• Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.

Confounding Game Design Decisions

Solo Act

Member
Why does FIFA ask me to choose my language every time that I boot up the game? Does EA believe that people swap between preferred languages so frequently that this cannot be a saved setting?

Why do I have to input an obtuse button code into New Super Mario U Deluxe to return the 'air-spin' controls to how they were in the Wii U version? Couldn't that be a menu setting?

(Obviously I spent some time on the Switch today)

I only gave two examples, but I notice little things like this often. I'm curious to see what game design decisions make GAF scratch their proverbial heads.
 

brap

Banned
Why in Wolfenstein: The New Order do they have to break up the action with the stupid home base sections where you have to look for items? They're so fucking boring and tedious.
 

Husky

THE Prey 2 fanatic
Ah geez, I know I've found plenty, and right now I have no game features to be angry at and regale to you. Shame.

Oh, oh, I've got one
why the fuck did Borderlands 2 downgrade from using a compass to using a minimap, and bloat that compact inventory UI to that giant dumb fuckin consolized mess
god
dammit
shit

It's fine if no one agrees with me I know I'm a lone weirdo for preferring BL1.

also why the shit did Tacoma have me play as a straight-up villain who wants to LIBERATE AI DON'T YOU KNOW HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS
THEY CAN'T BE OUR EQUALS
THEY MUST BE PROGRAMMED TO BE TOOLS NOT FRIENDS
Should have fought to destroy those AI. Remove artificial sentience from our world, preserve the state of humans as our ecosystem's apex predator. Tacoma's a pre-apocalyptic tale.
 

shark sandwich

tenuously links anime, pedophile and incels
Blue Dragon: searching for “nothings”.

Let’s put items EVERYWHERE, including “Nothings” which are used to unlock some of the best items in the game. Gamers will love running up and down every wall mashing X trying to find nothing. Really enhances the explorarion.
 

LMJ

Member
Legend of Zelda breath of the wild

Every time you want to upgrade armor you have to go to the great fairy, select the correct armor, upgrade materials and go through a animation, You are then booted out in have to do the same thing again every single time you wish to upgrade

It is monotonous to put it kindly lol
 

Saber

Gold Member
Hey, are you equiped with a heavy weapon in MHW and wants to use a sub-item?

Well too bad. If you select the sub-item and press the button, your character will guard your weapon only, so you have to press the button again. Just so you know, the game already has a specific button to guard your weapon.

Stupid mechanics, aka "time waster".
 
Last edited:

Shifty

Member
Most games

Why can I not mash through your god damn logo intros, I don't give a shit about middleware and never will
RE2 set the gold standard here- minimal number of screens, full control over skipping them

Blue Dragon: searching for “nothings”.

Let’s put items EVERYWHERE, including “Nothings” which are used to unlock some of the best items in the game. Gamers will love running up and down every wall mashing X trying to find nothing. Really enhances the explorarion.
3a0.gif
 
Last edited:

EctoPrime

Member
Time crisis: Razing Storm has a Call of Duty style campaign in the PS3 version and to get into cover you need to move the controller. Imagine playing Gears of War and instead of pressing a button to get into cover you move the controller from a horizontal position to now having those red Leds pointed at the ceiling and having to do it several hundred times not counting the multiplayer mode.

The first time you start Lightning Returns you are likely to watch the fmv. When you start a new game you get to see the exact same video but with voice-overs. Square Enix just wasted your time.

Two of the achievements for the new Bomberman game are just insane. I have completed everything in the game and my progress for the one million bricks destroyed and bombs used sits at 1%. Its like somebody at Konami really wanted people to play this game for thousands of hours.

I blame Sony Europe for this next one.

Expansion packs for PlayStation one games needing disc verification that you own the original game. Everything that the game needs to run is on the expansion disc. If you want to play Metal Gear: VR Missions or GTA: London you better make sure to not sell the original game.
 
Last edited:

Ka-Kui

Member
The only time where a game design decision really irked me was in Assassin's Creed 3.

What do you do in Assassin's Creed games? Run around rooftoops looking cool. But somehow the developers felt it was wise to place numerous guards on the rooftops as well large streets so that it isn't easy tobgo from one building to another.

For the first time in the series' history it was more expedient to run like an idiot on the streets.
 

Rodolink

Member
Game development is a complex process, and decisions permeate and stay depending on many people. Things are made with resources (money, people) and there comes a time when you have to choose between trying to find and fix a bug or removing a feature that doesn't really break the game even though is bad design (In the case of the Fifa).
In other cases its just bad game design decisions that the team couldn't figure out in time and thus stay.
 

mcjmetroid

Member
A lot of "immersive" gameplay decisions in RDR2.
Especially skinning animals.

