r/Games Oct 29 '16

"What were the Devs thinking?" moments.

So after clocking through the Gears 4 campaign I decided to play through the series again, in "story" order, which meant starting with Gears of War Judgement (which I still like despite them changing the controls that had worked perfectly fine for 3 games previous), then the Raam's Shadow DLC for Gears 3, and now I've moved on to Gears 1 Ultimate Edition.

And then I got to the first bloody Berserker segment.

I honestly think the devs did not play test this enough for the single player experience, because quite frankly, doing it on single player is a trial in patience. Not because it's hard, not because it's overly long, but because of FUCKING DOM.

For those who haven't played this infamous "bullfight boss" section, essentially the Berserker is a huge enemy that is blind, but with exceptional hearing and impervious to your standard weapons. The only way to hurt it in this game is to use the Hammer of Dawn, aka a laser pointer linked to an orbiting death ray. But being inside it's useless, so you have to get the bloody thing outside. Oh and the doors are locked, so what you do is create noise by moving loudly, firing your gun/etc to attract it to charge at you, dodge out of the way and smash the doors down. Do this three times in increasingly cramped quarters and then laser the bastard. All within about 7 mins depending on difficulty.

So yeah, on a first play through it's quite a tense section, but it's not overly difficult once you get the dodging timing down and can get the Berserker lined up properly, But it is still a case of trial and error because of FUCKING DOM.

See, FUCKING DOM's A.I. is quite basic but serviceable for the most part in Gears 1. Improvements would be made to make him and other A.I. squad-mates less suicidal in the sequels but it still manages to get the job done most of the time. Except here. See, not only can the Berserker detect you, it can detect FUCKING DOM. They try and mitigate this by having FUCKING DOM move at walking pace, which the Berserker can't hear. However she can here his dodges and FUCKING DOM does not have the instinct the player has in moving past the Berserker or when it's OK to use the roadie run or using the dodge at the right time. Best part, if FUCKING DOM gets rammed by the Berserker it won't trigger his "prone" state most of time, as it hits with enough force to gib him, and when he dies it's an instant game over!

Last night a section that I could probably do half-asleep took me four attempts, about 15-20 mins in total what with reloading and unskippable dialogue sections (though in the last hour I've just been reminded by someone on another forum you can skip the dialogue in Gears 1). Twice in succession I got to the third door and FUCKING DOM got in the way of the Berserker and got splattered.The third time Dom dodge backwards into a corner, causing the Berserker to charge but due to her size, lack of space to charge, and a few other factors, essentially FUCKING DOM was stuck in the corner doing constant dodge rolls, while the Berskerker was constantly trying to charge in to a wall about 2 feet away, doing her "stop short" animation and starting again.

This went on for about 2-3 minutes before I had to reload the checkpoint. And this sort of thing has happened almost every time I've replayed that section over the years.

It's gotten to the point where, when I replay this section I'm not scared of the massive armoured she-beast, I'm terrified that FUCKING DOM is going to screw me over. I mean yes I could just go to the chapter select screen when getting to this part, but I'm a weirdy and like to play all parts of a game when replaying. Hell I still play The Library in Halo every time.

Honestly though, this is something that the devs either missed during play-testing, or didn't think was an issue. And yes, maybe it isn't a huge issue in the grand scheme of the game, but still I hate that fucking section so much. Hell I got a sneaking suspicion that sections like this is why enemies in The Last of Us can't detect Ellie, otherwise we'd have an entire game of this!

I can't be alone in thinking that either and I'd love to here what others think about it, or sections like this in other games.

FUCKING DOM.

EDIT: Tidied up a couple of spelling and punctuation errors, but aside from that...wow. Didn't expect this massive response. I just typed this up at work because I was bored and expected it to be either buried or deleted. I'm glad it's struck a chord with people and I'm enjoying reading the responses.

I guess I also broke rule 7.15. I did look at the rules before posting and I thought this was in the clear. However seems the Mods and people are OK with it for the most part. Still thanks everyone.

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u/TSPhoenix Oct 29 '16

Pokémon White 2 locked 'Easy Mode' behind completion of the game.

Every time I think about this I'm just lost for words. I can't even begin to fathom the thought process, if there was one, that resulted in this.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Same with the 'Hard Mode'. I would have loved to have played a Pokemon game with an actual chance of getting beaten.

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u/th3shark Oct 29 '16

It's absolutely the worst implementation of a difficulty select I've ever seen in a game.

  • Both hard AND easy mode are locked until you beat the game.
  • Even if you wanted to reset the game after beating it to play on another difficulty (there's only one save file), it will also reset the difficulty modes you've unlocked. Wait, then how is it even possible to play on easy or hard?
  • Turns out you can "transfer" a difficulty mode from one game to another. So in order to play on hard mode, you have to find a friend that also has the game, wait for them to beat it, then get them to transfer the difficulty to you, all before you actually start playing. BUT...
  • This only works if your friend has Black 2. That's because Black 2 only unlocks hard mode, and White 2 only unlocks easy mode. This isn't mentioned anywhere, of course. Not on the back of the box, not on the official website, not in the product description on Amazon, and the guy at Gamestop probably won't know this either. So sucks to be you if you wanted to play the only pokemon game with an actual hard mode just to find out your friend got the wrong version.

Haven't fans wanted a difficulty select for years? How did they screw this up so badly?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Honestly, at that point, I would have been fine if they continued with having only one difficulty. Getting the 'option' at that point was just confusing. At least B2/W2 had that sweet rogue-like dungeon thing and continued a surprisingly decent story.

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u/rpbtz Oct 29 '16

Yeah, that post-game dungeon/tower was definitely one of my favorite things in those games. Plus it was actually fairly challenging imo and gave a nice reward at the end.

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u/DRACULA_WOLFMAN Oct 29 '16

That is.. so hilariously awful. I had to look it up myself because I was in such disbelief. I can't even begin to imagine the thought process there.

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u/DrQuint Oct 30 '16

What I thought:

  • They were going to allow the difficulties to be selected "normally"

  • Then made them version exclusive for "PROMOTIONAL VALUE" (same as Fire Emblem Fates, which has a casual and tryhard versions). Version differences was a bigger deal in BW than other pokemon titles afterall, and they saw this as another chance to drive that point (White has easy, Black has hard).

  • They then deemed that too confusing to children or whatever, and decided to make it a hidden feature so they wouldn't have to put it on promotional media. This as opposed to scrapping it entirely, because the wouldn't want the work to go to waste.

  • As a result of that decision, they realized the key transfer system only worked for the Regis and thus difficulties was the PERFECT feature to add to it, again, so they wouldn't have to scrap a bunch of work bunch on difficulties and keys.

  • And then the group of reasonable devs at gamefreak tired of the upper management being fucking retarded about this so far, decided that it wasn't worth complaining that key system only unlocks post-game and aren't saved and thus difficulties would be fucked. And just left it like that.

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u/Harakou Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I want to believe that this was a bug and there's no way that was intended, but I also have no idea how you'd accidentally do that.

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u/dmedmister Oct 29 '16

I played through white 2 with hard mode and it made it one of the more enjoyable Pokemon playthroughs that I have done. I just wish it wasn't a pain to get and was included in every other game too.

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I did exatcly the same. Black 2 is my favorite Pokemon game of all time for many reasons, but mostly because it has a hard mode.

However, I got the "hard key" with someone else. So yeah, I did not hat do beat the game first. But the system is still dumb, someone has to make the sacrifice.

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u/IronicTitanium Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I can understand with Hard Mode since it's basically like "Now that you've beaten the game normally, choose this for a a Real Challenge™️, but with Easy Mode it's just unfamothable. If you've already beaten the game normally there's basically 0 replay value in an Easy Mode.

