Binary morality system where you can only choose between being a normal person or a mass murdering psychopath. Then your decision has no consequences.
Dialogue system that gives you 3+ options which change literally nothing
Oh, Bethesda is in this?
No feedback when hitting enemies, besides generic blood splashing and maybe a stumble
Way more health than is necessary or interesting on enemies
Combat system is mindless and boring
Quests are full of “go to this cookie-cutter dungeon, clear it out and bring me the MacGuffin at the end” on loop.
The game has lots of bugs that were in the previous 2 games, and were patched in the fan-patches of both the previous 2 games.
2? More like:
The game has lots of bugs that were in the previous 7 games, and were patched in the fan-patches of all of the previous 7 games.
I encountered bugs playing Starfield that I also experienced in unmodified Morrowind, a game from 20 years and 7 games before SF
Its pathetic and embarrassing afaic, I’d be fired if my work had the same issues someone else fixed 7 iterations ago and i keep breaking it again
Out of curiosity what’s the morrowind bug?
I legit can’t remember now which specific one it was a year later. I think it had something to do with items and physics, I just remember being incredibly frustrated at seeing something I’d also seen in a semi-recent unmodded Morrowind playthrough (my first ever so the bugs were FRESH in my mind as I’d never seen them in a playthrough before)
And yet I still see people posting Skyrim screenshots and praising it… What a mediocre p.o.s.
Enemies leap directly at your camera while screeching like howler monkeys.
> Yes
> Sarcastic yes
> Reluctant yes
> No
> No
Okay, well I’m gonna take that as a yes
No, but actually yes but not right now.
All dialogue options have previews that are nothing like what you actually say (Looking at you Cyberpunk) so you try to apologise for someones loss but the actual dialogue is your character being an utter piece of shit without warning. Getting the true ending and several important pieces of gear require you to never be mean to multiple NPCs.
NPC: My husband was killed!
1: Sorry for your loss…
2: It’s about time!1: pfft sorry for your loss 🙄 tell someone who cares 🥱
2: It’s about time we found the MF who did this! Let’s go hunt him down!
Reminds me at the start of witcher 3 my brother was playing and some thugs come annoy you, one option was something like ‘I disagree’ which sounds reasonable, so he picked it. That option has Gerald insulting them and jumping straight into a fight, shit escalated fucking quickly lol
Do you want to die?
A. No
B. No way
C. Definitely notAnd one randomly answers “yes” and you need to restart from a save.
Or even worse, there’s an entire gradient, but what they actually bothered to put in the middle is boring and pointless.
Or there’s a viable third option, but it got scrapped 10 minutes before launch and all the text is at complete odds to the dialogue
Or the tone of the actual responses doesn’t match the text for the selection of the responses.
“Do you accept the mission?”
- Yes
- No, thanks
- Maybe…
Option 3 actually declares war on quest giver.
Oh and one that just happened to me last night:
Your normal actions still work during dialog so if you press buttons to try to exit out of a dialog, you might accidentally attack the NPC you’re talking to. If you let them kill you, they are still hostile when you return. Need to start a new save to recover. At least they drop the unique key from their shop when you kill them (Dark Souls 1, hopefully it’s no big deal that I had to kill the blacksmith. At least I don’t have to listen to the pounding metal when I spawn above him anymore).
In BG3 Lae’zel asked to be with me and she said “if not now, then later” and I said something like “no thanks” and it permanently locked me out of romancing her.
Or just all bad choices.
Fallout 3 lol
Although it has a PC version nothing can be configured.
30fps
You mean erratically fluctuating 3-30FPS just as the game wants you to go through a jump puzzle that requires precise timing and of course physics calculations are based on display FPS.
ah, I can’t believe you’ve done this
Doom3
Full screen only. Game crashes if you try to exit in any way.
Ugh the worst. No graphics settings beyond “vysnc” and whether you want a fullscreen or not.
Menus use a virtual mouse cursor even though you’re playing with a controller.
