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Baffling game design decisions
- Thread starter SleepSmasher
- Start date
Devs being cheap about placing checkpoints around bosses always bugs me. I hate when you fail a boss and the game doesn't just boot you to the start of the encounter, rather than having to repeat the journey and repeat cinematics.
But most bad decisions in a lot of recent games seem to be greed based so they're not so much baffling as bad. Assassins Creed odyssey really wants you to spend a long time grinding out levels to beat that game if you insist on not buying XP boosts.
But most bad decisions in a lot of recent games seem to be greed based so they're not so much baffling as bad. Assassins Creed odyssey really wants you to spend a long time grinding out levels to beat that game if you insist on not buying XP boosts.
Sure, but that strikes me more as a solution looking for a problem. It's not as though hiding behind cover (a significant portion of which is destructible) and throwing back grenades is a bulletproof strategy that can get you past most every combat encounter in the game.
I don't understand why Pokemon Black 2/White 2's difficulty modes were implemented the way they were. So they made an Easy Mode, and a Challenge Mode, and made them version exclusives. But not like that you have to buy a particular game to play a particular mode. It's that beating the champ in B2W2 gives you a key that unlocks Challenge/Easy Mode respectively. But, you yourself cannot use that key, because it's Pokemon; they only let you have one save file. You can't start a new game at that point in the difficulty mode you just unlocked.
What you have to do is find someone else locally who owns the specific version that has the difficulty mode you're interested in, and has beaten the champion, and have them trade the key over to you, and then you can start a new game with that difficulty mode.
Why do it like this? Was there no better way?
What you have to do is find someone else locally who owns the specific version that has the difficulty mode you're interested in, and has beaten the champion, and have them trade the key over to you, and then you can start a new game with that difficulty mode.
Why do it like this? Was there no better way?
lol, I literally just now got done actually playing for the first time in earnest and just went through this and this is the first thing I see looking back at my computer.
Red Dead Redemption 2. Not being able to clean your guns while at camp. Made the mechanic even more annoying to deal with. Your guns shot like absolute shit if you didn't clean them sometimes. Most of the missions are launched at the camp so naturally, that's where I want to clean them before I start them. Nope. Should've done that before you rode in, or ride outside the campgrounds for a minute and do it there. And at that point I'm like "fuck it". Not as immersive having to do it while actively getting shot at in the middle of a mission but that is usually what ended up happening.
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Easy Mode being locked until you beat the game in Pokemon White 2.
Bounty Hunters in Red Dead 2. Pretty much anything gets you a bounty in the game and then you'll get bounty hunters chasing you later on which will stop you from being able to do missions. So you'll pay off the bounty to stop it happening, take on a mission... and get a bounty from the mission. There's so many baffling decisions in RDR2 but that was the one that was constantly infuriating me because the game just wouldn't let me play it.
Bounty Hunters in Red Dead 2. Pretty much anything gets you a bounty in the game and then you'll get bounty hunters chasing you later on which will stop you from being able to do missions. So you'll pay off the bounty to stop it happening, take on a mission... and get a bounty from the mission. There's so many baffling decisions in RDR2 but that was the one that was constantly infuriating me because the game just wouldn't let me play it.
Bloodborne's decision to tell me my blood vials stock was full by using a dialog box that popped up as I was fighting.
This was patched out eventually.
Staying with Bloodborne.....
I couldn't even trial a new trick weapon unless I had the right stats.
The Hunter's Dream workshop having my trunk, the work-bench to upgrade/tinker with gems, plus another location to further augment my build.
What can I say, I miss Stockpile Thomas.
Oh yeah, the custom dungeon stuff was a huge mis-fire. Shame.
Oh oh one more - semi-related but the two shops in the Hunter's Dream were just obtuse. I shouldn't have to elaborate.
This was patched out eventually.
Staying with Bloodborne.....
I couldn't even trial a new trick weapon unless I had the right stats.
The Hunter's Dream workshop having my trunk, the work-bench to upgrade/tinker with gems, plus another location to further augment my build.