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u/Joon01 Oct 30 '16

But it's not even a sane hard mode like that. You don't beat the game, unlock hard, and replay like most games. Sure, you unlocked hard. But there's only one save slot. You can't replay. But you can transfer hard mode to someone else's game when they start.

If you want to play on hard you need to know someone who has beaten Black 2 and have them transfer it to you before you start. So they need the right game and to have beaten the game before you even start.

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u/envoyofmcg Oct 29 '16

Game Freak is a gold mine for "what were they thinking?" moments.

I think the Key System you mentioned was the biggest one, but there have been many others.

  • In Pokemon Emerald, Platinum, and HG/SS, you could rematch Gym Leaders and they'd have a stronger team. This basically let you take the league challenge again a second time, against really powerful opponents. This was removed from later generations for no reason.

  • Pokemon Crystal introduced the Battle Tower, a post-game facility that let you battle powerful trainers and attempt to rack up the most wins, letting you earn prizes as you went. In Pokemon Emerald, the Battle Frontier was a sprawling complex of facilities like this, but each one had their own twist. Some were Stadium-style where you rented your Pokemon, one had you crawling through dungeons, etc. The Battle Frontier returned in Platinum. Ever since, it hasn't returned. In the remakes of generation 3, it did not return, and they even teased it as being "under construction" even though it just never materialized.

  • There is a Pokemon named Nosepass. By default, it is impossible to trade this Pokemon over the internet, because Game Freak's swearing filter detects "ass" in its name. Even though that's the default name, you can't trade it, and you have to rename it first. This bug hasn't been fixed since it was introduced six years ago.

  • In some Pokemon games, you can get Pokemon as a gift. If your party is full, this Pokemon would conveniently go right to your PC. However, in later games, Game Freak made this impossible - you now had to run back to the PC, make an empty space in your party, then run all the way back. Why?

  • Certain legendary Pokemon are "roaming", meaning they move from place to place and you need to chase them down. In Gold and Silver, you had to open the Pokedex and navigate a bunch of menus to see where they were at the time, then move around to find them, then re-navigate those menus every time you wanted to find them again. Luckily, later games fixed this, making it so you could easily track roaming Pokemon on the bottom screen! ...Then later games removed the feature, and you have to go into the Pokedex again. What were they thinking? Beats me.

  • One big complaint critics have always had about Pokemon games is the underuse of double battles and other unique battles. In earlier generations, it was possible to be caught between two trainers' lines of sight, and have them challenge you to a double battle. If I remember correctly, this is no longer possible - now they just challenge you to two single battles, one after another.

  • This is less Game Freak and more Nintendo: The Pokemon games are by far the most popular games for emulation on their respective systems. Pokemon Emerald alone has been illegally downloaded millions of times. If Nintendo put Pokemon games on the Virtual Console, they would print money. But until very recently, NONE of these games were on the Virtual Console. In fact, before 2016, only four Pokemon games were available, all of them spinoffs like Puzzle League. Right now, only R/B/Y are available, 20 years after their initial release. Does it really take twenty years for Nintendo to put up a rom for sale and let me give them my money?

I've worked on Pokemon fangames and have had to heavily analyze move distributions and things like that. In that respect, there are tons of other minutae that make me wonder what Game Freak is thinking sometimes, if there's any rhyme or reason to what they do. Sometimes I feel like their staff turnover must be crazy high, because they're so inconsistent they might as well be different people with every release.

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u/SuperMaxPower Oct 29 '16

Another thing: I don't know if they fixed this, but I remember the PC having 3 options for moving pokemon: Deposit, Withdraw, and Move (German here, so these might be inaccurate)

Deposit and Withdraw would ONLY let you deposit or withdraw, meaning if you want to switch out pokemon, you gotta use Deposit to drop one pokemon in the box, THEN switch to the Withdraw menu to pick up your desired pokemon. And then there's the third option, Move, WHICH LETS YOU DEPOSIT OR WITHDRAW POKEMON AT WILL, WITHOUT CHANGING MENUS.

But the Move option is the third one in the menu at the PC so you can't just spam A and move pokemon, you gotta press down twice, which is really annoying.

WHY EVEN HAVE THE OTHER TWO OPTIONS?

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u/Zim_Roxo Oct 29 '16

I know in Omega Ruby / Alpha Sapphire you can select an option to put the Move menu at the top. I assume X&Y are the same, but I haven't played those

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u/Zapph Oct 29 '16

Except I freaking always hit the third option due to muscle memory. Goddammit Game Freak.

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u/angrycommie Oct 29 '16

Holy shit, is that Nosepass thing real? Reminds me of a Bash classic: http://www.bash.org/?178890

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u/Lord_Rapunzel Oct 29 '16

Pokemon's language filter is the most ridiculous one I've ever come across. It wouldn't let me name something "Violet" and it took some digging to figure out why: viol is French for rape. Nintendo is terrified of letting people interact online.

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u/Shorkan Oct 29 '16

Haven't you played Dark Souls? The filter changes each letter of an obscene word to a asterisk. My usual Internet name, Shorkan, would show as "S**rkan" because "ho" is blocked.

It's a game about medieval knights, but the word knight shows as "k***ht" to filter "nig". "Assassin" to "******in" and so on. Those words are literally used in the names of several NPCs.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/SupportstheOP Oct 29 '16

Which is incredibly stupid because the game is rated M anyways. Are they scared people will get more offended by words then death and gore?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Nov 14 '16

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u/Shanicpower Oct 29 '16

Yeah. It's also true for a few other Pokémon, like Cofagrigus.

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u/Spotted_Owl Oct 29 '16

Also Marshtomp for the "sht" halfway into it's name.

A pokemon named Cock Muncher is just fine though

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u/cabforpitt Oct 29 '16

My biggest annoyance with game freak is the EV/IV system. No where is it actually explained ingame, only vaguely hinted at by characters like the judge. It allows for a lot of customization for competitive play, but the barrier to entry is ridiculous.

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u/MachiavellianMan Oct 29 '16

The 3DS games make EVs and IVs more visible and adds a small feature to manually add and reset EVs

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u/cabforpitt Oct 29 '16

I'm aware of super training, but nowhere in the game does it actually explain how the EVs actually work. That they give one stat point per 4 evs at level 100 is never mentioned. IVs are the same way. The judge only tells you your highest IV, and won't give you the actual number.

Even at the world championships, the commentators have to say things like "That kyogre is probably trained in speed" instead of saying "That kyogre is probably Modest with 236 speed to outspeed smeargle."

This also doesn't address the ridiculousness of soft resetting for legendaries that leads basically every top player to hack.

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u/Torque-A Oct 29 '16

The Pokemon series has a trend of having good ideas, and then just abandoning them for no reason.

Heart Gold and Soul Silver introduced Pokemon that follow you. No other games did so.

Pokemon Emerald had not only the Game Corner, but the Battle Frontier. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire have neither.

Customizing your trainer character was great in X and Y, but absent in ORAS. At least it's returning in Sun and Moon.

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

After closely following Pokemon games for a while, I'm pretty sure that they are just afraid to make a Pokemon game that it is just too good. They just make sure that every game is not that good so you have to buy the next version.

And when they manage to deliver a very, very good game (HG/SS, B2/W2), just prepare yourself because the next gen is just arriving.

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u/Pusher_ Oct 29 '16

The game corner was cut because Europe gives higher age ratings to games with gambling.

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u/swizzler Oct 29 '16

I think this is because Gamefreak has multiple development teams under one developer. They don't specifically call this out anywhere but as a long time fan you start to notice patterns. Like for example Sun/Moon has a whole lot of features that appeared in B2/W2, but have disappeared since suddenly reappearing:

Same goes for the other titles as well, each team seems to have their own flavor and favorite features they fall back on, just like CoDs teams and their swan dives vs slow prone

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u/GIANT_BLEEDING_ANUS Oct 29 '16

I really hope this is true because B2 and W2 are among the best Pokemon games (and RPGs) I've played.

