Things a Game Did Wrong

[CrimsonFox]

I really like the "Things a Game did right" thread. So let's look at the flipside.
What did a game do wrong?
Whether it's a laundry list of things, or the one thing it did that prevented it from being good, or a really good game that had a major flaw(s).

[CrimsonFox]

Fallout 3 - Brilliant, fun game but has some obvious problems:

Dognastics - It is awesome that it gives you a pet/companion. But the fact that every monster that aggros charges immediately at the dog and attacks until it is dead sucks. I can be unloading into a beast at point blank range and be about to kill it, yet the monster will still only attack the dog. A classic case of "The DM is a dickhead and is gunning for my pets"

Stuck in the graphics - Or we can call this the "Fallen bookcase" effect. I've come upon many bookcases that are knocked over and lying face up indoors. Beware these. If you jump into one of the shelves you won't be able to get out. You will only be able to restart from a previous save wasting a lot of time.

Holes - Likewise holes and crevasses are a problem. THere aren't THAT many of them but enough of them that should have been found before release by beta testers or even within the first year of the game's existence. And any hole in the sidewalk that leads to instant death is a total fail. I wouldn't mind it, but the autosave you back up to is the last building you came out of. That COULD be hours of work. And if you waste my time, you are a bad game.

Spoiler

Tenpenny quest - There are many holes in this quest, probably because there are so many variations. BUt tweaking this quest was NOT a hard thing to do. But you can trigger certain events just by doing things in a different order causing certain people like Roy to say things to him when you've never even talked to you before. And the Karma given throughout this quest is totally off the mark. Another example of the DM being a dickhead. With Roy being such a bastard and inevitably killing everyone, there should have been more outs to avoid getting negative karma killing him if you're playing a goodguy. At least they should have added an arrest feature as we discovered his plot to kill the whole hotel. But no, the developers just wanted to force you into doing the right thing, so they could be dicks and kill everybody. And even afterwards they'd still give you negative karma for killing Roy if you don't take the one opportunity for that. And funny they give you positive karma no matter when you kill Tenpenny. That's a pretty big double standard. And the worst part is 3-dog bashes you no matter what happens.

[ISiddiqui]

Originally Posted by CrimsonFox

Fallout 3 - Brilliant, fun game but has some obvious problems:

Dognastics - It is awesome that it gives you a pet/companion. But the fact that every monster that aggros charges immediately at the dog and attacks until it is dead sucks. I can be unloading into a beast at point blank range and be about to kill it, yet the monster will still only attack the dog. A classic case of "The DM is a dickhead and is gunning for my pets"

I prefer to think of a homage to the earlier Fallouts where dogmeat was so useful for this purpose .

[CrimsonFox]

Originally Posted by ISiddiqui

I prefer to think of a homage to the earlier Fallouts where dogmeat was so useful for this purpose .

I don't follow. You mean the dog was extra powerful in the last game? And you could just send him in and he'd kill everything while the enemies would you?

And do you have any game candidates yourself?

[ISiddiqui]

Dogmeat was pretty damned powerful. Probably one of the best NPCs. But he wasn't be all end all powerful (I did miss him greatly when he died).

And... not off the top of my head.

[bhlloy]

Deus Ex 2 - everything

[Abe Sargent]

Originally Posted by CrimsonFox

Fallout 3 - Brilliant, fun game but has some obvious problems:

Dognastics - It is awesome that it gives you a pet/companion. But the fact that every monster that aggros charges immediately at the dog and attacks until it is dead sucks. I can be unloading into a beast at point blank range and be about to kill it, yet the monster will still only attack the dog. A classic case of "The DM is a dickhead and is gunning for my pets"

Stuck in the graphics - Or we can call this the "Fallen bookcase" effect. I've come upon many bookcases that are knocked over and lying face up indoors. Beware these. If you jump into one of the shelves you won't be able to get out. You will only be able to restart from a previous save wasting a lot of time.

