Badly conceived or implemented elements of otherwise great games

Cafe Society
61

The Ship has a novel game idea, pretty well implemented. And the map designs are pretty good. And it could be a really good game, except…

The weapon placement system is completely retarded.

You have to find weapons in your environment, with each weapon having a different value based on how rarely it was used. So the ubiquitous fire axes you find down every corrodor quickly bottomed out, while something rare like a letter knife would go up.

Some of the weapons on a level make logical sense. You could grab a pool cue from the pool room. You could find frying pans and knives in the kitchen. Scalpels in the sickbay.

And when it’s nice and logical like that, it’s good.

But most of the game is based off of Magical Random Weapon Nodes.

Instead of having weapons nicely integrated into the environment like that, there are crates on certain weapons that just spawn lots of weapons completely at random. So, instead of looking at the weapon money list, and seeing “hmm, the razor’s value is really up there, I’ll go search some dressers for a razor”, you simply go from Magical Weapon Node to Magical Weapon node, and choose the most highly valued weapon.

There are vast expanses of the map that have no weapons whatsoever, and then rooms that have 15 of them, illogically placed.

As weapon value, and acquiring weapons, is a critical part of the game, they ruined what would otherwise by a really fun and clever game with this lazy, stupid design.

62

I feel like I should mention a few games here.

First of all, the magical chest system in the Resident Evil series. I don’t think it’s poorly implemented, really, because it certainly doesn’t detract from the enjoyment of the game. However, conceptually it is quite bizarre. Anyone who has played these games will know exactly what I mean, but for those who haven’t, here goes: you have a limited number of inventory slots, and you can store items in special wooden chests that are scattered throughout the game. The thing is, when you put something in one chest, you can get that same item out of all of the chests. That means that if you put a box of shotgun shells in the chest in one area of the game (say, a guest room in a mansion) you can get those same shells out of the chest located in an underground laboratory. It completely defies logic and reason, but interestingly it doesn’t take away from the experience of the game.

Resident Evil 4 did away with this chest system but introduced another ridiculous concept, and this one was much more poorly implemented. There is a hooded, cloaked merchant that appears all throughout the course of the game, in all the different areas. He sells you weapons, and can also buy items from you. We are to believe that this merchant follows you around all over the entire game - and, also, that the zombies, evil monsters, and religious cultists who populate the game areas are just fine with this merchant setting up shop in their backyard. The Merchant has a British accent, and speaks the same stock phrases to you every single time you talk to him, which is very annoying and detracts from the realism. (Don’t get me started with the “realism” of zombies and monsters, you know that isn’t what I mean - even within the realm of fantasy, character interaction should still be realistic.) Another annoying thing is that the Merchant can sell you every gun under the sun, but no ammunition for anything. Overall I loved this game but this was one of the cheesier elements of it.

Last but not least, one of my favorite PS2 games, The Getaway. This game was outstanding in many ways. It captured the look and feel of London very well. It had great cinematic cutscenes, professional voice acting, and a captivating story. The graphics were extremely high quality for the time, and all the cars in the game are real (as opposed to the goofy made-up cars in the GTA games.) I still play this game all the time and I have had it for half a decade. But there is one element of it which is problematic. There is no GTA-style map - you have to find your way around the game by following your car’s turn signals, which are supposed to tell you where to turn. But frequently, they will tell you to turn left, for instance, and then once you do that tell you to turn right immediately, or you’ll come to a “T” in the road and neither signal will flash, for some odd reason. Some people complained of the camera and the gunfighting, but I didn’t have any issues with those - my only complaint is with the driving glitches. But I love the game so much anyway I don’t let it get to me - it gets way more right than it does wrong.

63

What about them was poorly-implemented?

64

The Bard’s Tale series had the same issue. Every party member had X slots to hold gear, dead or alive. The game design did not allow dropping players while on an adventure, so I occasionally used dead players to carry extra loot back. The reason for this was, only a live player with an open slot could find new gear.

65

Agreed with the other poster that the dancing really sucks the enjoyment out of the latest Pirates game.

I’ve been playing Total War: Rome. Great game. Horrible controls setup.

99% of the games out there use the left hand on the keyboard for directions. ASDW moves you forward, back, left, right. Not this game. You’ve got to use the arrow keys. Also there are a bunch of not intuitive command keys.

