Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => Gaming Discussion => Topic started by: MP-Ryan on September 16, 2014, 02:05:44 pm
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A worthy topic of discussion, considering the number of modders on HLP with design aspirations. I thought it might be fun for us to dig up various examples, particularly because I found an obnoxiously glaring one last night.
My example? Dishonored: Knife of Dunwall DLC Mission 1
For those unfamiliar, Dishonored is predominantly a stealth game with combat elements and a wide latitude in playstyle - it allows you to proceed by killing everything and everyone in your path, by avoiding everyone and being a complete ghost, by non-lethal neutralization, and various combinations thereof. The game has design elements that make all of these playstyles equally viable, and an achievement system that reflects that. It is a very well-crafted game and has clearly been painstakingly balanced... which is perhaps why this example is so baffling and infuriating.
In the first mission of the Knife of Dunwall DLC, you infiltrate a slaughterhouse (of whales) and interrogate its owner, who is really not a nice person. You can then lethally or non-lethally dispose of him, and finish out the level.
In the course of my game last night, I painstakingly cleared the level by knocking out enemies and stashing their slumbering bodies in secluded areas, being spotted by no one in the process. I've been doing my utmost to obtain three achievements in the playthrough: complete non-lethal, complete non-detection, and finish the game with a certain amount of coinage left to me. This means I am scrounging the whole level for every scrap of loot I can find.
I knocked out my primary objective, and then stashed him in a shipping crate to get rid of him non-lethally. I then backtracked through the level, knocked out the final remaining enemies, and collected the loot. Finally, I went to depart a certain area, then heard a sudden commotion. I turned around, and the game had spawned an enemy corpse in plain sight, with three live enemies around it, who immediately alerted and began searching. I reloaded, tried exiting a different way. Same effect. I tried several times, and determined that every time I knocked out the last enemy in one part of the level, it would spawn the corpse and three live enemies around it. I eventually bypassed this by leaving one enemy awake in that part of the level, and heading toward the exit... only to find the same thing happened in a different part of the level I had already cleared, with no way to avoid it.
To summarize: in a stealth game in which one playstyle is rewarded by knocking out all enemies and hiding them to proceed non-lethal with no detection, the game actively spawns enemies if you attempt this into a situation where you cannot prevent detection. Furthermore, when played through to the end of the level, the game counted the corpse it spawned as a player kill. Let me repeat that: in a non-lethal run, the game spawned an already-dead NPC and counted that as a player kill. There is no warning or explanation whatsoever that this would happen.
The end result is that I am replaying from a much earlier save, and I will refrain from knocking out all enemies in a single area after locking up my target, because that seems to spawn a railroaded game change that ruins player approach with no ability to prevent it.
This is bad design. Anyone else have some glaring examples they'd like to share? Keep in mind this is about bad design in otherwise good games, not simply bad games.
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Any game that has multiplayer, but has an absolute requirements for online matchmaking to play - even if you're on the same local network as the friend you're playing with.
A few good examples would be the DCS sim games, Lost Planet 2, Space Engineers, and Spintires. Every weekend I hook up with my local LAN gaming group; we all bring our computers over, set up a local network, and go crazy with whatever co-op game we want to play. But with these certain games, if any issues occur with our internet link, our entire game session will go down.
Why?! We're on the same local network. We have no interest in online matchmaking; we just want to play the game co-operatively with each other locally. We have no technical dependencies on internet-facing services to actually connect to one another, and yet if internet connectivity becomes unavailable, we're suddenly drop-kicked out of the game session even though our computers can still connect to each other.
Some games even make their online servers the authoritative point for all network traffic, so even if it's just you and your local friends playing in the same session, all your network traffic HAS to hit the online servers first and then come back down. This can potentially add hundreds of milliseconds of extra ping time to our local game session for no useful reason whatsoever.
The absolute worst is when the online matchmaking services go down (looking at you, Mercenaries 2...) and you're left with no way to play co-op multiplayer for your favorite games whatsoever beyond praying some third party comes out with a server emulator. WTF?
Give us proper LAN play, damnit.
Edit: And while I'm at it, give us proper scaling options for local network play. It's silly that I have to see my friends jumping, jittering, and teleporting all over my screen in some games when I've got a ~10ms ping time to them on a gigabit connection less than ten feet away. Yes, network optimizations are essential for online gameplay experiences, but if I go to the trouble of setting up a high-speed local connection, I should be able to benefit from it.
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Fallout New Vegas
Assassination squads being scripted to confront you in certain areas regardless of the character's skill or concealment
Invisible Walls in the middle of the map around black mountain
Basically any design which breaks immersion and reveals the game to be a game.