What can I say, I miss Stockpile Thomas.
Oh yeah, the custom dungeon stuff was a huge mis-fire. Shame.
Oh oh one more - semi-related but the two shops in the Hunter's Dream were just obtuse. I shouldn't have to elaborate.
This thread is going to have a lot of Pokemon in it I think. Forced motion controls for docked might be the most baffling of them all.
I like how From got this right the first time with Sekiro and they made Square the interact button, because jump is on X.
Every Souls game and Bloodborne had interact on X.
I agree regarding invisible walls, but I don't really see the issue with barriers limiting the explorable area. What would you prefer them to do instead?When games place barriers or invisible walls between areas that look otherwise explorable. The police tape barriers in some sections in Arkham Origins were particularly frustrating.
What makes it even funnier is, in FFXV while riding a Chocobo, jump actually changes to the circle button (which it should be all the time). But because you're used to it being X, you have to "relearn" how to jump once you ride a Chocobo. It's just another thing in a looooong list of completely baffling decisions they made with that game.
Going a step further, blood vials and all other consumables not automatically replenishing when you warp back to a lamp (like with the use of a Bold Hunter's Mark) or not allowing the player to rest at a lamp to replenish them. Means you have to sit through two loading screens to do something that Dark Souls figured out friggin' four years prior. Probably the most blatant example of time-wasting I can think of in the series.
And to continue the theme of repeating errors that had already been resolved in previous games: why doesn't Bloodborne allow the player to map jump to L3, y'know, like you could in Dark Souls II to avoid getting completely smashed when you're sprinting and you want to roll through an enemy's attack?
Finally, why isn't there an option to toggle off the Godawful chromatic aberration, especially considering that it was the effect was added in an update post-launch (or so I've read in other threads)? Bleh. I love Bloodborne, but anyone who claims that the game is "literally perfect" is out of their mind.
It says "Do Not Cross".When games place barriers or invisible walls between areas that look otherwise explorable. The police tape barriers in some sections in Arkham Origins were particularly frustrating.
He's just obeying the law, he's not a criminal!
I mean they clearly wanted to have you able to buy the powerful items in the insight shop but not give you the ability to just farm infinite blood echoes for them
Most recently in a game I absolutely love otherwise.
DMC5:
- cutscene - loading - change loadout - loading - cutscene - loading - mission before every. Fucking. Mission. Just let me disable the cutscenes completeley in the options.
- having a perfectly working Coop-System and effectively wasting it on one short mission. Made retroactively worse by a single player only bloody palace.
DMC5:
- cutscene - loading - change loadout - loading - cutscene - loading - mission before every. Fucking. Mission. Just let me disable the cutscenes completeley in the options.
- having a perfectly working Coop-System and effectively wasting it on one short mission. Made retroactively worse by a single player only bloody palace.
I'll go with an old one, NiGHTS Into Dreams on Saturn and exploring the 3d world.
Sonic Team went through a lot of work to craft a beautiful game with fun flying mechanics. It doesn't quite recapture the perfection of those early Sonic games, but it was a must have on the Saturn. But the design decision that never made any sense to me was the lack of utilizing the 3d world. You fly around in 2d, but the world itself is in 3d. There are only two opportunities to explore the 3d world on foot, and neither of them are encouraged.
When you begin each stage you have to enter a chamber and gain the ability to fly. For this brief moment you're walking in the 3d environment, but the game wants you to jump into the chamber immediately and fly on the 2d track. You can, however, decide to ignore the chamber and explore the map. The other way to explore is to run out of time while flying. If you do this, you'll crash back to Earth and need to complete the goal on foot. This can make completing the goal very difficult, and will guarantee you a failing grade for that track. In both scenarios, you will be chased by an alarm clock that, if it catches you, will give you a game over. So walking around is actively discouraged.
