What are some of the biggest examples of bad game design you’ve seen? -

[JamesFargo]

Menus that pop up and have you make a decision, without being able to check what you're deciding on.

That's a common complaint I have with sim games, as well.

As far back as Civ II. I take it these Elvis heads represent "entertainers"? Uhh, ok. Why do I have to sacrifice tax collectors for Elvis heads? And how will I know when I need more Elvis heads? Answer: I just wait for the rioting to start.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

That's a common complaint I have with sim games, as well.

As far back as Civ II. I take it these Elvis heads represent "entertainers"? Uhh, ok. Why do I have to sacrifice tax collectors for Elvis heads? And how will I know when I need more Elvis heads? Answer: I just wait for the rioting to start.

That being said, I miss the FMV Civ 2 advisors. Especially when you change governments and go through a period of anarchy; they're all yelling, arguing, or (in the Elvis impersonator's case) singing loudly. Funny shit.

 

[JamesFargo]

they're all yelling, arguing, or (in the Elvis impersonator's case) singing loudly. Funny shit.

Speaking of Elvis impersonators:

 

[I Love Beef]

This comes from a game that I actually like.

So, Mega Man Network Transmission is a take on the idea of putting the EXE/Battle Network games, which are based upon the rise of the internet and advanced computer sciences and are action RPGs, together with the Classic series; yes, there is a distinction between them and every other installment.

How does it do this?

Like a mixed bag.

So first, there's the Battle Chip system in this game. Battle Chips in NT try to combine the Special Weapons feature from Classic and the Battle Chip functions from EXE. The problem with this however is that this translates over..... very rough. I'll explain in detail:

1. Battle Chips are given many "drawback" or "weakness" or caveats; like from EXE, they are completely randomized by selection, have a limited number of uses, and once they are used up, they are gone, and like from Classic, they consume MP or Memory Points, which acts like practically MP and a stamina system to help prevent spamming, and you can get a higher limit of uses if you collect more chips. In this case, if you are online as Mega Man and you run out of one chip, you cannot just up and reboot your folder from the menu; you are out until you miraculously get more of another chip from what gave you it in the first place or log out.
2. MP kind of sucks in this game as you can't up and get weapon energy like from Classic, and if you are out of it, you need to retreat and recharge. You can get more MP Ups, but the highest you can ever get is like 200-250 or so.
3. Chip attacks are extremely hit or miss in this game. Bomb attacks are laughably near useless as they are practically the rock from Friday the XIIIth on NES, and you will need to be reliant on some varieties because your buster gun is miserably weak until you upgrade it. I'll get to this later, but overall, you need to have your folder open for utility chips like Dash and Double Jump which allows you to reach places you can't normally get to. Also, unlike other games in the series where you get a massive folder of up to 30 chips, you get a folder of 20, which is sort of reasonable, but the same rules from BN2 apply (only 5 Navi Chips, you get three varieties of enemy chips/rare chips if you want to PA, etc.)
4. Because of the random nature of chips, you get a feature called Custom Set.... which allows you to only set one chip of your choice upon selection, and is limited by its size limit dependent on the megabytes of the Battle Chip you're using. EXE fans know what I'm talking about. You'd think that because you're playing an action game, you'd be able to set, well, more chips, but no. You also get this feature after both the beginning stage and the first stage, the first stage being where FireMan.EXE causes a literal flame war online and causes much of the net to be a lava pool and is a real pain in the fucking ass to beat the first time around.
5. You do get Program Advances, which are special attacks that are gained through specific chip combinations, but you only get better ones as you progress and because Lan is a miserable flesh pile, he gives you chips at random until the Custom screen is filled, and even then, he'll probably switch out some chips if you are in desperate need of a PA.

These features kind of make NT a pain in the ass to play because these apply to all Battle Chips, and someone honest to heaven was being a lazy fuck at the studio. They even got the rights to show the fucking anime opening, which in that iteration, you can use Sword chips indefinitely as long as they still have durability, for one example. I can give the pass that this was a kind of experiment to know how BN and Classic would work, but come on, make some better gameplay beyond just BN in Classic Form in Textbook Pedant Definition.

Then, there's the fact you start off incredibly weak. Your buster cannot charge and only does only like what, 10 damage due to scaling (honestly if your buster did 1 damage like in BN, lol the game would suck), your folder has a bunch of chips that will be replaced once you find better ones, and you have basic as fuck health at 100 HP that will get you killed from spikes and tough as nails enemies that scale high once you get into the later beginning parts. This game is also like a Metroidvania and encourages exploration, but you will need to be a master at navigating online and platforming like no one's business because fuck your life if Mega Man runs into a security spike at this part of the game. There's parts where you need to navigate a small maze of spikes, where Quick Man and his lasers come back, and even Guts Man's monorails return later in the game, and if you want the best ending, you better know how to play Castlevania, and I mean Pre-Symphony of the Night, that much I'll say.