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Freespace 2's "Hammerhead" section, where it gives you the Herc II and then pits you into several situations where the Herc II is not very suitable, concluding the act with a bombing run in a bomber which' only redeeming feature is that it carries a massive payload.
Battlefield 4's knifing animations - when a knife battle takes place, other players can not fire upon the "couple" - The animations themselves are just over the toppish brutal to top it of, I much preferred older games basic slash (BF3 had a slash from front thing doing 50 damage which was usefull in panic mode)
Heck
Battlefield 4's tendency to ANIMATE EVERYTHING - which creates rather weird bugs - for example, when you shoot someone in the head, this person automatically ducks, changing the hitbox. This in itself is rather silly IMO (As instead of rewarding consistent aiming - you miss the follow-up!), but this animation is not always properly synched with the hitbox, so...
Saint's Row IVs Metal Gear Solid parody: It's great fun! But it does punish you very, very harshly for (intentionally) ****ing up, whilst similar stealth segments in say... CoD4 let you play around with your consequences.
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Well, I'm not sure I'd class the game as 'Excellent', but the raids in 'Impire' felt like a terrible wasted opportunity. (Posted the game as Dungeons earlier, wrong clone...)
Basically, you could group your creatures up and send them on missions, depriving your Dungeon of some of its defences at the chance of gaining resources. What this involved was a single room like a Barn or something from a fixed perspective, often half-obscured by it's own model into which your creatures would pile in, attack whatever was there and then open the chest for the reward.
This is one of those design decisions that just reeks of having been a production, rather than a design choice, which is a pity, since if these had been large, dungeon-like areas, rather than rooms, I think it would have made an interesting new twist for a Dungeon-Keeper clone, think DK meets Diablo :)
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While this is not the kind of glaring BAD thing MP-Ryan has in his OP, I've looked over my games and nothing really sticks in my mind for an excellent game with something so bad.
So I'm going to go with like Flipside, and the most annoying missed-opportunity to make an excellent game much better for me is not having Perfect-Dark level customisation options in the Timesplitters games.
At least let me choose the number of kills for a match down to single-digit level!
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Fallout New Vegas
Invisible Walls in the middle of the map around black mountain
Yes! Completely unnecessary, I can see it around the edges of the world, but in the middle... :rolleyes:
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Rubber band AI in several racing games.
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crysis 1/warhead - can't fire or even punch from stealth mode. also, just generally having WAY too little suit energy. my super suit with magic armor is less durable than north korea's standard issue flak jacket. wtf.
any modern game with a checkpoint-only save system.
any game that forces online accounts/third party apps into offline, single player games. if i want to use your "service," i am quite capable of installing it myself. yall remember when registering your game with the publisher online got you a cheat code or hint instead of a huge piece of the game that was held back from you until you do?
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Bioshock - The annoying juxtaposition of brilliant plot twist and disappointing plot resolution.
Edit : I suspect there are people who would place Mass Effect 3 in this same category. Having not played it though, I can't speak for myself on it.
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Prince of Persia : Sands of Time. - Climbing the Tower of Dawn without the Dagger of Time
By this point in the game, it has already established itself as probably the best platforming game of all time. The game has a limited number of savepoints and a mistake frequently ends in insta-death. But it is saved by the Dagger of Time mechanic which allows you a limited number of reattempts from the exact point at which you made the mistake. Once you run out of those, you have to start the whole section again from the savepoint. The result is that for the most part, the running, climbing and jumping works very well and single mistake doesn't result in the need to do it all again. If you do end up having to replay, the player generally ends up feeling it's their own fault because either they've repeatedly ****ed up the same jump, or they ****ed up repeatedly in an earlier section and have run out of retries further along.
Until you get to the Tower of Dawn.
Having lost the Dagger of Time because the plot demands it (i.e you have no choice and lost it in a cutscene), the player is forced to use every single skill he has learned in a section of the game which could take 5-10 minutes to complete. Any mistake results in the player having to replay the entire section again.
This one section is probably the main reason I haven't replayed Prince of Persia since completing it. There is no reason that it couldn't have been done as an achievement ("Who needs a dagger!") instead of forcing the player to repeat the same section over and over again until they finish it.
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Prince of Persia : Sands of Time. - Climbing the Tower of Dawn without the Dagger of Time
Having played that game on PC, that is certainly not the only section of that game I'd criticize - the controls for the combat were awful, and the entire combat model was generally awful as a result in a PC environment without a controller (Sand King battle, I am looking right at you!) - but the section you just mentioned does deserve special mention.
any modern game with a checkpoint-only save system.