The thing is, there's a lot to see by walking around on foot. You can collect points and items, and you can find all kinds of Easter Eggs that you would totally miss while flying. On some stages, entire parts of the map aren't covered while flying, so the only way to see them are by walking. But because you are absolutely punished for exploring it is likely that most gamers will miss some of the more interesting sights. There is in-game ecosystem called the "A-Life" system in which you can hatch eggs from the local wildlife. All this does is give you a slightly different tone and tempo to the music with the more eggs you hatch/fewer creatures you kill. Each stages has many eggs, but only a couple will ever be reachable while flying, so this entire system is basically inaccessible if you're playing the game as designed. The one or two eggs that you may get while flying simply aren't enough to make any difference, you NEED to explore on foot.
The craziest part of all of this is that this was at a time that the Saturn was dying for a 3d platformer in an era where gamers were soaking up new 3d environments. While the engine was not refined enough to really classify the game as a platformer, the combination of 3d exploration and 2d flying was absolutely unique. To make the design decision that they would include a fully realized 3d world, and then actively ignore it/punish you for exploring it, has left me baffled since I bought a Saturn in 1996. I've always felt that the design decisions behind NiGHTS were a combination of mission creep and a lack of vision. Sonic Team wanted to do something big, but they also wanted to keep the game tight and focused on the flying. They did the later very well, but the potential of the former was absolutely lost. I think they had a real game changer with NiGHTS that they couldn't fully realize. The lack of a sequel on the Dreamcast that made better use of the 3d environments was a missed opportunity.
Sonic Team went through a lot of work to craft a beautiful game with fun flying mechanics. It doesn't quite recapture the perfection of those early Sonic games, but it was a must have on the Saturn. But the design decision that never made any sense to me was the lack of utilizing the 3d world. You fly around in 2d, but the world itself is in 3d. There are only two opportunities to explore the 3d world on foot, and neither of them are encouraged.
When you begin each stage you have to enter a chamber and gain the ability to fly. For this brief moment you're walking in the 3d environment, but the game wants you to jump into the chamber immediately and fly on the 2d track. You can, however, decide to ignore the chamber and explore the map. The other way to explore is to run out of time while flying. If you do this, you'll crash back to Earth and need to complete the goal on foot. This can make completing the goal very difficult, and will guarantee you a failing grade for that track. In both scenarios, you will be chased by an alarm clock that, if it catches you, will give you a game over. So walking around is actively discouraged.
The thing is, there's a lot to see by walking around on foot. You can collect points and items, and you can find all kinds of Easter Eggs that you would totally miss while flying. On some stages, entire parts of the map aren't covered while flying, so the only way to see them are by walking. But because you are absolutely punished for exploring it is likely that most gamers will miss some of the more interesting sights. There is in-game ecosystem called the "A-Life" system in which you can hatch eggs from the local wildlife. All this does is give you a slightly different tone and tempo to the music with the more eggs you hatch/fewer creatures you kill. Each stages has many eggs, but only a couple will ever be reachable while flying, so this entire system is basically inaccessible if you're playing the game as designed. The one or two eggs that you may get while flying simply aren't enough to make any difference, you NEED to explore on foot.
The craziest part of all of this is that this was at a time that the Saturn was dying for a 3d platformer in an era where gamers were soaking up new 3d environments. While the engine was not refined enough to really classify the game as a platformer, the combination of 3d exploration and 2d flying was absolutely unique. To make the design decision that they would include a fully realized 3d world, and then actively ignore it/punish you for exploring it, has left me baffled since I bought a Saturn in 1996. I've always felt that the design decisions behind NiGHTS were a combination of mission creep and a lack of vision. Sonic Team wanted to do something big, but they also wanted to keep the game tight and focused on the flying. They did the later very well, but the potential of the former was absolutely lost. I think they had a real game changer with NiGHTS that they couldn't fully realize. The lack of a sequel on the Dreamcast that made better use of the 3d environments was a missed opportunity.
Beyond Good and Evil HD on PS3 not having an "Invert Y" camera option without also inverting X. What a fucking waste of money that was. Apparently the original was the same too.
