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Generally accepted things in gaming that baffle you

Alts said:
Yes, I'm referring to items that require not only psychic abilities, but for you to play in a wholly illogical manner to achieve.
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That happened once. People need to get over it.
 
Billychu said:
You sounded like you were implying that making story important is bad. Valve's perfect weaving of story and gameplay together is so unique and really makes me wonder what the fuck almost every other developer is doing. No one even tries to match them.
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It is since videogames story suck 99% of the time my them a major factor of games is definitely not on my list of things i think devs should be doing.
 
Cutscenes, period.

No game should ever take away control from the gamer at any point. If you have something important to say or show do it without stopping the game.
 
Melee buttons in FPS's. I mean, mechanically, I get it. What would be the point of using a short range attack if you could do more damage with a long range one that's also easy to aim in short range? But it always amazes me how a single swipe of a knife or a smack from the butt of the gun, even to none important areas like hands, will do more damage than shots from the gun itself.
 
flintstryker said:
It is since videogames story suck 99% of the time my them a major factor of games is definitely not on my list of things i think devs should be doing.
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It's not a bad thing to make it important if it's well done.
 
flintstryker said:
It is since videogames story suck 99% of the time my them a major factor of games is definitely not on my list of things i think devs should be doing.
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Story > Gameplay IMO

Chief example: Bayonetta. Amazing gameplay. Everything else, including story.....atrocious. Hated the game.
 
poppabk said:
Neither is at all realistic, but in real life do you think injured soldiers:
a) sit around until they get better
b) use medical supplies possibly with the aid of a medic
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Comparing health packs with regenerating health in terms of realism is like bitching about a six-inch headstart in a marathon. It's not just that neither is realistic; it's that both are so unrealistic as to be indistinguishable from one another if you're looking at it from that angle. It's an issue of what makes for better mechanical gameplay (both have strengths and weaknesses, as do other health recovery methods), not what makes more intuitive sense (neither makes a goddamn lick of intuitive sense unless you're only comparing to other video games).
 
Having to press a button to pick up ammo. I don't mind having to press a button to pick up a weapon because sometimes it's not the weapon I want. But for ammo? Come on, man!
 
Vincent Alexander said:
Story > Gameplay IMO

Chief example: Bayonetta. Amazing gameplay. Everything else, including story.....atrocious. Hated the game.
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You might as well stop playing games then and just watch movies or read books exclusively.
 
Characters who can take an untold amount of bullets, stab wounds, bludgeonings, explosions and incinerations during the normal course of gameplay... but get killed (permanently) by one stray bullet during a cutscene.
 
Vincent Alexander said:
Have I offended you guys with my opinion?
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Well, it's a weird decision to play video games if you mainly want a good story, and don't care much about gameplay. You'll be able to find way better stories in books or movies.
 
Vincent Alexander said:
Have I offended you guys with my opinion?
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Nope just suggesting potentially better hobbies for you based on the above statement, you might even say I am looking out for your best interest.
 
AndyMoogle said:
Well, it's a weird decision to play video games if you mainly want a good story, and don't care much about gameplay. You'll be able to find way better stories in books or movies.
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I love books and movies too. But I didn't say I don't care much about gameplay. It's simply that If I had a choice between a game having great gameplay or a great story, I'd choose story. That isn't to say I want the gameplay to suck. It's still very important to me.

flintstryker said:
Nope just suggesting potentially better hobbies for you based on the above statement, you might even say I am looking out for your best interest.
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See, and I knew you were a good person at heart.

Holy Order Sol said:
No, but that's kind of like saying the whole cake tasted like shit because the cherry was sour.
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How about if the cherry was a literal piece of shit? That'd ruin my birthday cake a good amount.
 
I've been thinking very hard about regenerating health and came up with a skill-based solution. Just make it so you can press a button to initiate a Gears active reload-style minigame where success fully refills your health. The ability has a cooldown and repeat uses makes the minigame harder and harder until it's near-impossible.

...Somebody already had that idea, right?
 
Just because your game allows people to aim down the sights, doesnt mean that shooting from the hip/using the normal crosshair should be as inaccurate as possible.
 
Vincent Alexander said:
How about if the cherry was a literal piece of shit? That'd ruin my birthday cake a good amount.
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That's where the analogy stops working because no matter how bad it is, story never affects the quality of gameplay in that kind of game. If it did... well beat'em alls would never have had a golden age. However, if your experience ends up being ruined because of something like that then yeah, given the general quality of video game stories, I wonder how you can even enjoy gaming.
 