Don’t forget you have to hold the button for 5 seconds while an animated circle fills to ensure you are clicking on the button you want to click on.
I want to find the person who decided that was the way. Hold actions are great, if there’s ALREADY a press action and you’re out of buttons. If there’s no press action and I have to hold your button just because, you’re bad designers. If you’re THAT worried about someone doing something on accident, give me the option to disable it. You don’t get to advertise 80 hours of gameplay when 20 of that is holding a button for the UI to work.
Just started playing rdr 2 and this has been such a pain in the arse.
Yeah, it’s a great mechanic when it makes sense. I hate when they shoehorn it into everything though.
Eh. I kinda prefer Hogwarts Legacy doing that rather than asking “are you sure you want to save”.
Why would anyone play Hogwarts Legacy?
An every menu has animations for each entry.
Laughs in Steam Deck touchpad controls
Every single shelf, cupboard, sack, discolored patch of dirt, hollow tree, etc. Is lootable. 99.9% of the loot is useless. The remaining 0.1% is key to solving several quests and/or the best stuff in the game.
Oh my wife would love this game, that’s basically all she likes to do in games. Someone needs to just make thief simulator for her.
Months after Red Dead Redemption came out for the PS3, my friend asked me why I didn’t beat it yet. He opened up my inventory and he saw more hunted meat he ever thought someone could accumulate.
All I did was hunt in the game. It was one of the best hunting games of all time.
Have you played RDR2? Those games have been suggested to me, but I have yet to get around to them. Are they worth playing still?
Bro fucking really?
RDR2 can be very tedious because Rcosktar hates giving players movement control over the character because muh immersion (highly recommend the first person mode), and it has a heavy dosage of cinematic shit, but god damn
It was one of the best games I’ve ever played. I just finished another playthrough recently.
I have only played the first one so all my opinions about the game are from reviews I read. I heard it’s better than the first one and one of the games you should play.
I’m just jealous you’ll get to play RDR2 for the first time. I’ll never have my first time with it again.
I had 2 weeks off work years ago (don’t worry, I’m not American, I get 4 weeks every year, this was just ONE instance of me taking PTO), but my plans for the vacation were canceled… And I had nothing to do. Lo’ and behold, an xbox with RDR2 on it, for me to use when bored.
I essentially worked a full time job playing RDR2 that vacation and regretted none of it. Would’ve been happier to experience it the first time on my PC instead of a base Xbox One, but it’s what I had available to me at that time. This was before the PC release, I’m normally a PC gamer and don’t own any consoles myself.
I had something like this with Final Fantasy IX. Like two-thirds of the way through the game, there’s a minigame that crops up where you have to use a chocobo to walk around these tiny scenes and peck to try to echolocate hidden treasures within a time limit. And I don’t know why, but I got totally addicted to that stupid little minigame, to the point that I kind of broke my brain and had to stop playing the entire game. I did later see some dorm mates in college getting frustrated with that task and get to just zip right through it for them, though, which made it feel slightly less like a savage waste of my lifespan.
The inventory is tetris-style. Lots of items arent squares or rectangles. Items do stack, but you can get them only by selecting and choosing “Take one/Take half/Take X”. If you drop something it is GONE.
That’s just an Elder Scrolls game, and I love it, for some reason.
This did not bother me at all in Skyrim honestly.
Gameplay heavily based on dodging and careful movement, but you can only dodge by double tapping movement keys or the stick
Wow, my controller just broke on it’s own. It was right there on my desk, and then I read your comment, and it snapped itself in half.
At least it was a quick death.
a worthy one at that compared to the alternative
What was that game? I know I played it, but I can’t recall what it was!
With tap-to-move mechanics, I’ve seen many, but I only recall Terraria having it hardcoded in.
In that game you can get certain items that allow you to dodge by double-tapping A or D; it just happens that for some reason you may want to slowly move towards a boss, and with a keyboard you can only do so by mashing A or D.
If you mash too slowly, you’re too slow, if you mash too quickly, you ram the boss.Also, cliffs range from annoying (in the late game) to deadly (in the early game).