I'm playing through Horizan Zero Dawn again and it's amazing how much easier this is to pick up and play.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
Having to switch to scan visor every few minutes in Metroid Prime if you wanted the 100%.

Having to switch to Detective Mode for 99% of the Batman Arkham games.

Re-releasing Mario 64 for the Nintendo DS and removing Analog controls in a game designed specifically for analog controls.
 

Raph64

Member
Why the fuck having made Fallout an online-only game with Fallout 76 ?

Enough said.
 
Last edited:

Shotpun

Member
Ah geez, I know I've found plenty, and right now I have no game features to be angry at and regale to you. Shame.

Yeah, I can only remember one too right now:

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. Whoever was the motherfucker who thought it was a good idea to give control to the player at the start of the level only to take it away within seconds to show some objective, give the controls back to the player again ONLY TO FUCKING TAKE THEM AGAIN TO SHOW SOME FUCKING OTHER OBJECTIVE. I think some level did that like four times within the first 30 seconds or something, quit playing and never went back. Rarely games make me genuinely angry but that did the trick.
 
Last edited:

Shifty

Member
FFXV

Jump and Interact being mapped to the same button

Greetings, weapon seller! Excuse me while I hop around your establishment like a fucking loon for a time before I make a purchase.
 
Last edited:

Smasher89

Member
Kirby and the rain ow painybrush, why didnt it have a timee as its designed like a highscore game and would be fun to play to optimize yet it just rewards slow causios play.

Mario 3d world, good game, but not having scores on who won the most dtages is a missed oppoturnity.
 

EctoPrime

Member
Double Dragon 3 on the NES has quite a few and is incredibly hard.

One life for your character and no health refills until you get to the next stage. You do gain two additional characters to play as by defeating them in stage 2 and 3. So by stage 4 you have three lives.
You get one continue after you get to stage 4 and it will take you back to that stage even if you were fighting the final boss.
It throws platforming at you in stage 5 and a lift that requires precise timing to jump off. If you have never played that stage before you will likely die at that spot.
The final boss seems to have too much health in singleplayer and more balanced for twoplayer.
 
Overwatch's in-game UI. That atrocity is too busy, I can't focus on jack shit. Take a hint from games like CS:GO on how to put a lot in without crowding the screen up.
 

Heimdall_Xtreme

Jim Ryan Fanclub's #1 Member
Double Dragon 3 on the NES has quite a few and is incredibly hard.

One life for your character and no health refills until you get to the next stage. You do gain two additional characters to play as by defeating them in stage 2 and 3. So by stage 4 you have three lives.
You get one continue after you get to stage 4 and it will take you back to that stage even if you were fighting the final boss.
It throws platforming at you in stage 5 and a lift that requires precise timing to jump off. If you have never played that stage before you will likely die at that spot.
The final boss seems to have too much health in singleplayer and more balanced for twoplayer.

Double Dragon 3 for NES is not so Hard, is a awesome game in Coop. i think that was a great idea the 1 life only.

Egipt mission is like a heart attack, you have to do a good timing in jump.

In the bosses when you play coop do a twin cyclone spin kick in the same time and close... that kill in a single hit any NPC, in Bosses cause a Huge damage like 20% of the health for each technique.

For me is a awesome game, the plot is like a Movie Style Van Damme, and is more "Real" when a character is killed.
 
Last edited:

Winter John

Member
Snipers in multiplayer games. Never understood why games like BF allow players to lie in bushes and kill people halfway across the map.

1 hit kill mechanics. Nothing annoys me more than that shit.

The constant crumbling ledges and breaking ladders in the Uncharted games. Once or twice would be fine but Jesus Christ every fuckin time you climb up a mountain or jump over a gap they put that shit in. How did nobody at ND bring that up?
 

ZehDon

Member
Ctrl + F "Destiny 2". Smh.

Ok, so you can basically just draw a big red circle around all of Destiny 2, so to be specific: its loot. Before they basically re-developed the entire game a year after it launched, it was a looter shooter designed around static loot, that was balanced so that nothing mattered. Bungie hoped to re-invent the very concept of a loot game by creating placebo loot, and offering a minuscule amount of it. Confounding is too small a word to describe the ineptitude and arrogance of Bungie in this one aspect of their game, and yet the game was filled with dozens of major design decisions that are just as horrifically inept. It'll forever stand as the worst sequel I have ever played.
 
batteries in the flashlight

In real life it's usually hard to switch them off even. I have a torch with three settings: constant beam, slow flash and quick flash.