And still, I like this game.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Heh, speaking of games we love that still have glaring flaws, I mentioned this in the 'biggest bullshit in a video game' thread.

System Shock 2 is a wonderfully atmospheric game, but the combat mechanics need an overhaul. Gun degradation is so bad a lot of people just switch it off (the devs did admit they didn't intend for weapons to degrade THAT fast), and the overall weapon balance is hosed.

Spoiler: SS2 Sperging here

In System Shock 2, you have four types of weapons:

Standard (wrench, pistol, shotgun, assault rifle)
Energy (laser pistol, EMP rifle, laser rapier)
Heavy (grenade launcher, fusion cannon, stasis gun)
Exotic (crystal shard, viral proliferator, annelid launcher)

The problem is that some weapons are more effective on enemies than others, but enemy spawns change as the game goes on and you advance. So you have a classic case of weapons and skills no longer being effective -- and you can't respec. That's what hurts energy weapons; the later annelid creatures are resistant to the damage, while you don't get Exotic and the viral proliferator and annelid launcher early enough to really make a difference.

You can pretty much go through the whole game with Standard 6/Energy 1/Heavy 3/Exotic 1. That lets you use the assault rifle (general combat), laser pistol (camera shooting), grenade launcher (hard targets) and the shard when you need to conserve ammo. Heck, you don't even need the shard if you don't want to spend those upgrade points; at Standard 6 with good strength the wrench is damned effective.

 

[Twitter Hate Mob]

NPCs who just won't shut up - enemy combatants who have a variety of taunts, ok fine, there's an incentive to kill the mouthy one. When it's shopkeepers you'll be visiting frequently and they have exactly one line and it's really annoying?

Yes Wasteland 3, I mean you and "Guhns. Sanctified by blood. Blood. Sanctified by guhns."

 

[JamesFargo]

When it's shopkeepers you'll be visiting frequently and they have exactly one line and it's really annoying?

The solution is to hire the RE4 guy to voice them all.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

NPCs who just won't shut up - enemy combatants who have a variety of taunts, ok fine, there's an incentive to kill the mouthy one. When it's shopkeepers you'll be visiting frequently and they have exactly one line and it's really annoying?

Yes Wasteland 3, I mean you and "Guhns. Sanctified by blood. Blood. Sanctified by guhns."

"Stay a while, and listen!"

Boy, did I get tired of hearing Deckard Cain say that.

 

[Honored guest]

Balancing your game around the top 1% that play for 8+ hours a day really killed Path of Exile for me. When I first started playing way back when lock boxes were new I moved slow, and wasn't very efficient but I still got loot. GGG has been stealth nerfing drop rates across the board, and its gotten to the point where you have to plan out how your going to farm if you want to make any meaningful gains. I just want to kill monsters and collect loot, I don't want to draft up a business plan on how i'm going to progress in the end game.

You best hope the build your working towards doesn't include any items in the current meta, because if it does you'll never be able to afford trading for them since the devs have fostered an extreme meta rat race within the community with the way they nerf items and builds. Speaking of the rat race if any build gains popularity even if its not particularly OP then the following league that build and maybe even an entire skill mechanic will be nerfed into the ground.

And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that due to the success that POE has become this cancer is spreading with other a-rpg developers copying GGG in hopes of becoming successful.

 

[Borzoi]

Balancing your game around the top 1% that play for 8+ hours a day really killed Path of Exile for me. When I first started playing way back when lock boxes were new I moved slow, and wasn't very efficient but I still got loot. GGG has been stealth nerfing drop rates across the board, and its gotten to the point where you have to plan out how your going to farm if you want to make any meaningful gains. I just want to kill monsters and collect loot, I don't want to draft up a business plan on how i'm going to progress in the end game.

You best hope the build your working towards doesn't include any items in the current meta, because if it does you'll never be able to afford trading for them since the devs have fostered an extreme meta rat race within the community with the way they nerf items and builds. Speaking of the rat race if any build gains popularity even if its not particularly OP then the following league that build and maybe even an entire skill mechanic will be nerfed into the ground.

And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that due to the success that POE has become this cancer is spreading with other a-rpg developers copying GGG in hopes of becoming successful.

From what I hear from no lifers who play the game they just keep nerfing the same top tier builds but those builds are still better than anything else so people just play more and more gimped versions of the same thing every single league.