Holes - Likewise holes and crevasses are a problem. THere aren't THAT many of them but enough of them that should have been found before release by beta testers or even within the first year of the game's existence. And any hole in the sidewalk that leads to instant death is a total fail. I wouldn't mind it, but the autosave you back up to is the last building you came out of. That COULD be hours of work. And if you waste my time, you are a bad game.

One of my biggest issues with Fallout 3 and New Vegas is that hundreds of years after the big boom, items are still in the same place. I mean, shouldn;t someone else have taken cash out of cash registers? It's like no one has scavenged at all, and things are still in realistic places for a long time ago, but not now.

[Abe Sargent]

Anyway, a few that pop off my head:

Knights of the Old Republic - For thinking that a great script and plot and characters makes up for a lousy game mechanics. How exactly does the D&D mechanic reflect Jedi and the force, like we've seen in the films and other places? There wads a big disconnect there, as well as a very easy game to beat. My first time through I never had to reload a save or struggle o defeat an enemy.


Blood Bowl Legendary Edition - I simply can;t believe that you can have every other team, nineteen of them, and miss out on Chaos Dwarves to complete the set.


Every Front Office Football since 2001 WTH happened to expansion? It used to work. Expansion made the experience for me. I don't buy that scheduling was too hard. Suck it up.


The Movies It's starts but so well, but then the amount of time and effort it takes to make a film becomes years and you don;t have enough people, and it becomes waaaay too micromanagegy.


Oblivion Sigh... The number of ways you suck is sad.


Master of Orion III Biggest disappointment ever in gaming.


Sid Meier's Railroads After playing for about four or five hours and realizes that yes, that's all the game does, you realize it's just a pretty train game, with none of the many mechanics from other economic simulators in the past twenty years, and it sucks.

[Draft Dodger]

batch files

[Draft Dodger]

Originally Posted by Abe Sargent

The Movies It's starts but so well, but then the amount of time and effort it takes to make a film becomes years and you don;t have enough people, and it becomes waaaay too micromanagegy.

there's so much about this game that I love - the music, the amazing radio narration, the surprisingly fun movie editing portion, the animations, the loving nod to the movie genre...and so much about this game that I hate - the micromanagement, the long delay to get anything done, the tedious need to overload your lot with decorations, the fact that you can't fit every building on your lot. Probably one of the biggest love-hate swings of any game I've played.

it won't run on my computer any more - some weird graphics glitch that turns everyone black - which is the only thing that keeps me from opening myself up to more abuse.

[Matthean]

Duke Nukem Forever: Hitting release dates.

[sabotai]

Agreed on The Movies. It starts out so well, but once things get rolling, it tries too much to be both a micromanagement tycoon game and a game where you make movies. The two didn't go well together after awhile.

Spore - It could have been so good, but they ditched everything that made the concept interesting. Physics and biology were thrown to the side so it could be a "cute" game where it didn't matter how terribly designed your creature was.

[mckerney]

I'll got with the game that was by far the most disappointing title of 2011 for me, Dragon Age 2.

Tactical RPG Combat - I loved the combat in Dragon Age: Origins and played well over a hundred hours on three or four different chracters. In Origins positioning was important to protect your mage and archer by putting your meat shield between them and the enemies. In Dragon Age 2 the devs decided that combat had to be more awesome. Want to tactically protect your squishy characters in Dragon Age 2? Well fuck you, after you kill a few enemies we're going to drop a few more enemies out of thin air through the encounter area. That mage you went through effort of protecting just had someone appear right behind them and one hit them with an insta-back stab.

Character Customization - In addition to Dragon Age: Origins lacking an awesome button the developers saw another problem with the first title in the series, and boy was it a big one. It turns out they were seeing enough cos play at conventions. The cause of the problem, you were able to give your party members whatever weapons and armor your wanted. No more in Dragon Age 2, you now now longer have the ability to equip your party members with any loot you find. They didn't seem too committed to the cos play thing though, since they just wound up writing a bunch of shitty characters. There was no one notable or memorable in Dragon Age 2.

Though another thing that came up from this, you're not going to be picking up many weapons or armor worth equipping since only one character can use it. The fix? Now nearly everything you pick up is labelled junk.