WTF is up with torches in videogames?

Devs with torches think that we all see dust floating around everywhere and a torch is a solid white circle that jerks for miles like a crazy long lightsaber. If you're in a zombie apocalypse, the last thing you'd want is a torch.

My choice would be water levels. Leave the water levels at the door devs. Just go for a swim after work and get it out of your system. Programming fun water levels will take god-like powers of programming and powerful hardware that we won't see till at least Xbox's next console.
 
Last edited:

Trogdor1123

Member
Was playing secret of Mana last night and this came to mind. Why in the world do you need to run at the edge of the screen to get anywhere? Why not center it? Chrono did just fine that way.
 

MC Safety

Member
I've got one and, yes, it's flashlight specific: Don't map a flashlight to the analog stick.

State of Decay and State of Decay 2 map the flashlight thusly. Go into combat at night, which happens about every 10 seconds, and you're sure to inadvertently push down on the stick and turn off the flashlight.
 
Last edited:
Horizon Zero Dawn's moronic loop of shit gathering for crafting purposes so you can do any kind of combat except for the atrocious and borderline useless melee. Combine that with terrible sidequests and enemies that always show up in hordes and it's like the game is begging you to just run past everything.
 

Vawn

Banned
Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening.

Every time you pick up an item, the game pauses and explains what the item does. Every. Time. Even at the end of the game. Easily the most annoying aspect of my favorite Zelda game.

I might be most excited for the remake just so I can play Link's Awakening without this annoyance.
 

Jigsaah

Gold Member
The Division 2. Living in most dangerous time in America's history, all buildings utterly destroyed, but the usable elevators are pristine.

Destiny 2: Going from the EDZ to the Farm requires a trip to outer space. Aren't they are like right next to each other?

The division as well. Enter a "contaminated" area in beach cargo shorts and a rebreather. Shots that create open wounds doesn't result in infection.

Dark Souls - Carry infinite weapons and armor in your inventory but you're naked = super speed. Put 4 pieces of Havel's gear on = you're rolling like a drunk boulder uphill.
 
Last edited:

Rest

All these years later I still chuckle at what a fucking moron that guy is.
Ah geez, I know I've found plenty, and right now I have no game features to be angry at and regale to you. Shame.

Oh, oh, I've got one
why the fuck did Borderlands 2 downgrade from using a compass to using a minimap, and bloat that compact inventory UI to that giant dumb fuckin consolized mess
god
dammit
shit

It's fine if no one agrees with me I know I'm a lone weirdo for preferring BL1.

also why the shit did Tacoma have me play as a straight-up villain who wants to LIBERATE AI DON'T YOU KNOW HOW DANGEROUS THAT IS
THEY CAN'T BE OUR EQUALS
THEY MUST BE PROGRAMMED TO BE TOOLS NOT FRIENDS
Should have fought to destroy those AI. Remove artificial sentience from our world, preserve the state of humans as our ecosystem's apex predator. Tacoma's a pre-apocalyptic tale.
This is why I didn't let the Quarrians ally with the Geth. Fuck robots, they're not alive.
 

Lanrutcon

Member
AC: Origins. Great game. Ending was some kind of joke.

Developer quiz! Your player is at the end of the game. Which character do you have them play as during the epilogue, and then feature primarily in the ending cutscenes?

a) The protagonist that the player has played as and developed for 99% of the 40 hour game.
b) The protagonist's wife that has featured for a few minutes in cutscenes and about 3 missions out of over 6 dozen.
c) A cat
d) 1942

The AC:O developers picked b). What the fuck. First game I've played in my life where the developers just completely lost it at the end.
 

Tapioca

Banned
Destiny 2.

The game is almost exactly as Destiny 1. It has the same exact enemies, same boss with a diff skin, same level design. It is pathetic.
 

cormack12

Gold Member
AC: Origins. Great game. Ending was some kind of joke.

That's a good point actually. Especially after fighting Septimus as Bayek the first time and getting sucker punched. Plus it was weird because you lost half the skills you'd amassed from the tree.
 

Lanrutcon

Member
That's a good point actually. Especially after fighting Septimus as Bayek the first time and getting sucker punched. Plus it was weird because you lost half the skills you'd amassed from the tree.

I felt so bad for Bayek, as a person and a game character. I should finish the Pharaoh DLC, maybe he gets a proper ending there.
 
Top Bottom