Want to DEselect all of your units: hit “enter”. Want to switch view to a single unit: hit “delete”. You end up having to move your keyboard over to the left and have your left hand on the right side of it. It would be a great game for left handers!

Also the way that you are forced to view the battlefield is very tough to navigate.

I’ve gotten used to it, but the awkward controls nearly ruin an otherwise fun game.

66

And I’ve got the opposite problem. I rock the mouse unless I want to Control-click something. I’ve got no problem getting around during battles.

67

Ah, you gentlemen probably built Factories. I never did. Less production, but also less pollution…

68

Oh, in Civilization, I rocked the factory. I also had two dozen workers automated like motherfuckers cleaning up the sludge and laying down the tracks for my world domination.

69

Oh. I liked the dancing in Pirates, it was fun.

70

I hated, despised, loathed the swamp-buggy level from Half-Life 2. It was incredibly monotonous, and way too fucking long. I never finished the game because of it. I kept coming up to dam after dam after culvert after drainage ditch, and after a while, I just said “fuck it.” Granted, I was more than a little annoyed at the game-on-rails nature of the whole thing to begin with, but the swamp-buggy level, in particular, killed the game for me.

71

good gameplay > high realism

It always annoys me when I see complaints like this. No matter how much you might think it’s lame, if they didn’t have it most people would be put off by having to run their asses off everytime they found out they needed a particular thing. At some point developers have to draw a line and say that the need to make the experience enjoyable and manageable trumps the desire for authenticity. I wholly endorse their decision regarding the chests.

Okay, I haven’t played very far in RE4 (one of those times you set something aside, and never seem to get back to it), so I can’t comment on the contents of the store (though I’m pretty sure I remember gamers hailing the ability to buy ammo and heals). However, I will say that you seem to be in a very small minority of people who didn’t like the merchant. In fact, a large number of very dedicated RE fans seemed to feel that RE4 was rivaled only by Code: Veronica.

It’s an odd thing; they wanted a true survival-horror experience, yet the puzzles, traps, and action components in the series always seemed to lean towards a dedicated action game (albeit one that almost seemed to punish players). While I didn’t dig very far into it, I kinda like the idea of RE4’s whole-hearted commitment to being a zombie action game.

72

Game on rails? Oh, you mean like all the other (action, as opposed to tactical) first-person shooters? And your complaint is that it isn’t open-ended or a sandbox title like GTA or something? I don’t really recall the first Half-Life being any different. I can’t even imagine where you would have gotten the expectation for something else. I think Half-Life 2 had every right to focus on a compelling experience and narrative rather than letting players freely explore a wide-open environment.

I liked the buggy level at first, but I will admit that it drags on way too long. But frankly, you’re missing a lot of the best parts of a truly amazing game by bailing out so early on.

73

I agree. Half-life 2 is like an inactive movie, just like HL1. In order for the story to unfold as they want it, it has to have constraints.

Sandbox and variable path games have their place (Deus Ex was cool), but HL2 follows HL1 thematically. And it works great - it honed the rails cinematic action game to near perfection.

74

Cool out, sport. I never played the first Half Life, and all I really knew about the HL2 was that it was the GREATEST GAME EVAR. I had played enough FPS games that, at the time, I was completely put off by the limited pathing typically found in them, and I had hoped that maybe HL2 would be a little different. Instead, it seemed like the same-ol’-same-ol’ (with perhaps better graphics.) I’ll admit that I was pretty wowed the first time I was attacked by the minigun-sporting 'copter, but after that, it was strictly Yawnville. It never seemed to me to be substantively better than Red Faction, and I had already played that years before…plus, RF had destroyable environments. Cool!

Add to that that there was a physical association with the game. Namely, I was desperately ill when I bought it, I had taken off several days at work, and I tried to play it while immensely doped up and terribly nauseated. :slight_smile: I tried to get past the buggy level a time or two after that, but like a pukey association with a bad ham sandwich, every time I tried, I felt my gorge rise.