Vincent Alexander said:
I love books and movies too. But I didn't say I don't care much about gameplay. It's simply that If I had a choice between a game having great gameplay or a great story, I'd choose story. That isn't to say I want the gameplay to suck. It's still very important to me.

How about if the cherry was a literal piece of shit? That'd ruin my birthday cake a good amount.
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But I doubt you've ever actually gotten a great story out of a videogame. How do you feel about Super Mario Galaxy?

I prefer my cake with no cherries, but that's just me.
 
Besides the magic clips of perfect ammo in every shooter ever (cept Op:Flash)

DLC and NASA grade AI for fighting game end bosses. I've never broken a controller... but the closest i ever came was a marathon attempt to beat Dizzy on hard in Guilty Gears. Sooooo frustrating.

Seconded on the tapping buttons to sprint from Mr. The Hutt down here... one of the relics from older games that just won't go away.. like tank steering in RE.
 
You've just finished slicing up wave after wave of enemies with your sword and you turn to face the last remaining foe who is standing at the edge of a cliff. You attack and easily dispatch him with a few deft swings of your blade. You continue to swing wildly at thin air even though you've ceased pressing the attack button and needlessly take a few steps forward while doing so. You fall off the cliff...

Another pet peeve of mine is regarding GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption. For some reason, the default walking speed has your character doing his best impersonation of Tim Conway from the Carol Burnett Show (yes, I'm showing my age here). As a result, my right thumb is spending 90% of its time either tapping or furiously pounding the "A" button in order to have my character move at a reasonable speed. This then takes away my ability to easily manipulate the camera with the right analog stick. So frustrating...
 
PTCoakley said:
"Metroid-vania"... Why isn't it just called Metroid-style or something else? SOTN's open world was based on Metroid's so I don't understand the 'vania bit.
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Yeah, it's general internet ignorance. At first it was a term for Castlevania games that followed the Metroid formula, but people kept misunderstanding it and now every Metroid clone out there gets labeled "Metroidvania" despite having nothing to do with Castlevania. I hate it.
 
The Xtortionist said:
...Somebody already had that idea, right?
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Shouldn't have said anything. This will be in a game early next year and it will cut you deep. I presented a new style of losing life/staying alive in a Samurai action/rpg style pitch for my first Game Design class at AIP and I sware to god my teach stole that shit and sold it to ubi for AC. The jaw drop when i first saw in-game fighting was pretty intense....
 
Screen tearing and framerates that are all over the place. Nothing breaks immersion faster, I'll never understand why graphical fidelity takes precedence over having a game run smoothly.
 
For me its the practice that started this gen with games being released full of bugs, framerate issues, clipping, audio cutting out, save data issues, etc. and the company releasing a patch a week or so later to "fix" the issue. Those games shouldn't have been released until those issues were addressed, imo.
 
artwalknoon said:
For me its the practice that started this gen with games being released full of bugs, framerate issues, clipping, audio cutting out, save data issues, etc. and the company releasing a patch a week or so later to "fix" the issue. Those games shouldn't have been released until those issues were addressed, imo.
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see socom 4 for a perfect example.......
 
Jumping into a multiplayer game and getting killed by people that have guns/attachments/perks that you haven't unlocked yet.

Guns that feel/sound like toys.

Melee that is quicker/more powerful than firing your gun.

Basically Call of Duty's entire design philosophy.

Console games that run at < 30 frames per second...especially in competitive multiplayer. (Killzone 3 >:|)

Bioware's neutering of RPG elements.

Ripping out content from the game to sell separately on day one as DLC.

PS3's lack of a central party-chat system.
 
The Xtortionist said:
I've been thinking very hard about regenerating health and came up with a skill-based solution. Just make it so you can press a button to initiate a Gears active reload-style minigame where success fully refills your health. The ability has a cooldown and repeat uses makes the minigame harder and harder until it's near-impossible.

...Somebody already had that idea, right?
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Honestly, I think it's kind of a solution to a non-problem. If regenerating health removes any sort of skill requirement for your game, it's because your game is bad, not because you've chosen a bad method of health recovery. Yeah, it sucks if the way to win is just to duck behind a rock and wait every time your health gets low, with no downside of repercussion, but what that means is that A) Your enemy AI sucks so bad that they never advance on the player or otherwise flush him/her out of cover, and B) Your enemies can be defeated by popping out, chipping away with a bullet or two, and then popping back into cover. Solving those problems immediately gives you a more rewarding and fun game, without requiring you to introduce some weird artifice to a mechanic as basic as health recovery.

