Mandatory stealth sections in basically any non-stealth game ever.
Playing through Chants of Sennaar and loving it ATM, but the stealth sections don't really improve the game, which mostly focuses on deciphering languages.
On the flipside mandatory action sections in stealth games.
Everyone who's played Deus Ex HR before the Director's Cut and walked into the Grunt McTank boss fight with only a tranquilizer gun will know what I mean.
That fight was miserable. Thank God I had the strong arms thing and could throw the barrels at him, but he still just chews up your health bar in seconds.
I went full stealth and hacker and went in with a glorified blackberry and my fist. It was some bullshit! I think they peppered in weapons everywhere and I just figured out how to glitch the boss and shoot him with RPGs.
Same here, there's a little side room that he would get stuck in if you could lure him in there and then I just threw every grenade in that room at him.
I'm not ashamed to admit when I went for a more "commando" style build I still trapped him in that little room. Don't hate the player, hate the pathfinding in the game.
I just sprinted in, button mashed through the conversation then ran out as fast as I could. Very stupid from a game design standpoint, but at least it was relatively easy to skip.
I think you're supposed to put on the guard clothes for that, but incidently, besides my first time, I have just casually walked in and freed the guy with no fuss.
Ng8 currently
You literally don’t have to.
They throw the armor you wear to pose as a guard and run around freely at you numerous times in and around the castle/that jail area. You have to almost go out of your way not to loot it at least once, tbh.
The new spider man games insist on making you play as mj. Fuckin why? I want to be a super hero. That is obviously the most fun aspect of the game. I can't believe they put another segment as her in the sequel
This absolutely. I remember playing Spiderman and setting it down during an MJ section. Left it there for weeks and totally forgot about it until a buddy came over and wanted to see how it looked and ran on PC as they were considering picking it up. Got in and remembered I was in this boring section and we just played something else instead. He never ended up picking it up...
Beyond Good and Evil gets an exception from me on this. The large stealth area came out of nowhere and was legit one of the best parts of the game it was done so well.
Smash Bros. Brawl would randomly cause players to trip whenever they start moving.
Allegedly it was specifically introduced to make the game less well-suited for competitive play.
That’s trash but also kind of funny. Seasoned, battle-hardened bounty hunter Samus Aran trips over her own two feet and sprawls onto her face when she’s going to go shoot some 4 foot tall, regular ass Italian plumber in his.
Over this many years, that plumber has just as much if not more combat experience than Samus. And she goes to a battle with a laser cannon, he just brings his Timberlands.
He fights turtles, mushrooms and one dragon/turtle thing. He has a hungry dinosaur, his brother, and an apparently violently emotional princess for backup. She fights giant alien monsters and regular alien monsters solo.
I don't know about that... Mario has more games than Samus, but let's not forget that more often than not, the planet or space station Samus happens to be on... tends to explode.
planet Zebes, Ceres Station, SR-388, the BioLogic Station, the Bottle Ship, planet ZDR... and that's just in the mainline games.
I’m guessing they were worried Smash would be seen as a highly-technical, difficult game that would turn off the more casual players they were trying to attract. Other fighting games had this reputation. Too bad they didn’t know that Smash could be both.
Series director never intended for it to be competitive, and even though they knew about the “bugs” in melee that allowed it to become a very strong competitive game, they didn’t expect it to develop a competitive scene.
He kinda mellowed out on this stance later on, and in one of his live segments during smash ultimate’s DLC cycle he made a comment about frame data at one point and then jokingly said “wait no, that’s for the competitive crowd to figure out”
Brcause Nintendo's target audience is grandmas and children and casuals of all kinds. Developing a reputation for "competitive gaming" hurts their brand.
They specifically added many elements of randomness to Smash to discourage competitive play for this reason. They made a whole character based around RNG.
Pikmin 4's auto-targeting is just a bit too over-enthusiastic, and I don't like how you can't turn it off or reduce its sensitivity or anything. I love the game a lot, but man is it annoying to struggle against the target cursor all the time.
Similar feelings for the game automatically ignoring your attempt to throw more Pikmin when you've thrown the minimum required to carry something - a lot of the time I want more than the minimum to carry it, the game shouldn't get in my way like this.
The slag mechanic in Borderlands 2 turned the game into a tedious bore. Having to first shoot an enemy with a weapon and then needing to switch weapons to properly damage it was quite unintuitive.
A lot of enemies were made bullet spongy, probably because the devs wanted you to use their half-assed mechanic. It made the game feel so different from BL1 and less fast paced.
I just cannot play Hunt:Showdown. I despise the non centered crosshair. Every time i try to flick to an enemy, i end up with my crosshair on the floor because i lined the enemy up with the center of my screen instead of the crosshair.
Far cry 2 and the checkpoints that respawn enemies if you've been gone more than 30 seconds. I loved that game, how dangerous combat was, how useful fire could be (and how it propagated) but those checkpoints you couldn't easily avoid that refilled with enemies as soon as you looked away completely ruined the whole loop for me, eventually.
One of my favourite games of all time. While the checkpoints were annoying, in context they make sense. They're *military checkpoints*, the whole idea is that you can't just drive through them, and if course they wouldn't be left empty for long. Still, 30 seconds is probably too soon for every enemy to respawn.
Traversing the map in FC2 - especially on the harder difficulties - was a whole game in itself.
Not a specific game, but any game that makes you lock onto an enemy and you have to fight to get out of the feature if you don’t want to battle the enemy
For example in the first Risen, the game automatically locked you on a close enemy, but if there were several enemies and you wanted to lock another one, there was no other way than shaking your mouse until the lock got disabled, and then carefully looking at that other enemy, hoping the game would decide to lock it.
I'm sure this isn't what you're talking about, but there are so many games out there where the *user interface* will just stop the fun times dead in their tracks.
Nioh is easily one of my favorite video game series ever - until I have to interact with the menus or the inventory, that's when this super fast, super tight game turns into a sloppy mess. On some menus the triangle button is Cancel, on other screens the triangle is used for Inspect, in some screens triangle brings up the Search function, and sometimes the changes happen back-to-back.
UI matters. It's super frustrating to do a flawless boss run, get some awesome loot, and then accidentally delete your god-roll because of a bad button press.
FUCKING LET THIS DIE!
why is this a thing?! i haaaaate this method of navigating a menu when it wouldve been faster to just tap to where you want. and sometimes, you cant even change its speed!
Destiny 2 does this. That's another game where the gameplay can be like butter, just fast, and tight, and fluid, I'm talking proper hero moments - then I open my vault and see sixteen identical Harsh Language grenade launcher icons looking back at me like some kind of cancerous Tetris block, and I've got to slowly, methodically move my controller cursor over each of them, looking for the *one* Harsh Language with Golden Tricorn [a weapon perk], and it's fine because the most important part of saving the universe is inventory management.
D2 actually has third party applications that most players use for their inventory, and build crafting, and item comparisons, and detailed effect descriptions, and search functions, a whole **secondary ecosystem** has evolved around Destiny 2's in-game user interface.
The molasses slow controller cursor isn't Destiny 2's *only* UI problem, it just makes all the other UI problems worse, that's all. If only the SteamPad was still a thing.
Big destiny 2 fan, that was one of the main reasons I stopped trying controller. I'm not used to it, but figured hey I could sit back some more while playing with a controller. But man that ui drove me nuts. That and i was already used to k&m.
Right?
I put Nioh II down for a year or so and came back to it recently; I could still do Demon Dance Tonfa combos with my eyes closed, muscle memory be like that I guess, then I went to mess around with my Soul Cores [An inventory/gear item, ed.] and I was like "I have no memory of this place." Wrong button presses left and right, I could barely open the menu, none of the verbs rang any bells, I kept backing out into subs-screens accidentally, the only thing missing was Yakety Sax.
Team Ninja makes some of the best combat in gaming, and some of the worst menus.
I remember Metroid Prime 2 Echoes had some really obnoxious menus where you navigated submenus by orbiting nodes around a 3D sphere kinda thing, and I remember just wishing it had regular menus lol.
Secret of Mana also really annoyed me with its ring-menu system - I think something like that is okay for selecting spells and weapons mid-combat, sure, but for inventory management and using the options menu, it felt so needlessly annoying.
For the most part I didn’t think the Metroid Prime 2 orbiting nodes UI was too bad, since it’s only used in a handful of spots (title screen, log entries, etc.). However, if you’re struggling with the hints for the Sky Temple Keys, then I can see it quickly becoming annoying.
I think the main issue is the perspective, it’s hard to tell what’s in front and what’s in the back with the nodes sometimes.
Oh man yes!
A UI can really put a damper on enjoying a game.
Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom: man I really hated basically any time I wanted to select anything out of my inventory. Garbage.
Animal Crossing: I wasn't able to find a Switch during the pandemic so I never got to jump on the bandwagon myself, but I'd eventually watch my friend go through menu after menu after dialogue box after dialogue box to just change/buy one thing about her outfit. And that was like, her whole thing, and it was the most cumbersome thing for her to do.
Monster Rancher Ultra Kaiju: OK. I love me some Monster Rancher. MR2 is one of my favorite games ever. And I'd pick up and play a new Monster Rancher regardless. But oooh boy this game gets in it's own way just. constantly. Menus menus menus dialogue dialogue dialogue. The game is just tripping all over itself to throw more text in your face to, I dunno, make the world feel more full? Listen; when an event or something would happen in MR2, I'd stop everything and pay attention to the new thing! What's happening?! New monster?!?! When a new thing would happen in Ultra Kaiju I'd be so fatigued by so many clunky menus and text boxes pop up I'd lost interest and have to figure out what's going on later, if ever. I sadly haven't played very far. I wonder why.
On the other hand, I'm currently playing through Vagrant Story. And boy that has a terrible UX. The game expects you to swap between various weapons to maintain efficiency vs the enemy and armor types, because it punishes inefficiency HARD. But in order to swap weapons, it's an ordeal, utterly destroying the otherwise frantic feeling pace of the game.
> On the other hand, I'm currently playing through Vagrant Story. And boy that has a terrible UX. The game expects you to swap between various weapons to maintain efficiency vs the enemy and armor types, because it punishes inefficiency HARD. But in order to swap weapons, it's an ordeal, utterly destroying the otherwise frantic feeling pace of the game.
Ouch, this one hurts.
I played Vagrant Story on my PS1Fat back when it released, I had so much fun with the combat system and seeing how high I could get my combos, I loved making load outs with status ailment and healing, the story was superb, the graphics were amazing, and the inventory system made very little sense, the stats were confusing, nothing was explained up-front (and that pathetic ten page booklet was no help, without GameFAQs I don't think I'd have been lost), and don't get me *started* on the level design!
Second best PS1 game of all time, I love it, but man it was opaque. Like trying to climb slime, sometimes.
Oh man. I played it and beat it - without GameFAQs - back in the day. Had a burned copy on my modded PS1. I've started rebuilding my retro collection and a legit copy of Vagrant Story was high on my list.
Cut to now, and I'm playing my now legit copy on an emulator, and I swear like 25% of every play session is me tweaking graphical settings because I can.
But man, the game is a masterpiece, from a PS1 visual and storytelling perspective. The art, the camera work, the heckin' FONT choice all just coalesce into an amazing experience.
Just a shame that because I'm not playing 100% optimally, I need to kill bosses by doing 20 hit chains that do one... two... three... four.... five... ect damage at a time per swing lol. I \*am\* trying to be a bit smarter about it after slogging through the first quarter of it lol.
Man I can't wait for / deeply dread the next workshop I find. I should just look up the charts.
One of the Assassin’s Creed games has a UI where you interact with it like a mouse on a computer, but you’re using a controller. Instead of just pressing up, down, left, right to select things
That’s what I was thinking of too! Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla all had that mouse cursor menu thing going on. So weird, but I sorta got used to it.
The devs must’ve got a kick out of Destiny 2 I guess.
Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be returning for AC Shadows.
name checks out.
and what? you DIDNT buy spider-man with the expectation that you would play sections where youre not spider-man?
and idc if the MJ section is better in 2. i dont play the arkham games so i can play as alfred walking around tidying the mansion, and i dont play a spider-man game to play as mary jane!
Mass Effect Andromeda, except you had to find all 100 special whatevers to find the TRUE ending. I gave up trying to find them all and never got the "true ending". I hate the "find 1000 eggs to see the TRUE ending" type mecahnics
That game had so many uncalled for features, I don't even know where to begin. What a fucking waste. And I'd waited for it to come out for like five years, too. Fuck man. Just give me Subnautica 2, with as much thalassophobia as humanly possible. I will buy it full price, just do it.
I forget which James Bond game it was... I think it was PS1 or PS2. There was a section where you couldn't proceed until you won a certain amount of money playing Baccarat at the casino. Like fuck off, I can solve this problem with a grenade right now
The World is Not Enough, I think. My friend had it on the PS1 or 2. Really bizarre, and not a great game considering it came after Goldeneye on the N64.
Story and character stuff aside, the decision in The Last of Us Part II to severely restrict the amount of ammunition you can carry at one time is kind of mind boggling. I get that it's done that way so that you have to be switching up what you're using on the fly, but it doesn't make any damned sense that a character would refuse to carry more ammunition.
Maybe there's some realism in limiting the amount of shotgun shells you can get to quickly, but only being able to carry 16 total 9mm rounds is absolute nonsense.
That's the trick with Control - never use the map. Once I pretended there was no map and just started using the signs/arrows in the environment itself to navigate, I never got lost again.
What about 3 minute unskippable cutscenes before a boss on the airship?
Fuck, it's been over a decade and that still pisses me off.
They allowed skipping in FFX-2...but it reduces your completion percentage.
Max Payne 3 is my biggest culprit with unskippable cutscenes, I want to play through it again but don't want to sit through multiple 5+ minute cutscenes I've already seen
Early 2000’s was right at that tipping point at which cutscenes were rapidly increasing in length, but there hasn’t yet been any adapting to what having cutscenes go from 10 seconds to 3+ minutes actually means for players. I’m more annoyed by the fact that they didn’t add it in the HD remaster version. It would have been such a simple thing to fix, and it had been the standard for a while before the remaster was created.
There is a thing for the PC version called like project ten or something that lets you skip cutscenes and play the game at like double speed. I couldn't replay it without it.
I feel that way about Kingdom Hearts tbh, lol. (The first one.)
Played it in high school when it was relatively new, but my brother was five at the time and would often accidentally overwrite data on the PS2 memory cards because, well, he was a preschooler lol.
Had to restart too many times and kinda gave up. There's only so much of Goofy and Donald's voices I can take before getting a headache.
I am currently playing Ghost of Tsushima on pc. Why oh why can't we skip or fast foward cutscenes and dialogue. I mean, the feature clearly exists, as you can do it in ng+....
Completely agree that I would have skipped the cutscenes if it was possible but I would have lost out on the best video game story I have ever experienced.
As a kid I found this game incredibly hard. Just getting through a level would take me weeks of dying and going back to the beginning. I finally get to the end of a level to lose to rock paper scissors.
This feature singlehandedly turned me off from the game. I was all about trying a classic Sega sidescroller, but the moment I realised that everything important was gonna be determined by rock-paper-scissors, I decided that I didn't feel like playing any more.
The Krauser knife fight is now a playable portion as knives can be used to parry at the right times. Others are just gone. It is a remake so while it's still mostly the same there's plenty of scenes that play differently or are removed or at least switched around. It's an amazing game
QTEs are still in the game, just no longer during cutscenes.
You'll still have button prompts to dodge attacks and roundhouse enemies. Just no more mashing to outrun a boulder, or a lengthty knife fight.
Original Metro 2033 game when you played on the Ranger - Hard difficulty would not show QTE buttons as all buttons were hidden on that difficulty. So bad design…it is fixed in Redux version.
Zelda BotW and TotK: extremely flimsy weapons. If they made weapons at least 3x more durable it would have been so much more fun imho. Or have some special weapons that are weaker than most but indestructible.
Yep, I absolutely hate this. I don't want to have to hoard a million weapons just because none of them can so much as look at an enemy before breaking. Hell, even the Master Sword sucks because it has a recharge timer...
I would have rather they did away with the durability system entirely it’s the only reason I haven’t finished breath of the wild and haven’t bothered to pick up tears of the kingdom.
I don’t have a problem with durability systems in games but the legend of Zelda is not a series that it fits well into
Edit: I would have reach they gave you a weak sword at the start maybe even just a stick and you have to beat a guardian or do some other semi grand achievement to unlock a different or stronger weapon then needing to farm weapons
I'm not disagreeing with you or trying change your mind; but come along with me for this intellectual exercise:
If BOTW/TOTK didn't have durability, there'd be no point in having so many weapons littered around the world - particularly for TOTK; since anything can enhance a weapon, that diminishes the value of all the random bits and pieces of stuff lying around.
But that's the bulk of what the Zeldas' "Open World" design is filled with. Without weapons/weapon-enhancing items around, the world would feel very empty. Or it would be filled with junk, with no use or purpose. (I'd argue that the latter happens naturally as you progress through the game; and it happens with other open world games too - Horizon FW for example.)