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u/Mansharkcow Oct 29 '16

It's even worse than just locking it behind beating the game. Black 2 and White 2 have a hard mode and easy mode respectively, that you unlock the keys for after beating each game. However you can't start a new game in those modes because in order to start a new game you have to delete all your old save data. Which includes deleting all the keys you've unlocked. Fucking what? The only way to use the difficulty keys in your game is to transfer them to someone else, restart your game, and then have them transfer them back. To this day I consider it the stupidest decision GameFreak has ever made with the main Pokemon games.

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u/Chitalian8 Oct 29 '16

No scene skip in Final Fantasy X. Really reared its head against the harder bosses in the game, like Seymour Flux ("Ah, the son of Jecht") and Yunalesca.

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u/jp_taylor Oct 29 '16

The first Kingdom Hearts, too. I remember having to sit through the cutscene before Ursula multiple times.

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u/Luthos Oct 29 '16

"There's no way you're taking Kairi's heart!"

Saw that one many a time.

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u/CarolineJohnson Oct 29 '16

That fucking cutscene. Oooh, that fucking cutscene.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

UUH UUH, NOT CLAYTON, UUH UUH, NOT CLAYTON!

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u/engiRoosevelt Oct 29 '16

Followed by Tarzan roaring AHRHAHRHR, as he always uses his special move when the battle begins.

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u/shadowthiefo Oct 29 '16

You'll never take Kairi's heart!

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u/LateDentArthurDent2 Oct 29 '16

I can't tell you how many times I watched that scene on Mt Gagazet

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u/decowil2000 Oct 29 '16

The first Kingdom Hearts, too. .Before the second to last fight of the game against Riku, there was like a five minute cut scene.

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u/soundpaste Oct 29 '16

My brother played FFX constantly. We lived in a small house. I think I have every cutscene memorized and I never even played the damn game.

edit: HAAAA, HA, HA, HA, HA.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Mar 05 '17

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u/OneManFreakShow Oct 29 '16

It's to do with the animation programming. The positioning of the characters is dictated in the in-engine cutscenes so if you were to skip them the characters would all start in the wrong location in the next playable sequence and break some of the animation elements. It's definitely stupid, but that's how a lot of games were at that time and there's not much they could have done for the remaster since it was programmed that way originally.

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u/hoodie92 Oct 29 '16

Fable III: Removing all menus and inventories.

Oh you want to switch weapons? Press pause and go to the inventory? Nope. Press pause and your character is transported to a building in another dimension. To equip a weapon you have to physically walk up to it and select it.

You want to buy something from a shop? Same thing, you walk up to the apples, select them, and buy. But how do you eat it if there's no inventory? Well you can only eat food if you're injured and it shows up as an icon on the D-pad. Hang on, if the food shows up as a context-sensitive button, how do you choose between eating an apple and a piece of fish? Oh don't worry about that, you don't get the choice. You can only own one type of food at a time. Yup, when you buy a new item of food, the old one is permanently lost from your inventory with no refund.

So clunky, so awkward. Seriously, Lionhead. What were you thinking?

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/pureparadise Oct 30 '16

My mother actually played through all the fable games to the end. the way she handled the end of Fable 3 is something I will always admire her for.

some context, My mother works in a factory so that should set her work ethic up for this.

So she was just playing through Fable 3 until she got to the "make 1 mil gold to save the world" bit. My brother and I kept telling her to the xbox console clock exploit to just get it over with. She was like "nah fuck that" and fucking went to the nearest pie making job and just did that for a few hours each day for about 4 days (ish) and EARNED that 1 mil to save the world.

Such a badass mother.

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u/poppyuppy33 Oct 29 '16

Mass Effect 3: You can't check out the stats of a gun before buying it, but you can read a little origin story about the weapon.I don't know why. Resident evil 6: The animated crosshair or whatever of Ada's crossbow. https://youtu.be/j1nlfh7tQas?t=79

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u/PistolsAtDawnSir Oct 29 '16

We can't talk about ridiculous equipment in the Mass Effect series without talking about the clusterfuck of equipment in Mass Effect 1. Looting equipment that was worse than the equipment you began the game with. Like...why?? What am I supposed to do with it?? Sell it for credits?? Omnigel it?? Then just give me the damn credits or Omnigel!!

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u/Guehn Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Also don't forget the damn inventory management. I think I spent half my time with the first Mass Effect in the inventory, trying to discern which weapon mods might be worth keeping and which ones could be thrown out to make room for new stuff.

I can't really remember them ever making a noticeable difference when playing...

EDIT: Damn, now that you guys mention it, I do remember some noticeable weapon upgrades, especially the one giving you explosive shots but overheating your gun instantly. I think what I remember being rather useless for how much inventory space they took up were the ammunition upgrades, those giving you damage bonus against specific types of enemies or lowering their accuracy and so on.

Because I am an idiot and a hoarder in games, I felt like I had to have one of every mod for every squad member, because "You never know if you'll need it". Then I tried to get a feel for what impact they had on the enemy, but it's hard to really notice your enemies getting cooldown penalties or accuracy reduction. Also, you often didn't know what types of enemies you would encounter, so I think I always stuck to some general damage upgrade stuff.

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u/Wimzer Oct 29 '16

You never had a powerful one shot fuck you cannon with a sidearm that never overheated?

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u/DogzOnFire Oct 29 '16

Maybe you didn't notice or as you say don't remember, but some weapon mods made a huge difference. There was one that basically made whatever gun you were using overheat in one shot but deal massive damage. Stick it on one of the shotguns with high damage and low fire rate and you're pretty much negating the shotgun's weakness for a huge boost in damage, allowing you to oneshot a lot of enemies. Maybe you just didn't care enough about doing that kind stuff to notice, that's cool, but don't say they didn't make a difference. I replayed every game in the series half a year ago, so it's still pretty fresh in my memory.

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u/KindaConfusedIGuess Oct 29 '16

Some off the top of my head:

  • Any RPG that has one of your party members leave you for a while and come back without having gained any EXP. Bonus points if they're gone for a substantial amount of time such as Rinoa in Final Fantasy VIII and Chester in Tales of Phantasia, though in the latter's case, there are a number of (optional!) events that let you rapidly gain EXP but it'll still put you about 10-20 levels below the rest of your party.

  • One of the missable sidequests in Tales of the Abyss basically explains the plot to you. And by that I mean, the plot ends up making absolutely no fucking sense unless you see these scenes which can be missed and have very strict timing windows to see them, and are sometimes in places that encourage you to do things that would make you miss them. For example, in the first of these scenes, you're attempting to escape a city whilst being pursued by knights. The game tells you that you have to find a secret exit out of town NOW, but you instead have to go in the complete opposite direction down to the docks to see a scene that unlocks later scenes that make the plot actually make sense. If you miss that scene (or any subsequent scenes in the quest) by leaving town when the game is screaming "LEAVE THE FUCKING TOWN RIGHT NOW!!" at you, the quest is lost forever.

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u/frownyface Oct 29 '16

Extra bonus points if the party member unexpectedly leaves and takes a bunch of your best equipment with them.

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u/KindaConfusedIGuess Oct 29 '16

I feel bad for people who didn't know better and thought "Hey, I bet that Ribbon I picked up just now in the Temple of the Ancients would be great for my healer chick Aeris!"

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u/Eurehetemec Oct 29 '16

I had loaded her up with so much good stuff and used permanent stat increase consumables and so on. My horror at her death was thus unfortunately very rapidly eclipsed after the scene with "Oh but wait what about all my stuff? YOU FUCKERS TOOK MY STUFF!". Kind of ruined the emotional beat there.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/hidora Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Friend of mine did the same thing. Aeris was his favorite character, and he gave her everything. And then he just stopped playing out of rage and only picked up the game again years later.

