It’s a third person shooter, but this is a classic.
Or, as we often put it in City of Heroes, “This building planned, designed, and built by No Sane Mind Realtors [tm].”
Game-enforced stealth missions.
I just walked into the secret lab/warehouse/crate factory with nothing but a 9mm pistol and a knife, and now half of the People’s Republic Army is dead and I have all their weapons and ammo.
But if I get seen by a security camera, the alarm goes off and the game is over.
That will actually get me to stop playing a game right then and there.
Especially if in the same game they have a heavy machine gun that (realistically) has a certain amount of bullet spread deliberately built into it.
I know. My solution would be a flashlight (torch) with a very small field of illumination, so you can only see the room in small bits at a time.
The ol’ “you’re dead immediately if you haven’t played this level before” trick. Level loads, you look around, and a giant sawblade slices you in half one second later. Oh, ha ha. From now on you have to remember to run forward right away whenever that level loads.
Any tiny creature that is thrown in just to irritate you by forcing you to deal with them taking tiny bites out of you. Like those insects that gnaw at you in Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy, or the face huggers from Duke Nukem.
Agreed. I avoid the “Metal Gear” games the kids rave about for this reason.
I don’t know which Metal Gear games you’ve been playing (maybe “AC!D”? I haven’t played those), but an alarm is certainly not game over. It just means you need to get your butt to a hiding spot to avoid the sweepers.
Here’s another vote for clunky ladders, coupled with one for disproportionate fall damage. If a pistol shot takes only a quarter of my character’s life bar, why should a fall off a lousy ten-foot ladder consume half of it? Double phooey for such damage in games involving extensive platform/window ledge/bridge jumping, and triple for games with bottomless pits below said platforms. Nothing annoys me more than waiting for my character to finish plummetting to his doom so I can try that jump yet again…
Clearly you’ve never been on the ACME tour.
Two words, followed by bile:
Timed. Missions.
I HATE timed missions. I hate them more than ingrown toenails infected with ebola AND mad cow disease. I mean, I can understand WHY I’d need to drive a Warthog outta my damn ship REALLY FAST to avoid getting blowed up REAL good, but damnit, gimme more than 5 minutes to drive a vehicle that, really, handles like a snail on Crisco.
Oh, and SAVE POINTS. Why the heck can’t I save where I WANT? I already DID this part, I don’t wanna wade through it AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN to get to the next damned save point.
If you tried to learn your history from FPS games, you could be forgiven for thinking that WWII was fought exclusively between June 6, 1944 and May 1, 1945, and only involved the US and German militaries, with a Guest Appearance by the Red Army and a cameo by the Royal Air Force.
Unrealistic player character movement. How many people do you know that can run backwards up a spiral staircase at the same speed as they can run forwards along flat asphalt? I don’t care so much if it’s Serious Sam or Unreal Tournament, but surely there is unexplored strategic potential by making these things more realistic in some games. That said, maybe it’s been done - I’m pretty out of touch with FPSs at the moment.
One other thing - I’m sick of looking down at the ground and seeing a shadow where my feet ought to be. Especially with jumping puzzles being so horribly abundant, your feet really need to be visible more often (and heck, maybe even the rest of what is usually visible to a human looking down at themselves).
What are you referring to here? The only thing I can think of is that you’re thinking of designs with a gas assist muzzle booster sometimes called a “recoil booster”, but those aren’t used to deliberately make the gun inaccurate, but rather, to make a gun with a long recoil design function more reliably. Otherwise, machine guns are usually the most accurate small arm in a platoon, and aren’t designed to be otherwise.
My tongue in cheek contribution: lack of gravity gun.
HL2 has spoiled me. Now that I’ve tasted the joy that is pulling a toilet out of a wall, throwing it at someone and cracking the skull with it, every other game seems one notch lamer.
All games from now on should have a mechanism for breaking skulls with toilets. Not even necesarily just FPS games. When I fire up flight simulator, I want a scenario where I have to land the plane because I accidentally throw a toilet at the pilot.
I agree, but some games have already done this. Notably, Halo 2 and Chronicles of Riddick.
F.E.A.R. does the best, er… body presence. You can see all your limbs, your eye level bounces around a bit, when you actually do stuff in the world like climbing to your feet or going up or down a ladder, you actually see your limbs moving realistically performing that action.