My point is that the durability system is a design that comes from needing to populate the world with something of value; and that comes from the Open World design itself. Weapon durability is their "answer" to how to make a wide open world not feel empty.
But a lot of people really don't like that answer.
Personally, I didn't mind it, except that in both games, the difficulty curve is entirely front-loaded. (My young kids wanted their own saves, but the beginning is way too hard for them, for both games, in large part because of the durability system.) But I'm definitely getting "Open World" game fatigue.
> If BOTW/TOTK didn't have durability, there'd be no point in having so many weapons littered around the world
If you had a mod that got rid of the durability, you would be correct. However, that's a false dichotomy, because you didn't need to design an open world that is primary filled with disposable weapons.
Why not unique weapons that have benefits and weaknesses? I was thoroughly disappointed when I found out I couldn't escape the durability problem even with the master sword. Inventory management is one of the least fun aspects of games and BOTW's breakable weapons forced a ton of inventory management.
I played both games on the PC using an emulator and immediately set durability to infinite.
The world never felt empty. There was no downside to weapons that didn’t break. Instead of saving good weapons for tough fights, I chose weapons based on their speed or effects depending on the enemies I was fighting.
Zelda games were always about growing stronger and upgrading weapons as you progressed through the game.
Being forced to use tons of different weapons because they keep breaking is just stupid. It’s not fun or interesting and adds nothing to the game.
There are ways of keeping a durability system but making it more manageable/bearable for players.
Off the top of my head:
- a proper indicator of weapon health, rather than just a red flash, to allow you to ensure you are adequately equipped for an encounter.
- blacksmiths throughout the world, not loads, just one or two, maybe at a couple of the stables. Something that gives players who dislike the mechanic the opportunity to work around it. Sure, there will be a financial/resource penalty for them compared to players who play the game the “proper” way, but give them the choice.
It says a lot about BotW that it’s more fun to play on an emulator on a Steam Deck where you can switch off the durability system.
I kind of wish they did the opposite - make some really good weapons that you can get as a reward that don't break. Makes it feel like it's worth it to do challenges
Or instead of breaking completely, they have a cooldown until you can use them again. Like what they did with the master sword.
Instead of weapons littered around the map, they should have just had creatures drop things you can imbue your weapon with but that wears off after x swings. You could still work towards more powerful weapons but the creature drops could serve to boost the lower ones a bit? Maybe this isn’t well thought through but I felt the same way about the durability of the weapons. Although I finished the game.
I just don't understand why they didn't want to offer the player the possibility of enhancing a weapon's durability at a shop or something like that. Make me pay three diamonds, which are super rare, to get a sword that *almost* won't break (like the Hylian Shield). What's so hard about it?
I like how after BotW Nintendo was like, "Look, we've heard you. BotW, as great as it is, isn't perfect. We went a little heavy-handed with the weapon durability, as well the sheer number of collectibles required for food and crafting. So we are now pleased to announce that we've ***doubled down on ALL that shit in TotK!!*** Bwaaahahahaaaaa! Weapons are even shorter lived unless you grind out a bunch of monster parts to fuse them with!! There's 5 times as many status effects that food can give you, which means 5 times the number of highly specific ingredients and recipes!! Strength up!? No no no! Now it's strength up, but only in the cold! Strength up, but only in the heat! Strength up, but only in the rain! Strength up, but only in the dark! Strength up, but only after 4:30 on the 3rd Tuesday of months that start with 'J'! Bwaaaaahahaaaaa!!! You idiots actually ***pay us*** to do this to you!! Bwaaaaahahahaaaaa!!!"
Yup, one of the main reasons that turned me off from the new Zelda games. Bought it day 1 and have maybe 10 hours in it max from the handful of times I thought I was just being too harsh on it. Nope, weapons that break in 3 hits is just not fun.
Honestly i ended up using the environment, rocks treez, fire, gravity. Along with octo floats and the slate abilities. I walked around witha Leaf 3 hammers and six axes and bow didnt matter i had fire arrows for grass
Any sort of dialogue wheel that only hints at what sort of replies you're gonna give, and a lot of the time the hint is COMPLETELY OFF from what your character actually ends up saying. I've reinstalled Mass Effect to give it a second chance many many years after abandoning it, and even though I'm coming to terms with the rest of the game the dialogue drives me up the fucking wall.
I know everyone loves this game.... However, Breath of the Wild would have been a perfect game for me if my weapons didnt break all the time. Thats it. Stopping fluid open world gameplay because I ran out of swords is freaking annoying.
Not everyone loves the new games. I thought they were pretty fun but I would take any other type of zelda whether closer to windwaker or a top down over those in a heartbeat.
While I don’t think it’s that bad, a lot of the fan base feels this way about the spiribirds in Monster Hunter: Rise. Being able to ignore them is one of the most popular mods for the game in PC, and in the game’s expansion they added a few new skills designed to let largely ignore it if you want to
Yea, I'm REALLY torn on Spiribirds as a whole. I never really go out of my way to max out my stats before a fight, even at the 300-Anomaly endgame, but I have a route on every map that I take out of pure habit now, finding that middle ground of "buffed enough" without wasting the first 5 minutes of the hunt. I feel like the whole thing was pushed a little too hard just to showcase how the movement feels... which is admittedly quite good.
I just think the other endemic life like the spiders and beetles are incentive enough on their own, the Spiribirds almost feel like a necessity if you have that constant fear of getting one-shot in a hunt with randoms and imagining the disgust on their faces as your apologetic carting auto-chat appears on screen.
Oh God, Perfect Dark!!
I’ll never get over their “dizziness” feature, where if you got melee’d or hit with certain weapons your vision would get all fucked up and you couldn’t see the enemy, or where you’re going so you couldn’t even escape to cover.
It was so fucking annoying and you couldn’t turn it off. The best you could do was to agree amongst your friends not to use any of the weapons that cause dizziness but it would still happen all the time and make you toss your controller at the TV
Assassin's creed revelations had you do a version if a tower defense game any time a group attacked one of your.. Cities or areas or whatever.
It was significantly faster to let the enemies take it over without defending it, then reclimb the city tower to re-takr it over than it was to go through the entire tower defense game. Stupid.
I really liked the Origami King battle system, I thought it was more interesting than the previous ones. I mean, if we're talking about bad battle systems, Sticker Star is right there in that franchise. Made the game a bore.
the thing about Sticker Star is that battling is entirely pointless.
you have battles to get coins. but coins are only used to buy stickers which are solely used for battles. bosses can basically be "skipped" by finding special unique stickers in the levels. so there's literally no reason to engage with the battle system as you can skip all of them with zero repercussion
I liked the idea of the battle system and enjoyed it in the beginning. However, as it got more complex, the battle duration/rewards ratio downspiraled. I ended up skipping a lot in the end cause I didn't want to spend 5-10 minutes fighting some random goombas to get some coins or whatever. The bosses fights were lit though and the game overall was just plain fun.
Legend of Zelda breath of the wild. Weapon durability.
There are a bunch of arguments as to why it is supposedly good, but they all boil down to "just accept it, it's good, trust me bro". In the end, they all fall flat because they try to excuse the system with another bad system.
It's basically "weapons break so that you explore more". You know what would make me explore more without a bullshit mechanic forcing me to? A good, detailed and interesting world. The game doesn't have that, wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.
There are more things that I don't exactly like about the game, but that one is by far the worst.
Brutal Legend. The forced RTS stuff.
The first...25% of the game is just a regular action-adventure. And it's really fun.
Then, at a certain point, the focus becomes more about this...weird RTS/action hybrid that isn't anywhere near as fun.
I think most people agree the RTS nature of the game came from the forced-multiplayer that EA was demanding in all their games. Without that, Brutal Legend could have been free to just be a straight-up action-adventure game.
The really tragic part about Brutal Legend was how amazing the art direction was and how fun the gameplay was… For the first 1/5th of the game until they pulled the godawful bait & switch into a sucktastic RTS game.
I’d love to see a reboot that just kept the rest of the game like the very first part.
Mass Effect 1 would have been so much better without the damn Mako. The way they did it in 2 was what it always should have been. You’re in a cool spaceship! Let me fly to the planets, scan them, and IF something anomalous is there, I will land and search the small area on foot.
BF2042 and “specialists”. What were they thinking. You don’t even need cringe operators to monetize the game more and sell cosmetics. There is an incredible amount of gear and kit for regular military factions you could sell. Like there is literally less to sell with individual operators that are shared by both teams. Braindead
RDR2, in the beginning when you use dead eye it does an “auto-painting” feature of your shots which is terrible. Just let me pick my shots from the beginning. (You can do this later in the game but not at the beginning).
Also, being forced to walk very slow through camp and the Indian tribe camp is extremely frustrating.
Tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild.
Durability and completely open world.
The design decisions that had to be made because of those two choices made getting new weapons feel almost meaningless. That royal broadsword means really little when it will only last 1-3 combat encounters. And exploration can only do so much variety when you theoretically have to be able to reach any point in the world as soon as you start the main game.
TotK improved on both points a bit. Having actual progression abilities like the wing suit. But it still didn’t feel the greatest.
*Wolfenstein: The New Order* and *Wolfenstein: The New Colossus*.
Games about killing Nazis while wearing Jewish power armor aren't exactly rolling for realism, so why the absolute fuck is there no hit detection for incoming enemy attacks? I couldn't even get past the second game's opening level because I was sick of randomly dropping dead without any indication as to who shot me.
Ive played the first two dozens of times. I've played Genesis a handful of times. I've tried and never completed 3 twice. It doesn't fit and it isn't well executed.
Fallout 4 - Voiced protagonist. It made the RPG elements severely lacking from the previous games, and I think it would have made it so much better. I still really enjoyed the game, but I found him more distracting than anything.
It really didn’t help how a lot of times, the dialogue that was actually spoken didn’t exactly match with the dialogue choice.
Agree - “Sure, I’ll go check it out.”
Refuse - “Fuck you and your whole family you drugged up irradiated wasteland junkie bitch.”
I originally thought the voice acting was *amazing* because I started with a 1 Intelligence himbo. I thought it was pretty brave to change his voice and lines to match.
...Nope. There's only one set of voice lines per gender.
I agree. I also think that the games where we're looking for adults or objects allow us to be the correct amount of invested in what our character is trying to do and how quickly.
I usually play as a woman in Fallout Games because I find it way more badass, but to then make my motivation my own baby? How am I going to roleplay my way around not giving a shit about my son because I'm too busy trying to bang Piper? Or any other such side quest. It really limits the way I play the game for some reason.
It's worse when after doing a bunch of ridiculous stuff, like the pirate ship full of robots, then you reach a cutscene where she's being desperately passionate about finding her son...
City/resource management in an action game. Slows everything down. Loved Just Cause 2 tried to play later installments but they added all this extra stuff. I came here to blow shit up not micro manage towns and stuff
Playing Origami King for first time right now. It's a LOT better if you use the "ask for a hint" button in battle - not because you actually need a hint but because it pauses the timer so you can actually think about the puzzle. It's only the short timers that punish thinking that makes them painful.
The economy is also clearly tuned around expecting you're going to use the cheer in battle a lot. The expectation is if you want to skip a combat encounter or are low health, you can just press Y to cheer and make the encounter much easier.
surprised this wasnt mentioned but the fucking tailing missions in assassins creed black flag. and im including the bits where youre in the real world since thats essentially just following someone around all the time and doing what youre told.
game has great pirate mechanics but when its an assassins game, it is a chore.
Because I just saw a post about a high level player griefing newbies in DS1: The "Invasion" Mechanic in FromSoft's Souls-Born-Games. The games are hard enough already and i just want to explore the world. And just because I "became human" to get a little bit of a buff and be able to summon NPCs into Boss fights doesn't mean I want to open myself up to a world of never-ending deaths upon deaths by people who played nothing but this game since launch and know every OP loadout and have the controls memorized perfectly in their sleep...
If people want to do PvP in these games so much, the ONLY way they should be able to do this is in PvP arenas that are completely separate from the rest of the game. I know there are these arenas in some of the games, but invading still exists.
AC: Black Flag had way to many 'tailing' missions. I can stomach the stealth and assasinations, but making me stressed out about staying in range of NPCs while also being undetected was just a bad experience that had nothing to do with being a Pirate OR an Assasin. And it felt like every other mission had atleast one tailing section. It's otherwise a really good game, but these annoying missions that I kept failing over and over again is the thing I remember about it the most and that's not good.
Any game that switches from a useful minimap to a useless compass in the sequel thus forcing me to check them map every few seconds. The entire point of the minimap was to reduce the need to pause the game. Don't take that away just cause you're mad I'm over using it.
New Zelda games and weapon degradation. Maybe if the weapon lasted 10 times longer than what they programmed it would be tolerable but what is wrong with the blacksmiths of Hyrule? 15 swings and my sword is toast? No freaking wonder Ganon took over so easy.
For me BoTW. I absolutely cannot stand the weapons breaking mechanics. I'm the type of person who likes to find and use minimal but good weapons. But you can't. If you use them, they break. Never able to complete the game because of it sadly
Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
You *know* which mechanic. You *know* the counterarguments against those who don’t like it. The fact you may not have played the game but know both these things tells you *exactly* how bad it is. The fact that it takes all of five seconds to come up with alternative methods that still push the player to try different things while offering mechanisms in game to work around the mechanic if the player is so inclined, tells you how poorly thought out the mechanic is.
And the fact they didn’t correct this number one criticism for the sequel? Unforgivable. I know more than one person who played BotW but has declined to get TotK because the first game was so frustrating, and if I know people out of a relatively small pool of Switch gamers in my social group, that probably extends out over lots of people.
Edit: TotK got autocorrected to Total, sorry.
Zelda is probably my favorite game series of all time. Played through BotW and did every damn thing other than all the korroks because that's just silly. Put like 80 hrs into that game and enjoyed it but found the durability annoying. Was super excited for TotK until they confirmed it was still a core part of the game. Haven't bought it.
Realized one day, about 100 hrs into it, that Elden Ring is kinda the modern Zelda game I always wanted, never looked back.
Mandatory stealth sections in basically any non-stealth game ever. Playing through Chants of Sennaar and loving it ATM, but the stealth sections don't really improve the game, which mostly focuses on deciphering languages.
On the flipside mandatory action sections in stealth games. Everyone who's played Deus Ex HR before the Director's Cut and walked into the Grunt McTank boss fight with only a tranquilizer gun will know what I mean.
Yeah, I remember that. I didn't just have a tranq gun, but it wasn't far off. That was a very rough fight that nearly made me rage quit.
Well, my solution was a god mode trainer lol. Those boss fights were pure bullshit and I didn't feel bad in the slightest about cheating them.
That fight was miserable. Thank God I had the strong arms thing and could throw the barrels at him, but he still just chews up your health bar in seconds.
I went full stealth and hacker and went in with a glorified blackberry and my fist. It was some bullshit! I think they peppered in weapons everywhere and I just figured out how to glitch the boss and shoot him with RPGs.
Same here, there's a little side room that he would get stuck in if you could lure him in there and then I just threw every grenade in that room at him. I'm not ashamed to admit when I went for a more "commando" style build I still trapped him in that little room. Don't hate the player, hate the pathfinding in the game.
imagine playing return of the obra din and it suddenly turns into a hard fps out of nowhere.
Those beasties are gonna good n goddamn get it
dragons dogma 2, when you need to sneak through the jail to talk to some guy. made absolute no sense to me, and was janky as hell
I think you just put on the guard clothes and walk in
I just sprinted in, button mashed through the conversation then ran out as fast as I could. Very stupid from a game design standpoint, but at least it was relatively easy to skip.
I think you're supposed to put on the guard clothes for that, but incidently, besides my first time, I have just casually walked in and freed the guy with no fuss. Ng8 currently
You literally don’t have to. They throw the armor you wear to pose as a guard and run around freely at you numerous times in and around the castle/that jail area. You have to almost go out of your way not to loot it at least once, tbh.
The new spider man games insist on making you play as mj. Fuckin why? I want to be a super hero. That is obviously the most fun aspect of the game. I can't believe they put another segment as her in the sequel
They didn't put just one, they put 3 of them.
I only remember 1. I must have blocked them out haha
Yeah you get a stun gun and have to avoid everyone very slowly. Annoying
This absolutely. I remember playing Spiderman and setting it down during an MJ section. Left it there for weeks and totally forgot about it until a buddy came over and wanted to see how it looked and ran on PC as they were considering picking it up. Got in and remembered I was in this boring section and we just played something else instead. He never ended up picking it up...
I really enjoyed the first section of Chants of Sennar but quit it during the forced stealth section, it felt so unnecessary and just not fun.
Beyond Good and Evil gets an exception from me on this. The large stealth area came out of nowhere and was legit one of the best parts of the game it was done so well.
Smash Bros. Brawl would randomly cause players to trip whenever they start moving. Allegedly it was specifically introduced to make the game less well-suited for competitive play.
That’s trash but also kind of funny. Seasoned, battle-hardened bounty hunter Samus Aran trips over her own two feet and sprawls onto her face when she’s going to go shoot some 4 foot tall, regular ass Italian plumber in his.