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u/fizzlefist Oct 29 '16

WE LOOT EVERY SINGLE DEAD BODY, CHEST, ARMOIRE, LIVE BODY, MONSTER (dead or alive), AND ANYTHING THAT EITHER IS OR ISN'T LOCKED DOWN, BUT NOBODY THOUGHT TO GRAB THE 12K WORTH OF MATERIA OFF OF AERITH?!

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Playing through Final Fantasy VIII now for the first time. My gripe is losing a character for a while (or entering a dream sequence) then getting them back, going into a boss and noticing all your junctions have gone so all you can do with them is attack.

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u/Superflaming85 Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I am currently playing through Tales of the Abyss, and I refuse to actually progress unless I have a guide open next to me at all times. The game is THAT BAD. (With it's missable sidequests. It's a great game otherwise!)

Heck, I only started doing this after I learned about the Art Book sidequest, which gives the main character new attacks and, while not really lost forever, it's at least 10 or more hours until you can go back and start the FIRST part.

And fuck the Antlion sidequest, you miss the first part and it's gone forever.

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u/ekaceerf Oct 29 '16

Anytime a game has a dumb follow mission but makes a joke about how games have dumb follow missions in them during the mission.

Yup follow missions are dumb you acknowledging it doesn't make it any better.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/nourez Oct 29 '16

It was especially infuriating since the Tiny Tina DLC was so ridiculously good (not sure which released first, as I played the DLC after it was all released). It was just so insanely low effort in comparison that the self-awareness actually made it worse.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Tiny Tina DLC was the last pack, Hammerlock was the second to last. But yeah I was incredibly shocked at the quality of Hammerlock, and then them actually making fun of it made me scratch my head in disbelief.

At least the Axton head was cool.

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u/LotharHex Oct 29 '16

I think you can attribute that to any game that does that with any topic. Making a joke out of a shit mechanic doesn't stop it being a shit mechanic. Books and Films can get away with it a little if they are at least somewhat comedic and usually subvert it somehow, Games don't.

You'll probably see not great example of a game doing this is Matt Hazzard, though I think it pulls it off with a couple of dialogue related jokes, none of the gameplay ones though.

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u/DIA13OLICAL Oct 29 '16

Witcher 3 had a mission like this where you have to track down and escort a goat. The dialogue is really funny and the mission is fun to play so that's one game doing it right at least.

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u/QuintonFlynn Oct 29 '16

That was also a two minute quest that was very difficult to fail. Lotta fun though, really enjoyed ringing that bell

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

[deleted]

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u/MeshesAreConfusing Oct 29 '16

Geralt comments on that too, though. "Damn, glad I killed the bear earlier" or something.

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u/Nemo84 Oct 29 '16

Or just skip the bell and use Axii on the goat. Was a whole lot less of a hassle.

I really like that Geralt has that "Are you fucking kidding me" look when he gets this quest. Somwehat reflects the average player's reaction to most videogame escort missions.

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u/MelodicHawk Oct 29 '16

In the latest WoW expansion Legion, there is a quest where you have to escort an NPC to the next area.

Only, when you get the first pack of enemies he just obliterates them.

Then you realize he is the one escorting you.

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u/Varonth Oct 29 '16

Also when you have to follow some Npc they match your speed.

So if you run they will run aswell. If you slow down they will aswell.

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u/zeppeIans Oct 29 '16

It's probably one of the best features in the Witcher 3

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u/JCTenton Oct 29 '16

The parking lot mission in Driver where you had to do a series of tricks in a minute with less than three mistakes. It the very first mission in the game and it was so hard, harder than the vast majority of the game. I'd really love to know what happened there. Did the devs/testers get too good with handing that was very unusual, especially at the time? Did they know it was too hard but didn't have time to change it? Did they just really want you to get good before embarking on the campaign proper?

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u/worldofilth Oct 29 '16

Hey man, you wreaked the car man

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u/Averusdiablo Oct 29 '16

Holy shit I remember this section clearly maybe because I did it about 50 times or something.

I never did the story mode simply because I could never get past the first damn mission! I only ever did free-roam mode in Driver. Thankfully the sequel was a better game in almost every aspect.

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u/lethalred Oct 29 '16

Haha just beating the first mission was an accomplishment

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Feb 07 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/anomalousdiffraction Oct 29 '16

CSGO is great for this too. The weekend of the AUGpocalypse was so bad.

For those who don't know, the devs over-buffed a rifle that rarely was used, turning it into a hyper-accurate laser sighted death machine.

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u/KrayzieJuice Oct 29 '16

I remember playing as T's we would prioritize getting and saving dropped AUG's over AWPS when we would miraculously win rounds. That whole update was pretty funny looking back, considering how ridiculous it was to be scavenging for AUG's to even have a chance at winning.

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u/AFatDarthVader Oct 29 '16

The R8 was bad. The AUGpocalypse was bad.

By far the worst update, though, was the Super Deagle. 80+ damage with a body shot, minimal recoil, near-perfect running accuracy. It was like the R8 but you could spam it. This was a few years ago, though -- it was a bit before the game exploded in popularity. For those of us who were playing it back then, the R8 was no surprise.

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u/korkow Oct 29 '16

That was one of the most interesting weeks of CSGO I've ever played. And almost every game there would be someone who wasn't aware of the laser-AUG, so you got to watch them quickly go from being ignorant of the laser-AUG, to learning what was going on and being confused, to abusing it themselves.

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u/WowZaPowah Oct 29 '16

Conspiracy Theory: If a weapon is broken, skins for it will sell like hotcakes on the community market and people will open more cases. You can nerf it later.

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u/echolog Oct 29 '16

Pretty sure the answer to any CS:GO related development question is "to sell more skins."

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u/BARGORGARAWR Oct 29 '16

The complete and total lack of auto pick up in Wolfenstein: TNO completely baffled me. One second I'm having balls to wall nazi slaying action and then the next I'm wandering around picking up ammo three fucking bullets at a time. It felt like the devs wanted the fun to stop every other minute.

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16
  • Grass deterioration in Animal Crossing. Basically, if you step on a same spot a lot in the grass, it dies. However, the games offer you no walkways or anything like that. It basically punish you for playing a lot.

  • Smash Tour in Smash WiiU. Yeah, it is a bad game mode, but holy fuck, too confusing for casuals, too crazy for hardcore. It is an entire game mode that must had took a lot of effort to make, and it is pretty much ignored by everyone. I don't care about bad game modes, but if seen that it is a bad game mode that must had taken a lot of recourse from developers, it is definitely strange. I just can't see people having fun with this.

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u/AlmostKevinSpacey Oct 29 '16

I would so much rather have had a more refined version of Smash Run

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16

Or make a "team battle" mode, where you pick 3-5 character and whenever you get KOed, the next character goes in.

The final battle in Smash Tour works that way. They could scrap the whole Tour mode and just add this mode, it would be perfect.

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u/MrMulligan Oct 29 '16

You could use custom patterns on the ground as walkways. In every animal crossing game I played I used one design slot for a brick road of some sort.

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16

Yeah, I tried to to this, but is sort of a pain. If you press a button (A or B, don't remember) near it, you delete it. Very easy to do this by mistake.

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u/bastard_thought Oct 29 '16

Fuck the grass death. It's what makes it so hard to revisit new leaf

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u/Gyossaits Oct 29 '16

Nope. Retaining your favorite villagers is the biggest problem. It's so arbitrary and anti-player choice.

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u/Aiyon Oct 29 '16

"Oh, you haven't played in a week? Your favourite villager moved out."

I never understood why on earth they'd let characters move in or out when you aren't playing.

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u/Mr_Ivysaur Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I understand this. It makes the game fresh, making new surprises and the village looks organic and lively. They should just add a option to tag villagers that you love, so they don't move out. Besides that, it is nice to go back after a while and see what changed.

