The 5 Ways to Improve X Game

[Johnny Novgorod]

Here at The Escapist we love to complain about flaws and half-baked or repetitive ideas in games we would otherwise fucking love. Forget about hazy concepts like "better story" or "evolving gameplay"! Let's make a thread where we list a Top 5 of concrete, punctual solutions to punctual problems in a game of your choice.


5 Things to Improve Assassin's Creed

1) Reward the collection of Flags & Templars with life and/or weapon upgrades.

2) Don't insta-drown Altair if he touches water. If you can't teach him to swim, at least pull a saving animation ala Arkham City.

3) Speed up the enemy-toggling. Sometimes I will highlight an enemy and press block, but by the time Altair turns around, faces the enemy and guards against the attack it's too late. Accelerate Altair's reaction to commands during combat.

4) Enforce more stealth in the assassination mission. Every mission starts with Altair in a crowd surrounding the target, and from there it's a piece of cake to just run up and hidden-blade the enemy. Place enemy targets out of reach, with better security and force the player to take lengthier, more windy routes through the rooftops and/or inside palaces. The Hitman way.

5) Completely remove the futuristic framing narrative. Fuck Desmond, fuck his non-story, fuck his anticlimactic ending, fuck the GLaDOS computer voice that keeps bursting through XIIth century Holy Land, speeding up and slowing down time while fencing off sections of the game with glitzy Tron pixels. It does nothing but destroy the immersion.


EDIT: It doesn't have to be a "bad game".

 

[Scarim Coral]

5 things to removed Animal Crossing-

1 Removed the concequences for being absent in the game like the whole weed and flower dying in the grass and villagers leaving (especially when New Leaf allow you to removed a villager).

2 They should let you to leave and explore out of the villager region instead of being boxed in. Example there is like mountain and forest (likewise to collect bugs and fish etc) outside your town. It could even be RNG to keep you playing for longer.

3 Fossils should not be limited to four per days. In saying so I am not expected to see 4 til 10 fossil patch on the grass, more like after finding the fourth fossils, there are a few more hidden ones that does not have the fossil patch on the ground.

4 The shopping districts should be more lively and have random villagers not living in your town visiting the shop and there should be more people inside Club LOL especially when KK Slider inside.

5 Villagers should be smarter when it come to delivery tasks (e.g. villager A asked you to hand the item to vilalger B who just happened to be standing next to you.)

 

[Elfgore]

5 Things to improve Viking: Battle for Asgard. This is in no particular order.

1. Make the stealth system not suck. God I hated sneaking into those towns as it took me around ten tries and more hair pulling then I can handle.

2. Make magic a little more valuable and easy to use.

3. Make it so it doesn't take a thousand hits to kill an enemy with a shield.

4. Allow us to give commands in the epic battles. Like focusing on a certain point for your troops to take or archers to target.

5. Add some more player weapons. Give me a spear, mace, battleaxe, or anything besides the sword and axe combo.

 

[Zefyrix]

5 things to improve Final Fantasy X. Now before I start I love this game , but it obviously has some flaws. And these are my opinions, i know some people don't like blitzball for example but I liked it. And I know everyone hates Tidus..but..but i didn't mind him. Please don't ban me.

1. The damn temples where you get your summons. They are so boring and slow. And going through the Macalania and especially the Bevelle one is such a pain. I always look up the Bevelle one in guides when i get there because I really cant be assed going through it.

2. The final boss.. like really? A boss with barely any HP and you have auto resurrect on everyone so you can't die. And this is the final boss? I guess you can technically call the boss before the final boss but this one is just a joke.

3. It's pretty damn linear. I know it opens up later (wait are we talking about FF13 here?) but still. Even though it make sense that you can't go anywhere the areas should at least be bigger so you can explore a bit more. You're always running on one straight road basically and it would be nice if they were more open and had branching paths.

4. Seymour. The dude is annoying, not interesting, looks ridiculous and shows up way too often.

5. Some of the ridiculous stuff you gotta do to get the best weapons for every character. The chocobo races, the butterfly catching, hoping that the top price in blitzball is the one you need and then winning that tournament and dodging 200 lightning bolts in a row being some of the things.

There's some other small stuff as well but the topic said 5 reasons so yeah.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

5 Things to Improve Batman: Arkham Asylyum

1) This comes from having played Arkham City first, but: let Batman do a slide move & let him use the grappling hook in mid-air.

2) Similarly, spawn mooks during the endgame. Otherwise trophy-seeking becomes more boring than it should be.

3) Cut down on the Titan fights by half, they get repetitive (alternatively come up with new ways to defeat them).

4) The Killer Croc bit: I'm not saying remove the section, but at least let me fight the damn thing.

5) Fix Joker boss fight like so: first step, remove the mooks. Second step, remove James Gordon - it's idiotic he gets kidnpapped TWICE in the game. And third, It'd be nice if you were asked to use all your combos and takedowns combined to bring down Titan Joker.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

5 Things to Improve System Shock 2

1. Decrease the rate of weapon degradation, but have the weapon's performance based on its current quality. This way you're not constantly having to repair your weapons after just a couple shots, but still gives incentive to keep your weapon in good condition. This way the Maintenance skill is still valuable, but not quite so mandatory.

