monumentally stupid game design decisions
interpolator
As something of an antidote to the current culture of nerdily nitpicking bits of style and logic in games and films and whatever, here's one in which to vent on decisions taken in the game development process that just seem totally alien to a reasonably normal human who's bought the thing to play. Not bugs and fuckups that slip through the net ... but conscious decisions - often made in committee - that totally ruin what would otherwise be a decent experience. Like a ranting focus group who's been employed to late
My nomination for the Joey Deacon Design Choice of the year :
The vehicle reset system in Colin Mcrae Dirt. In a nutshell, this is a system that will allow you to drive a flawless race but smack into a hidden rock on the last corner, knock a wheel off, and naturally fail to finish. Twat, be more careful next time. But it will *also allow you to drive off a 500 foot cliff at over a hundred miles an hour, and a second later whilst in mid-air teleport you safely back onto the track with not a scratch, and only the brief loss of forward momentum as punishment for your shit driving. Off you go virtual driver, win the stage, that little fiery death plunge cliff incident didn't happen. At least in the previous couple of colin games you collected an appropriate amount of ravine-based damage before being hauled back onto the track. So dumb, SO DUMB. At what point did the codies team sit back, take a good hard look at this spastic turn of events you can easily replicate on every single level of the game and go "hmmm, you know what? That's spot on, that is". Chronic
Any more for any more?
My nomination for the Joey Deacon Design Choice of the year :
The vehicle reset system in Colin Mcrae Dirt. In a nutshell, this is a system that will allow you to drive a flawless race but smack into a hidden rock on the last corner, knock a wheel off, and naturally fail to finish. Twat, be more careful next time. But it will *also allow you to drive off a 500 foot cliff at over a hundred miles an hour, and a second later whilst in mid-air teleport you safely back onto the track with not a scratch, and only the brief loss of forward momentum as punishment for your shit driving. Off you go virtual driver, win the stage, that little fiery death plunge cliff incident didn't happen. At least in the previous couple of colin games you collected an appropriate amount of ravine-based damage before being hauled back onto the track. So dumb, SO DUMB. At what point did the codies team sit back, take a good hard look at this spastic turn of events you can easily replicate on every single level of the game and go "hmmm, you know what? That's spot on, that is". Chronic
Any more for any more?
Replies
Yes, CRIPPLING the controls. On Purpose.
The Hollister boss battle was the dumbest fucking boss fight I'd had in such a long time. He's basically a Metal Gear Solid guard with a perfect shot. Shoot the dumb fuck in the head, he goes apeshit and chases you, all the while you *have* to keep cover between you and him, or he'll shoot you with a big fucking gun, has no chance of missing, and he's not exactly a slow shot. How do you beat him? Let him get close, then play ring around the rosie around a rock so your out of his sight until he forgets about you and walks away. Shoot in head about 40x more times, and that bear rectum encounter is over. At least Hollister's character model was cool.
I was so satisfied with killing him, I took a screenshot, beat the game, and will never touch it again.
There was a good one in Rainbow 6 Lockdown where all your teammates had an extremely high priority on peeking around every corner. Had some... Interesting results.
Played metal gear solid 2 on PC, loved it (hard setting)...
..until...
At almost the very end of the game, you get grabbed by the throat and have to keep tapping a button to hold your breath while you're being choked. I managed this ok on normal setting. On hard I just couldn't do it fast enough. I'm not exactly a slug, my fingers were moving fast, I even tried stuff like using a spoon and quickly rubbing back and forth the curved end so it pressed the button and let go as I scrubbed. Not fast enough.
So they made this part of the game so demanding that you just can't proceed and finish it.
I am up for a challenge, but when you have to sweat blood just to get to the next level, then its becomes a bore quite quickly.
Having to shoot something 200 times is not really good design, just lazy IMHO.
The advanced moves you have to do to pull it off, just don't seem to work half the time also, so you just have to cheat to move on, which sucks.
I could whine for pages about... peculiar... design changes coming from on high that I've had to work with throughout my short career, but I won't. Instead I'll complain about Ecco the Dolphin, which popped up on Live Arcade this week. horrible design all the way. The UI is nondescript. There are two similar looking meters which one could easily assume are both part of the same metre. Theres no suggestion that one of them is an oxygen gauge, not even when you run out of oxygen. When your dolphin dies theres no animation, or message or anything, you simply respawn back at the start of the level. Took me a bunch of deaths before I noticed what was going on with the air. I've got a lot of issues with the level design too, but thats enough griping from me for the moment.
I love check-point systems that are EFFICIENTLY designed and spaced to keep me on my toes without feeling like I have to redo an entire level just to catch up to where I was before I died.
My #1 pet-peeve in any game, any genre except RTS: Save-anywhere. On a PC, this can usually be conveniently bound to a hot key (re: "Quick Save" in most PC shooters). I absolutely hate it. It takes away from the experience when I can just save before every room I go in with no fear of dying, making the wrong choices, etc.
I love check-point systems that are EFFICIENTLY designed and spaced to keep me on my toes without feeling like I have to redo an entire level just to catch up to where I was before I died.
[/ QUOTE ]
I thought Far Cry did this very well. Most others hated it - save anywhere was their pacifier, of sorts. I also think it takes away from the experience, and when I have it I abuse it - F5 before every room and F9 after a bad encounter. I always end up at the last boss with huge stockpiles of every weapon and ammo because I never had to use it during the rest of the game.
