The last few Lego games I played didn't have this. Like, they actually took it out. Crazy.
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Basic design issues that were solved decades ago but still for some reason exist
- Thread starter flyinj
- Start date
I thought that maybe I just didn't enjoy Metroidvania type games, but I played Axiom Verge immediately after, and that had save points right next to (almost) every boss. Really helped alleviate the frustration.
Having to constantly fight through to bosses wasn't my only problem with Hollow Knight, but it's what made me drop it.
I did beat Demon's Souls, which has a somewhat similar setup. But I think that may be an easier game, so it avoids having this issue rear it's head.
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This problem happens in so many games. Especially when there's another harmless button they could have assigned interactions to. Absolutely infuriating.
Yeah getting on/off the horse is absolute garbage when you compare it to Zelda BOTW. Both you and the horse have to be at a complete standstill, you have to stand in the right spot next to it, press the button and then watch the stiffest robotic animation ever, then wait for it to completely finish until you can do anything. In Zelda? Approach the horse from whichever direction, press the button within a generous range, and bam. Link just does magic and works out a smooth transition animation to hop on the horse without breaking flow for both himself or the horse's momentums, and this can happen while both are in motion. It's not even funny how amateur Witcher 3 seems in comparison.
Never had problem with that, but I can see why others can.. I basically never had a big issue with Roach, he is even my favorite horse in any game that I played.. but in fact I never had problem with some jank in games, so ..
Stop making me get off my horse to collect shit and talk to people
If I have to hold a button, watch a 'dismounting horse' animation, walk over to the item I want to pick up, and then repeat the process I probably won't bother picking up that item. The same goes for if I have to be on the ground just to talk to some random NPC. All it does is make me less likely to use the game's mounting/vehicle options and opt to just walk around.
If I have to hold a button, watch a 'dismounting horse' animation, walk over to the item I want to pick up, and then repeat the process I probably won't bother picking up that item. The same goes for if I have to be on the ground just to talk to some random NPC. All it does is make me less likely to use the game's mounting/vehicle options and opt to just walk around.
Lol, lots of things have existed in Pokemon games that no longer do
That's what analog movement is for. Push the stick a little, you go slow, push it farther and you go faster. No need wasting a button on it.
I had actually completely forgotten about this, since it was never implemented again.
PREACH.
My vote goes to the Beyond Good and Evil text inputs.
Keyboards in games have always sucked, with the exception of DS/Wii/Wii U games that had touch and pointer controls. BGE's spiral interface was fast and easy to use, simply amazing. It would work amazingly well on Smart TVs too (honestly, nothing is worse than typing something on a Smart TV).
I never want to press start during a cutscene for the first time and worry if it will pause or skip the cutscene.
Looking at you DMC5. I thought it being the same engine as RE2make would mean it would pause but nope. Wish this was a standard like trophies and achievements.
Looking at you DMC5. I thought it being the same engine as RE2make would mean it would pause but nope. Wish this was a standard like trophies and achievements.
The world ends with you gave the player a level slider so they could lower their level if they ended up being over leveled or raise it if they were struggling.
Bravely default let you change random encounter rates from never to every single step depending upon how you wanted to play.
Why every jrpg hasn't incorporate these two mechanics is mind blowing. Even action rpgs or games without random encounters can benefit from allowing the player to adjust up/down their level or reduce/increase how often enemies spawn.
Bravely default let you change random encounter rates from never to every single step depending upon how you wanted to play.
Why every jrpg hasn't incorporate these two mechanics is mind blowing. Even action rpgs or games without random encounters can benefit from allowing the player to adjust up/down their level or reduce/increase how often enemies spawn.
Yup. EarthBound also sped-up grinding and low-level area traversal with its "insta-win" battles literally 25 years ago (1994). How has this never been copied?!
For games that have meaningful movement thresholds, like "you can't sprint and shoot", or "running will alert the zombies/guards" etc, mapping that purely on analogue movement often would be more frustrating than having a button for it. It prevents you from accidentally crossing that threshold that might have a large impact on your current situation without that second intentional action.
Hear hear
Slight tilt on the stick to walk, full tilt on the stick to run.
Mario 64, the granddaddy of 3D game solved this. What are you even doing, Rockstar
You come to a fork in the road. One path leads towards progress, the other probably leads towards a collectible, or something more interesting. You don't know which is which. The path that leads to progress will probably lock you out of coming back for the collectible. You pick left. You walk for a while. Oh no, this is feeling like progress. Should you turn back and go down the other path before you hit the invisible point of no return?