Level Design - I got confused the second time I went into a dungeon in Dragon Age 2. "Did I miss something in the story," I though, "Why am I back in the same dungeon as the last quest? Aren't I in a different area entirely." After entering a few more I realized what it was. Instead of designing different caves and dungeons they made one and gave it several different entrances and exits, plus the ability to add doors that couldn't be opened to block off different areas. It was awesome.

Wait, that's not entirely fair. There wasn't one dungeon. There was a design for a small cave you'd enter several times, plus they made two buildings you'd go into several times.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by Matthean

Duke Nukem Forever: Hitting release dates.

I had been hoping with Duke Nukem forever it would at least be a bad game that had some of the old school elements that made DN3D great, but instead it had almost all the shitty elements from modern shooters.

[kcchief19]

Maximum Football: You call that a beer tent?

[CrimsonFox]

Originally Posted by Abe Sargent

One of my biggest issues with Fallout 3 and New Vegas is that hundreds of years after the big boom, items are still in the same place. I mean, shouldn;t someone else have taken cash out of cash registers? It's like no one has scavenged at all, and things are still in realistic places for a long time ago, but not now.

bullets have homes too! Maybe they just live there!

[CrimsonFox]

OOTP - The biggest ones are obviously AI selections, pitcher resting, and pitching rotation. Just choose people at random, don't ya ootp...

[Radii]

Warhammer Online - The most hyped and hoped for PVP based MMO since Dark Age of Camelot, and I don't know a single person that liked it long term. My biggest issue were the PVP scenarios... they wanted open world combat and objectives, but then they go make PVP scenarios that were just as beneficial and more efficient, so the % of the population taking part in the open world/castle taking content was much, much smaller than it could have been.

The other problem that I found gamebreaking was the requirement to complete high end PVE combat and to farm PVE dungeons to get armor sets to allow you to do significant damage to the final pvp castles on each side. If people want to PVE, great, but the idea to design a PVP game but make farming high end dungeons a requirement to maximize your potential is just horrible.

And finally, if enough people did participate in open world PVP to get to the other realm's main castle... at that point the entire server was encouraged to go to one zone, and past that one room to fight. The first three times that happened on the servers I played on, the servers crashed and PVP was reset so that everything was equal. Whoops.

Also, THREE REALMS FOR PVP. Dark Age of Camelot is widely accepted as the gold standard for pvp design in an MMO, just copy it and tweak it. Three realms, no scenarios, truly encourage open world combat, go go go.




Black & White -- Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. Its been so long that my only memory of it was flinging cow poop at people and otherwise massive, massive disappointment.

[mckerney]

[CrimsonFox]

Originally Posted by Radii

Black & White -- Surprised this hasn't been mentioned yet. Its been so long that my only memory of it was flinging cow poop at people and otherwise massive, massive disappointment.

add to that:

Fable - Absolutely everything after childhood. And add all the press releases and hype to that.

[Abe Sargent]

For recent stuff, I would add:

Planet Coaster - Would you please work on all of the modern video card sets for PCs so I can f'ing play you?

Fallout 4 - Released a change to the game for the first expansion that made it stop working on certain PCs. No patches or help came later. Only it and PC are the only two games out there I can't run.

100% Orange Juice - I feel like this game is about 80% of a good game, and 20% just not there yet.


Paradox Software Grand Strategies - I love you guy sso much, but the late game sloooow down for games like Victoria II and Stellaris and EU2-4 is annoying.

Leviathan Warships - I find your lack of single player irksome.

[Groundhog]

Fallout 4 - A very, very unsatisfying ending.

Spore - Everything about this. We got a bunch of before-their-time mobile app-esque time wasters loosely stitched together, when we were promised (literally) the universe.

No Man's Sky - See: Spore, except replace the mobile app time waster with vanilla, cookie-cutter, procedurally-generated survival/exploration game.

[CrimsonFox]

I forgot about this thread. heh. Well necroed.

This episode is about Modern Platformers...

I've always loved plaftormers.

indie games being the boom that they are, platformers of all kinds have gotten a resurgence.