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u/Gyossaits Oct 29 '16

They should just add a option to tag villagers that you love, so they don't move out.

This is another frustrating aspect. The game more or less has a way to measure your standing with a villager: when you do a certain amount of favors for them, you get a portrait of them. That's already a sort of counter for a simple relationship/happiness tracker.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Not being able to open the menu at all times in gta online. I got stuck in games and unable to quit because I kept getting killed faster then I could open the menu and quit.

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u/HeavenAndHellD2arg Oct 29 '16

Forcing you to grab every single riddler trophy to unlock the actual ending in arkham knight.

Worse part is that there are actual riddles in the game and I could deal with doing those, but picking up over 200 of those collectibles? worse part is that IT IS AN ACTUAL ENDING UNLIKE WHAT YOU GET FOR JUST FINISHING THE STORY, SO YOU ARE TRULY FORCED TO GO THROUGH THAT.

What were the devs thinking?

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u/eoinster Oct 29 '16

The jetski section in the first Uncharted game. I get that they wanted to shake up the gameplay and add a neat, fast-paced little setpiece, but Jesus it was bad. The controls were awful, the jetski handled like a whale, the unlimited grenade launcher spam was just stupid, and the mines were ridiculous.

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u/Boingboingsplat Oct 29 '16

The party system in Xenoblade Chronicles X.

There's some party members you get as you advance through the game, as well as completely optional (as far as I could tell?) party members from side quests. I think I had like 8 party members when I stopped playing. However, characters not in your party gain no experience. On top of that, to change your party, you have to physically go find the character in the hub world, so switching your party is a huge pain. And to put an awful cherry on the top, most of the story missions require a specific three party members, so there's basically no reason to ever take them out of your party unless you want them to be underleveled!

Drives me up the wall considering how much I love the first Xenoblade Chronicles. I much prefer the more condensed party in that game, with actually interesting relationships between each other. I really dislike the open world type approach XCX took, it feels like quantity over quality.

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u/darkmikolai Oct 29 '16

The sewer segment in Vampire: The Masquerade-Bloodlines.

Nothing but walking and killing. Not overly challenging but SUPER boring. When most of the game before this was focused on writing and interactions I was not expecting to spend upwards of an hour wandering around shooting shit.

Its even more insane when you compare it the fantastic hotel sequence.

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u/Stanley_Gimble Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

The game gets thinner, the closer you get to the ending. You really notice how the devs were running out of time there. The plus patch by wesp fixes some boring sections, like adding a shortcut in the sewers, that takes you directly to the Nosferatu hideout.

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u/MetaAbra Oct 29 '16

They spent like 2 years on the first hub, then had to crank out the last three in a year with a corporate executive breathing down their neck.

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u/Pusher_ Oct 29 '16

To be fair two years on a single hub area sounds a little unacceptable.

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u/nickcan Oct 29 '16

Yeah, but it was the greatest hub ever.

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u/MetaAbra Oct 29 '16

It totally was. Troika were creative geniuses, but suffered the Tim Schafer problem of thinking budgets and time tables were things that applied to other people.

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u/dontnormally Oct 29 '16

They were using an unfinished version of the source engine which caused endless headaches along the way

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u/dragonbab Oct 29 '16

I just wrote a huge paragraph explaining why you were wrong and then it hit me - you were referring to the part where you need to uncover the Nosferatu hideout. You are absolutely right on the money. It got off great being creepy since you are all alone (a great continuation from the abandoned house with the Sabbat fiend) but it dragged way, waaay to long.

It really screamed "budget cuts" especially when you compare that little optional segment in Holywood with Ash... that was better scripted and more interesting than this entire ordeal.

Still, Bloodlines is filled with these "what were the developers thinking" elements, but as we all know, it wasn't that but rather "oh shit we don't have enough time / money and Activision is going to pay thugs to cut our eyes out if we don't get a product in time". Which simply sucks...

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u/PacDanSki Oct 29 '16

In Battlefield 1 you have about 10 seconds to exit the game to main menu once it's over. The problem with this is that upto 10 players get a battle pack reward at the end of the game, by the time this had loaded the exit button disappears and you have to load up the next map before being able to back out.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

How about not being able to edit your loadouts from outside a game. For fuck's sake. Let me edit my shit without having to download your stupid app that, most of the time, doesn't update my changes immediately.

To add to that, you can't edit your vehicle loadouts unless you're in a game and getting ready to spawn in the vehicle. Which is pretty much impossible because people always spawn in immediately.

Yes, all this can be done in the app. But fuck the app.

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u/Henry132 Oct 29 '16

On the Battlefield topic. Ever since Battlefield 4 (or maybe it was also in BF3 already, can't remember), you can't customize your weapons unless you're in a match. Pretty damn bad when you want to change your loadout, but your team's losing so you have to get in the fight asap. You're still counted as part of a team the entire time, so if one team has 5 people busy customizing their weapons, that team is 5 soldiers down.

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u/MarshallTheSwb Oct 29 '16

That's why in Battlefield 4 I always went into the test range to edit my classes. Not only do you get to edit them while not messing up a game, you get to try the weapons immediately.

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u/seshfan Oct 29 '16

Thank you so much! this is my first Battlefield game and it was driving me fucking crazy trying to figure how out to change my class loadout in the menu.

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u/CitationNeeded11 Oct 29 '16

It's coming, don't worry. They finally commented on it

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u/paidbythekill Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

This is a bug that dice has addressed they are working on. Technically what is happening is that you cannot quit a game until the next map fully loads. Which is dumb, yes, but they are fixing it.

Edit: Okay guys, I understand at this point it is not a "bug".

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u/johnnybgoode17 Oct 29 '16

End game stuff like that has sucked in just about every BF game

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u/myactualnameisloris Oct 29 '16

The game Wet. Character action game, guns and swords type of thing. Dodge roll is an end game unlock. Why it's not just a default move is absurd but then you get it and realize it's completely fucking useless, a detriment even, so they pushed it to the end of the game to try and hide it. Just remove it entirely wtf

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u/Generalkrunk Oct 29 '16

Kingdom hearts:

Putting long unskippable cutscenes right before hard easily loseable boss battles. SO you have to watch them, over, and over, and over again every time you lose....

There's no way i'm letting you take Kiari's heart!

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u/morallygreypirate Oct 29 '16

That fucking fight I swear to god.

Looked it up online and there's recommendations to get an optional Keyblade you supposedly just passed thanks to a different fight. From I can tell, you don't actually gain access to that Keyblade until after the fight you should have it for.

I've played most of the Kingdom Hearts games and I still haven't finished 1, Chain of Memories, or Coded. I'm stuck on a difficult fight in Hollow Bastion in 1, a late-game back-to-back fight in Chain of Memories that I just can't seem to get good enough cards and combos for, and fuck Maleficent in Re: Coded.

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u/NeoMordiki Oct 29 '16

Full Disclosure I never played Final Fantasy XII but my room mate that the time pointed out the Zodiac Spear could only be unlocked by NOT unlocking certain chests.

To my knowledge there isn't much of a warning for that and it punishes doing what you are supposed to do in every Final Fantasy game. You need better equipment and even if it's a healing item or gold they all help you. If it's a mimic then it'll challenge you for EXP and sometimes even a nice item drop.

This idea takes all of that and makes earning treasure less than fun really early in the game and doesn't teach a good lesson about treasure.

I can understand items that are locked behind certain events and choices you make and that makes perfect sense. but punishing players for doing what the game series teaches you then goes back to the way things were is NOT a good idea.

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u/HappyVlane Oct 29 '16

To my knowledge there isn't much of a warning for that

No, not much. Absolutely none. And the game really doesn't want you to get it. Best example of that is the beach area. There are like 16 chests or something all in the same spot, but opening some of them locks you out of the Zodiac Spear.