This is all solved by a "Where do I go?" button like DMC5's, but so few games include one. Not only does it point you in the right direction when you're lost, but knowing where the critical path is is a great way of knowing which way you should go to find what's hidden.
This is all solved by a "Where do I go?" button like DMC5's, but so few games include one. Not only does it point you in the right direction when you're lost, but knowing where the critical path is is a great way of knowing which way you should go to find what's hidden.
Games that have pre rendered cut scenes in which your character is wearing the default outfit despite the devs letting you customize your character's gear.
Having a perk/skill tree system yet no way to respec.
When someone says "Follow me" and your run speed is too fast to run next to him and walk speed too slow.
Cutscenes that can't be paused.
Having collectible side stuff and no way to keep track of what you're missing.
Having a perk/skill tree system yet no way to respec.
When someone says "Follow me" and your run speed is too fast to run next to him and walk speed too slow.
Cutscenes that can't be paused.
Having collectible side stuff and no way to keep track of what you're missing.
Because performance can and will suffer with it on consoles. On PC there's no excuse, honestly, but with console FPS it's not a good idea.
Why this isn't mandatory for every game is beyond me.
Confession: My first time playing Earthbound was when it came to Wii U. And if you're leveled up enough, any low-level enemies you run into is an automatic win. That was 1995. How had that not been blatantly applied to every JRPG since blows my mind.
I feel like current generation games expect me to be sitting much closer to the TV to read text than older generation games. I'd like to sit on my couch, please.
The absolute worst. It didn't ruin Horizon Zero Dawn's ending for me but it was close. Then the post credit scene ruined it anyway lol.
There's also an argument in saying that not all FPSes necessarily need to go for realism, even on newer hardware.
Or in other words... FPS is also a genre where realism is totally fine to throw out the window, just depends on what the particular FPS is going for.
PC games that don't map the defaults to whatever keyboard layout you happen to use. Or worse have hardcoded on screen prompts.
There were some other stuff that made me quit playing it but yeah this was a big part. Same with picking flowers, press A to loot and Y to loot all but you weren't on the exact right spot so have fun looking at this long ass heavy punch animation.
Literally the only thing BOTW horses have over Roach. I found my horse so useless in BoTW that I ended up not bothering anymore after a while.
"Oops, you walked 10 ft away from your horse and he can't hear you anymore, I guess you'll have to walk now."
I wouldn't say that's exactly a solved problem though. In-engine cutscenes can be good, but pre-rendered cutscenes will always be able to look even better.
Though it'd be interesting if a hybrid approach could be achieved... pre-rendered cutscenes, but they're rendered in the background on your console to reflect how your character looks
Not always.
Especially not if they are prerendered using the engine, because then they are at the mercy of the encoder and whatever resolution they were rendered at. For instance if I were to play Arkham Asylum now the prerendered cutscens in that game look awful and run at 30FPS that looks choppy because it's not encoded properly. All this would've been avoided if it was real time but they likely couldn't animate the models in real time properly. It is possible to have cutscenes in real time but at a higher fidelity than ingame as most games do and over time they will end up looking better with better resolution and framerate. When Halo 4 comes out on PC it'll have stunning looking cutscens, same for Reach and Halo 5 (on One X) because they ran in real time while using superior assets and lighting.
I'd say unless they are going full CGI, they should just do it in real time instead of bothering with inengine prerendered stuff. Even less worth it if the asset quality in cutscene isn't even that much better than what's achievable in real time.
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lemme guess, they're actually constantly accelerating remodelled trains which are actually adjusting the entire map world height instead of the player.
True that poor encoding can ruin them, and being pre-rendered inherently makes them of their time and age poorly whereas real-time cutscenes can run at whatever resolution and age better as a result.
But when a game is new, the pre-rendered cutscenes always should look better than what would've been possible in-engine unless the devs really screwed up.
what was the last time you saw a character in a bethesda open world game use a ladder ?
well, it never happened. npc and pc do not climb ladders in beth's games, bethesda does not know how to ladder, it breaks their path finding.
this reminds me of those old (& terrible) 2D Dragon Ball fighting games.
It doesn't suffer in Fallout 4 when I zoom the camera all the way out in third person mode. It doesn't suffer in Halo (any of them) when I get into a Warthog and play with a much larger FOV, again in third-person. It doesn't suffer in Forza Horizon 4 when I put the camera to fully zoomed out. Despite that neither of those games have an FOV slider and the FOVs they do have in their respective first-person modes are abysmal.
