The most retarded thing in games. you can think of
- Thread starter Dez
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Good points from everyone so far..I'm glad i'm not the only one which such issues. Bad controls are just bad controls. Not allowing player to FULLY customize his controls is just extermely retarded. They can't defend it any sensible way.
The bad pc porting is an other annoyance. RE4 is a prime example of this. Its so annoying because issues like these can be easily avoided. DX2 for example is a game that is not designed for pc platform at all. everything just shouts Xbox...yet xbox players weren't all happy with the interface either. It isn't a good game no mattter the perspective where you look at it.
The game design decisions can be argued over, but controls and interface either work or not. There is no middle ground.
Ofcourse things like
1) A labyrint
Not fun and the most obvious way to lengthen the gametime.. The labyrint is Arx fatalis did just that, nothing else.
2) npcs not responding (right) your actions.
Gothic 3: Lee kills king rhobar in his throne room under noses of his elite guards. Yet one of the paladins asks me that someone has been killng our people and whether I know anything about it?"
3) No detail.
I don't care about super craphics. I want to see detail in my gameworld. Its those little things which make differene to me.
4) important quest items that can be sold or lost.
For example arx fatalis once again. It has meteor stones that are needed to finish the game, yet they can be sold to merchants..throw in the lava... g3 did this very well. you couldn't even sell the quest items..thus never needed to worry about losing something important.
5) Babysitting experienced npcs.
In many games you have followers who can't take care of themselves at all. Its fine if you have to escort a helpless a merhant or a lonely child or something..but a paladin, fearsome mage, experienced hunter...
The bad pc porting is an other annoyance. RE4 is a prime example of this. Its so annoying because issues like these can be easily avoided. DX2 for example is a game that is not designed for pc platform at all. everything just shouts Xbox...yet xbox players weren't all happy with the interface either. It isn't a good game no mattter the perspective where you look at it.
The game design decisions can be argued over, but controls and interface either work or not. There is no middle ground.
Ofcourse things like
1) A labyrint
Not fun and the most obvious way to lengthen the gametime.. The labyrint is Arx fatalis did just that, nothing else.
2) npcs not responding (right) your actions.
Gothic 3: Lee kills king rhobar in his throne room under noses of his elite guards. Yet one of the paladins asks me that someone has been killng our people and whether I know anything about it?"
3) No detail.
I don't care about super craphics. I want to see detail in my gameworld. Its those little things which make differene to me.
4) important quest items that can be sold or lost.
For example arx fatalis once again. It has meteor stones that are needed to finish the game, yet they can be sold to merchants..throw in the lava... g3 did this very well. you couldn't even sell the quest items..thus never needed to worry about losing something important.
5) Babysitting experienced npcs.
In many games you have followers who can't take care of themselves at all. Its fine if you have to escort a helpless a merhant or a lonely child or something..but a paladin, fearsome mage, experienced hunter...
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Sorcha Ravenlock
Sentinel
oh, one of my pet-hates too!
Either they can't defend themselves at all, or they would end up defending themselves too well...
In Morrowind you had to take a mage from Balmora to Pelegiad. He'd kill me every time we ran into a rat because his spell was too powerful and would kill me in one go when he hit me in the back with it while I was just about to run the rat through with my sword. Very annoying.
And in Guild Wars there was this Kamikaze farmer who needed an escort since he was a farmer with no fighting skills and all... guess what? He'd charge head-long into any enemy he could find, and since he wasn't a party-member the henchmen healer wouldn't heal him... great fun
Prime Junta
RPGCodex' Little BRO
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I'd reframe this: important and *irreplaceable* quest items that can be sold or lost. In fact, I'd add "unnecessarily irreplaceable quest items." Some games require an absolutely mundane item to solve puzzles or even advance the quest -- yet this absolutely mundane item is available at one single location and one single time in the entire game.