There are more than just the two methods of implementing health recovery, anyway; pretty much all of them carry their own pros and cons that go way deeper than 'requires skill: is good' and 'does not require skill: is bad':

Health packs:
+ Adds a sense of permanence to your game; doing well at one combat encounter will leave you better prepared for the next one, and limping through with 1HP is going to make the next one more difficult. Rewards efficient, skillful play.
+/- Same as above, but punishes unskillful play; rewarding the players who do well and punishing the players who don't can be a bit like giving food to the gluttonous and starving the hungry.
- Combat and encounter design becomes inextricably entwined with level design. Essentially health loss and health recovery become two completely disparate elements of design, and requires that every combat encounter in the game, no matter how minor or major, needs to be counterbalanced in the level design with enough health packs to maintain game balance. Works fine in something as scripted and linear as Half-Life, where there's really never more than one way to get through something, but becomes difficult-to-impossible when your combat encounters are more open-ended and you can't easily predict where the player is going to be at any given point; something like Halo or Lost Planet would be problematic for this approach, let alone games with actual exploration.


Regenerating Health:
+ Makes health recovery systematic. When a combat encounter is placed into the game, you don't need to go back and make further iterations on the level design to accommodate. More open-ended, unpredictable combat encounters can be added to the game, since health recovery is essentially in the player's hands.
+/- No permanence whatsoever. There's no vicious cycle where poor players are put at a larger and larger disadvantage as the level progresses, but neither is there any reward for players who manage to perform well.
- As a systematic approach, it requires that other systematic elements of the game be up to snuff. As above, if your enemies can be whittled down while popping in and out of cover every few seconds, the game is trivialized, and the same thing happens if enemies will never flush the player out of their hiding spots.


Inventory Health Kits - As in Bioshock and Stalker, the player is allowed to carry around a stock of health-restoring items, and can use them at will.
+ Permanence and consequence are maintaiined, without being tied intimately to the level design. The downsides are somewhat mitigated as well, without sacrificing much of the reward; the good player is still rewarded by being able to progress and explore at a fast, steady rate, while the poor player merely has to make more trips back to collect/buy recovery items instead of being painted into a corner.
- Very easy to completely trivialize the game's difficulty. In both Bioshock games, enemies drop more money than it takes to brute force them to death by spamming health kits, and nowhere in either game will you find yourself in a situation where nine health kits isn't enough to chug your way from one Circus of Value to the next, whereas in Stalker, the only times I died were if I was shot to death before I even had a chance to heal; at all times I was packing around so many health kits that I was effectively immortal to anything that didn't kill me before I could react. Also still tied in somewhat with the level design; it can be very feast-or-famine if you're not careful.


Hybrid Health Pack/Regeneration: Most prominent in Halo ODST and Reach, though there are other examples - the player is given a shield that regenerates, but beneath that has a health meter that needs to be refilled via health pack pickups.
+ The advantages of both 'pure' systems, only scaled back - your reward for doing well isn't as drastic as in Half-Life, since you can never really go below having a maxed-out shield available, but you've still got an advantage over a guy who limps his way through. The level design is not particularly important, and the systematic approach still holds.
- As above, disadvantages of both, scaled back. Tossing the pizza crusts to the hungry, but the advantage is still going to the people who don't need it. Still quite susceptible to systematic problems with enemy AI and design trivializing the difficulty.


Push Buttons To Recover: Pretty close to what you're suggesting, although the only example I can think of that sticks entirely to this approach is Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath. When you take damage, you need to mash a button to recover, which can be done at any time, but can be interrupted by enemy fire, and makes you immobile for the duration of the recovery. It lacks the cooldown idea and getting-successively-more-difficult elements of your idea, but I don't know if those would necessarily change the outcome.
+/- Pretty much all the advantages and disadvantages of Health Regeneration still apply; needing to push the buttons is either a positive or a negative depending on whether you think it adds to the urgency or just annoys.