Even in games that could potentially suffer, of which I don't really see too many off, I see no reason not to just include a slider and put a "this will affect performance, recommended FOV: X" disclaimer next to it. (the way DICE and Respawn have done with Battlefield/Front and Titanfall/Apex Legends respectively). Shitty console FOV that you can't change, to me, seems like a holdover from last generation where developers were allergic to options and limited in what they could do by consoles with weird, antiquated designs.
This one pisses me off the most. Analog for menuing feels like poopoo.
This is not a design issue. A game doesn't have to have an undo button and can make you deal with your choices if that's what the designer is going for.
It's a little known fact that Bethesda's engine can't support the player character moving, so you're really controlling this massive person with the world on his head which moves around and ducks when the player needs to move.
The problem there usually isn't that you can climb both sides of the ladder but the way many modern games tend to just guess whether you want to climb sth so you'll sometimes start climbing a ladder just by walking towards it/against it and if you did not actually intend to climb it but the game decides that you did, then it can get frustrating if both sides are climbable because you'll often end up on the wrong side through no fault of your own. But if a game has a more precise, less automated control system, then I think having both sides be climbable would be far less of an issue. (Incidentally, I cannot think of a single game that features both, non-automated climbing/grabbing controls and ladders that can be climbed from both sides. I guess that's just a sad testament to how automated climbing/platforming controls generally tend to be.)
Still, let players decide. I bet there are instances of performance overhead; give a warning and be done with it. Apex Legends offers this on console, for instance.
Please standardize what button allows you to pause cutscenes. Start should let you pause cutscenes, then ask you if you want to skip or not. I actually really like the method Bandai Namco uses for Tales of Vesperia Definitive Edition (though I believe it's the same in the original 360 version too). Start button to pause cutscene. And if you want to skip a cutscene, while paused, you can press the X button (I play on Switch so it would be triangle on PS4 and Y on Xbox for those with those systems) to skip the cutscene. No additional menu dialogue box asking you to skip, just some text at the bottom in the pause screen saying to press start to unpause or X to skip. Just start to pause and unpause, ezpz.
I don't care what methods devs go with when it comes to scene skipping, just standardize the start button to be a pause button and not a scene skipping button. People can't always sit there and finish the whole scene, and may be at a mid-point in a game where the scene will run long because of heavy plot reasons. Not everyone can sit through an entire show or movie in one sitting either, that is why the pause button exists!
I don't care what methods devs go with when it comes to scene skipping, just standardize the start button to be a pause button and not a scene skipping button. People can't always sit there and finish the whole scene, and may be at a mid-point in a game where the scene will run long because of heavy plot reasons. Not everyone can sit through an entire show or movie in one sitting either, that is why the pause button exists!
Subtitles are not made good.
Sometime they are so little you have to get closer to read them, sometimes you can put them on only after the intro of the game (that plays without subtitles), sometimes you have subtitles for something and no subtitles for other things.
I'm playing Fallout 4 in these days and if i listen to a record inside the pipboy, there is no subtitles, if a close the pipboy sometimes there is subtitles, other not.
Sometime they are so little you have to get closer to read them, sometimes you can put them on only after the intro of the game (that plays without subtitles), sometimes you have subtitles for something and no subtitles for other things.
I'm playing Fallout 4 in these days and if i listen to a record inside the pipboy, there is no subtitles, if a close the pipboy sometimes there is subtitles, other not.
Haha I was thinking the same for Kingdom Hearts 3. You open chests with Triangle, but you also have your way-too-powerful-and-always-available commands on the same button.
If you are not close enough to the chest, it triggers a command and a brief cutscene (that you can choose to shorten/disable), which is often frustrating.
The fucking ladders on DayZ during the days of it being a mod lmao
That can't be the case. There's already been enough reports on the crunch and working conditions EA put on Bioware for Anthem.
Remember: Many bad games are less about laziness and more about team morale and working conditions. Daikatana's a famous example.
Any survival game with hunger/thirst mechanics where your character is literally dying of hunger/thirst after a few minutes. Just make it a slightly longer period, Christ on a bike.
Also games where you sprint, but run out of stamina after 10 seconds and are are reduced to a wheezing wreck. Even I can run longer than that.
Also games where you sprint, but run out of stamina after 10 seconds and are are reduced to a wheezing wreck. Even I can run longer than that.
Unless it's an action/exploring game, I want ladders to just teleport me to the other side.
Yeah it's a waste of time esp if there's loading. But at least now some games make these weak monsters not attack you unless you initiate.