Adventure games are the worst offenders, of course, but RPG's do this too -- for example (minor spoiler) getting a key out of a fire in one of Neeshka's quests in NWN2. You can only do that by finding an empty bottle, using it on a bucket of water, and then talking to the fire to douse it -- even if you're a spellcaster who could blast the damn fire with a cone of cold or ice storm, or summon a water elemental, or cast energy immunity: fire on yourself, or any of a number of other things that absolutely should work but don't 'cuz the game designer sez so.
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I don't mind important and story-relevant quest and other items to be sold - as ling as they reappear at one of the vendors again !
Normally, I sell things, and they just vanish. Go into some sort of black hole or are quickly tranported into another dimension or into the foreign countries.
What I would expect al "normal" would be this behaviour:
- the one I sold the item to still has it for several days.
- the items I sell circulate among the shops.
This means, that the item is inprinciple still available. It's difficult, yet feasible (to get it back).
But this also means that the in-world overall number of items must not be too high, or the circulation would go gaga.
I mean, someone finding 10.000 items dropped by dying monsters ... - and I sell them to various shop-keepers ... the price would drop.
But, hm, on the other hand, this is an very exciting idea ...
Teaching the player not to take and sell *everything* monsters drop ...
Normally, I sell things, and they just vanish. Go into some sort of black hole or are quickly tranported into another dimension or into the foreign countries.
What I would expect al "normal" would be this behaviour:
- the one I sold the item to still has it for several days.
- the items I sell circulate among the shops.
This means, that the item is inprinciple still available. It's difficult, yet feasible (to get it back).
But this also means that the in-world overall number of items must not be too high, or the circulation would go gaga.
I mean, someone finding 10.000 items dropped by dying monsters ... - and I sell them to various shop-keepers ... the price would drop.
But, hm, on the other hand, this is an very exciting idea ...
Teaching the player not to take and sell *everything* monsters drop ...
Zaleukos
Bum
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Non-remappable controls is pretty retarded in this day and age, but I dont think about it much since most of the games I've played suffered from it (and most arent of the twitch type).
I mainly play RPGs and strategy games, and what bugs me the most is unnecessary micromanagement due to a poor interface. Non-sortable journals and inventories are some aspects of it (just a few days with some intro UI course material would help many game developers a lot). Basically anything that force you to use a lot of clicks to perform a mundane task that doesnt advance the plot or game qualifies. I have three "favourites".
Inventories that are arftifically limited, for instance by number of slots rather than weight like 20 rings taking up as much space as 20 sets of armour in unmodded Baldurs gate, would definitely be one of the pet peeves. It wouldnt be so annoying in itself, but it is often coupled with a need to sell a lot of the crap, forcing you to trek back and forth to various traders, often through totally emptied areas.
Which brings up what I might dislike the most. Slow walking through "cleared" or "safe" areas, something that makes a game longer but doesnt add to the length of the actual playing experience. Prime offenders would be Arcanum or Baldurs Gate (when I play the latter with my gf one of goes to make tea or sth while the other does the walking and selling of loot, since it takes quite long, and it adds up during the course of a game). Give me fast travel for gods sake! It would be different if the trip actually was presenting some sort of gameplay experience, like running through a camp of orcs or something, but just marching is so dull.
Gothic III actually solved this pretty well, and it is one reason I dont mind the fast travel system of the otherwise dislikable Oblivion much either.
The third thing that hasnt been mentioned, but I find utterly retarded, is how three-dimensional interfaces in some strategy games clutter things and making it hard to actually select the right item or click on the right spot. Trying to make an agent or worse, an army, reach the intended destination in a cluttered spot can be extremely frustrating, which has resulted in me quick-saving before issuing movement orders on such occasions. The first medieval had similar problems in 2D, with agent icons cluttering small provinces on the map making it incredibly frustrating to select the one you wanted on Malta or some other tiny speck...