Pointless inventory management and crafting.
inventory expansion slots only available for
purchaserent with real money.pay to win gacha/lootbox mechanics
“Losing the 50/50”
Inventory is limited by item weight.
Discarding items requires 3+ button presses (per item)
And then they just drop on the ground in front of you and are immediately picked up again as you move the slightest bit.
Ugh I hate games with weighted inventory.
I like how From Software does it with Souls and Elden Ring, how it measures the weight of what you currently have equipped, and affects how fast you run/roll/etc. Very intuitive, and you don’t get punished for picking up too many items.
Everything has durability
Some items also rot, the rot timer doesn’t stop in the unskippable cutscenes and maybe even continues ticking down while you are not playing.
With the result being effectively that almost all provisions you looted yesterday are rotten the next day. The exception being salami, which last a few more days, but eating too much of it makes you take damage after going to the bathroom. You also get a stacking debuff.
The only way to not have to eat the salami will be to log in within 8 hours of picking up some veggies or something. 8 hour rot timer.
Further, the only canned food in the game will be decorative unlootable assets. You will notice this and it will annoy you. Especially because there will be a campfire asset used repeatedly in both the world as decoration and in rest stops as an interactable. (As a general crafting station that includes an option to cook meat to reset the 8 hour rot timer, but also has the options to make and repair clothes, etc. Having it be just a cooking station would be too visually appropriate.)
That campfire asset will always have the same opened half eaten can of beans in the same place with ridiculously detailed modeling of the sheared metal rim, and an equally detailed model of a can opener lying in the dirt next to it. It will seen like an intentional prank. It will be an internal community joke. It will later become clear it was a bought pre-made asset and the developers will seem to not understand why it’s funny when the topic is brought up, and will try to use the opportunity to explain the merits of their food system. It will be a confusing, frustrating, and stressful time for the community.
The stacking debuff of course does have a timer that doesn’t continue running while you are not playing.
Of course.
Fun glitch: rot value is unsigned, and once it reaches -1 the item is reborn phoenix-style from the ashes of itself.
This makes for some interesting mechanics where its worth saving old rusty near-dead items until the end of the game just before a vital boss battle.
The variable overflows at 512 and the rot value is counted in ds
It can never overflow though since it’s constantly decaying
Not if its measuring time left
the rot timer is calculated based on when the item is picked up using real world time. if you reload a previous save then most likely all of your things are now rotten
even continues ticking down while you are not playing.
Hmm, I kind of like this idea and could see it working alright if used correctly. Reminds me of Animal Crossing, but so much more annoying.
I got the idea from Ark.
TIHI
That, honestly, kept me from enjoying Fallout 3 after being introduced to the series via FO4. I understand that far in the future everything is going to be shitty and broken, but the raiders that just jumped me didn’t seem to have any problem getting hits with their useless broken pipe weapons that I can somehow use to repair 5% of the durability of my shitty pipe weapon.
Fallout 3 is a shit game (The classic example of why is that things like stealing a spoon will get you sentenced to death by mob violence) Play Fallout New Vegas, it’s built on Fallout 3’s engine but instead of being designed and written by indentured interns at Bethesda it was made by people who are, you know, game designers. (I would kill for a NV-esque sequel to F04)
I wouldn’t call it shit, but yean NV is definitely a much better game.
I’m currently making my way through FO3 and I haven’t even discovered half of all the POI and I’ve been playing for months. NV piques my interest, because the story telling in FO3 is great, weapon durability aside.
Give NV a try. I don’t think there’s any reason to make sure to finish FO3 first (spoiler-wise), and you might end up liking it more.
They’re both decent, but pretty long, so playing both back to back would be way too much Bethesda-jank for most people (though NV is def better, it is the same engine).
If I had to choose one, it would be NV every time.
if fo3 is a shit game then so is new vegas. cant stress that enough
Well that’s a take.
Ooh! And if you have anything less than 100% durable then the game has a little flashing icon warning you it’s not 100%. Couple that with the repair cost being the same regardless of the percentage missing!