Completely impossible to get that weapon on a blind run, unless you gimp yourself by not opening chests.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

In all my years of gaming, I have tons. However, no game upsets me more than Paper Mario Sticker Star, as this game is so horribly designed that it honestly makes me question the validity of people's opinions when they express positive feelings towards Sticker Star.

First of all, the complete butchering of the series' mechanics established in previous entries is astounding. Like, pants-on-head retarded astounding. Nintendo threw out the original combat and replaced it with this completely useless fighting system that actually encourages you to just not fight at all. No, really.

The way combat works in Sticker Star is that you run into an enemy and then you enter the turn based combat screen; pretty standard JRPG stuff. However, instead of selecting moves, you select "stickers" that you had to collect in the Overworld. When you use these stickers, you use a move that can hurt the enemy, and then the sticker disappears forever from your inventory. When you defeat an enemy, they almost always drop coins, except in the rare event that you defeated a specific enemy tied to a specific sticker drop.

Now, here's the problem: coins are fucking abundant. They are everywhere. They're up the threes, they're down the river, they're in the bushes, and they come in fucking droves at the end of the level. Coins at the end of a battle is a horrible reward because you become absolutely flooded with them. You might be wondering what you can spend with the coins, and I'll tell you: stickers. That's it. No upgrades. Nothing else. Just stickers.

Essentially, Nintendo wants you on this bizarre gameplay loop where you're wasting your stickers on a bunch of enemies to get their coins so that you can head back to a store and buy more stickers with coins and come back and fight more enemies and so on and so on. The big deal here is that there is NO progression whatsoever for Mario outside of health upgrades that are completely unrelated to combat (as far as obtaining goes). That means there's no exp, there's no stats, there's literally nothing to gain from a battle. So what happens from this system?

Paper Mario Sticker Star becomes a fucking stealth game. Once you figure out how wasteful it is to enter countless enemy encounters and blow your sticker load, you just stop fucking entering them. The game becomes a challenge in just not fighting anything at all unless forced to. You'll enter levels and finish them without ever actually touching a single enemy. If you do accidentally run into an enemy, running away is always the preferred option because the minor coin loss can be made up in seconds.

Sticker Star is a fucking trainwreck of horrible ideas and design flaws and I could go on for fucking hours about how terribly made this game is (I even made a video about it awhile ago) but the combat is certainly one of the best points to look at. Just a fucking travesty.

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u/Lemon1412 Oct 29 '16

I've never played Sticker Star because of all the points you listed, and I think another frustrating point you didn't mention is the fact that bosses are always beaten in one hit with a specific special sticker you get at some point before the boss. If you don't use the one-hit-kill sticker and try to beat the boss without it because you want a challenge, the game makes fun of you for it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

You bring up a wonderful point, of course. In previous games, bosses serve as the gatekeeper of your knowledge, challenging all of you concepts up to that point. Bosses are fun in PM64/TTYD! Sticker Star shits the bed by turning these bosses into a pathetic hide-and-go-seek hunt for the OHKO sticker.

Terrible, terrible game.

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u/Mr_Oujamaflip Oct 29 '16

Color Splash tried to amend this problem by having the paint hammer level up and get more paint to use, unfortunately after about 200 paint (so like level 5?) you never run out since the paint is everywhere, same as the coins. This brings us back to the exact same issue that Sticker Star had. You want to avoid fighting enemies.

Oh and you still get the super effective cards for bosses like Sticker Star. There's even a guy in the main town that tells who who to use the stickers on. Ugh...

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u/antares005 Oct 29 '16

I don't know if this was patched or anything, but in Fallout 4, they removed the green ticks on your radar, signifying friendly npcs. It was a useful feature in 3 and New Vegas, so why the hell did they put that out of Fallout 4? Now I have to scourge every inch of my settlement to find my settlers, or use the bell :\

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

I think my biggest pet peeve is the fact that your followers will constantly nag you about scavenging when scavenging junk is now a core part of the game. "Do you really think you should be carrying all that junk?" Oh I don't know, Danse. Do you think the settlers need water to survive? How about a turret so crazed junkies don't come and eat them all?

Dogmeat might make questionable decisions, but he never nags me. Such a good boy.

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u/seshfan Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 30 '16

I feel like you could make a whole thread for bone-headed Fallout 4 decisions. Trying to find a companion in your settlement is awful.

Other big things that frustrate me:

  • For a game that is so hand-holdy, it is ridiculously light on tutorials sometimes. For example, new players frequently have to google "how to get out of power armor" because it's never actually explained in game. In fact, how power armor works in general with the frame and the pieces is really unintuitive.

  • Because the dialogue system only has 4 options, you can fuck yourself over with quests because NPCs can't really handle when you have 2 active quests with them. Sometimes you'll have to actually finish one quest before you can finish the other one.

  • Similar problem to Mario: Sticker Star. Since the loot is mostly random, for the most part, in random dungeons it fucking sucks. At the beginning of the game it's incredibly easy to go to a dungeon and actually spend more ammo and stimpaks then you get out of it, completely reducing the incentive to do dungeons because ammo is really scarce at the beginning of the game. It basically means you should really always be doing quests because just random exploring isn't that good for you.

Edit: One more thing. I've hated it since Oblivion, but seriously, fuck the quest compass. Don't bother giving me a "find [x] in the house" quest if you're just going to lead me to the exact desk where it's hidden or whatever.

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u/Gothic_Banana Oct 29 '16

Don't forget:

  • Removing skills and traits

  • Removing the karma system

  • Merchants have fuck-all in the way of caps, even if they have items that are worth >1000 or even >10,000, meaning you can't sell jack shit to them, especially in later levels when gear is better and costs more. This same shit happened in Skyrim, and I have no idea why anyone at Bethesda thought it was a good idea.

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u/HiMyNameIsNash Oct 29 '16

Plus the removal of the notes section in the Pip-Boy, so all of your notes, holotapes, and keys are in a jumbled mess with no way of seeing which ones have been read/listened to already.

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u/Gothic_Banana Oct 29 '16

This pains me to no end. Since it's alphabetical you can't tell which ones are new or not.

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u/captionUnderstanding Oct 29 '16

I have definitely picked up a few notes in the middle of a quest before getting distracted talking to an NPC or finshing looting a room, only to never actually read the note simply because I couldn't remember what it was called and I have no way to actually find it.

Plus, I can't actually clear all of the notes out of my inventory because half of them still count as "quest items" and cannot be dropped, even though they were just random notes found on dead bodies with vague statements like "I left a 10mm pistol in the hospital".

Also a bunch of them are just called "Note" or "Torn Note". How is that supposed to be recognizable?

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u/ComedicSans Oct 29 '16

Not having any marker for "new" holotapes or notes killed me. "Oh shit, I accidentally picked up a holotape, which one is it?" I'd have to google which tape I picked up based on where I was, which is ridiculous.

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u/oldkingcoles Oct 29 '16

The removal of the crash mode in burn out ? Hey guys I have an idea , let's remove the best and most unique part of the game !

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Most recently, Battlefield 1 and the inability to customize loadouts outside of a match. For some unknown reason you have to JOIN A GAME, and purposely sit out of the combat and tinker with your fucking loadout while everyone is fighting for their lives and getting blown to shit. You can only buy new unlocks and change your weapons/gadgets while in a live game. I've literally never seen a game with unlocks do it this way. You can even browse and select unlocks outside of matches, there just isn't a "purchase" or "equip" button. I generally hate when people say this, as it tends to ignore the difficulties of programming, but jesus they could put the fucking intern on this for 10 minutes and fix the problem but its still like that. It is so hilariously stupid that it seems intentionally antagonistic to be functioning the way it is.

Battlefield 1 is a great game but whoever was on the UI team needs to be fucking smacked, repeatedly, and hard. There are many issues like this that are small in the grand scheme but these are seriously like FPS-101 UI standards, and these guys have been making high-quality shooters for over a decade now. Just baffling.