Oblivion, full stop. From the skill system which encourages 'favoring' all the skills you'll never use, to extremely wasteful assets (go go three-thousand polygon rocks), there's just so much wrong with the game it hurts my brain. It's a pitty because what IS good is good-- especially the expansion.
[/ QUOTE ]
Dear god, yes. You can take pretty much any single system in Oblivion and it will be horribly broken. Combat? Horrendous. Leveling system? Character gimping 101. Dynamic difficulty scaling? No satisfaction of getting stronger ever (hi, group of lowly bandits wearing the best armour in the game). The list goes on and on...
I just built a new rig, so I thought I'd throw Oblivion back in (because it's so poorly optimized it's a great speed test!). If you spend several hours modding it, you can actually turn it into a good game! Who knew?
And people wonder why everyone is scared about Fallout. Ah well, as long as they include mod tools so the community can fix their shit again I suppose it will end up alright.
Most other decisions in the game seem just bad, but this one's actually stupid... The whole facegen didn't work out too well, but this could have been avoided so easily.
[ QUOTE ]
Bad design decisions... I want to say Spiderman3 but I feel lots of movie games have the same issues.
[/ QUOTE ]I feel for the developers of the Spiderman 3 game, I really do. When you're developing a game like that, not only do you have to contend with an extremely tight deadline, you also have a whole hell of a lot of people sticking their finger in the proverbial pie - You've got the usual publisher whims, coupled with the insane requests and restrictions from both the movie studio and from Marvel. You can see the decent game Spiderman 3 hidden under what it became when people decided to start screwing with it without allowing adequate time to get everything working again.
mafia. race level. period.
[/ QUOTE ]
lol qft
A general pain in the ass feature found in many games is whack enemy spawning. Nothing like being nailed in the back by an enemy you know is only 3 seconds old and appeared out of a room you just cleared.
[edit] Oh yeah, that Mafia race level killed the game for me too. I ended up getting sick of it and playing something else. Sucks because up 'till then I was really enjoying it.
edit: oh and more recently, the whole design of red steel, and how you can reverse-engineer their equation for level-building: small boxy rooms, some corridors, big boxy room (large firefight) corridoors, small boxy room with space in the middle (swordfight), maybe an outside bit, repeat..
I love check-point systems that are EFFICIENTLY designed and spaced to keep me on my toes without feeling like I have to redo an entire level just to catch up to where I was before I died.
[/ QUOTE ]
Efficiently is the key word here. I am a very impatient gamer. I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas and got to the trainyard level, which is nearly a half mile long. There are bad guys along the way which you have to sneak up and take out, etc., and at the end you need to be stealthy and decisive to rescue hostages. Being that this is a realistic tactical shooter, covering the half mile distance of the trainyard takes about as long as it would in real-life at a slow jog, it would be about 10 minutes without adversaries.
But seeing as how there are a good number of bad guys shooting at you, it takes at least 15 minutes even if you are very efficient. Now it is also very easy to screw up the hostage rescue at the end, and if you do mess it up, you start over at the last check point half of a mile back. I've tried it about 7 times, and still haven't rescued the hostages. My problem now is that by the time I get through the trainyard again, I am so impatient and pissed off that it all ends in a bloody firefight with none of the hostages surviving. It is terrible.
With several hours of my life completely wasted due to that checkpoint, I will never play the Rainbow Six series again, and wouldn't recommend the game either.
I want to skip them. I don't want to have my guy drive through the desert for ten minutes before I get to shoot someone. I feel like I'm being punished for starting a game. And finishing a level.
GRAW 2's cinematics are pissing me off.
I want to skip them. I don't want to have my guy drive through the desert for ten minutes before I get to shoot someone. I feel like I'm being punished for starting a game. And finishing a level.
[/ QUOTE ]
I haven't played the second one, but in the first game they had a 'skip insertion' option, which skips the entire cutscene and gets you straight into the action. The really long ass intro sequences were a pain in the ass in the first one as well.
-caseyjones
At least Hollister's character model was cool.
[/ QUOTE ]
Hah! You just saved a retaliatory tirade from me.
http://superostrich.net/images/large/3d_hollister.jpg
Efficiently is the key word here. I am a very impatient gamer. I was playing Rainbow Six Vegas and got to the trainyard level, which is nearly a half mile long. There are bad guys along the way which you have to sneak up and take out, etc., and at the end you need to be stealthy and decisive to rescue hostages. Being that this is a realistic tactical shooter, covering the half mile distance of the trainyard takes about as long as it would in real-life at a slow jog, it would be about 10 minutes without adversaries.
But seeing as how there are a good number of bad guys shooting at you, it takes at least 15 minutes even if you are very efficient. Now it is also very easy to screw up the hostage rescue at the end, and if you do mess it up, you start over at the last check point half of a mile back. I've tried it about 7 times, and still haven't rescued the hostages. My problem now is that by the time I get through the trainyard again, I am so impatient and pissed off that it all ends in a bloody firefight with none of the hostages surviving. It is terrible.
With several hours of my life completely wasted due to that checkpoint, I will never play the Rainbow Six series again, and wouldn't recommend the game either.
[/ QUOTE ]
That, and a dozen other points in the game pissed me off to no end. Its fricking Pc, I have my F5 or F9, I want my save function ><
Beyond that one major item, RB6 Vegas is an awesome game, and I'm going through it my second time now. It took a lot of practice, but now I don't usually die in single player.
Terrorist Hunt mode ftw