Yes. This times a million.
And along that line, any modern game with a limited number of save slots (on PC). Seriously, the ONLY thing that should limit your save slots is disk space, not some arbitrary number (Dishonored, I am looking at you again).
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Checkpoints are annoying but kind of understandable, they're a lot less complex to program than a full save system.
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Checkpoints are annoying but kind of understandable, they're a lot less complex to program than a full save system.
Checkpoints would be far less obnoxious if they auto-saved when you want to exit the game. There is nothing more infuriating than replying the same 10 minutes of game over and over because you get interrupted in the middle of it and have to quit out between checkpoints.
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But that's exactly why checkpoints are easier, you don't have to deal with saving at arbitrary points in the game.
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And along that line, any modern game with a limited number of save slots (on PC). Seriously, the ONLY thing that should limit your save slots is disk space, not some arbitrary number (Dishonored, I am looking at you again).
Oh yes this. Absolutely this. But I'd like to extend it to console as well. At least on PS1 and PS2 I could get around this through the use of multiple memory cards. I have some games where I'll have saves on like 8 memory cards. But on PS3, I'm stuck with just whatever number the game designers have chosen to limit me to. And it is infuriating.
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Checkpoints are annoying but kind of understandable, they're a lot less complex to program than a full save system.
sure it's harder, but it's been proven not prohibitively so. if a completely open world game like skyrim can do quick saves, how does a linear shooter claim it's too difficult?
at the very least, don't have multiple difficulty spike or generally tedious sequences between saves.
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Skyrim, ironically, was extremely unstable on the PS3 because of bugs in its save system. It's not at all easy, especially when you factor in the design constraints of keeping the player from saving themselves into a corner.
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Oblivion had a bug (that was later corrected) where the object's id would overflow eventually and start deleting objects from the world in order to be able instantiate new objects, which was somehow related to the save game file.
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Having played that game on PC, that is certainly not the only section of that game I'd criticize - the controls for the combat were awful, and the entire combat model was generally awful as a result in a PC environment without a controller (Sand King battle, I am looking right at you!) - but the section you just mentioned does deserve special mention.
I hated the combat system when I first played the game (The Sand King was something I especially hated!). But after a while I started to like it and to be honest, I don't mind the combat in PoP much now. In fact, before I had to reinstall, I would occasionally play PoP and only play the Tower of Dawn lift section (Which apparently most people hate).
I never liked combat in either of the sequels anywhere near as much. Too much reliance on button mashing special moves. If I want to play Mortal Kombat, I'll play Mortal Kombat sothankyouverymuch.
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I didn't find Sands of Time combat hard, it was just repetitive. Combat in the second game was better but the mood of the story tried to get too edgy with heavy metal, swearing and chain mail bikinis in the rain. Haven't yet gotten to the third game. Forgotten sands was decent if forgettable.
The problem for me with sands of time is the hand-holding. Whenever you entered an area, the camera would pan around and show you which way to go rather than letting the player figure it out for themselves. Then it was just a matter of executing the moves.
In fact hand holding is a massive pet peeve of mine in general. Games which tell you what to do before you get a chance to fail. Arkham Asylum, Gears of War 3 are some of the games guilty of this.
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Prince of Persia : Sands of Time. - Climbing the Tower of Dawn without the Dagger of Time
I can certainly understand the frustration with that segment, but I honestly kind of liked it myself. I think Tycho of Penny Arcade said it best a long while back: that segment was the true "final boss" of the game, with the actual final Vizier fight being just something of an epilogue. It was basically the game's way of saying, "Okay, you've been using these skills the whole game and honing your platforming, now let's see if you can hack it without that safety net below you." Like I said, totally get it if that choice didn't work for you, but it clicked for me, and I got much more frustrated at myself than the game for my failings in that sequence.
And yeah, Warrior Within was totally 3EDGY5U, Godsmack soundtrack at all. Fortunately Two Thrones was a big swing back towards the original in tone, and wound up being a solid finish to the trilogy.
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Mask of the Betrayer. The Spirit Eating mechanic.
It still might be the greatest CRPG ever made, every bit the intellectual equal of Planescape: Torment and packing a far stronger emotional punch, remarkable in its use of elements of a D&D fantasy setting as a metaphor to deconstruct real world religion (especially the doctrine of salvation by faith alone)...and they make you constantly worry about having to recharge your spirit meter by suppressing your hunger in proximity to enemies, or by devouring them (thus increasing your hunger for them and making the meter deplete even faster). You don't insert a time limit gameplay mechanic into a wordy CRPG that's meant to be played at a slow, methodical pace. There is at least a mod that reduces the rate at which your spirit energy depletes to the point that it's only a little distracting, but still, what the hell was Obsidian thinking?