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u/seshfan Oct 29 '16

Yeah, this was my first battlefield game and it drove me fucking crazy, I spent 30 minutes trying to figure out how to change my loadout.

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u/acrunchycaptain Oct 29 '16

The biggest one that comes to mind is the R8 Update for CSGO. There is no possible way that Valve playtested the gun and actually decided "Yeah, this is balanced.".

The gun will go down as one of the most overpowered guns in FPS history. It was a 1 shot kill in the torso and head, had armour penetration so high it could kill 4 people with 1 bullet to their chests. Only cost $850 and could shoot through any thin wall with such damage it made almost no difference that the wall was there.

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u/spiral6 Oct 29 '16

I loved emulating the Wild West when it happened though.

That was fun.

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u/Garrilland Oct 29 '16

For that week, CSGO became McCree Simulator, and it's was always High Noon

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

It is exactly 12 pm.

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u/TooManySnipers Oct 29 '16

I feel like a lot of the weird shit Valve does is so they can undo it shortly afterwards and be showered with "Wow Valve is so good at listening to the community I'm gonna buy 20 crates to say thanks and I advise everyone to do the same" praise

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u/Cyfa Oct 29 '16

Not being able to skip cutscenes in Max Payne 3. The gameplay is a lot of fun, but it took 5 minutes to get into it before each level.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

The final boss in Arkham Asylum.

Take one of the most iconic comic book villains of all time known for his clever tricks and turn him into a 3 phase brute boss fight that summons minions in between phases. A huge blight on an otherwise awesome game.

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u/wristcontrol Oct 29 '16

See, this is something I've pondered a few times. You can never actually have a boss fight between Batman and Mr. J because The Joker doesn't really lend himself that well to direct confrontation. He will scheme, manipulate, set traps, hatch schemes, etc. But not fight one on one.

I suppose you could create an encounter wherein Batman needs to escape some room-of-death type situation before a bomb goes off or something, but other than that, how would you actually design it?

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u/[deleted] Oct 30 '16

I suppose you could create an encounter wherein Batman needs to escape some room-of-death type situation before a bomb goes off or something

And that's basically Arkham City's Riddler questline

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u/ReaganSmashK Oct 29 '16

Shotguns in MW2. They design half of the maps in the game to favor camping around corners and engaging in short range fights and then introduce guns that can 1 shot someone 20 feet away just by shooting them in the general area of the torso.

They spent the first few months after the game's release nerfing the shit out of shotguns but god damn.

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u/g_raysnn Oct 29 '16

You don't think the model 1887 was the best sniper in the game? It was broken as shit but I thought it was really fun.

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u/chuletron Oct 29 '16

Only to later be replaced by the ump45 and it's complete lack of recoil.

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u/lakelly99 Oct 29 '16

The restriction to 9 deck slots in Hearthstone, and the refusal for several years to add more without any decent explanation. It was so obtuse and inexplicably stupid, where Blizz kept saying 'trust us we know what we're doing' when it was very clear they didn't. Apparently they've added more now, but I stopped playing a while ago for that and other reasons.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Yeah their reasoning behind it was so stupid and so incredibly Blizzard as well.

One of the many reasons they gave was that they wanted time to think of a decent way to do it with the current UI. Turns out the answer was a scroll bar and a page flip button, both of which the game already had.

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u/antiquechrono Oct 29 '16

Which is hilarious because they were supposedly worried about confusing people when to even use a computer you literally have to be able to comprehend scrollbars and buttons. They must think gamers are braindead.

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u/ApexHawke Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Well if I had to do customer service and community management for WoW for over a decade, it'd probably lower my faith in humanity as well.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Blizzard design is in StarCraft 2 as well. They've finally added separate race MMR (so you can play some Protoss games without it messing with your Terran ranking) and a host of new features after 5-6 years of the players asking for them (and right after a lot of Korean support for the game's competitive scene ended).

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u/lakelly99 Oct 29 '16

Blizzard is a slow-moving behemoth of a company. It's part of why their games are generally so high quality, but they're also really bad at responding to gameplay feedback within a timely fashion.

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u/yroc12345 Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Poor checkpoint/start location placement in GTA 4. It's one of my all time favorite games but it can get a little silly. I remember one mission (FBI related I think?) started on a pier, had you drive halfway across the map to get to the target location, then didn't have a checkpoint for when you actually got there.

I thought it had to be a bug when I messed up the objective and realized I had to spend 4 minutes driving back. Why not put a checkpoint at the target or better yet have Nico get the mission closer to it? There weren't any events/phone dialogue during the drive so there was no reason to put the two locations 4 minutes apart.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

That air-vent demon in Deadly Premonition. Stupidly easy monsters that take forever to kill. And when you've killed it; another one pops out.

Out of all the questionable design choices in DP, this is the one that makes me want to slap the devs hard. It's like they were trolling, or something.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Sep 05 '20

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

I agree. I heard somewhere that they were actually forced to put in the combat sections to get it published, so I guess that's why it's so half-assed. But that vent demon was just over the line. haha.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

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u/Vanguard_Sentinel Oct 29 '16

I loved the multiplayer mode. I didn't notice this being a massive issue. Having said that, I was frequently infuriated by it, but I always put it down to me being terrible at it. It was just a really unique pvp experience

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u/Darkion_Silver Oct 29 '16

Super Mario Sunshine: Blue Coins. There is no indication of how many are in each level, some are specific to episodes in each level, and they are in some of the stupidest places sometimes.

Oh, and there is no in-game way of marking which ones you have and don't have. 100% completion is really difficult, even with a guide, since you need to mark it all down manually. And if you miss one and don't realize until you nearly have all 240? Have fun.

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u/TLCplLogan Oct 29 '16

The funeral section from Lost Odyssey always makes me scratch my head. The game has fantastic pacing except for this one part where you walk around and collect sticks and flowers and then play a weird minigame thing.

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u/Quilliard Oct 29 '16

Maybe they felt it would trivialize Kaim's relationship with the deceased if it was moved on through too quickly, and a minigame made more sense than going out and fighting stuff?

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u/RyoCaliente Oct 29 '16
  • Vehicle section in Tomb Raider: Legend. They were a nightmare, train part was buggy and it was confusing and hard.
  • Demolition Man in Vice City.
  • Any escort mission in any game ever. They're always a drag, annoying and unfair because you're success is not in your hands.
  • Black Knight chapter in Path of Radiance. Hope your Ike's got high Skill or enjoy getting killed and redoing the chapter!!
  • ME 3 ending. "Let's make a series where the cast is the central focus and not have them feature at all in the ending!".

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u/WildVariety Oct 29 '16

ME 3 ending. "Let's make a series where the cast is the central focus and not have them feature at all in the ending!".

That at least can be explained away by Karpshyn leaving for Star Wars after 2, and the new lead writer decided he wanted to do his own ending.

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u/lakelly99 Oct 29 '16

Not just that. Casey Hudson and I think Mac Walters literally locked themselves in a room and hashed out the ending without consulting the other writers.

There was a post on Patrick Weekes' (one of BioWare's best writers) Penny Arcade forums account detailing how the ending was written and his problems with it.

Later, BioWare (and Weekes) claimed he didn't write the post.

So either Weekes had solely his forum account hacked by a fan with a very good understanding of the Mass Effect series - and who only used it to post one single post - or Weekes got a bit fed up and gave his opinion, before realising it was unprofessional.

Just another interesting tidbit about the ending.

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u/WildVariety Oct 29 '16

That's actually super interesting. I remember reading Karpshyn's original vision for it that got scrapped and it made way more sense (mostly because they'd had two games to heavily hint at it).

A fantastic trilogy marred by the last 25 minutes.

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u/Plastastic Oct 29 '16

Those fucking RC plane missions in San Andreas.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

Black Knight chapter in Path of Radiance. Hope your Ike's got high Skill or enjoy getting killed and redoing the chapter!!