2. Rebalance the weapon classes so that Standard weapons aren't so clearly dominant. Lower the damage output of Standard weapons to compensate for their somewhat plentiful and highly versatile ammunition. Keep Energy weapons roughly the same since the damage difference between them and Standard weapons won't be so pronounced, while retaining the damage penalty against the common organic enemies and damage bonus against the rarer mechanical ones as a trade off for their effectively infinite free ammunition. Make the late-tier heavy weapons accessible earlier in the game and give them more opportunities to acquire ammunition. Make the Exotic weapons available earlier, reduce the Research skill requirement to make them usable, and give them access to more ammunition over the course of the game. I think this would make each weapon class more useful, rather than just have the Assault Rifle completely destroy all other competition in every single way.

3. Make the difference between Marines and Navy more pronounced. Make the Marine stronger, have more health, and get slight bonuses with Standard weapons and melee weapons while also starting him off with a penalty to Hacking, Cyber Affinity, and Research. Make the Navy officer have slightly lower strength, lower health, and get innate bonuses to Hacking, Cyber Affinity, Research, and Energy Weapons. This way the gameplay for the Marine is focused more on brute force, with maybe some skill in Hacking and Research over time but never quite to the same degree as a Naval officer. Have the Naval officer focused more on indirect combat through hacking security systems and getting into otherwise inaccessible areas of the ship to bypass threats, with the ability to increase combat skills though never to the same degree as a Marine. This would make the difference between the two specializations last more than just the initial hour, and make them as different to each other as they currently are to the OSI operative.

4. General bug fixes, and touch up some of the locations that had to be rushed through development (most prominently the Rickenbacker portion of the game).

5. Be able to use the Research skill to find out how much crap 150 lab monkeys produce in a day for Dr. Grassi.

 

[Artaneius]

Five things to Add/Improve in Smash Bros Wii U

1. Bring back L-Canceling
2. Bring back Wavedashing
3. Make online matches not so laggy compared to Brawl
4. Matchmaking services, not that crappy friend code stuff.
5. Keep Metaknight out or balance him.

 

[Bombiz]

5 Things to improve ROME 2 Total war


1: we need more diversified units for Parthia and the eastern factions in general. tired of the only good units for Parthia being horses

2:More eastern factions to pick from. there's like only one.

3:AI. by god the AI. i know it's hard to program good AI for a game like this but come on. how is it that factions like Carthage and Rome are able to be wipe out by minor factions in less then 100 turns. hell it's like that for all the major factions. FIX THE DAMN AI

4: a better political system that actually feels like your choices matter.

5:Bring back the General Skill tree from Shogun 2. or at least the trait system from Medieval 2, at least that made sense.

there's a bunch of other stuff but those are the ones that i have a big problem with.

 

[Terminal Blue]

1: we need more diversified units for Parthia and the eastern factions in general. tired of the only good units for Parthia being horses

As opposed to Rome I?

Kind of interesting to see the lack of diversity comment can still be applied though.

 

[Bombiz]

1: we need more diversified units for Parthia and the eastern factions in general. tired of the only good units for Parthia being horses

As opposed to Rome I?

Kind of interesting to see the lack of diversity comment can still be applied though.

well it just seems like they have no units. hell even minor factions have more units then them.
also at least there Cataphracts are worth a damn. in Rome 2 there Cav units aren't all that great.

this actually makes me want to play rome 1.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

5 Things to Improve Resident Evil 5

1) Let characters consume herbs off the ground without having to stash them first in their inventory, like Code Veronica.

2) Cut up inventory space into slots and stash items proportionally in them, like RE4. Also opening it up should pause the game.

3) Introduce more commands to hold a better control over your partner's AI (i.e. hold fire, don't use X, etc). Also, if you're holding a healing item in your hand and are about to use it, that should stop your partner from trying to heal you with another item.

4) Drop the Jack Bauer talk about freedom and terrorism and replace the plot with a campier James Bond-ish version, ala RE4. I feel the game is stuck halway between these two opposites and suffers for it.

5) Redesign Chris so his face has more intelligence than a neanderthal's.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

5 Ways to Improve Halo 4

5) Change the title by removing the number 4 and, adding in a BS sub-title (that doesn't begin with RE)

4) Re-Work the plot: replace Master Chief with another Spartan and set the game at some point in the past...say, around or just before Reach

3) Import the character customization from Reach so as to allow you to play in Pink Armor or whatever in Single Player.

2) Stop re-balancing the weapons. Also, stop changing around sound effects. This counts for vehicles too.

1) Give the game a strong emphasis on vehicular combat to the point that ground-level, non-vehicular combat doesn't happen...at all...The Mantis can stay and be the closest thing to ground combat you get.

Aliens vs Predator (2010)

5) Exclude the FPS Marine missions and...

4) ...The FPS style in general. This should be a 3rd-person game

3) The tutorial level for the Predator should have been taken from Predator and, include things such as the one-on-one fight with Billy.