Repairing permanently makes the item worse and upgrading it more expensive
- DLCs out-the-ass Paradox-style.
- Escort quests/missions where the NPCs move at a speed between the player’s walk speed and run speed.
The entire game is a series of chained together escort quests through dangerous territories, at awkward speed.
With extremely frequent pauses so the NPCs can spend 40 seconds fawning over the exact same flower they saw two feet back.
I don’t really have much of an issue with how Paradox does things… Their games are more like game engines that they spend the next 15+ years developing for.
Also, with each DLC, they put out a (usually massive) free update for everyone who owns the base game. So even if you don’t get any DLC, you will end up getting some of the new features for free.
It is kind of ridiculous that they’re still putting out new DLC for EU4… I think it gets absurd after a certain number.
Why are they starting with “starting the game”?
They forgot to start with a kernel-level anticheat and a pointless, slow to load “need an account, always online” launcher.
- Connection lost for five entire seconds. Progress dumped, save file deleted, assassins en route.
Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don’t get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
Upgrading the equipment has a chance to fail and waste all your resources. The chance to fail increases with every level.
Bonus points: Failing destroys the equipment and you need to start over from scratch.
Ahhh the Ragnarok Online upgrade system! Safe up to… oh god it’s been a while… +7, then the upgrades get much more strong for the next three levels, but with a 50% chance for your weapon to break.
For armor, it was +4 I believe. I bought an insanely expensive card to make me immune to an element and ended up setting with a +7 coat to put it in after breaking tons of coats.
Wait but I actually like this (without the bonus points part)
(I do have a system somewhat like that in a game I’m working on in my free time lol)
You’re a villain. Sorry, the evidence is incontrovertible.
nooooo ;-;
I guess to elaborate, the way I designed it, it doesn’t take very many resources to upgrade, and there’s something akin to checkpoints every 3 levels.
(i’m assuming that, as usual, managing your upgrades is a secondary part of the gameplay, and that we’re talking about a random chance based danger of failure )
why are random setbacks better than just getting out of the player’s way, and getting back to the main action of the game as soon as possible?
if upgrades are rewards for playing well enough to gather resources, why waste the player’s time and effort when they aren’t doing anything wrong?
“wasting” resources can be fine, if you learn something from it, even by process of elimination, like experimenting with different ingredients to find a recipe.
but it sounds here like your game would just slap the player in the face sometimes, to try to make them feel better about when they don’t get slapped.
To give some more details, this isn’t something that happens rarely, the chance of getting to the next checkpoint is actually quite low towards the highest upgrades. To get a weapon to max level (+15), it takes on average around 230 attempts (would be 280, but there’s a sort of pity system that very slightly increases the chance of success for every failure on that weapon). Though it’s also important to mention that this is something only really feasible in the mid to late game, and there’s a mechanic to do multiple attempts at once. Technically, I could also make it so that there is no chance of failure, and instead drastically increase the amount of resources required for the upgrades. But I’m designing the resources needed around the average amount of upgrade attempts it takes.
The reason I’m doing it this way is a similar reason to why I enjoy farming bosses or special enemies in games like Borderlands, it’s fun to get that rare drop (my game also has loot with rarities etc). So it’s not that you’re upgrading and rarely get unlucky and get a failure, but instead you’re farming enemies to get the resources and try to get to the next level checkpoint on your weapon. In looter shooter games (or any loot-based RPGs), you kill bosses again and again to get a special drop, and all the attempts where you don’t get it are technically a “waste”. I think that, because failure is the expected outcome, it’s not something the player gets surprised and annoyed by. Rather, it’s the hunt for getting that success that’s the focus.