 

[Honored guest]

From what I hear from no lifers who play the game they just keep nerfing the same top tier builds but those builds are still better than anything else so people just play more and more gimped versions of the same thing every single league.

For the most part thats true, the only problem is the skills and items that get caught in the crossfire. GGG likes to nerf skills and mechanics in broad ways that almost all ways hit others and they never go back and buff those skills that unintentionally got nerfed, so those idiots end up hurting build diversity by killing other builds while trying to nerf the meta skills that people still continue to play.

 

[FriendlyPrimarina]

NPCs who just won't shut up - enemy combatants who have a variety of taunts, ok fine, there's an incentive to kill the mouthy one. When it's shopkeepers you'll be visiting frequently and they have exactly one line and it's really annoying?

Yes Wasteland 3, I mean you and "Guhns. Sanctified by blood. Blood. Sanctified by guhns."

"Oh, what a delight! Another charming customer!"
"Oh, let me just drop everything to serve you! I don't mind, really."

Like 5 different lines, and they're all awful.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Speaking of action-RPGs, let me throw an obvious one that was probably mentioned before but I can't be fucked to go looking through 20+ pages.

A meta being based around items that increase skill damage by some absurd amount, for the purpose of creating or making a build "viable", just to compensate for numbers getting out of hand. Case in point, set bonuses in Diablo 3 (yeah, I'm a peasant who got back into it, blame my friends). Every single one increases damage for certain skills by at least 10,000%, resulting in a situation where if you want to do any damage at all you need to use either a full set or one of the gimmick items that give you a 10,000% damage bonus for not having a set.

I understand that action-adventure games are numbers games, but when they have to go logarithmic with monster health (and accordingly player damage) for the sake of keeping the no-lifers running on the gear treadmill, someone dropped the fucking ball.

 

[Mnutu]

Speaking of action-RPGs, let me throw an obvious one that was probably mentioned before but I can't be fucked to go looking through 20+ pages.

A meta being based around items that increase skill damage by some absurd amount, for the purpose of creating or making a build "viable", just to compensate for numbers getting out of hand. Case in point, set bonuses in Diablo 3 (yeah, I'm a peasant who got back into it, blame my friends). Every single one increases damage for certain skills by at least 10,000%, resulting in a situation where if you want to do any damage at all you need to use either a full set or one of the gimmick items that give you a 10,000% damage bonus for not having a set.

I understand that action-adventure games are numbers games, but when they have to go logarithmic with monster health (and accordingly player damage) for the sake of keeping the no-lifers running on the gear treadmill, someone dropped the fucking ball.

My eyes start to glaze over the moment the number 1000 gets involved. You can make a compelling and challenging action game without resorting to big numbers.

 

[Michael Wade]

Hunt down the freeman is quite possibly the most aggressively bad "modern" game Ive ever played in terms of design. It's beyond belief how bad it is in terms of enemy placement and locations.

 

[An Ghost]

C:dda has a lot of menus. Its an ascii crafting survival rogue like so of course it does. Sometimes you [e]xamine trees to cut them down. But use the [*]construction menu to dig a hole. Sometimes [a]ctivate instead of [&]crafting to process materials. Theres even an advanced interaction button that i dunno what it does. Unloading guns is big U. But [r]eloading is small r. Big R for [R]eading. Im autistic enough to know the difference now but I remember starting out reading a guide on the wiki that said "construct a brazier with *" which isnt true. Its crafted with & and dropped.

And no mouse support. The bane of menus.

My eyes start to glaze over the moment the number 1000 gets involved. You can make a compelling and challenging action game without resorting to big numbers.

I played a lot of wc3 and starcraft 2 arcade and people always resort to this. Big damage for maximum cool. But its way harder to compare 10000000000 hp and dealing 1000000 damage to 10000 hp and dealing 1 damage.

 

[Kane Lives]

Balancing your game around the top 1% that play for 8+ hours a day really killed Path of Exile for me. When I first started playing way back when lock boxes were new I moved slow, and wasn't very efficient but I still got loot. GGG has been stealth nerfing drop rates across the board, and its gotten to the point where you have to plan out how your going to farm if you want to make any meaningful gains. I just want to kill monsters and collect loot, I don't want to draft up a business plan on how i'm going to progress in the end game.

You best hope the build your working towards doesn't include any items in the current meta, because if it does you'll never be able to afford trading for them since the devs have fostered an extreme meta rat race within the community with the way they nerf items and builds. Speaking of the rat race if any build gains popularity even if its not particularly OP then the following league that build and maybe even an entire skill mechanic will be nerfed into the ground.