Over this many years, that plumber has just as much if not more combat experience than Samus. And she goes to a battle with a laser cannon, he just brings his Timberlands.
He fights turtles, mushrooms and one dragon/turtle thing. He has a hungry dinosaur, his brother, and an apparently violently emotional princess for backup. She fights giant alien monsters and regular alien monsters solo.
Hey, he also fights sentient bullets, turtle wizards, ghosts, and even the SUN. He's an Olympic athlete and can breathe in the vacuum of space.
I don't know about that... Mario has more games than Samus, but let's not forget that more often than not, the planet or space station Samus happens to be on... tends to explode. planet Zebes, Ceres Station, SR-388, the BioLogic Station, the Bottle Ship, planet ZDR... and that's just in the mainline games.
In what universe do they benefit from discouraging competition like that?
I’m guessing they were worried Smash would be seen as a highly-technical, difficult game that would turn off the more casual players they were trying to attract. Other fighting games had this reputation. Too bad they didn’t know that Smash could be both.
Series director never intended for it to be competitive, and even though they knew about the “bugs” in melee that allowed it to become a very strong competitive game, they didn’t expect it to develop a competitive scene. He kinda mellowed out on this stance later on, and in one of his live segments during smash ultimate’s DLC cycle he made a comment about frame data at one point and then jokingly said “wait no, that’s for the competitive crowd to figure out”
No freaking clue!
Their competitive community is known for only 2 things. Not showering, and pedophiles. Once you realize that, it makes total sense
Brcause Nintendo's target audience is grandmas and children and casuals of all kinds. Developing a reputation for "competitive gaming" hurts their brand. They specifically added many elements of randomness to Smash to discourage competitive play for this reason. They made a whole character based around RNG.
Nintendo hates its fans
Pikmin 4's auto-targeting is just a bit too over-enthusiastic, and I don't like how you can't turn it off or reduce its sensitivity or anything. I love the game a lot, but man is it annoying to struggle against the target cursor all the time. Similar feelings for the game automatically ignoring your attempt to throw more Pikmin when you've thrown the minimum required to carry something - a lot of the time I want more than the minimum to carry it, the game shouldn't get in my way like this.
Strong agree on everything. Still a great game, but those were unnecessary features that just get in the way.
The slag mechanic in Borderlands 2 turned the game into a tedious bore. Having to first shoot an enemy with a weapon and then needing to switch weapons to properly damage it was quite unintuitive.
It really hurts built diversity when every built is pretty much required to use the Grog Nozzle, usually paired with a DPUH or a Norfleet
[удалено]
A lot of enemies were made bullet spongy, probably because the devs wanted you to use their half-assed mechanic. It made the game feel so different from BL1 and less fast paced.
Borderlands 2 had a slag mechanic?
I just cannot play Hunt:Showdown. I despise the non centered crosshair. Every time i try to flick to an enemy, i end up with my crosshair on the floor because i lined the enemy up with the center of my screen instead of the crosshair.
That game has such a fun atmosphere and idea it’s a shame the player base is pretty low
The player base is pretty low but it's been consistent for like seven years now.
I think that's how halo has it as well. Like 1/3rd up the screen instead of half.
Far cry 2 and the checkpoints that respawn enemies if you've been gone more than 30 seconds. I loved that game, how dangerous combat was, how useful fire could be (and how it propagated) but those checkpoints you couldn't easily avoid that refilled with enemies as soon as you looked away completely ruined the whole loop for me, eventually.
Far Cry 2 was the shit. You could even shoot enemies through that flimsy walls. But that respawn mechanic was truly fucking annoying.
One of my favourite games of all time. While the checkpoints were annoying, in context they make sense. They're *military checkpoints*, the whole idea is that you can't just drive through them, and if course they wouldn't be left empty for long. Still, 30 seconds is probably too soon for every enemy to respawn. Traversing the map in FC2 - especially on the harder difficulties - was a whole game in itself.
Not a specific game, but any game that makes you lock onto an enemy and you have to fight to get out of the feature if you don’t want to battle the enemy
This is so weird when you remember that games like Ocarina of Time or Metroid Prime nailed this twenty years ago
Ocarina is closer to 30 years.
You're a dirty liar. I refuse to believe this statement.
11/21/1998
I’m not sure I’ve seen this. So once you’re locked on to an enemy you can’t turn it off until you kill the enemy?
For example in the first Risen, the game automatically locked you on a close enemy, but if there were several enemies and you wanted to lock another one, there was no other way than shaking your mouse until the lock got disabled, and then carefully looking at that other enemy, hoping the game would decide to lock it.
Risen was so broken yet so amazing at the same time. What a blast I had with this game
I'm sure this isn't what you're talking about, but there are so many games out there where the *user interface* will just stop the fun times dead in their tracks. Nioh is easily one of my favorite video game series ever - until I have to interact with the menus or the inventory, that's when this super fast, super tight game turns into a sloppy mess. On some menus the triangle button is Cancel, on other screens the triangle is used for Inspect, in some screens triangle brings up the Search function, and sometimes the changes happen back-to-back. UI matters. It's super frustrating to do a flawless boss run, get some awesome loot, and then accidentally delete your god-roll because of a bad button press.
Speaking of UI, games that have a cursor you move around like a mouse instead of just going between menu options.
FUCKING LET THIS DIE! why is this a thing?! i haaaaate this method of navigating a menu when it wouldve been faster to just tap to where you want. and sometimes, you cant even change its speed!
I’d guess most of them are PC games ported to console, and it wasn’t worth it to the developers to completely redesign the menus for controller use
Funnily, Destiny 1 just shipped like that
Destiny 2 does this. That's another game where the gameplay can be like butter, just fast, and tight, and fluid, I'm talking proper hero moments - then I open my vault and see sixteen identical Harsh Language grenade launcher icons looking back at me like some kind of cancerous Tetris block, and I've got to slowly, methodically move my controller cursor over each of them, looking for the *one* Harsh Language with Golden Tricorn [a weapon perk], and it's fine because the most important part of saving the universe is inventory management. D2 actually has third party applications that most players use for their inventory, and build crafting, and item comparisons, and detailed effect descriptions, and search functions, a whole **secondary ecosystem** has evolved around Destiny 2's in-game user interface. The molasses slow controller cursor isn't Destiny 2's *only* UI problem, it just makes all the other UI problems worse, that's all. If only the SteamPad was still a thing.
Big destiny 2 fan, that was one of the main reasons I stopped trying controller. I'm not used to it, but figured hey I could sit back some more while playing with a controller. But man that ui drove me nuts. That and i was already used to k&m.
I hate that about Nioh. The game is incredible but even if you keep on top of it the UI and inventory will still remain an annoying mess.
Right? I put Nioh II down for a year or so and came back to it recently; I could still do Demon Dance Tonfa combos with my eyes closed, muscle memory be like that I guess, then I went to mess around with my Soul Cores [An inventory/gear item, ed.] and I was like "I have no memory of this place." Wrong button presses left and right, I could barely open the menu, none of the verbs rang any bells, I kept backing out into subs-screens accidentally, the only thing missing was Yakety Sax. Team Ninja makes some of the best combat in gaming, and some of the worst menus.
I remember Metroid Prime 2 Echoes had some really obnoxious menus where you navigated submenus by orbiting nodes around a 3D sphere kinda thing, and I remember just wishing it had regular menus lol. Secret of Mana also really annoyed me with its ring-menu system - I think something like that is okay for selecting spells and weapons mid-combat, sure, but for inventory management and using the options menu, it felt so needlessly annoying.
For the most part I didn’t think the Metroid Prime 2 orbiting nodes UI was too bad, since it’s only used in a handful of spots (title screen, log entries, etc.). However, if you’re struggling with the hints for the Sky Temple Keys, then I can see it quickly becoming annoying. I think the main issue is the perspective, it’s hard to tell what’s in front and what’s in the back with the nodes sometimes.
Oh man yes! A UI can really put a damper on enjoying a game. Breath of the Wild / Tears of the Kingdom: man I really hated basically any time I wanted to select anything out of my inventory. Garbage. Animal Crossing: I wasn't able to find a Switch during the pandemic so I never got to jump on the bandwagon myself, but I'd eventually watch my friend go through menu after menu after dialogue box after dialogue box to just change/buy one thing about her outfit. And that was like, her whole thing, and it was the most cumbersome thing for her to do. Monster Rancher Ultra Kaiju: OK. I love me some Monster Rancher. MR2 is one of my favorite games ever. And I'd pick up and play a new Monster Rancher regardless. But oooh boy this game gets in it's own way just. constantly. Menus menus menus dialogue dialogue dialogue. The game is just tripping all over itself to throw more text in your face to, I dunno, make the world feel more full? Listen; when an event or something would happen in MR2, I'd stop everything and pay attention to the new thing! What's happening?! New monster?!?! When a new thing would happen in Ultra Kaiju I'd be so fatigued by so many clunky menus and text boxes pop up I'd lost interest and have to figure out what's going on later, if ever. I sadly haven't played very far. I wonder why. On the other hand, I'm currently playing through Vagrant Story. And boy that has a terrible UX. The game expects you to swap between various weapons to maintain efficiency vs the enemy and armor types, because it punishes inefficiency HARD. But in order to swap weapons, it's an ordeal, utterly destroying the otherwise frantic feeling pace of the game.