I also remember playing older MMOs etc that had weapon breaking mechanics upon failure, but premium items that protected your weapon from breaking. Usually you could get some of those for free, but they were very limited, so those games always were quite P2W. But I did enjoy those systems, just hated the real money aspect.
ah, i was looking forward to saying “you’re not a villain” with more context, but… it seems like you’re making a gacha game. this sounds just like, for example, Genshin Impact wishes. the diagnosis stands :(
There are also four normal endings and a true ending. You can only see the true ending after getting all four normal endings. There are multiple branch points in the story leading to the different endings so you have to start almost from the beginning to find a new one. The true ending is on a wholly separate route that is 99% identical to the one leading to Ending A. There is no new game plus, so you have to start from scratch each time. The true ending boss, unlike the other ending bosses, is absurdly over tuned and the only enemy in the game that requires you use or even know about several obscure mechanics, and even then requires you to have all upgrades maxed out and be near the level cap to even stand a chance.
Driving mechanic where you steer where you look, making it impossible to drive straight while looking around or behind you.
Halo’s gameplay is really not that great (I’d even say pretty bad) without the nostalgia goggles.
I disagree. I’d rather have look-to-steer then the full-left-straight-full-right steering that’s in other fps games. Not being able to make slight changes to direction and speed in Half-Life 2 vehicles always made them frustrating.
Even the original Duke controller had two analog sticks and two analog triggers. Mapping two independent actions (camera movement and steering) to the same input was already bad in Halo CE, but it was downright criminal in Halo 2 and later games that started to include massive backdrop setpieces. You can either look at the Covenant spaceship glassing the city or steer your warthog, but not both. It’s asinine.
I’m not looking at the landscapes while in a firefight. That’s why the game designers give you moments of pause. Like when you exited the cave in Halo 4 or the very beginning of HL Episode 2.
I’ve never had any problems with Halo’s controls.
It can still be relevant in combat when you want to look around to see where your enemies are or find the exit or something.
KSP was annoying like this to. They at least had a way to make small adjustments on addition to big ones, but it was still very tricky to be precise.
The endless fan-boat segment is the worst part of the game, for me at least. Physics are fucked, puzzles to progress are forced as hell. I was so happy when it was over.
It’s not like those physics puzzles were hard. How many variations of the SeeSaw puzzle were there?
GabeN: In Episode 2, we’ll have the biggest puzzle in a Half Life game to data!
Episode 2: It’s just a huge seesaw puzzle.
I just got triggered
“boost me up”?
Probably from The Last of Us where you have to help a companion character reach a higher ledge which slows down gameplay.
But… That is a disguised loading screen. The ones everyone complained about as well. The game has to load the data at some point. So either it’s completely being removed from the game via a screen or something like “boost me up” or crawling through the caves like in the new God of War.
It’s funny to me that loading times are still the Achilles heel after all these years. Don’t get me wrong–it makes sense. Games getting more graphically intense, larger worlds, online play etc, it all adds up. I always just thought that we’d finally see loading times become at least significantly shorter by now–and in scale with the size of the games, they likely have. I guess some things are simply as optimized as they’re gonna get, can’t just expect magic to happen and make that much computation instantly doable.
The loading times did get better! I think a lot of people who complain either forgot or never player old games on original hardware. I remember minutes long loading screens. What we have now is so much better than the past. Imaging playing a Dark Souls game and waiting 1 minute each time you got defeated. That was my experience with one segment in Dark Messiah of Might and Magic
Exactly. I remember getting up to get a drink/pee during loading screens, and now I just get dehydrated.
Solid state disc drives have definitely made load times much faster. Anyone who has played a PS4 game on PS5 can tell you this.
Wasn’t TLoU made by Naughty Dog who also made Jak and Daxter, a game which famously had no loading screens?
Okay but if you play the game in 2040 with a super solid state drive formatted with FTLS, 512 GB RAM, and a 32 core CPU, does the loading screen still take just as long?
Huge amounts of foreshadowing, but the story is already very predictable.
Motion controls.
Very long unskippable cutscenes before all bosses.
Hitboxes that make no sense whatsoever.
Voice Actors that really want to be somewhere else. (perhaps with full bladders?)
All cutscenes are slideshows.
A huge open world, with massive Travel distances and no fast travelling, and theres nothing to explore.