And the cherry on top of this shit sundae is that due to the success that POE has become this cancer is spreading with other a-rpg developers copying GGG in hopes of becoming successful.

Just one point of contention here: I don't think GGG has been stealth nerfing drops. Or at least not intentionally. The main problem with modern POE is the sheer amount of trash uniques and items that were added and powercreeped over the years. It's why it's getting to the point where you need to plan your farm because the odds of the correct item for the correct build dropping is astronomically low and being diluted by trash drops.

 

[Kheapathic]

Started South Park: The Fractured But Whole, talk about a massive downgrade into an already unbalanced piece of shit battle system. The Stick of Truth was unbalanced, but it worked both ways; you could sweep your enemies in a turn or two (outside of bosses) and they could do the same for you. But this shit that I'm playing now, everything is worse. The writing and jokes don't feel as good, the combat/gear/upgrade system is complete fucking shit, and to try and hide their shit design, they try to hide it behind poorly planned battles where a single battle is more like several battles all dumped into one, and there's no heals between. So if you squeak by the first phase, well, get fucked because the damage done then is carried over into the next phase. Don't want to go into a full review about how the sequel is a step back, but the combat system and everything around that is a pile of shit. Oh and they added a crafting mechanic, because that's hot and popular right. Oh, and the game operates with an auto-save system that will fuck you over, and the "manual save" is just a copy of the most recent auto-save, so if you did something after an auto-save and then make a manual save, go back and do it, because it didn't count... bitch.

A meta being based around items that increase skill damage by some absurd amount, for the purpose of creating or making a build "viable", just to compensate for numbers getting out of hand. Case in point, set bonuses in Diablo 3 (yeah, I'm a peasant who got back into it, blame my friends). Every single one increases damage for certain skills by at least 10,000%, resulting in a situation where if you want to do any damage at all you need to use either a full set or one of the gimmick items that give you a 10,000% damage bonus for not having a set.

I understand that action-adventure games are numbers games, but when they have to go logarithmic with monster health (and accordingly player damage) for the sake of keeping the no-lifers running on the gear treadmill, someone dropped the fucking ball.

It's been a while since I played D3, but without a set, I got (what I think was) an Ancient Artifact for my Mage, that did something crazy like a 30,000% increase in damage if an attack stuns. It just so happens the Mage has an augment for Chain Lightning that has a 15% chance to stun. I've killed Treasure Goblins of all types in under five seconds. Large groups of enemies fucking evaporate into the air. I had low opinions of D3 because "harder" just meant we cranked the numbers so fucking high it's ridiculous, and then the power creep carried over to the players.

 

[NerdShamer]

I was going to bitch about Bravely Default 2, since I have to grind to unlock ANOTHER ending after beating the crap out the magic mummy thing around 3 time and enjoying the bullshit ending, but then I found this.

The first game is okay until the hidden chapter, where you get a boss that will just murder you if you aren't Cheesing the game/Over leveled and does so by pulling really annoying crap like "Applying Weakness to fire to the entire party" and this ability negates any equipment that you have that negates fire damage so the sensible equipment to use such as the accessories that let you absorb fire damage are completely useless.

Bravely Default 2 doesn't have that, but it has this really annoying issue where every single boss in the game has counter attack mechanics, and late game it devolves into "Counter attacks every action you can take" so you basically have to equip every character in the game with the ability that lets them evade counter attacks.

Of course that only solves half the problem because a bunch of the endgame bosses including all the optional ones counter attack by getting Brave Points (extra turns) which the counter attack negation ability DOESN'T NEGATE. This gets further absurd when you get classes like Red Mage who cast two spells every time you cast a spell so if you use a Red mage a boss will gain 2 Brave Points.

There is also The Spiritbringer class which has this really fucking stupid passive that occasionally dispels effects on the party but they didn't make the ability differentiate between positive and negative effects so you dispel your own Reraise/Regen/Haste/Damage Reflection effects, combined with the Boss HP amounts you just sort of make boss fights long slogs.


The biggest issue the series has is that the Brave/Default system actively harms the game, the games would be so much better without it because you don't get boss fights where they can bank 4 turns and just chunk your party.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I was going to bitch about Bravely Default 2, since I have to grind to unlock ANOTHER ending after beating the crap out the magic mummy thing around 3 time and enjoying the bullshit ending, but then I found this.

It gets worse because basically the end game Fights devolve into "Abuse the fact that every human boss (all of them really) lacks immunity to some major status effects. You can legitimately lock down entire "Trials" because nothing has protection to Paralyze.

It's awful and boring, I will say however..the ultimate weapons (Rare drops from the Trials) are fucking cool at least.