I think it's fixed now (?) but Days Gone where square looted bodies and picked up dropped weapons. Times without number I swapped my awesome sawblade baseball bat for a useless chair leg or something while trying to loot a corpse. I refuse to believe that didn't come up during playtesting.
Always found it weird you could only max one weapon in Bloodborne as it gives people even less reason to explore trying other weapons.
Recently played Days Gone having weapon swap and resource on the same button. When you have items that stack up, that becomes an annoyance every single time when you don't want to swap weapons. Think they should have automated ammo pick up.
Recently played Days Gone having weapon swap and resource on the same button. When you have items that stack up, that becomes an annoyance every single time when you don't want to swap weapons. Think they should have automated ammo pick up.
The inventory system in BotW was bad, not Bioware levels of bad but bad nonetheless. The discarding stuff mechanics specially. Maybe increasing the inventory space or limiting the drops in the sequel would work better?
Mission structure in FF Type 0 was utter shit for no reason whatsoever. I understand it's a portable game but for experiencing the full game you needed to replay the game plenty of times, there were arbitrary limitations in the deployment of characters (you have 14 characters to play? Fuck you, you can only use 4 in this mission), summons kill the characters who use them and there were tons of skippables. Why not let me enjoy the game and then optionally give me the option to replay it if I want more? And that's another thing, the story and characters are so bad why would I? But that's not for this topic...
Mission structure in FF Type 0 was utter shit for no reason whatsoever. I understand it's a portable game but for experiencing the full game you needed to replay the game plenty of times, there were arbitrary limitations in the deployment of characters (you have 14 characters to play? Fuck you, you can only use 4 in this mission), summons kill the characters who use them and there were tons of skippables. Why not let me enjoy the game and then optionally give me the option to replay it if I want more? And that's another thing, the story and characters are so bad why would I? But that's not for this topic...
I think it's more that they just didn't want it to be a cover shooter once you were spotted with how they made the arenas multi tiered and grapple points etc.
Just a little nudge to get people to start moving.
My wife finished the first 3 pretty much just moving between a couple of pieces of cover in every battle.
Final Fantasy VIII is a game that has multiple aspects of design that baffle me, although that's not to say that all of them bother me. I just find it a strange sequel.
I imagine that this problem is more of a localization issue more so than a bad decision on the original designers' part. In Japan, the Circle and X buttons are reversed in menus. It seems like the North American version of FFXV changed Circle and X's functions in menus but not for combat, and I'm guessing that X is used to jump while Circle is used to interact in the Japanese version of the game. I dunno if my guess is actually the case, but it stands to reason.
What baffles me is why Sony decided around 1998 that all North American versions of Playstation games needed different control schemes than their Japanese counterparts, and that most console games still do not allow players to fully customize button layouts.
I imagine that this problem is more of a localization issue more so than a bad decision on the original designers' part. In Japan, the Circle and X buttons are reversed in menus. It seems like the North American version of FFXV changed Circle and X's functions in menus but not for combat, and I'm guessing that X is used to jump while Circle is used to interact in the Japanese version of the game. I dunno if my guess is actually the case, but it stands to reason.
What baffles me is why Sony decided around 1998 that all North American versions of Playstation games needed different control schemes than their Japanese counterparts, and that most console games still do not allow players to fully customize button layouts.
The camera in God of War, mainly in combat. Since you're still in the same overhead view you're normally in throughout the rest of the game, if you're surrounded by enemies, it can be tough to deal with them. Now the game does provide an indicator for them but why not go for a more traditional 3rd person view that other games have for combat, like Bayonetta or the previous games had, and have it go back to the overhead view when you just use want to aim and throw the axe? It'd have worked a lot better in my eyes. Not awful or anything but something that rather confuses in me in an otherwise really good game
...or you could find an area to build a fire to skip the time or still try to climb and try to take rests in between because you can still actually climb or just try a different path
Oh, of course. I don't think that's mutually incompatible with the ability to return enemy grenades, though; there's quite a bit of distance between de-emphasising it as a viable strategy and removing it from the equation altogether.