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Assassin's Creed: 7 step process just to exit the damn game.
Pause
Exit
Exit Animus
Walk around in confusion thinking maybe it's an interactive lobby type of thing. Approach doors, the computer, etc. looking for the exit command.
Futilely attempt alt-f4
Pause again
Exit
Wonder why the **** you aren't out of the game yet and slowly build rage as you search the title screen you're now at for an exit button. Mash escape repeatedly.
Sign back in to your profile.
Wait for **** to load again.
See exit button, dare to hope it's the way out of the labyrinth.
Click exit button, sigh in exasperation at the designer who forced this upon you.
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Mask of the Betrayer. The Spirit Eating mechanic.
I personally enjoyed that. It was reminiscent of very old D&D where everything was literally trying to kill you for the slightest ****.
Missed a lever? It deactivates the spike floor on the room below you'll go to in an hour; Read the runes on that wall? They are eldritch rules, your mind is now full of fthag'hn; Didn't bring enough food for the trip? You starved to death.
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EVE Online.
They removed the really good cloak, warp, and gate firing sounds and put in airy fairy noises. I hate airy fairy noises.
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I remember that issue in Dishonored. It was quite obvious and annoying in the Golden Cat level in particular.
any modern game with a checkpoint-only save system.
This is by far my biggest beef with modern FPSs, and the main reason I don't play them much these days. It means the game is either trivially easy, or wastes your time in replaying sections repeatedly. I actually go out of my way to play the few games that have it. It's amazing that a feature that was once completely standard is now considered a great thing to have.
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Assassin's Creed: 7 step process just to exit the damn game.
Pause
Exit
Exit Animus
Walk around in confusion thinking maybe it's an interactive lobby type of thing. Approach doors, the computer, etc. looking for the exit command.
Futilely attempt alt-f4
Pause again
Exit
Wonder why the **** you aren't out of the game yet and slowly build rage as you search the title screen you're now at for an exit button. Mash escape repeatedly.
Sign back in to your profile.
Wait for **** to load again.
See exit button, dare to hope it's the way out of the labyrinth.
Click exit button, sigh in exasperation at the designer who forced this upon you.
After discovering how ridiculous that was, I quickly started to just ALT-F4 from the game itself. Then I uninstalled it not long after.
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i tried alt-f4. it didn't work. task manager is the only other way i can kill it, but that's not all that much less annoying.
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Are you on a laptop or a desktop that has duel-function F-keys? (your F1 - F12 keys also function to turn down the volume / brightness / sleep / wifi etc). If so, you might have to also press Fn as some models default to the alternate behavior and to press F4 you would have to Fn+F4, so Alt+Fn+F4. This option is changeable in the BIOS for the laptop I observed it on (Compaq, so HP probably does it too).
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Alt-F4 worked for me is asscreed.
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tried it again from in-game and it worked. i guess it's just the menus or something where it doesn't work. well that's a relief.
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My biggest beef with Assassin's Creed 1 is the lack of subtitles. Well, that and an annoying tendency to get killed by the sometimes-clunky controls; I was profoundly grateful that both issues were addressed in the sequel... although while the controls got better with every game, they never really managed to avoid accidentally killing yourself by jumping in completely the wrong direction.
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Assassin's Creed is a good example of a series that was ruined by checkpoints. Given the open world environments in those games, the lack of saves is a deal-breaker for me. The games have a lot of good ideas but are tedious and frustrating to play because of this, and I pretty much gave up on the series after the second game.
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I never found the checkpoints frustrating in the open-world sections of Assassin's Creed because there were almost no long-lasting negative consequences. During scripted 'missions' they could be very annoying, though.
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I might have liked Assassin's Creed better had I (1) played in on console and (2) played it when it was first released. Trying to play it on PC in 2013 just made me think it was generally terrible, repetitive, unnecessarily restrictive, and the save system was brutally bad. I agree with CP; especially as I'm accustomed to open-world games like TES series, Fallout, etc that allow you to save anywhere.
I'm sure the later games in the series are better, but the first one has not aged well - and it's not that I dislike older games (hell, I finished the original Thief series not that long ago), but just that it is now a game with an immense amount of unrealized potential and an equally immense amount of frustrating little missteps that make it absolutely not worth playing today.
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I have another entry for the list: Dead Space.