I think I pick the moving of merchants and ships to distant locations in that game as the most retarded design issue in the games I play today. The stupid things often have to take multi-turn walks to locations. Walks that can be disrupted if they run into something (which they often do as they tend to walk on roads). This force you to give them new directions. But they are disrupted by "obstacles" even if they can walk around them (as they ignore zones of control)!!! And a second merchant walking the same path in the same round, when the obstacle should be known, will be interrupted in the same way... All agents are like this, but I single out merchants since I feel that they should have been abstracted out of a game where the primary issue is battles!!! As for the ships the reason for my annoyance with that is that the only way to avoid them getting "stuck" on other ships is to move them in steps corresponding to their line of sight. And a stupid ship can move 5-6 times that distance in one turn, so you have to click 5 times rather than 1 to get somewhere, for no other reason than that the programmers didnt bother to code basic evasion, on a static grid... How freaking difficult can it be to find a free path for ONE turn on a grid, in turn-based mode where nothing else is moving???
I mainly play RPGs and strategy games, and what bugs me the most is unnecessary micromanagement due to a poor interface. Non-sortable journals and inventories are some aspects of it (just a few days with some intro UI course material would help many game developers a lot). Basically anything that force you to use a lot of clicks to perform a mundane task that doesnt advance the plot or game qualifies. I have three "favourites".
Inventories that are arftifically limited, for instance by number of slots rather than weight like 20 rings taking up as much space as 20 sets of armour in unmodded Baldurs gate, would definitely be one of the pet peeves. It wouldnt be so annoying in itself, but it is often coupled with a need to sell a lot of the crap, forcing you to trek back and forth to various traders, often through totally emptied areas.
Which brings up what I might dislike the most. Slow walking through "cleared" or "safe" areas, something that makes a game longer but doesnt add to the length of the actual playing experience. Prime offenders would be Arcanum or Baldurs Gate (when I play the latter with my gf one of goes to make tea or sth while the other does the walking and selling of loot, since it takes quite long, and it adds up during the course of a game). Give me fast travel for gods sake! It would be different if the trip actually was presenting some sort of gameplay experience, like running through a camp of orcs or something, but just marching is so dull.
Gothic III actually solved this pretty well, and it is one reason I dont mind the fast travel system of the otherwise dislikable Oblivion much either.
The third thing that hasnt been mentioned, but I find utterly retarded, is how three-dimensional interfaces in some strategy games clutter things and making it hard to actually select the right item or click on the right spot. Trying to make an agent or worse, an army, reach the intended destination in a cluttered spot can be extremely frustrating, which has resulted in me quick-saving before issuing movement orders on such occasions. The first medieval had similar problems in 2D, with agent icons cluttering small provinces on the map making it incredibly frustrating to select the one you wanted on Malta or some other tiny speck...
I think I pick the moving of merchants and ships to distant locations in that game as the most retarded design issue in the games I play today. The stupid things often have to take multi-turn walks to locations. Walks that can be disrupted if they run into something (which they often do as they tend to walk on roads). This force you to give them new directions. But they are disrupted by "obstacles" even if they can walk around them (as they ignore zones of control)!!! And a second merchant walking the same path in the same round, when the obstacle should be known, will be interrupted in the same way... All agents are like this, but I single out merchants since I feel that they should have been abstracted out of a game where the primary issue is battles!!! As for the ships the reason for my annoyance with that is that the only way to avoid them getting "stuck" on other ships is to move them in steps corresponding to their line of sight. And a stupid ship can move 5-6 times that distance in one turn, so you have to click 5 times rather than 1 to get somewhere, for no other reason than that the programmers didnt bother to code basic evasion, on a static grid... How freaking difficult can it be to find a free path for ONE turn on a grid, in turn-based mode where nothing else is moving???
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Lucky Day
Daywatch
fixed cameras!
I want to be able to adjust the azimuth myself and zoom in close, even to FP perspective, or at least over the shoulder, and zoom out a great distance.
