said fuck it

 

[Stammer]

...Red Dead Redemption and inFamous don't have first person camera angles...?

Well, you zoom in to be able to shoot. It might not be first-person, but it feels like it should be.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

Cheating computer opponents. I don't mind games being hard, but I want them to be fair.

For example, in Final Fantasy: Dissidia, every time you attack, the computer's attack takes priority over yours. You attack first? You'll mysteriously miss, and the attack will hit you before you can block/dodge. Or in Soul Calibur, where the computer reads your button presses and reacts with inhuman speed, or most blatantly, breaks throws from behind as someone other than Voldo, impossible for a human player to do.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

I know this is a bit weird, but when FPSes have an aim down sight and they get it wrong. When nothing actually moves and it seems like its just normal looking but zoomed in.

A more unweird one. In stealth games where if you make one sound, everyone immediatly knows where you are and comes looking for you. The most recent case is Deus Ex:HR (still an amazing game).

 

[Hagbard Celine]

This actually made inFamous and Red Dead Redemption unplayable for me. You can slightly remap the controls, but not enough so that I could get used to it. I played a game for 8 consecutive years where in third-person the camera was inverted and in first-person the camera was normal, and in both of those games you can only have it where BOTH are inverted or BOTH are normal, and I just couldn't get used to it.

Add L.A. Noire to the list of games that are just damn broken like that. This is pretty basic stuff and Rock Star should just know better. For those that don't understand to sheer pain that people who play inverted controls go through, let me summarize a typical experience with Red Dead Redemption:

Me: "Tum te tum, just riding my horse..."
*Some bandits appear*
Me: "Fear not, I'll just pull out my gun and pick them... arghh, no"
*My character stares at the sky for a bit, turning the wrong way*
Me: "Gah, dammit, no, just point the goddamn gun at the .... no, not at your feet you stupid $&!*@#."

Repeat this scenario > 100x with ever more explicit swearing and cursing and you're beginning to experience my frustration at this issue.

So here's the lowdown for any game devs out there. There are _three_ completely distinct control styles:

1) First person: stick-left==look left, stick-up==look up, etc...
In this you are seeing the world though the eyes of the character. Left, right, up, down all down their natural thing. You are playing the character, seeing the world through their eyes.

2) Aeroplane: stick-left==left, stick-up==down, etc...
This one _only_ makes sense for aeroplane (or other vehicle) simulators because you are mimicking the single stick controls in a plane. I can work ok for driving, but only if up/down are not very important. The important thing to say here is that while this can work well for controlling vehicles, it makes no damn sense for controlling where a character is looking ... none whatsoever.

3) Third person: stick-left==look right, stick-up==look down, etc...
This one seems to have stumped Rock Star, though I don't know why ... it's really simple.

YOU ARE THE CAMERA BEHIND THE CHARACTER.

Assuming that the game keeps the character's head in roughly the same place, and you want to see what's to the character's left, you have to swing the camera to the right. If you want to look down, you move the camera up, over their head. You are seeing the world through the camera behind the character. This is 100% consistent with showing me the world from an imaginary camera behind the character's head and yet it's the one damn option I cannot use in the game!!!

C'mon developers, it's not that tough a concept to grasp.

The really really stupid bit about this is that adding an 'Invert Y-axis' menu option if you already have an 'Invert X-axis' option, which all these games do, as about an extra 10 lines of code! I paid good money for these games, let me control them in a way that's intuitive to me!

 

[WindKnight]

Sadistic level design.

'they have to jump from here, to there with pixel perfection, turn 180 and jump before the hammer squished them, wallrun, jump, rebound wallrun, jump, jump the second they land, rebound and duck under a razorfan, all under 30 seconds while fifty guys with machine-guns are firing at them with near-perfect accuracy.'

'What about the easy mode?'

'that IS the easy mode!'

 

[bombadilillo]

Useless money.

You know what I'm talking about. The game gives you a load of cash that becomes completely useless somewhere after the half-way point.

Im going the opposite direction. Mass Effect, Woohh I did a mission, I have 2000$, what can I buy with these here space bucks? (Cool rifle, 20000000$) (Rifle not as good as one you have 5000$) Well looks like I wont bother with stores anymore, thanks game.