When Dead Space was first released, it had marketing that made it look considerably like a modern and streamlined System Shock 2. Space horror with RPG elements? What's not to like?
For me, Dead Space had three things that absolutely killed it, despite the game itself having a great deal of promise (I ultimately never bothered to finish it):
1. Manual save points at specific intervals only. This doesn't increase the horror or difficult; actually, in a horror game it's a terrible design decision because once you have gone through the a section once and died, all the horror is now gone and you know exactly what to expect. Therefore, why am I being forced to replay 3-5 minutes of tedium to get to a combat sequence that I failed? This makes NO sense. SS2 and Bioshock handled this much better: in addition to manual saves, the presence of Vitachambers or QR units in the combat areas ensured that combat sequences were not tedious and monotonous; you got the horror, you finished the skill test, and you moved on.
2. Jump-scares and music. Take off your headphones in Dead Space and there's no more horror. Notice that an empty room you've walked into has vents.... an attack is therefore imminent. The "scares" were cheap and utterly predictable. Dead Space's horror aspects were no environmental and atmospheric, like a good horror game, but based entirely on jump-scare mechanics, which turned me off immediately.
3. Awful controls, and awful camera. There is a reason most horror movies switch to first person or fixed camera points at points of tension, because it puts the viewer into a locked viewpoint and makes them emulate the victim/subject of the plot in the circumstances. Humans process horror and fright due to lack of information; the more information you have, the less frightening a situation. Horror games usually approach this in one of two ways: first-person perspective (SS2, Bioshock, etc), or fixed camera angles (Resident Evil). The over-the-shoulder third person breaks immersiveness, because you can't see what you should be able to see if you are the player, and it eliminates the horror, because the obstructed view is not due to player position in the environment (a la Resident Evil) but simply awful camera movement. Just.... NO! Furthermore, frantic escape is a common and important aspect of horror atmosphere, and Isaac simply doesn't have that option. Instead of frantic movement, your options are to shoot well or reload the last damn save point. Couple with the camera movement, it makes the parts of the game that should be the most intense simply a shooting gallery.
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the biggest problem i had with dead space was the slow as piss movement and control scheme. i don't think the system employed brought anything better than just a standard shooter scheme would have.
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The original Command and Conquer: Fixed missions with fixed forces are okay, if you give recon enough to avoid fights. (You didn't always do this, but you realized that when Tiberian Sun came.) Fixed missions with fixed forces trying to hunt down stealth units are not ever okay.
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The second Assassin's Creed is generally much better than the first one, with a better story and more diverse missions, but it still has the same irritating save system. I played it once and liked it, but would not want to play it again or any further games in the series because of the save system.
In C&C, I think GDI mission 14 was the only one where you had to do that. I always liked those limited-force missions and their puzzle-like gameplay better than the base building ones, which frequently just felt like skirmish games.
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Dune 2000, being forced to build concrete under your buildings. Caesar 3, having the residential buildings devolve when one of the many people walking by who maintains the building status decides to take a different route.
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In C&C, I think GDI mission 14 was the only one where you had to do that. I always liked those limited-force missions and their puzzle-like gameplay better than the base building ones, which frequently just felt like skirmish games.
I didn't mind them, if, again, they actually allowed me to recon so I could chose my fights. Otherwise "puzzle-like" becomes "trial and error" and unless you're in a Sierra adventure game "trial and error" is not a phrase that should considered normal operating procedure. (Or if you are in a Sierra adventure game either; there's a reason they didn't last.) This didn't always happen until Tiberian Sun.
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The bit of SS2 where you have to go on the Rickenbacker. The best word I can use to describe the layout of this ship is "retarded", especially considering it's supposed to be a military ship. Four levels of frustration and mediocrity totally overshadowed by the awesomeness of the preceding sections of the game. The ending didn't help matters either.
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Dune 2000, being forced to build concrete under your buildings.
I've only ever played Dune 2. What was the issue?
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Dune 2000, being forced to build concrete under your buildings.
I've only ever played Dune 2. What was the issue?
You have to build concrete on the sand and then put your buildings on top of it. You don't have to, but if you just build straight onto the sand, your buildings take damage slowly, so it's a lot less cost effective having to keep repairing them than putting them on the concrete.
I imagine he found the process annoying and thought it brought nothing to the game. Me, it took a bit of getting used to, but it didn't annoy me after that and soon became second nature.
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I vaguely remember having to do it in Dune 2. And it wasn't really a bad choice there.
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It was a bit tedious in Dune 2 but I didn't really mind it. I think people actually bashed Emperor later on because it did not have concrete.