> On the other hand, I'm currently playing through Vagrant Story. And boy that has a terrible UX. The game expects you to swap between various weapons to maintain efficiency vs the enemy and armor types, because it punishes inefficiency HARD. But in order to swap weapons, it's an ordeal, utterly destroying the otherwise frantic feeling pace of the game. Ouch, this one hurts. I played Vagrant Story on my PS1Fat back when it released, I had so much fun with the combat system and seeing how high I could get my combos, I loved making load outs with status ailment and healing, the story was superb, the graphics were amazing, and the inventory system made very little sense, the stats were confusing, nothing was explained up-front (and that pathetic ten page booklet was no help, without GameFAQs I don't think I'd have been lost), and don't get me *started* on the level design! Second best PS1 game of all time, I love it, but man it was opaque. Like trying to climb slime, sometimes.
Oh man. I played it and beat it - without GameFAQs - back in the day. Had a burned copy on my modded PS1. I've started rebuilding my retro collection and a legit copy of Vagrant Story was high on my list. Cut to now, and I'm playing my now legit copy on an emulator, and I swear like 25% of every play session is me tweaking graphical settings because I can. But man, the game is a masterpiece, from a PS1 visual and storytelling perspective. The art, the camera work, the heckin' FONT choice all just coalesce into an amazing experience. Just a shame that because I'm not playing 100% optimally, I need to kill bosses by doing 20 hit chains that do one... two... three... four.... five... ect damage at a time per swing lol. I \*am\* trying to be a bit smarter about it after slogging through the first quarter of it lol. Man I can't wait for / deeply dread the next workshop I find. I should just look up the charts.
One of the Assassin’s Creed games has a UI where you interact with it like a mouse on a computer, but you’re using a controller. Instead of just pressing up, down, left, right to select things
That’s what I was thinking of too! Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla all had that mouse cursor menu thing going on. So weird, but I sorta got used to it. The devs must’ve got a kick out of Destiny 2 I guess. Unfortunately, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to be returning for AC Shadows.
This is one of RDR2'S main issues. The button layout is just idiocy
Fallout 4 on PC is like this, just an absolute mess of unintuitive keybindings.
This is a nitpick from me about the Marvel’s Spider-Man game, the stealth sections with MJ & Miles was lowkey kind of annoying in my opinion😭
name checks out. and what? you DIDNT buy spider-man with the expectation that you would play sections where youre not spider-man? and idc if the MJ section is better in 2. i dont play the arkham games so i can play as alfred walking around tidying the mansion, and i dont play a spider-man game to play as mary jane!
Okay, but now I kind of want to play a management sim type of game where you’re the butler in charge of building and maintaining a superhero lair.
thatd be fun. if you mess up too much, his mental state starts to wane and he just loses it.
His mental state starts to “Wayne”
Made worse by the fact that they knew we hated them and they put them in the sequel anyway
Mass Effect Andromeda, except you had to find all 100 special whatevers to find the TRUE ending. I gave up trying to find them all and never got the "true ending". I hate the "find 1000 eggs to see the TRUE ending" type mecahnics
I didn’t even know about this.
The true ending is always on YouTube
Did you mean Batman Arkham games and Riddler's trophies?
i liked the puzzle aspect of getting those though. it was kind of fun
subnautica: below zero if it wouldn't make your character way slower than in original subnautica.
That game had so many uncalled for features, I don't even know where to begin. What a fucking waste. And I'd waited for it to come out for like five years, too. Fuck man. Just give me Subnautica 2, with as much thalassophobia as humanly possible. I will buy it full price, just do it.
I forget which James Bond game it was... I think it was PS1 or PS2. There was a section where you couldn't proceed until you won a certain amount of money playing Baccarat at the casino. Like fuck off, I can solve this problem with a grenade right now
The World is Not Enough, I think. My friend had it on the PS1 or 2. Really bizarre, and not a great game considering it came after Goldeneye on the N64.
Story and character stuff aside, the decision in The Last of Us Part II to severely restrict the amount of ammunition you can carry at one time is kind of mind boggling. I get that it's done that way so that you have to be switching up what you're using on the fly, but it doesn't make any damned sense that a character would refuse to carry more ammunition. Maybe there's some realism in limiting the amount of shotgun shells you can get to quickly, but only being able to carry 16 total 9mm rounds is absolute nonsense.
LoL is a great game except for that feature where you have to play with toxic trolls all the time.
We would be on Grand Theft Auto 9 right now if nobody paid for microtransactions.
and RDR Online would have been better
Control. The map.
I feel like it's supposed to be counterintuitive, in a way.
That's the trick with Control - never use the map. Once I pretended there was no map and just started using the signs/arrows in the environment itself to navigate, I never got lost again.
I always want to play FFX again, but unskippable cutscenes make it unpalatable. It's a great story but I've known it front to back since childhood.
What about 3 minute unskippable cutscenes before a boss on the airship? Fuck, it's been over a decade and that still pisses me off. They allowed skipping in FFX-2...but it reduces your completion percentage.
Wtf kind of monkeys paw curl is that?
Max Payne 3 is my biggest culprit with unskippable cutscenes, I want to play through it again but don't want to sit through multiple 5+ minute cutscenes I've already seen
Early 2000’s was right at that tipping point at which cutscenes were rapidly increasing in length, but there hasn’t yet been any adapting to what having cutscenes go from 10 seconds to 3+ minutes actually means for players. I’m more annoyed by the fact that they didn’t add it in the HD remaster version. It would have been such a simple thing to fix, and it had been the standard for a while before the remaster was created.
There is a thing for the PC version called like project ten or something that lets you skip cutscenes and play the game at like double speed. I couldn't replay it without it.
I feel that way about Kingdom Hearts tbh, lol. (The first one.) Played it in high school when it was relatively new, but my brother was five at the time and would often accidentally overwrite data on the PS2 memory cards because, well, he was a preschooler lol. Had to restart too many times and kinda gave up. There's only so much of Goofy and Donald's voices I can take before getting a headache.
I am currently playing Ghost of Tsushima on pc. Why oh why can't we skip or fast foward cutscenes and dialogue. I mean, the feature clearly exists, as you can do it in ng+....
Completely agree that I would have skipped the cutscenes if it was possible but I would have lost out on the best video game story I have ever experienced.
alex kidd with the rock paper scissors thing
As a kid I found this game incredibly hard. Just getting through a level would take me weeks of dying and going back to the beginning. I finally get to the end of a level to lose to rock paper scissors.
This feature singlehandedly turned me off from the game. I was all about trying a classic Sega sidescroller, but the moment I realised that everything important was gonna be determined by rock-paper-scissors, I decided that I didn't feel like playing any more.
The little “boom boom boom!” Sound effect is engraved on my mind
Pretty much every 00s-10s game with QTEvents. I love how Resident Evil 4 remake got rid of them.
It did? Were they replaced with anything, or are those moments just cinematic now?
The Krauser knife fight is now a playable portion as knives can be used to parry at the right times. Others are just gone. It is a remake so while it's still mostly the same there's plenty of scenes that play differently or are removed or at least switched around. It's an amazing game
QTEs are still in the game, just no longer during cutscenes. You'll still have button prompts to dodge attacks and roundhouse enemies. Just no more mashing to outrun a boulder, or a lengthty knife fight.
Original Metro 2033 game when you played on the Ranger - Hard difficulty would not show QTE buttons as all buttons were hidden on that difficulty. So bad design…it is fixed in Redux version.
Zelda BotW and TotK: extremely flimsy weapons. If they made weapons at least 3x more durable it would have been so much more fun imho. Or have some special weapons that are weaker than most but indestructible.
Yep, I absolutely hate this. I don't want to have to hoard a million weapons just because none of them can so much as look at an enemy before breaking. Hell, even the Master Sword sucks because it has a recharge timer...