Two games I couldn't play because of this was Hammer and Sickle and Warcraft III.
I don't think devs realize just how lack of a free cam annoys players. It was one of the first things cracked on NWN1 but Bioware insisted their fixed cameras were absolutely essential and the players fought with them for 2 years.
I can understand trying to design a game a certain way, NWN1 for example didn't have skies or roofs, and the camera controlled the fog effects so you pick off monsters when they couldn't see you.
However, we players are too spoiled now. We know a 3d camera can freely move anywhere and we want that option.
I want to be able to adjust the azimuth myself and zoom in close, even to FP perspective, or at least over the shoulder, and zoom out a great distance.
Two games I couldn't play because of this was Hammer and Sickle and Warcraft III.
I don't think devs realize just how lack of a free cam annoys players. It was one of the first things cracked on NWN1 but Bioware insisted their fixed cameras were absolutely essential and the players fought with them for 2 years.
I can understand trying to design a game a certain way, NWN1 for example didn't have skies or roofs, and the camera controlled the fog effects so you pick off monsters when they couldn't see you.
However, we players are too spoiled now. We know a 3d camera can freely move anywhere and we want that option.
dteowner
Shoegazer
I can live with the fixed camera in most instances, but there's one situation related to that that's one of my pet peeves- if you're gonna stick me with a fixed camera, things better not be able to hide behind scenery sprites (looking at you, HoMM3!).
I think limited inventory is a pain since I'm a packrat, but I understand the logic behind it.
The other thing I hate has already been mentioned- rats dropping full sets of plate armor. I do my best not to think about it. I don't generally get too wound up in "realism" in my games, but I do have my limits.
I think limited inventory is a pain since I'm a packrat, but I understand the logic behind it.
The other thing I hate has already been mentioned- rats dropping full sets of plate armor. I do my best not to think about it. I don't generally get too wound up in "realism" in my games, but I do have my limits.
free cameras!
Seriously though, freely adjustable cameras can be just as annoying. The thing is, games have to be designed to fully support one way or the other. Fixed perspectives are good in that the developers have to take them into account when designing levels and are thus much more accessible.
Let's say you can rotate your camera, which is already one form of freedom. Then there's never a perspective that's truly "best". One time or another you have to rotate or adjust your camera setting in order to see stuff better, because the developers didn't want to provide a way around it and expect players to change their point of view all the time while playing. Or they simply forgot about it.
Your NWN 1 example applies here too: The developers got lazy. Due to walls being solid all the time you're constantly trying to find a better perspective. I guess they said to themselves, "hey, the player won't be able to see the action here. Ah, no matter, they can rotate the camera!" Whereas in games like UFO or X-COM with fixed perspectives the developers probably thought along the lines of "hey, the player won't be able to see the action here. Well, let's provide visual clues to support him. Or let's design the level a bit differently."
I could imagine that Warcraft III at least was probably designed that way from the ground up (haven't played Hammer and Sickle). I consider that to be a Good Thing (tm). So was Divine Divinity for example.
NWN1's camera system was a mess, NWN2's was only marginally better in my opinion. So many options and none of them was satisfactory, because there were so many options that had to be taken into account! If they had designed the games around one (or two max.) setting and designed the entire game around it, things would have been much better.
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MudsAnimalFriend
Watchdog
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As far as I know it was Sir-Tech and their WAD(X) control system. I guess Wizardy was so hugely popular that the system just stuck.
The Apple II keyboard.
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Lucky Day
Daywatch
by fixed cameras what I meant was that zooming rotated the azimuth instead of being straight. When you can't adjust the vertical axis manually it seriously sucks! I want to be able to look from the ground or overhead if I want to and I want to look close!
NWN1 actually got noted for its graphics in spite of using what was a 5 year engine old at release. The hacked camera showed that it had some fine detail when zoomed in that you complete missed with its fixed modes.