Of course, it fails hard in another complaint in the thread - boring level design. I played a few hours into it, and I’m not sure if it was supposed to be multiple facilities or one giant one or what, but you’re in a 5 mile long warehouse/sewage plant/misc industrial complex. Blah.
Game maps have to end eventually, and when it ends there is always going to be something there to block you. If it’s not traffic cones it’s a large chunk of rubble, a tall fence, or a pair of guards telling you to turn around. It’s a necessary game convention.
As for non-destroyable decorative doors - what would be the point of allowing the player to pass through them? I don’t want to play a game that allows you to open up every room in a hotel, because it would be both pointless and a waste of resources.
Ahh yeah - two games that I’ve been meaning to play for quite some time. 
The only examples I could think of were Tribes 2 and F.E.A.R. And, in a weird sort of way, Metroid Prime had some good ‘body presence’ like watching your arm swing with the grappling hook, getting steam on your visor, etc. You couldn’t look down far enough to see, or not see, your feet, if I recall correctly, though (what kind of sentence was that?).
I remember being extremely impressed with that aspect of F.E.A.R. actually (my god that’s a stupid name). In particular, there was a bit with some freaky monster of the little girl variety standing behind you, and to escape you had to climb a ladder, but doing so meant turning your back on her for an excruciating defenseless climb to freedom. shudder Also, staying with the character’s view when you get knocked unconscious and fall over was a nice touch.
Did you ever play the Metroid games? They have timed missions, but they give you ludicrously ample amounts of time, without telling you of the fact. I found it quite effective for the most part - when big letters flash up saying “Warning - ship structure collapsing - escape in 9 minutes!” you get freaked right out, without realising that you could escape at a leisurely pace in about half that time. None of the obnoxious frustration caused by missing your time limit by a second because of the controls flaking out on you, or whatever.
Also, along similar lines and in the category of “Why do they keep putting in these missions when everyone hates them” - missions where you have to escort some AI-controlled NPC to safety. They’ve gotten better with AI improvements, but even at their best these missions only ever aspire to the classification of ‘tolerable’, and some of them are downright game-breaking. I’m surprised they don’t just gloss over those aspects of the storyline more often rather than making you play through them.
One game that really gripes my grits is Medal of Honor; First to Fight which was heavily advertised as based on USMC doctrine and stuff. A fine quality of pure BS.
First off, like every other FPS it has magic first-aid packs. Hey, how about an option without 'em? Next the ammo loadouts are all wrong. Most critically, the time scale is all wrong. When people are shooting at you, you have two speeds “Run! They’re shooting at you!” and “Sit and think, they are shooting at you.” I can do in six minutes what takes an afternoon in RL.
Fine, its a game. So don’t tell me its a freakin’ simulation.
Next, the year is 2005 (for this game), why do shadows still fall through solid walls? Why is it when I zap a guy in one room his buddies don’t run out of the other rooms? Why don’t the people speak real Arabic? Is that too much to ask? Why do the bodies disappear? Why is there always a scene in every FPS where you are stationary and targets pop out at you? Machine gun whack-a-mole. In this game you are firing up a freakin’ mosque. Wonderful. Why do we always have a section where you are in a moving vehicle you cannot steer? I hate those levels.
Here is a clue. Beirut ain’t got a subway. Do some research, OK?
More critically, why are there so many FPSs out there (and God Games) but little else? What happened to flight simulations? Tank games and of course Silent Service, perhaps the best computer war game of all? How about a text adventure? I can still read. What ever happened to The Great Underground Empire?
It’s twenty years since text adventures were commercially viable, but there is a fairly active community still creating them. The Interactive Fiction Archive has pretty much everything the modern text adventure fan needs. And if you’re playing check out my own Strange Geometries which I made late last year…
Some of these complaints could be hard to implement, but what really pisses me off is something that could have been done in freaking Wolfenstein 3D.
If I can carry a maximum of 100 shotgun shells, and I already have 99, if I walk over a pack of 20 shells there should not be a hole in the space-time continuum that opens up and swallows up 19 shells never to be seen again. My shell count should go up to 100, and the pack on the ground should not vanish in a puff of smoke but remain, with 19 shells.
All it freaking takes is to an extra short integer value in memory for each pack!!! And maybe 5 more lines of code!!!