Your Least Favorite Video Game Enviornment?

[Rariow]

Apart from the classics that everyone's been mentioning - sewer, water and ice levels - desert levels have always managed to find SOME way to bug me. When it's a 3D game they're brown and boring to look at, when it's a 2D game they always seem to have really annoying enemy placement (World 2 of Mario Bros 3 is by far my least favourite). A combination of Tatooine and Taris are the reason I don't re-play KotOR all that often.

These rarely come up anymore, but for old-school FPS I used to hate the train level. If they're done a la GoldenEye (By far the most common) they're just a room copy-pasted over and over, if they're done a la Half Life 1 they're usually a really annoying, slow puzzle.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

Post-apocalypse. The nuclear hellscape to be precise. It's mainly due to me liking colour and not having to look at samey, drab, uninteresting ruins. Give me a reclaimed landscape a la The Last of Us any day.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Run down places in shooter games, they are ok in small doses. I`ve no problem with them in horror styled games like Condemned (obvious title) but with TPS or FPS i want to see the kind of destruction that makes a difference.

 

[NightmareExpress]

Swimming.
It either makes you too slow or defenseless.
Be it in a sewer, in a swamp or just in a really wet environment.
Unless you're in a sub, it generally sucks the big one.

So mandatory swimming segments can go fornicate with a cactus.

 

[Frankster]

Sewer level, sorry for being unoriginal there.

2nd choice goes to miserable dark caves. Occasionaly you get cool ones but otherwise they just tend to be dark places where monsters hang out. Am usually visually underwhelmed.

3rd choice goes to desert levels, they tend to be massive so hard to explore or map out fully, plus i HATE heat and sand irl, which incidentally leads me to my favorite...

Snow levels are my favorite levels so am disagreeing with most forumites on that one
Though that might stem from me preferring cold environments in real life, but my heart litterally leaps in joy when i reach the snow level in games, they are usually the mid point of a game where you face challenging enemies but you yourself are geting pretty geared up and that+environmental hazards just makes snow levels pure fun for me.
But then im biased, again, i prefer the cold and snow in real life.

 

[gamernerdtg2]

I don't care what you give me, as long as I have variety. I can't stand it when the environment is too gloomy.

 

[Hero of Lime]

Dark places, having limited visibility is usually really annoying. I'll jump on the sewer bandwagon because sewers are inherently meant to be dark and confusing to navigate. Ice areas and levels can feel more like a chore, but they usually look pretty cool (no pun intended.)

 

[Lord Garnaat]

I adore Bethesda games, but I've often find that they include some areas that I utterly despise being in. I've found that most of these places are based less on the features of environment itself - such as deserts or swamps or seas - and more on the qualities of those places. I absolutely hate places that are filled with boring enemies with large amounts of health, for example, particularly when those enemies don't drop anything of use or value.

You can see why, then, that going through the Vaults and sewers of the wastelands in Fallout or the tedious, endless Falmer caves and Oblivion gates in The Elder Scrolls were easily the worst parts of both series for me. I can forgive a sewer level or a water dungeon, but only if it isn't a samey, difficult to traverse labyrinth that gives me no tangible reward for all of the tedium I'm forced to go through.

 

[The Enquirer]

I'm not the biggest fan of desert or forest levels. Most of the time desert levels are just empty space, or they feel unnatural. Forest levels mostly feel the same.

Every one of them tries to differentiate itself from the competition by going "oh look there are tree top villages you can camp on and use a sniper class. The only problem is half the time you're left too exposed or you can't see past a certain distance because of all the trees.

 

[l3o2828]

Sewer and Industrial levels yeah. They tend to be bland, confusing, and ugly.

 

[Assassin Xaero]

I can't really think of any specific type of level I hate. If they are done well, then it is usually ok. But, I can say one thing... Blighttown sucks.

 

[scorptatious]

Jungles and forests and the like. They are always so goddamn fucking boring.

You probably wouldn't like MgS3 then.

OT: I hate dark areas. Like the cave in MGS3. I stumble around in the dark for about five minutes before I find the torch nearly every time I play through the game. Geh.

I'm also not too fond of sky levels oddly enough. I always seem to have an unpleasant time with them. Except maybe the hub world in Skyward Sword and Cloud Cukoo Land in Banjo Tooie.

 

[QuantumNebula]

I hate any level where you can't see or where you constantly run in circles because everything looks the same. I also hate any level changes the gameplay drastically and it doesn't work, stuff like driving, flying, swimming, ect.

 

[fornever1]

night levels. especially with fog and strange noises. Dragona dogma at night with no pawns and no oil left in the middle of nowhere *shudder*

 

[MarsProbe]

Sewer levels. I groan every time I see them. Do your market research game devs. No one wants to play this. Forget it as a "start off at the bottom" concept too. Just because we're noobs doesn't mean we should start in the crappiest crap that ever crapped. Enough already.

I also hate industrial retreads. "Manufacturing Central." "Chemical Plant." "Water System Control." These places all sound alike, they all look alike, and difficulty curving by making mazes that all look the same flavor of blah makes games a lot easier to stop playing.

Even the Chemical Plant Zone from Sonic 2? Actually I remember that stage being rather annoying, especially with that dreadful purple chemical...

I can't think of any particular style of level I really hate, though I always find it a little odd playing snowy levels (esp. in platform games) when it isn't winter. Playing such levels always makes me think it should be winter, if not Christmas.

Anyone remember the Caves of Kaliya level from Tomb Raider 3? That was a terrible level - maybe it was down to the tech limitations of the time, meaning that it looked less than a network of caves and more like a prefab tunnel system.

 

[Tyelcapilu]

In my opinion any level can be done well, and it's really about the heart the devs put into it. This is a big issue these days with rpg's trying to claim "most dungeons" and other games with "most hours of gameplay" through lazy roguelike features and copy-pasta'd rooms and creatures. I eventually gave up on skyrim after fighting the three hundred thousandth dragon and/or draugr.
Certain levels these days do off-put me, though. Dark levels and zombie levels in particular are boring as hell. The undead has been beaten to undeath so many times. Media has been slaughtering skeletons, zombies, mummies, vampires, and lichees since before video games even incorporated them. It's almost literally been a hundred years since the first movie incorporating them. Not that you can't have them, just don't make them your backbone without a really really legit reason.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I hate sewer levels because of how freaking over-used they are. Not to mention they tend to be visually ugly and fairly uninteresting from a gameplay perspective.

I also hate underwater levels because I like exploring every last nook and cranny of game worlds, and underwater levels usually prohibit that with drowning mechanics. It's made even worse by the fact that underwater environments tend to have far more nooks and crannies to explore than other zones. It drives me nuts.

 

[Gitty101]

I cannot stand industrial levels. It's always and excuse to use really bland environments and reduce the level to a shooting gallery.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Anything blue and orange. It was fine at first but now it's just total overkill.

 

[already in use]

Water/Underwater levels. They just make me feel unkomfortable and coupled with
limited air and clunky controlls it is just a pain.