Fixed 2D games as isometric are certainly better than top down. Ultima Online did it seriously bizarre. BG did it great - although those hidden doors at the back could be a problem.
A number of games, especially 3D ones like the later Simcities and Civs allowed you to rotate the screens 90o. That helped a lot. The Mysts, of course, were 2D shots of 3D images.
NWN1 actually got noted for its graphics in spite of using what was a 5 year engine old at release. The hacked camera showed that it had some fine detail when zoomed in that you complete missed with its fixed modes.
Fixed 2D games as isometric are certainly better than top down. Ultima Online did it seriously bizarre. BG did it great - although those hidden doors at the back could be a problem.
A number of games, especially 3D ones like the later Simcities and Civs allowed you to rotate the screens 90o. That helped a lot. The Mysts, of course, were 2D shots of 3D images.
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In JUmp & Ruin games, fixed cameras can really be fatal - for the character. Imagine Lara Croft not knowing where to jump to ...
... Or, to put in other words: SHE might know where she jumps to, but maybe the player doesn't ...
... Or, to put in other words: SHE might know where she jumps to, but maybe the player doesn't ...
there was a couple spots in TR:A where I was certainly wishing for a fixed camera! I'd like to just be able to have a lock camera option or something.
When people were talking about kamikaze NPC's, they are definitely the worst. Some games need to be very meticulously advanced in (ie enemies need to be "pulled" individually) and sure as hell some idiot party member or dolt that youre escorting, yet forgot to babysit for one second, screams it's impotent battle cry and runs headfirst into insurmountable odds!
This is a big issue in RTS's that dont have a "stand ground" or "defensive" type stance control. It just makes me absolutely nuts. Nothing worse than a whole pack of upgraded, really expensive, yet anything but artifically intelligent morons that run off and get themselves whacked the minute you look the other way.
When people were talking about kamikaze NPC's, they are definitely the worst. Some games need to be very meticulously advanced in (ie enemies need to be "pulled" individually) and sure as hell some idiot party member or dolt that youre escorting, yet forgot to babysit for one second, screams it's impotent battle cry and runs headfirst into insurmountable odds!
This is a big issue in RTS's that dont have a "stand ground" or "defensive" type stance control. It just makes me absolutely nuts. Nothing worse than a whole pack of upgraded, really expensive, yet anything but artifically intelligent morons that run off and get themselves whacked the minute you look the other way.
Jaz
Play nice.©
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IMO the first game with TR perspective which did the camera thing right was Heretic II. You could readjust it, just in case, but actually there was no need to.
Too bad the game was a) too short and b) too easy.
Too bad the game was a) too short and b) too easy.
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magerette
Hedgewitch
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I just found a few more retarded things that really bug me lately:
1. Armor and weapons that disintegrate after a few puny hits from a low level monster and then cost half your stash to repair.
2. Items that cost more to identify than you'll get when you sell them.
What is it with identifying items? You've picked up and identified thirty five yellow potions of invisibility, they're the only yellow potion in the game--but when you pick up # 36, you still don't know what it is? Your character is a level 39 mage, but that scroll of magic missiles baffles him? Come on, people. One of the biggest time (and money) wasters ever, IMO.
Yeesh!
1. Armor and weapons that disintegrate after a few puny hits from a low level monster and then cost half your stash to repair.
2. Items that cost more to identify than you'll get when you sell them.
What is it with identifying items? You've picked up and identified thirty five yellow potions of invisibility, they're the only yellow potion in the game--but when you pick up # 36, you still don't know what it is? Your character is a level 39 mage, but that scroll of magic missiles baffles him? Come on, people. One of the biggest time (and money) wasters ever, IMO.
Yeesh!
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dteowner
Shoegazer
But just when you assume the 36th yellow potion is invisibility, you find out it's just yellow snow... Tell me every DM in the world hasn't pulled a trick like that on an overconfident player or two.
Tell me every DM in the world hasn't pulled a trick like that on an overconfident player or two.