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Please explain. I don't play Overwatch and wouldn't know any of the questionable design decisions regarding her.
I think he is talking about the visualization. They should look like a hassle to get through or around. They shouldn't leave any doubt that you can't get past them or else you try and then you're frustrated why it wasn't clear on that in the first place!
She has a short CD stun that cancels almost everything any character does on top of stunning you and leaving you open for attack. I think the only ultimates she can't cancel are Zen's and Widow or something like that. Imagine building up your meter as Reaper, use your ult only for her to stun you and render it useless. And that's ults, but she can cancel ANY ability.
Blizzard has been trying to fix her since release (increasing the CD and such) but she would need a complete redesign to fix her. She's also piss easy to play, and you know how elitists feel about easy to pick up and succeed chars...
Controllers only have so many physical buttons you can bind actions to. :(
Or our game has too many actions to begin with.
Arkane, why is it that, after *two* games in your stealth, choice-centric, item-and-power-filled, possible-if-not-outright-preferred-to-go-nonlethal series Dishonored, I still have to waste a whole 50% of my possible actions on a short range, always lethal sword?
There is absolutely no reason this should be the case. None.
There is absolutely no reason this should be the case. None.
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Lol I don't think you understand the actual reason they don't offer it
Shin Megami Tensei franchise mostly.
Strange Journey (DS version) --- poisonous or lava floor that gives you damage each time you move, problem is you can't avoid any of that shit and for most of the game there's no equipment or abilities that block or reduce that damage. You end up having to go back and forth from base to dungeons farming money to buy lots of healing because of this shit.
Soul Hackers (3DS remake) --- you have device that can summon monster, but over time it will break and you have to return to some guy to repair. This again another goddamn back and forth is just tedious as shit.
Strange Journey (DS version) --- poisonous or lava floor that gives you damage each time you move, problem is you can't avoid any of that shit and for most of the game there's no equipment or abilities that block or reduce that damage. You end up having to go back and forth from base to dungeons farming money to buy lots of healing because of this shit.
Soul Hackers (3DS remake) --- you have device that can summon monster, but over time it will break and you have to return to some guy to repair. This again another goddamn back and forth is just tedious as shit.
"Hey, you know all those great weapons/powers/upgrades/spells/etc you've been aquiring, building up and using up to this point in the game? Yeah, I'm going to take away/lock away all these while you do a 20 minute enforced stealth section." (Bonus negative points if the game hasn't had a stealth section upto that point in the game)
Has this ever been fun?
Has this ever been fun?
I can't stand when a game offers the player lots of choices/options, but there is one that is best or right. This applies to Cage-esque games, open world rpgs where you build your character, or any other game guilty of this.
Like if you're giving me options, make sure they are viable options. Don't punish me for not following some "meta".
Like if you're giving me options, make sure they are viable options. Don't punish me for not following some "meta".
Perfectly valid criticism, but I believe it's not so much a "baffling" decision as it was just due to engine/control issues they had when testing the 3D flying. They decided the 2D "tracks" were the best way to go. It would've been very early in the game development when this was decided, so it's difficult to imagine how the game could've played otherwise. I was originally disappointed when I first got the game back then, but it's still fantastic so whatever.
Regarding the eggs - I'm preeeettty sure most will be on the 2D track (if they don't get stuck behind geometry Nights can't get past), and they can hatch by themselves if need be.
All that said, I used to play on foot as much as possible when I was younger to make sure all my mepians were well taken care of anyway!
I have NO IDEA WHY but in the PS2 version Spyro: A Hero's Tail, they inverted the flame and charging buttons which made it so stupidly hard to get used to.
I would have so many questions about decisions made with V... :/
I'll never understand level scalling in RPGs. Like, I understand it's to keep the challenge stable through the whole game, but what's the point of leveling at that point? If I want to "train" my character in this specific point in the game, it will be rendered useless in the next area I go.