Here are some modern kinds and what they do wrong...
The "Impossible" platformer- Wanting to make things impossible to play is actually now a genre on its own. I Wanna Be THe Guy was the first one I saw. A game that taunted you at every turn. VVVVVV was another one and I can't really point out a flaw in that one. But those that are more difficult usually become awful simply with their controls. If you can't change the keys to something comfortable, then it won't be fun. There is a difference between a challenge and a bad time. Also IWBTG seems to have a lack of story or theme . It's just "hard".
Super Meatboy - It needs controller support and adjustable keys. There is a certain move that seriously doesn't work all the time. Maybe it is the keys. WIthout controller this is very trying.

Artistic platformer - Many extremely themed platformers have come out. Those that want to make a visual statement. These tend to forget about gameplay.
Two such lately are
Nihilumbra - IT has a whispery positive speaker narrator and a prentious vibe to it. Its theme is relaxing and annoying at the same time. Love its artistic design. What I dislike is that you have to learn from death. It doesn't seem to have a middle ground between WAY TOO EASY and YOU WON'T SEE IT COMING TIL YOU DIE. Some things wait off screen and kill you right away. Also it needs to allow controller support. Hotkeys become a requirement toward the end. It actually never told you it had hotkeys. would have been nice to know during training. Training always seems to be a fail point of most games. Also THe "MOVING" level of each section at the end is horribly designed. The whole screen constantly moves and is timed...but the screen moves MUCH slower than you can move. And there is a wall of purple chasing you. Yet you have no idea what color you will need ahead of time and once you need it it's often too late and you die. THen Once you know what you need ahead of time, you breeze through it. Those levels are kinda not fun. THen when you get to hard mode...sheesh forget it.


NEver ALone - A Beautiful Alaskan Village brings to life a girl and a fox who work together on a journey. Beautiful game. Inspired., Informative. However it suffers from gameplay issues. Very hard to use the fox some times. Also it requires you to break its own premise without any hint. THat you often have to separate. It IS linear...but you sometimes have to go back through areas you've been before....sometimes with only one character. Becomes a little confusing in that way sometimes. It may be this game is nothing but a pretty face.

[RainMaker]

OOTP - It should have never gone the FM route where you can make up all these custom leagues with crazy settings (the "universe" I believe it was called) after 6.51. Took the series over 5 years to clean up that mess and make an MLB simulation playable. Focus of the game should have been on a ML system with historical replays as an option. It's gotten much better of late but still the whole structure makes it tough to iron out financials, GM AI, and other things.

[EagleFan]

The Witcher 3 - A six inch high rock should not be treated like a 15 foot high cliff when I am trying to fight. I should be able to step over it.

[Radii]

Originally Posted by CrimsonFox

This episode is about Modern Platformers...

Ori and the blind forest is all you'll ever need.

Super Meatboy - It needs controller support and adjustable keys. There is a certain move that seriously doesn't work all the time. Maybe it is the keys. WIthout controller this is very trying.

I only recently bought this, i'm playing with controller just fine so far.

[TroyF]

Fallout 3 - The ending. I've never been so angry at any ending in any game. Just horrilbe.

OOTP - As said above, if they had just focused on the major leagues. Ugh, I have finally given up. It's just too much work to make the financials make any sense for me. I will be skipping this year and playing FOF and DDPB17

MLB The Show series: Bunting, line drives down the lines being mostly singles. This series gets A LOT of things right. But this game is in a far to advanced stage to not get these two things respectable. It's a train wreck and it shouldn't be.

[CrimsonFox]

Originally Posted by Radii

Ori and the blind forest is all you'll ever need.





I only recently bought this, i'm playing with controller just fine so far.

huh it doesn't list that. It definitely seems to be a requirement.


HOwever I just soaked all my keyboard keys in water and scrubbed the inside. This keyboard works like new now! Maybe I'll have an easier time...but the keyboard still stinks with this game.

[CrimsonFox]

Originally Posted by TroyF

Fallout 3 - The ending. I've never been so angry at any ending in any game. Just horrilbe.