2) The tutorial level for The Alien could easily just be a recreation of the first Alien film

1) FIX THE STEALTH ENGINE

5 things to removed Animal Crossing-

-snip-

I would love nothing more than a way to invite or, entice specific animals to join your village. There are a couple hundred at this point right? Why couldn't there be more public works projects specifically designed to appeal to certain villagers? It would make me feel like I have more control of my Animal Crossing Community...

 

[Avaholic03]

I clicked on this thread expecting it to be about fixing the X series of games (most recently, X Rebirth). So I'll stick with that. I haven't played Rebirth yet, but I hear it's a buggy piece of shit, so I'll mostly be commenting on the earlier games.

1. Better tutorial and early game. Get people hooked without overwhelming them. Then gradually introduce other mechanics and ways to play.
2. Fewer areas with more detail in each area (this is one area I hear Rebirth improved on, but at the expense of freedom to explore). Most importantly, more details in each area would give a sense of scale and speed rather than flying through some areas that are just fog with a few stations dotted in between.
3. Better UI. I know it's a lot of information to present, but at least have a common "hub" for information rather than forcing players to dig through menus and memorize dozens of shortcuts.
4. Either tell a story, or just be a pure sandbox. But don't half-ass it where there's a story but only if you go looking hard enough for it.
5. Better NPC interaction. I'm sure voice acting and variable interaction is expensive, but it's an important touch when you're trying to craft a detailed universe.

 

[Tanis]

Caesar 3:
1) Let the markets have more than 'just enough' food, let them store a a metric ton of the stuff'.

2) Make it so traders will sell/buy to their max (10/15/20/etc) not just random numbers.

3) Let the player BUY directly from the trade routes, and even the world market itself.

4) Make a tile that prevents certain jobs from moving on the road.
-Like Zeus had.

5) Improve the AI path finding so that I don't have to build double what I need; just to keep people from being burned alive or crushed to death or starve or whatever.

 

[aozgolo]

Well I was going to do something like 5 ways to improve Skyrim but most of the ways I would suggest (except to make Marriage more meaningful) have already been done by mods, so instead I'll go with one of my favorite Final Fantasy games: FFXII:


1. Diversify character roles, every single character becomes an identical hybrid half-way through the game, and specializing is less important, you'll still want a tank, dps, and healer, but who those are doesn't seem to matter.

2. Either remove or give more in-game warning of certain items that you can screw up getting altogether. The RNG "You might get an awesome unique 1-of-a-kind weapon.... or a mote" thing that forces players to do save-scumming if they want things (assuming they even know about it) is absolute garbage gameplay mechanic.

3. Put a few more mini-games in there... Final Fantasy VII had The Gold Saucer, Chocobo Breeding, Snowboarding, Mad-Max Motorcycle Mayhem, VIII & IX had really cool collectible card games, X had Blitzball... in FFXII all you had was hunt quests which were basically just "more bosses to fight", which is great but having an alternative way of passing the time or making money outside of combat would have been really good too, especially with such a rich world to explore.

4. Make boss strategies somehow more easy to decipher, I like the difficulty level of the game, but it's unforgiving in making you try to figure out the correct way to beat bosses who rely heavily on micromanaging your party and the bosses' status effects. It's often trial-and-error to figure out what does or doesn't work, or requires relying on online guides.

5. Just make an enhanced HD Port of it for PS3 already!

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I clicked on this thread expecting it to be about fixing the X series of games (most recently, X Rebirth). So I'll stick with that. I haven't played Rebirth yet, but I hear it's a buggy piece of shit, so I'll mostly be commenting on the earlier games.

Sorry about that, I wasn't sure how to word the title.

 

[madwarper]

5 ways to improve Mass Effect 2
1) Remove thermal clips.
2) Get rid of the the planet mining.
3) Remove thermal clips.
4) Display the numerical differences between the weapons in game.
5) Remove the fucking thermal clips.

 

[Tanis]

Perfect Dark:
1) Remake to PC.
2) Add modding tools, like those from TimeSplitters 3.
3) Better voice actors.
4) RPG elements for the weapons.
5) Bigger maps

 

[Roxas1359]

snip

Fun fact, the International version of Final Fantasy XII actually fixes a lot of the things you listed in the improvements. XD
For one, they removed the "can't open this chest" requirement for the Zodiac Spear; they made 12 unique license boards that can be applied to characters that mirrors the old classes in Final Fantasy (Knight, Red Mage, Archer, Thief, etc.); they removed the damage limit so you can get past 9999 damage; they added new hunting like modes in the game along with some more side quests; oh and they rebalanced some spells and weapons as well as added new ones. Oh and best of all, guest party members level up with you, and you can turn off their Gambits too (this includes Esper Gambits as well!)

I highly recommend getting it if you loved XII like how I did, because the International version is lovely.

 

[Tanis]

Shogo ? Mobile Armor Division (PC):
1) Remake the game.
2) Add more reasons to get out of the mecha.
3) Add more RPG elements to justify mission replays.
4) Add side missions that do some world building.
5) Create better modding tools so the community can go nuts.