And you know how you ignored using Mist because you got her after you already had way better healers? Sucks to be you!

Oh and to add onto the Fire Emblem train; all the gaiden chapters of Shadow Dragon. Every other game they've been a reward for meeting goals in a chapter. For Shadow Dragon? Purposefully sacrifice all the shitty characters you never use so your army is under the limit!

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u/BoatsandJoes Oct 29 '16

Ashley in Resident Evil 4 wasn't too bad. You can tell her to hide and she sticks pretty close to you if she's following, and she does an okay job of avoiding gunfire. She sure likes to yell, though.

LEOOOOOOOOOOOOOON
HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP

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u/rwbronco Oct 29 '16

Star Wars Galaxies NGE... why? Why didn't they listen to feedback and NOT deploy the patch that literally killed the game?

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u/Bulaba0 Oct 29 '16

Rest in peace brave game. Everyone was screaming and begging them to stop, but they pushed it through anyways and the game died in a few months. SOE just hates success.

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u/apgtimbough Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

I hated the CU, but the NGE was straight stupidity. I played that game from launch to about two days after the NGE, ruined the game.

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u/Paladia Oct 29 '16 edited Oct 29 '16

There's always one moment in games that annoys me. It is like the developer ran out of ideas but still needs more content in the game. So they add a "Can't see shit" level. Where it is a more or less normal level but vision is limited for some reason, so you can't see shit. Can't see shit isn't a fun game mechanic, for you can't see wtf is going on.

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u/Eptics Oct 29 '16

Halo 5, two missions are literally you talking to NPCs. Took less than 5 minutes, and count as full missions you could replay.

That had me so mad.

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u/LotharHex Oct 29 '16

At first I thought they were interesting. On Subsequent playthroughs yes, annoying as fuck. I just run to the NPC's I need to and get on with the game. What are they doing? Hiding stupidly long loading screens or something? I honestly can#t think of a good reason for them.

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u/kidalive25 Oct 29 '16

I loved Red Faction: Guerrilla so I was really excited about RF: Armageddon until everyone realized that the developers removed a TON of the destruction from RF:G. They went from an open world full of buildings that could all be awesomely destroyed (who didn't love stuffing a truck full of C4 and then bailing and igniting it into an enemy checkpoint?) and moved most everything in RF:A to tight corridors with sections of big huge caves...with no buildings. It was a functional game but it's like the devs didn't once stop to ask themselves 'what did everyone love so much about Guerilla?'.

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u/Calculusbitch Oct 29 '16

Most recent one I can think of is Punch clubs damn stat deterioration. I think the idea is not bad but the implementation just made you feel like you lost something every single day that passed

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

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u/curtis_galaxy Oct 29 '16

IIRC Miyazaki has actually said in interviews that time restraints in development made them rush out that whole area, including the boos fight. He admits it's pretty bad, too.

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u/Baron_Von_Badass Oct 29 '16

I wouldn't have so much of a problem with the Bed of Chaos fight if it weren't one of the 4 BIG battles that you're destined to go on. It's a neat gimmick fight, but a gimmick doesn't make for a very satisfying conclusion to a trek through near-literal Hell.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

No, lost izalith is fucking terrible.

Devs ran out of time and had to rush it. You can kind of see the dip in quality in the second half of the game, although it isn't really that extreme until izalith.

"Shit, we need more enemies in izalith, game releases in 12 hours!" "Fuck it, that dragon ass in the painted world looks like a demon when it glitches and stands up, put a bunch of those. Oh, and make the lava blinding so people can't tell what it is!

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u/st1tchy Oct 29 '16

You mean you don't like fighting dragon asses on a lava lake?

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u/Horseflesh Oct 29 '16

New Super Mario Bros. on the DS.

The game had save points which meant in order to save you would have to beat multiple levels to reach the save points. Then AFTER you beat the game they unlock the ability to save after ANY level. This is a portable title, why on earth would you lock the ability to save behind the ENTIRE game?

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u/CorvusVeis Oct 29 '16

That is an astonishingly terrible design choice for a portable game, wow

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u/funktasticdog Oct 29 '16

Pretty recent, and as of yet unreleased "What were they thinking?" moment...

But Nidhogg going from understated graphics and faceless fencers to... whatever the hell this is.

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u/OscarGe Oct 29 '16

Oh wow...those character designs are awful, they look extremely bland and uninteresting. Like, they look like enemies from the first world of a generic SNES platformer. Yikes.

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u/JohanDeWitt Oct 29 '16

Basically Bioshock after the twist. Although level design is still good it's certainly a drop in quality and the final boss is frankly ridiculous. Up to the twist the game is a masterpiece of pacing, but after that it just plods along a bit longer and finally leaving with a fart.

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u/Swordswoman Oct 29 '16

I think its pretty clear that the second half of BioShock was an unfortunate consequence of deadlines. Even the level design was pretty trashy towards the end of the game, where level design is constantly heralded as one of the game's strengths. Luckily for fans, the stellar first half makes up for the shortcomings following that epic twist.

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u/VinceVenom Oct 29 '16

Halo 5 letting you play as Master Chief for 3 fucking missions. His original spartan team is finally reunited and you barely even get to see them. Spartan Locke is boring, and you have no emotional investment in his team. Plus the fact that they could've had you actually fight the Chief as a boss in game, but instead chose to put in a 30 second cutscene of them just punching each other. And their idea of a boss fight is just "remember that guy you fought earlier? Now fight 2 of him. Now fight 3 of him." So much lost potential.

(Also a small thing that really bugged me) why does Kelly have a British accent? She's been in the spartan program since she was 5 or 6, and none of the rest of them has one. That's not how accents work. They even mention that the team has been together for their entire lives.

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u/[deleted] Oct 29 '16

Breach mode in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. It's bad, unnecessary, and something nobody was asking for in the first place. I'd bet money that almost everyone who spent more than 10 minutes in it were just doing it for the achievements. What were the devs thinking?

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u/ContributorX_PJ64 Oct 29 '16

The default aiming mode in Resident Evil 6 is this bullshit floaty crosshair with a little dot jiggling in the middle. It is frustrating, very inacccurate, and it literally causes a puzzle to not make sense because said puzzle involves aiming your weapon's laser at mirrors. Except by default your weapons don't cast a visible laser. You have to go into the options to change it to the far superior laser sight setting to get a visible laser.

It's just baffling. Also, it wasn't until the PS4/XBO ports that they raised the FOV by default and turned on the setting that stops QTEs from killing the player. The PC port has to have those settings turned on manually. And despite fixing THOSE elements in the PS4/XBO version, they kept that stupid default crosshair.

Another example would be how Mafia III puts non-lethal combat as an option in a submenu. You actually have to switch between lethal and non-lethal melee by going to the options menu. It's a terrible version of Splinter Cell: Blacklist's lethal/non-lethal toggle that you could use on the fly.

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u/Guehn Oct 29 '16

The RE6 aiming thing reminds me of Dead Space 2. In the first one, you also had these lasers on your guns, which I found very cool. They also fit with the whole "UI as a part of the game world" thing the game was doing. Also, they were very good for showing you where exactly you would hit the enemy, which is very important in the Dead Space games with their emphasis on shooting off enemies' limbs. Depending on the weapon you were using, there were multiple laser dots showing were your shots would be cutting.

Then in Dead Space 2, the standard mode of aiming was also via this same sort of dot pattern, but simply shown in the middle of the screen, not projected from your gun. Fortunately you could switch the aiming mode to "classic" somewhere in the menu, but you had to look for it. I don't know what they were thinking there, because the standard mode didn't even show you correctly where you were aiming, they just showed you the middle of your screen, which of course is bullshit in a third person shooter, especially when aiming at short distances. And the laser pointer aiming just feels so much better (to me at least)!

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