Very long unskippable cutscenes before all bosses.
It’s probably assumed but just to be clear - the save point is before the cutscene, so if you die then you have to watch the cut scene again every time.
The save point is obviously not even directly before the cut scene but before some slow moving platform/elevator jump puzzle you need to navigate by waiting for each of them to be in place that comes before the cut scene.
Also, maybe do what FFXII did to my teenage self, and put a save point between phases of an incredibly difficult, optional boss (I will never again not have multiple saves after that nightmare).
I don’t recall what game it was, but probably ff7 remake…
If you die in prolonged battles you can choose where to resume even though you can’t actually save there. Last checkpoint, before starting the combat at all, or before the current phase of battle for multi-phase fights.
This was ridiculously helpful for a few things, where you had some difficult non-boss thing that drained your health (if this was your first play through) and then that led directly to a boss fight.
I played super fast and loose with saves in that one thanks to the auto save.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings about that… I’ve become a huge fan of From Software games, and have learned that some of my favorite gaming experiences are ones where I overcome extreme challenges (I’m that guy who defaults to “hard” difficulty on first playthroughs). And whenever I die and start in the middle of a battle with full HP and MP (but the boss remains in phase 2 without healing), I feel a little bit of that joy being taken away from me lol.
And I’m weak. Sometimes just having that option there is enough for me to “rage quit” a battle and just brute force it that way. And that’s not rewarding at all.
I mean shit… I don’t know if I’ve ever admitted this, but I believe this is a safe space: Sekiro is my favorite video game of all time, and I still haven’t beaten “Demon of Hatred” without using cheese… It haunts me. Maybe this time will be different…
A huge open world, with massive Travel distances and no fast travelling, and theres nothing to explore.
But right before the final boss you find out you should’ve been collecting 100 golden rings from nooks and ledges and now you have to grab a guide and check all 100 locations because there’s no way to know which ones you found already.
And at least 2 are only available during a main mission and aren’t advertised.
I haven’t seen many open world games do that, but I have seen it in platformers where the item is in the most dangerous spot at the end of the most annoying level and if you miss it you get to start it all over again. Or like in Rayman where you kinda just have to jump in every pit and hope a platform spawns to catch you. Oh, but your lives are limited and if you lose the last one, you have to restart the entire game.
Nah, not 100, that’s too convenient a number. Make it something weird like 97 or 143 or whatever non-intuitive option. Have someone hint about 90% in that you’ll want “all” the rings, but prior to that final quest, nobody tells you how many there are, so you’ll be at 97 searching for the last three and going nuts.
Of course, the achievement isn’t for finding, but for delivering all of them and only triggers when you’re handing them over, otherwise you might know ahead of time that you’ve got them all.
A currency system where the game has a normal currency that you can earn via tasks but that currency is artificially nerfed because there is an additional “premium” currency that is only available either in extremely paltry amounts that have to be saved over months of grinding or spending actual cash. Also there’s a ton of stuff that can only be purchased with large amounts of premium currency
A subscription for basic services like multiplayer or a song catalog even though you just paid $70 for the game
High paced action game that suddenly grinds to a halt for a forced stealth section that was clearly tacked on and poorly designed
Inventory expansions of the extremely tiny default inventory cost premium currency per month.
> escort mission with walk-and-talk exposition dump
> keep close to the escort target or the radio will yell at you
> faster than walking
> slower than runningDon’t forget that you have to stay really close to even hear the exposition dump, but the character is constantly walking through busy areas where you get stuck behind groups of npcs.
You’re also in a busy town, so all of those NPCs are having conversations of their own (mindless babble), and their voices and subtitles drown out the shit you’re actually supposed to hear.
Not only drowns it out but also over-writes all the subtitles as soon as they pop up!
Subtitle pop ups for unimportant npc chatter shouldn’t exist. Especially not in groups.
And the exposition is important to the next quest, or at least part of it is, and there’s no journal or quest list “for immersion” so your only option is to redo the quest.
Yes, exactly. This person gets it.