Also, just to weigh in on game design, there is a very warm, cozy, happy place between optionless pathing and wide-open sandbox gaming (GTA never appealed to me either.) That place was exemplified by a little gaming experience I like to call Deus Ex. In my opinion, no other game has ever matched it in terms of ridiculously smart level design. Sure, you had a mission, and you needed to end up at a particular place, but how you got there was entirely up to you. Straight-ahead assault? Sure. Pure stealth? Can do. Any combination of the two? Yup, anything will work. I truly thought that it would revolutionize the way FPS’s were designed, but developers seem to have systematically ignored every intelligent thing DE brought to the table (and I’m certainly not excepting the designers of DE themselves - Deus Ex 2 was an unplayable abortion.)

I doubt I will ever be satisfied by an FPS until I play one with a fraction of the thought and design put into DE. I’m ruined, and have been ever since I downloaded the demo for DE and was blown completely away by that Liberty Island map. The idea of trudging through an action movie whose every scene, twist, and turn are entirely prescripted simply does not appeal anymore.

So, maybe someday I’ll try to finish HL2. Maybe.

75

I’m not complaining about the chest system, I actually thought it was fine. It doesn’t make any sense, logically, but as I stated it didn’t detract from the gameplay experience for me.

I think the idea of a merchant was cool. But come on - why couldn’t they have a FEW MORE PHRASES for him to say? My biggest complaint with him was that he said the same shit every single time you talked to him. It would have been really, really awesome if you could actually have developed conversations with the merchant.

About Code Veronica, by the way, that game was truly excellent. I remember in 8th grade Mass Communications class I made a commercial for RE:CV, using recorded in-game action scenes with Nine Inch Nails in the background. It was a big hit with the class.

76

The original Age of Empires was infamous for it; PC enemies could build vast empires and armies in preposterously short times. It was impossible to match them.

77

Which wouldn’t help when the enemy hordes came across the border and you needed another fifty divisions.

I once fought a war against the Celts in Civ 3 in which the two armies started off with, I would estimate, 400 units each, all of the most modern and kick ass variety. At least. And I was pumping out 15-25 replacement units a turn and needed every one. It was an astonishing war. (And nothing was decided; we ended up in the same place we started.) At the same time, my empire, which was split between two continents, was fighting a war against the Americans anc Chinese, in cooperation with the Indians, using a starting army of perhaps 75 divisions that took seven or eight cities and required another 50 or 60 replacement units.

Without absolutely maximizing my production capacity I’d have been toast. Civ 3 really favoured the guy with the most guns.

78

Frequency. They’re like pigeons…no matter how many you might kill, more still appear.

79

The pollution and corruption mechanics in Civ3 are an interesting example of poor gameplay elements.

The designers want to implement a penalty for overproduction and overpopulation. Pollution is bad, m’kay? So there has to be some consequence for raping the earth. Except the penalty isn’t an in-game penalty, it’s a metagame penalty–boredom. In game terms it isn’t much of a penalty at all, you just put the workers who’ve now finished improving and railroading every tile in your empire on pollution cleanup duty. It doesn’t cost much in game terms, since there isn’t much you can do with these guys anyway during the late game. But the punishment is having to micromanage all these guys.

Micromanagement CAN be enjoyable, everyone wants to manage their military units. But that’s because you have interesting choices to make with the military units. Attack, defend, which city will you target, and so on. But managing workers cleaning up pollution is totally uninteresting.

Corruption is another example of a game mechanic introduced to solve a problem, but the mechanic didn’t actually work to solve the problem, it just made the game more annoying. Once you’ve built your core empire there’s almost no reason to build any more cities except to claim a resource, because those cities will be nearly worthless. And there’s no reason to conquer enemy cities either, except to deny those cities to the enemy, because those cities will be worthless to you. And the game problem corruption was supposed to solve…millions of tiny worthless cities…isn’t even solved by the corruption mechanic! You can crank out tiny city after tiny city.

Fortuneately, Civ IV eliminates these problems. The health mechanic instead of pollution works great to simulate the negative consequences of overindustrialization and overpopulation, all without imposing any boredom at all. And the switch to making maintenence depend on the number of cities rather than the number of buildings in a city solves the ICS problem at one stroke without imposing an illogical and frustrating game mechanic. These simple design changes work to create the in-game experience the designers want, without making the players hate it.

80

Too many of them and they magically zero in on your location. You can normally see other monsters/enemies come at you but with cliff racers they come out of nowhere.

The Zelda version aren’t as annoying and you do have a target button. Really that’s the only thing (a rather small thing) I dislike about the game. Same goes for Morrowind.

Maybe I just hate flying enemies.