Unskippable credits at the end of the game. To add injury to insult, I’ve only seen this in games where there are still things to do after you finish the main quest. No, asshole, I don’t want you to lock up my computer for 10 minutes so I can find out what your name is, I want to continue playing the game I paid for.
In deference to Grumman, non-skippable credits are good if there’s something at the end. But even so, the credits should still be skippable. (One good example is Prey, where if you watch through the credits there’s a tag scene.)
I prefer credits to be an optional feature or Easter egg. (Marathon 2, for instance, or good old Adventure on the Atari 2600.)
Are you sure there’s no volume control for those? I’ve played BF2 and BF2142 quite a bit and I’m sure something like this would have driven me nuts if it were particularly loud but it never did.
I love the jump puzzles in DDO! It’s got the best movement/jumping mechanics of any MMO I’ve played and it’s great to play the few quests that actually make good use of it. The Pit, especially, is my favourite quest. Luckily most of the jump zones only need one or two people to do them so those who suck at them can stand and watch as I do them for ya.
I’d say the worst design feature in video games is infinite respawns. There’s nothing more annoying than infinite respawns.
Yes, you could in all the BG games. Your character was only even n the front by default because you only start off with one character.
That’s a very good pick, and also the reason I stopped playing Stalker, which was otherwise a pretty good game. Apparently the radioactive wasteland around Chernobyl has a higher population density than London, UK. Who knew?
Yep, I’ve looked extensively into options for fixing it, but I can’t find anything. There’s a “voiceover” volume slider, but it only affects the tutorial voice.
If I can figure out how to record game sounds, I’ll make like a 1 minute clip of the audio from the game to show what I mean.
There was an old nintendo game, i think it was ghost and goblins, where one of the powerups made you invisible. Invisible to YOU, not the monsters, so basically all it did was make you play blind.
I didn’t remember it being so bad. :eek:
I disagree: there’s something far worse than infinite respawns, and that’s finite respawns. Nothing sucks more than a sandbox game where you can run out of enemies to torment.
Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time had a little fairy guide called Navi. Navi was programmed to give you useful information whenever a new situation arose. However, developers failed to notice that “useful” becomes “useless” and then “damn annoying” when triggered repeatedly, especially in the middle of a boss fight.
VG Catsnoticed too.
That’s like in Doom 3 the flashlight being handheld rather than on your rifle or helmet.
It was wizards and warriors. There’s a review of it somewhere, maybe the angry video game nerd? He point out how useless it is. You can’t see your character, but the enemies still can (though I guess to see where you are just look where the enemies congregate) and you still took damage from them.
I don’t mind some respawning, but infinite in the sense I think it was used here is when you can really see that it’s endless in that new enemies will literally pop out of thin air just as soon as you drop one of them. Marginally acceptable in an over the top zombie shooter, perhaps, but not in a purportedly realistic game like Stalker or IGI.
I agree with Gruman - KOTOR 2 had a finite number of enemies. There was ONE room that had a respawn, and was the only place you could try to power up. Once you left, you were done. Terrible. Terrible terrible terrible.
But isn’t this the case with most western RPGs? Neverwinter nights, baldurs gate, kotor 1, etc… All had finite enemies. That’s one reason I like them is because there’s no worrying about having to grind for a few hours just to be powerful enough to beat the game. Unlike JRPGs, there’s rarely a need to grind in western RPGs, just make sure to do the sidequests and you’ll be high enough level.
Uh, Both BG’s AND KoTOR had infinite spawns (KoTOR had a level cap). NwN I believe supposedly had some infinite spawns, but it didn’t work as advertised. But ti also had level cap, so it was irrelevant.
The other reason that you’re wrong, however, is that while players should never feel that they HAVE to grind, it shoudl always be an option for people who need it. It’s one thing to toss gabs of pop-up enemies who attack at randomg steps as you walk along. It’s quite another thing to say “You can’t get any more powerful. If you’re not good enough to beat it, you ust suck.”
It usually isn’t. There are a few things going on. Notice that it is a 64 player server, which doubles or quadruples the amount of spam. Also, it’s probably one of those “we’re in the army!” teamwork servers given that six pub players won’t work together on anything else.
As I recall, Baldur’s Gate didn’t quite precisely have respawning enemies, but what it did have was random encounters: Whenever you left one zone of the map for another, there was a chance that monsters would pop up that you’d have to fight on the road, but the areas themselves stayed clear. Or if you camped out out in the wilderness, but you could usually avoid that by sleeping in inns instead.
I don’t mind infinite respawns, provided there’s a delay (say, 24-28 hours of “Game Time”). It pisses me off in something like FarCry 2 when I sneak up on a roadblock, take out the bad guys (all of them), run back to my 4WD, get in, and then drive back to the roadblock, only to find all the bad guys have suddenly respawned and shot my 4WD (and my character) full of holes.
The best compromise would be an option in the setup menu, I think- players who want unlimited bad guys can have infinte respawns, and those of us who like our computer game bad guys to stay dead can turn the infinte respawns off.
IIRC, there was an article in a game developer magazine–I’ll have to look it up when I get home, I have the issue–where they interviewed one of the lead devs on Far Cry 2, who seemed to have been taken by surprise that people didn’t like the respawn radius system.
This is as opposed to the rest of us, who are left trying to figure out how anyone who has ever played any game at any time anywhere in the world could’ve thought that was a good idea.