 

[TestSubject4]

One i haven't seen here and I notice all the time. Audio logs that you have to stand near, wait and listen to, (I love exposition) but by god am I not willing to stop playing just to hear it.

 

[octafish]

Moral choice systems - forces one decision to be the "good" one and the other to be the "bad" one, instead of offering multiple options and not making value judgments about them - that's what the player can do for his/her self.

And even when it does this, usually the neutral people get the short end of the stick.

I hope you played Alpha Protocol. It didn't have a morality system, just choices and consequences.

For me it is not being able to turn off achievement notifications. I don't care about them and having them pop up ruins any immersion the game may have generated.

 

[liquidsolid]

I noticed this mechanic in both GTA: Balad of Gay Tony and AC: Brotherhood. Giving you a sandbox but telling you the "right way" to do things. AC has it's "Full Synch" mechanic and BOGT has a similar system for missions. This bothers me because sometimes I want to do things my way and I feel like I'm either missing something or playing wrong even though I pass the mission.

I also would like to voice my disdain for "grading" at the end of a level. This is mostly a Japanese thing but so often do I just pass a mission and I am happy/relieved. Then I get graded "D". WOW all of my accomplished feelings just went out the window.

 

[Liberator XIII]

I thought of these 3 just earlier today, playing Split/Second.

1) AI drivers finishing in the exact same (or almost the same) places EVERY TIME if you aren't there to mess things up a bit - or in some games, even if you are . It makes it harder to stay at the top in a series of races - if you don't win every race, the AI who always got 2nd behind you will probably overtake you on points, and if you get in the bottom half it'll be impossible to catch up again. OK, so all you'd have to do to win without this flaw would be to finish in the top half consistently and the AIs would average out at halfway, but either compromise and have them finish within 2 or 3 places of their usual spot (simulating individual driver skill and bad/good days for that driver) or make them all better (so it's harder to even finish in the top half). Or, give them each their own personality (aggressive, dodge-happy, come from the back of the pack etc) that is suited differently to different tracks or modes. This gives an added benefit to players - you can learn their personalities and learn how to counter them. Perhaps you could even program the AI to do this.

2) If you pick a bad car, the other cars are also bad. It makes it easier to win the crappier your car is - you'll still have the same advantages/disadvantages your personal driving skill/style brings, but with slower cars you have more time to react to danger - you have an advantage over the AI that is taken away with faster cars. As an example in S/S, I can win almost every race with the all-round Class C car, but I struggle to place 5th with the all-round Class A. Your opponents should have preset cars for each race or series, to force you to upgrade to keep in line with them.

3) Redoing races when the story dictates that's impossible. S/S is meant to be a TV show - how can you possibly redo those races if you don't think you did well enough? Tell the viewers to wait while Mr. Unsatisfied has another go? Take a leaf out of most other genres' books - if you do well enough, you can't redo it. If you didn't do well enough, you have to replay the entire series/season/whatever again. This encourages you to practice races beforehand, so you can do very well in the real thing, if you get rewards for doing so. Performing OK won't give you those rewards, but will mean you can't try for them again (at least until the endgame).

Other games:

Enemies with a telepathic link. There are several things related to this - if you are discovered, every enemy knows where you are, if you kill one with some kind of stat attached (e.g. belonging to a faction) it causes a global effect (decreases your allegiance to that faction) immediately, and others. Fair enough with radios or enemies within earshot, but what about, say, Oblivion? You commit a crime in Bravil, ride as fast as possible to Chorrol, and everyone there already knows about it. I can't remember if they actually did in Oblivion, but the general point stands.

Hard-to-see enemies. Anyone who's played a shooter knows about this. You're getting shot at, but you can't see where from. So how do you find out? Get hit, and the damage thingy shows you what direction it came from. Can't there be another way? I can't think of a reliable way, but I'm not in the games industry. Surely those who are can find a way.

I could go on, but those'll do.

 

[Stammer]

3) Third person: stick-left==look right, stick-up==look down, etc...
This one seems to have stumped Rock Star, though I don't know why ... it's really simple.

YOU ARE THE CAMERA BEHIND THE CHARACTER.