OOTP - As said above, if they had just focused on the major leagues. Ugh, I have finally given up. It's just too much work to make the financials make any sense for me. I will be skipping this year and playing FOF and DDPB17

MLB The Show series: Bunting, line drives down the lines being mostly singles. This series gets A LOT of things right. But this game is in a far to advanced stage to not get these two things respectable. It's a train wreck and it shouldn't be.

I am seeing ootp complained about a LOT. I don't really get it. What exactly did they do??? I quit many years ago because I was disgusted with having to shell out 40 bucks I didn't have every year only for a game that didn't fix previous bugs, add LITTLE to the new version, and STILL tank ALL of my pitchers in the playoffs and WS.

[mckerney]

Originally Posted by CrimsonFox

huh it doesn't list that. It definitely seems to be a requirement.


HOwever I just soaked all my keyboard keys in water and scrubbed the inside. This keyboard works like new now! Maybe I'll have an easier time...but the keyboard still stinks with this game.

It definitely supports controllers, there's even a screen telling you to use a controller when you load Super Meat Boy.

The real probably with it is that being made with flash it has occasional performance issues and hiccups. I wish it had gotten the remaster treatment like Binding of Issac did.

Originally Posted by Radii

Ori and the blind forest is all you'll ever need.

Ori is the best metroidvania style platformer. The best classic style 2D platformers to come out recently are only on Wii U in Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze and Yoshi's Woolly World.

[TroyF]

Originally Posted by CrimsonFox

I am seeing ootp complained about a LOT. I don't really get it. What exactly did they do??? I quit many years ago because I was disgusted with having to shell out 40 bucks I didn't have every year only for a game that didn't fix previous bugs, add LITTLE to the new version, and STILL tank ALL of my pitchers in the playoffs and WS.

I can't speak about anyone else. I'll explain from my side. You look at the games on my list and there have been hundreds of hours, maybe more put into all of them. I played The Show so much this year I thought my PS4 was going to burn up. I've I played a ton of Fallout 3. Sadly, I've wasted years with OOTP.

If a game gets it wrong and I hate it, it will not be one my list. You don't see Earl Weaver 2 on my list for example.

OOTP gets a lot right. The stats feature, the speed, how it uses the history. The draft where you can get players all mixed up through history and have a league with an aging Mike Schmidt while Brooks Robinson is in the draft is a truly inspired idea. I WANT this game to be good for me. Every year I try to tweak the financials and make it work and every year I just give up after 3 or 4 years because it's just too much work. I have no idea why I cut the cord after last years game and didn't do it 10 years ago. Hope I guess. Misguided and stupid, but there is a fantastic game there if I could get around my issues with it. I know that will never be the case and last year was it.

[CrescentMoonie]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

OOTP - It should have never gone the FM route where you can make up all these custom leagues with crazy settings (the "universe" I believe it was called) after 6.51. Took the series over 5 years to clean up that mess and make an MLB simulation playable. Focus of the game should have been on a ML system with historical replays as an option. It's gotten much better of late but still the whole structure makes it tough to iron out financials, GM AI, and other things.

I'd be happy if a real league sim got minor league teams right for expansion clubs.

Originally Posted by TroyF

OOTP gets a lot right. The stats feature, the speed, how it uses the history. The draft where you can get players all mixed up through history and have a league with an aging Mike Schmidt while Brooks Robinson is in the draft is a truly inspired idea. I WANT this game to be good for me. Every year I try to tweak the financials and make it work and every year I just give up after 3 or 4 years because it's just too much work. I have no idea why I cut the cord after last years game and didn't do it 10 years ago. Hope I guess. Misguided and stupid, but there is a fantastic game there if I could get around my issues with it. I know that will never be the case and last year was it.

I gave up for two years, but got the 2017 version because it was part of the $1 level on a Humble Bundle. I got it on 11/30, played 59 hours, and haven't touched it since 12/16. With the exception of free, or a ridiculously low price like $1, it's just not worth it when it hasn't improved on basic problems that have been obvious for a while (some for a decade).