Enemies Drop Bits of Health: Although I'm sure there are other games that do this, I can't think of a better example than Lost Planet 1. T-Eng acts as a catchall Do-Everything meter, acting as a time limit, fueling the pilotable robots and acting as ammo for your energy weapons, but the most important function is that it acts as an extended health meter. There's no delay before your health regenerates in LP1, and it regenerates so quickly that you'll never really die unless you take two heavy hits (ie: Rocket Launcher, giant bug stomps) in quick succession - but every time it needs to restore your health, it drains off your T-Eng at a furious clip. Basically every enemy in the game drops T-Eng on death, as do all sorts of storage tanks and exploding barrels throughout the level.
+ Huge degree of permanence. The difference between doing good and bad in Half-Life is that you'll either walk into your next encounter with 25% health and no shields, or full health and full shields. In Lost Planet, the difference is between walking in with half a health bar (that drains every second you don't have T-Eng), no fuel for a robot, and no ammunition for energy-based weapons, or walking in with 1000-1100% health and tons of fuel for any powerful weapons or robots you may have. At the same time, the system is largely systematic, meaning that level design can be open and only loosely controlled. Any time you have to fight something is an opportunity to lose or recover health, and many of the props in the background of the level also act as small stores of health - however, hiding behind cover forever is not really to your benefit.
- The disadvantages of permanence are ratcheted up just as much as the advantages are, given the huge variance between efficient and inefficient play. Those who can play the game well will almost never die, given the tremendous advantages they can accrue throughout the level, and those who play poorly can be pretty easily outgunned. And while the game isn't quite as trivialized and you aren't quite as immortal when you have a lot of T-Eng as you are in Bioshock/Stalker with a ton of health kits (since you can be killed in two successive hits, as long as they come one after another), it still sort of tears down the overall difficulty level when you are so easy to kill.


Hybrid Push Buttons/Bits of Health: I'm only putting this in here because thinking about Lost Planet and health recovery made me realize how different it really was in Lost Planet 2. While the basic idea is largely the same as LP1 (as far as Health Recovery goes, anyway), there's a big difference in the mechanics of the actual recovery - specifically, that your health will only 'automatically' restore at a snail's pace, too slow to really matter in any extended fight. Instead, the player needs to hold down a button to activate the speedy regeneration, which leaves them vulnerable and open to interruption by enemy fire.
+ All the advantages of the LP1 system, with the added bonus that the game is never really trivialized no matter how much T-Eng you collect, since you have to consciously find a time when you can duck out of the fray for a few seconds to manually restore your health.
- Again, disadvantages of permanence out the wazoo; a lot of the game's negative opinions essentially boiled down to the game leaning so heavily on the idea of permanence and consequence that a lot of reviewers had to play the tougher missions over and over until they got it right.



I don't think you can really fairly point to any given system and say that it is inherently more or less skillful than another; there's a whole spectrum of ways you can handle that mechanic, and choosing the best one for your game is a pretty complex equation that needs to take into account almost every element of your game's overall design. I don't think Vanquish would be improved by any sort of health drop, for example, Stalker doesn't need a Halo-style shield, and as much fun as it would be to be able to hammer a button and see Gordon Freeman beat his chest like The Stranger until all the bullets fell out of him, it would probably degrade the game's overall quality to do so.
 
Wolverine regen in games that you play as a normal human being

How cheats and cool unlocks like big head mode are a thing of the past

How Cell Shading is insanely underused (see goal : realism)

Games so fixed by the "white hetero teen male" audience that you almost feel bad for playing it if you are outside of this audience.
---Also, Mature = Boobs and Blood

Lack of Cofigurable controls.... and the only place to see wich button does what is in the insanely fast loading screens.

Games where gameplay is secondary (Heavy Rain and others "omfg cinematic" games, i'm talking to you =P)
---Also, games taking thenselfs insanely more serious than they should

Pratical death of mascots and their games.

Lack of an option to rewatch the cutscenes in cutscene heavy games

Game doing bizarre gameplay choices based on realism that don't make any sense in reality:
---Crazy inventory systens that have limit, like resident evil 5 or the already said "only 30 types of items, but can have 999 of each"
---Health Bars gone ... instead we get crazy bloody eyes and stuff that even shows from where you are getting hit on your vision
---Stamina to stop you from running around like a crazy .... and then a quicktime event that shows that your character is a mix of a Ninja with an Yoga Master
---Making cover based gameplay... and showing everything you wouldn't be able to see if you were covered because when you get in "cover mode" the camera does and insane zoom out
---The model showing signs of damage ... yet you run, fight and do everything else normal


So basicaly .... i want more "for fun" games like the past
 
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