Assuming that the game keeps the character's head in roughly the same place, and you want to see what's to the character's left, you have to swing the camera to the right. If you want to look down, you move the camera up, over their head. You are seeing the world through the camera behind the character. This is 100% consistent with showing me the world from an imaginary camera behind the character's head and yet it's the one damn option I cannot use in the game!!!

I spent like half an hour trying to explain this to my friend once. "Push right and the camera moves right, so your field of view looks toward the left"

Also, lol at the "useless money" thing. I just finished another playthrough of Mass Effect and by the end of the game I had max money (999,999,999 I think) where most guns were in the 20M range, and I'd bought every character level-10 Spectre gear (the best stuff you can buy), and by the time I'd sold all the crap that I picked up I was back at the max value again.

EDIT: Another thing I find in a lot of games are the perpetuation of 1-ups/lives. That was fine back in the day when you could die in a level you weren't careful with and running out meant restarting the whole game. But nowadays it's just pointless. Especially Super Mario Galaxy. Why the hell even bother having lives? Within an hour of play you've already racked-up 99 lives and maybe lost 2 in the process.

 

[willsham45]

It is not an inherent problem and it works both ways. Most mapping problems on PC are thanks to console controls generally having limited buttons. Are you really saying you would prefer e - picks items up, f - opens doors, v - talks to people.

Mapping lots of actions onto one button is not a problem it generally makes a game more accessible but I can see when it goes overboard like a run button also be the cover button that is bad design.

Although at the end of the day if you are playing a PC game you can remap all you like to get a game control system you like. prime example vice city remapped all helicopter controls to use the arrows on the num pad. It is a pitty i suppose that now it seams action buttons means too much in some cases so maybe games should give an option to define what action is especitly with pc games where keys are plentiful.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Any game that has some sort of an excessive everything button with 2 very key things on it. Pick up weapon and defuse bomb. I am sorry I don't care about lack of input options on consoles there should be an option for these to be separate on PC. I have lost so many scrims(super cereal Clan games) because of this in games such as BF and CoD. Just fucking change it already.

 

[Stammer]

Any game that has some sort of an excessive everything button with 2 very key things on it. Pick up weapon and defuse bomb.

...Or in Smash Bros where the button that says "Pick up bomb" is also the exact same button as "Punch bomb". They tried to fix that in Brawl by making the character do both things at the same time, but that made it even worse! Now if there are two bombs next to each other it's completely impossible to pick one up without punching the one beside it. >_<;

What makes it worse is there's one button whose sole purpose is to grab enemies. You don't think THAT would have been a better item to map to "grab items"?

 

[Aean]

Summon Knight for the GBA: Spinning my spear required me to press the jump button.

So many needless deaths...

 

[Ghaleon640]

For me, I hate breezing through levels, but I also like going back to old levels just to goof around for a while. This always creates the problem that I become so ungodly overpowered there is nothing I can do to recreate any form of difficulty. Like in borderlands. I goof around for a few hours, do every quest, and what do I get? Easiest boss fights in the world. I shoot with my weakest gun, far away from the critical spot, and its still too easy. Granted, only the first playthrough, but I mean, what the hell?

I just grew up on old games where replaying levels was done for its own sake, so to be punished for doing it by becoming overpowered is rather annoying. I know I had other examples.... but too tired to bring them up right now.

 

[Jdb]

Rewards based on time in exploration games. So here you have this giant alien world full of secrets and treasure to uncover. However, in order to get an important achievement or the best ending, you need to rush through it and skip 75% of the world. I'm looking at you, Metroid. At least the Prime games do it right by rewarding you based on the amount of items you collect.

 

[Stammer]

I just thought of another one that bugs the hell out of me... ragdoll deaths. It ALWAYS breaks my immersion in a game. I think they're one of the reasons I stopped playing shooter games in general and why I couldn't get into Oblivion or Fallout 3.

I can't wait until people find a way to make deaths look genuine. A lot of more modern games have the right idea: have the start of the death react to the part of the body that gets hit last and start to fall in a controlled manner, and THEN go to physics. Unfortunately that doesn't work so well with ragdoll since it's completely ridiculous to see arms twisted backwards and limbs flying around like paper.

Maybe one day...