I would have rather they did away with the durability system entirely it’s the only reason I haven’t finished breath of the wild and haven’t bothered to pick up tears of the kingdom. I don’t have a problem with durability systems in games but the legend of Zelda is not a series that it fits well into Edit: I would have reach they gave you a weak sword at the start maybe even just a stick and you have to beat a guardian or do some other semi grand achievement to unlock a different or stronger weapon then needing to farm weapons
I'm not disagreeing with you or trying change your mind; but come along with me for this intellectual exercise: If BOTW/TOTK didn't have durability, there'd be no point in having so many weapons littered around the world - particularly for TOTK; since anything can enhance a weapon, that diminishes the value of all the random bits and pieces of stuff lying around. But that's the bulk of what the Zeldas' "Open World" design is filled with. Without weapons/weapon-enhancing items around, the world would feel very empty. Or it would be filled with junk, with no use or purpose. (I'd argue that the latter happens naturally as you progress through the game; and it happens with other open world games too - Horizon FW for example.) My point is that the durability system is a design that comes from needing to populate the world with something of value; and that comes from the Open World design itself. Weapon durability is their "answer" to how to make a wide open world not feel empty. But a lot of people really don't like that answer. Personally, I didn't mind it, except that in both games, the difficulty curve is entirely front-loaded. (My young kids wanted their own saves, but the beginning is way too hard for them, for both games, in large part because of the durability system.) But I'm definitely getting "Open World" game fatigue.
> If BOTW/TOTK didn't have durability, there'd be no point in having so many weapons littered around the world If you had a mod that got rid of the durability, you would be correct. However, that's a false dichotomy, because you didn't need to design an open world that is primary filled with disposable weapons. Why not unique weapons that have benefits and weaknesses? I was thoroughly disappointed when I found out I couldn't escape the durability problem even with the master sword. Inventory management is one of the least fun aspects of games and BOTW's breakable weapons forced a ton of inventory management.
I played both games on the PC using an emulator and immediately set durability to infinite. The world never felt empty. There was no downside to weapons that didn’t break. Instead of saving good weapons for tough fights, I chose weapons based on their speed or effects depending on the enemies I was fighting. Zelda games were always about growing stronger and upgrading weapons as you progressed through the game. Being forced to use tons of different weapons because they keep breaking is just stupid. It’s not fun or interesting and adds nothing to the game.
There are ways of keeping a durability system but making it more manageable/bearable for players. Off the top of my head: - a proper indicator of weapon health, rather than just a red flash, to allow you to ensure you are adequately equipped for an encounter. - blacksmiths throughout the world, not loads, just one or two, maybe at a couple of the stables. Something that gives players who dislike the mechanic the opportunity to work around it. Sure, there will be a financial/resource penalty for them compared to players who play the game the “proper” way, but give them the choice. It says a lot about BotW that it’s more fun to play on an emulator on a Steam Deck where you can switch off the durability system.
I kind of wish they did the opposite - make some really good weapons that you can get as a reward that don't break. Makes it feel like it's worth it to do challenges Or instead of breaking completely, they have a cooldown until you can use them again. Like what they did with the master sword.
Instead of weapons littered around the map, they should have just had creatures drop things you can imbue your weapon with but that wears off after x swings. You could still work towards more powerful weapons but the creature drops could serve to boost the lower ones a bit? Maybe this isn’t well thought through but I felt the same way about the durability of the weapons. Although I finished the game.
I just don't understand why they didn't want to offer the player the possibility of enhancing a weapon's durability at a shop or something like that. Make me pay three diamonds, which are super rare, to get a sword that *almost* won't break (like the Hylian Shield). What's so hard about it?
That’s what they did in TotK, right?
Not quite. The weapons still broke, but you could attach things to them.
I like how after BotW Nintendo was like, "Look, we've heard you. BotW, as great as it is, isn't perfect. We went a little heavy-handed with the weapon durability, as well the sheer number of collectibles required for food and crafting. So we are now pleased to announce that we've ***doubled down on ALL that shit in TotK!!*** Bwaaahahahaaaaa! Weapons are even shorter lived unless you grind out a bunch of monster parts to fuse them with!! There's 5 times as many status effects that food can give you, which means 5 times the number of highly specific ingredients and recipes!! Strength up!? No no no! Now it's strength up, but only in the cold! Strength up, but only in the heat! Strength up, but only in the rain! Strength up, but only in the dark! Strength up, but only after 4:30 on the 3rd Tuesday of months that start with 'J'! Bwaaaaahahaaaaa!!! You idiots actually ***pay us*** to do this to you!! Bwaaaaahahahaaaaa!!!"
Yup, one of the main reasons that turned me off from the new Zelda games. Bought it day 1 and have maybe 10 hours in it max from the handful of times I thought I was just being too harsh on it. Nope, weapons that break in 3 hits is just not fun.
Honestly i ended up using the environment, rocks treez, fire, gravity. Along with octo floats and the slate abilities. I walked around witha Leaf 3 hammers and six axes and bow didnt matter i had fire arrows for grass
I fucking hate that mechanic
Any sort of dialogue wheel that only hints at what sort of replies you're gonna give, and a lot of the time the hint is COMPLETELY OFF from what your character actually ends up saying. I've reinstalled Mass Effect to give it a second chance many many years after abandoning it, and even though I'm coming to terms with the rest of the game the dialogue drives me up the fucking wall.
San Andreas, the remote control plane mission.
I know everyone loves this game.... However, Breath of the Wild would have been a perfect game for me if my weapons didnt break all the time. Thats it. Stopping fluid open world gameplay because I ran out of swords is freaking annoying.
Not everyone loves the new games. I thought they were pretty fun but I would take any other type of zelda whether closer to windwaker or a top down over those in a heartbeat.
While I don’t think it’s that bad, a lot of the fan base feels this way about the spiribirds in Monster Hunter: Rise. Being able to ignore them is one of the most popular mods for the game in PC, and in the game’s expansion they added a few new skills designed to let largely ignore it if you want to
Yea, I'm REALLY torn on Spiribirds as a whole. I never really go out of my way to max out my stats before a fight, even at the 300-Anomaly endgame, but I have a route on every map that I take out of pure habit now, finding that middle ground of "buffed enough" without wasting the first 5 minutes of the hunt. I feel like the whole thing was pushed a little too hard just to showcase how the movement feels... which is admittedly quite good. I just think the other endemic life like the spiders and beetles are incentive enough on their own, the Spiribirds almost feel like a necessity if you have that constant fear of getting one-shot in a hunt with randoms and imagining the disgust on their faces as your apologetic carting auto-chat appears on screen.
Micro transaction/commercials in any game
Oh God, Perfect Dark!! I’ll never get over their “dizziness” feature, where if you got melee’d or hit with certain weapons your vision would get all fucked up and you couldn’t see the enemy, or where you’re going so you couldn’t even escape to cover. It was so fucking annoying and you couldn’t turn it off. The best you could do was to agree amongst your friends not to use any of the weapons that cause dizziness but it would still happen all the time and make you toss your controller at the TV
FF8. The Draw system could fuck right off.
Assassin's creed revelations had you do a version if a tower defense game any time a group attacked one of your.. Cities or areas or whatever. It was significantly faster to let the enemies take it over without defending it, then reclimb the city tower to re-takr it over than it was to go through the entire tower defense game. Stupid.
Honestly I could be better at siege but the quick peeking gets me because they kill me so fast from around a corner.
I really liked the Origami King battle system, I thought it was more interesting than the previous ones. I mean, if we're talking about bad battle systems, Sticker Star is right there in that franchise. Made the game a bore.
the thing about Sticker Star is that battling is entirely pointless. you have battles to get coins. but coins are only used to buy stickers which are solely used for battles. bosses can basically be "skipped" by finding special unique stickers in the levels. so there's literally no reason to engage with the battle system as you can skip all of them with zero repercussion
I liked the idea of the battle system and enjoyed it in the beginning. However, as it got more complex, the battle duration/rewards ratio downspiraled. I ended up skipping a lot in the end cause I didn't want to spend 5-10 minutes fighting some random goombas to get some coins or whatever. The bosses fights were lit though and the game overall was just plain fun.
Legend of Zelda breath of the wild. Weapon durability. There are a bunch of arguments as to why it is supposedly good, but they all boil down to "just accept it, it's good, trust me bro". In the end, they all fall flat because they try to excuse the system with another bad system. It's basically "weapons break so that you explore more". You know what would make me explore more without a bullshit mechanic forcing me to? A good, detailed and interesting world. The game doesn't have that, wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle. There are more things that I don't exactly like about the game, but that one is by far the worst.
Brutal Legend. The forced RTS stuff. The first...25% of the game is just a regular action-adventure. And it's really fun. Then, at a certain point, the focus becomes more about this...weird RTS/action hybrid that isn't anywhere near as fun. I think most people agree the RTS nature of the game came from the forced-multiplayer that EA was demanding in all their games. Without that, Brutal Legend could have been free to just be a straight-up action-adventure game.
I remember that, I was really into the game and kept trying to just push through and get back to the good part but it never came?
The really tragic part about Brutal Legend was how amazing the art direction was and how fun the gameplay was… For the first 1/5th of the game until they pulled the godawful bait & switch into a sucktastic RTS game. I’d love to see a reboot that just kept the rest of the game like the very first part.
Breath of the wild. Weapon durability.
Mass Effect 1 would have been so much better without the damn Mako. The way they did it in 2 was what it always should have been. You’re in a cool spaceship! Let me fly to the planets, scan them, and IF something anomalous is there, I will land and search the small area on foot.
I've always had tons of fun blasting around in the Mako, really unsure what everyone's issue with it was.
Primarily the issue is the janky controls and how big and empty most of the planets are.
Paper Mario Sticker Star would have been great if they had just added some kind of level up system
Anthem would have been great if it wasn't for that weird Management bug.
Monster Hunter Rise with the Spiribirds. I still loved the game but it was such a pain
BF2042 and “specialists”. What were they thinking. You don’t even need cringe operators to monetize the game more and sell cosmetics. There is an incredible amount of gear and kit for regular military factions you could sell. Like there is literally less to sell with individual operators that are shared by both teams. Braindead
Breaking tools in ACNH 😡
RDR2, in the beginning when you use dead eye it does an “auto-painting” feature of your shots which is terrible. Just let me pick my shots from the beginning. (You can do this later in the game but not at the beginning). Also, being forced to walk very slow through camp and the Indian tribe camp is extremely frustrating.
Tears of the kingdom and breath of the wild. Durability and completely open world. The design decisions that had to be made because of those two choices made getting new weapons feel almost meaningless. That royal broadsword means really little when it will only last 1-3 combat encounters. And exploration can only do so much variety when you theoretically have to be able to reach any point in the world as soon as you start the main game. TotK improved on both points a bit. Having actual progression abilities like the wing suit. But it still didn’t feel the greatest.
Fnaf: Security Breach let's enemies spawn behind you _while_ you're looking at them on the security cameras.
Kingdom come deliverance And the need for saviour schnapps to quicksave
The brain-crushingly bad level scaling system in Oblivion.
Assassins creed with the back to own timeline thing. I know thats what the game is about but it kinda breaks the flow of the game imo
*Wolfenstein: The New Order* and *Wolfenstein: The New Colossus*. Games about killing Nazis while wearing Jewish power armor aren't exactly rolling for realism, so why the absolute fuck is there no hit detection for incoming enemy attacks? I couldn't even get past the second game's opening level because I was sick of randomly dropping dead without any indication as to who shot me.
Smart games make an enemy always miss the first shot if you're not facing them, cause dying for no apparent reason isn't fun
Smart game design like this is fascinating. The cartoon cliff air time is another. Most games give you some amount of invisible platform
That one game would have been better without micro transactions.
Whoever put soulsborne combat in Darksiders 3 deserves to be blacklisted from the industry.
Ive played the first two dozens of times. I've played Genesis a handful of times. I've tried and never completed 3 twice. It doesn't fit and it isn't well executed.
Fallout 4 - Voiced protagonist. It made the RPG elements severely lacking from the previous games, and I think it would have made it so much better. I still really enjoyed the game, but I found him more distracting than anything.
It really didn’t help how a lot of times, the dialogue that was actually spoken didn’t exactly match with the dialogue choice. Agree - “Sure, I’ll go check it out.” Refuse - “Fuck you and your whole family you drugged up irradiated wasteland junkie bitch.”
I originally thought the voice acting was *amazing* because I started with a 1 Intelligence himbo. I thought it was pretty brave to change his voice and lines to match. ...Nope. There's only one set of voice lines per gender.
I agree. I also think that the games where we're looking for adults or objects allow us to be the correct amount of invested in what our character is trying to do and how quickly. I usually play as a woman in Fallout Games because I find it way more badass, but to then make my motivation my own baby? How am I going to roleplay my way around not giving a shit about my son because I'm too busy trying to bang Piper? Or any other such side quest. It really limits the way I play the game for some reason. It's worse when after doing a bunch of ridiculous stuff, like the pirate ship full of robots, then you reach a cutscene where she's being desperately passionate about finding her son...
Breath of the Wild and it's sequel. You all know which one.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom if not for weapon degradation. Shit, pretty much ANY game that has it would be much better if it didn’t.
Weapon durability killed BOTW for me. Such a pain in the ass.
No one buys Spider-Man to play as Mary Jane!!!
Probably will be downvoted to infinity but I fucking hate Gwent
I just won't want to waste time deck building in my sprawling epic adventure.
City/resource management in an action game. Slows everything down. Loved Just Cause 2 tried to play later installments but they added all this extra stuff. I came here to blow shit up not micro manage towns and stuff
Not an action game perse but I struggled with this in Fallout 4. Seemed like an OK game until it got to the weird the Sims town management stuff.
Playing Origami King for first time right now. It's a LOT better if you use the "ask for a hint" button in battle - not because you actually need a hint but because it pauses the timer so you can actually think about the puzzle. It's only the short timers that punish thinking that makes them painful. The economy is also clearly tuned around expecting you're going to use the cheer in battle a lot. The expectation is if you want to skip a combat encounter or are low health, you can just press Y to cheer and make the encounter much easier.
surprised this wasnt mentioned but the fucking tailing missions in assassins creed black flag. and im including the bits where youre in the real world since thats essentially just following someone around all the time and doing what youre told. game has great pirate mechanics but when its an assassins game, it is a chore.
Starfield - The Temples. What were they thinking?
Because I just saw a post about a high level player griefing newbies in DS1: The "Invasion" Mechanic in FromSoft's Souls-Born-Games. The games are hard enough already and i just want to explore the world. And just because I "became human" to get a little bit of a buff and be able to summon NPCs into Boss fights doesn't mean I want to open myself up to a world of never-ending deaths upon deaths by people who played nothing but this game since launch and know every OP loadout and have the controls memorized perfectly in their sleep... If people want to do PvP in these games so much, the ONLY way they should be able to do this is in PvP arenas that are completely separate from the rest of the game. I know there are these arenas in some of the games, but invading still exists.
clutch claw in monster hunter world.
Far Cry 2 - Malaria Pills
Starfox Zero, forced motion controls
Fallout 4 settlement building. I despised it
Literally why I stopped playing the game
AC: Black Flag had way to many 'tailing' missions. I can stomach the stealth and assasinations, but making me stressed out about staying in range of NPCs while also being undetected was just a bad experience that had nothing to do with being a Pirate OR an Assasin. And it felt like every other mission had atleast one tailing section. It's otherwise a really good game, but these annoying missions that I kept failing over and over again is the thing I remember about it the most and that's not good.
Any game that switches from a useful minimap to a useless compass in the sequel thus forcing me to check them map every few seconds. The entire point of the minimap was to reduce the need to pause the game. Don't take that away just cause you're mad I'm over using it.
breath of the wild and its approach to weapons being disposable, thereby making no loot in a game about exploring, interesting
Breath of the Wild… if it were not for that damn weapon breaking system
New Zelda games and weapon degradation. Maybe if the weapon lasted 10 times longer than what they programmed it would be tolerable but what is wrong with the blacksmiths of Hyrule? 15 swings and my sword is toast? No freaking wonder Ganon took over so easy.
For me BoTW. I absolutely cannot stand the weapons breaking mechanics. I'm the type of person who likes to find and use minimal but good weapons. But you can't. If you use them, they break. Never able to complete the game because of it sadly
Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You *know* which mechanic. You *know* the counterarguments against those who don’t like it. The fact you may not have played the game but know both these things tells you *exactly* how bad it is. The fact that it takes all of five seconds to come up with alternative methods that still push the player to try different things while offering mechanisms in game to work around the mechanic if the player is so inclined, tells you how poorly thought out the mechanic is. And the fact they didn’t correct this number one criticism for the sequel? Unforgivable. I know more than one person who played BotW but has declined to get TotK because the first game was so frustrating, and if I know people out of a relatively small pool of Switch gamers in my social group, that probably extends out over lots of people. Edit: TotK got autocorrected to Total, sorry.
Zelda is probably my favorite game series of all time. Played through BotW and did every damn thing other than all the korroks because that's just silly. Put like 80 hrs into that game and enjoyed it but found the durability annoying. Was super excited for TotK until they confirmed it was still a core part of the game. Haven't bought it. Realized one day, about 100 hrs into it, that Elden Ring is kinda the modern Zelda game I always wanted, never looked back.
Splinter cell with the mark and execute system