Glaringly obvious design flaws that ruin good games.

[xman]

Mise said:
These flaws don't exactly ruin games, but are really annoying and ofter glaringly obvious.

1) RPG:s that are way too black-and-white with their dialogue choices and character development. Especially prominent in Bioware games - as much as I like their stuff, they have a really nasty habit of forcing their players to become either Disgustingly Good or Retarded Evil or SUFFER - and there might be a Bastard Neutral option if you're really lucky. JRPG's are exempted, as I haven't really seen any player-influenced character development in any one of those that I've played.

2) Games that don't punish failure at all. Ie. Bioshock - it completely kills the games intense and frightening atmosphere when you can't really lose for most of the game. In fact, you can just clobber everyone with a wrench and not fire a single shot since dying is completely inconsequential. Yeah, you can switch the Vita-chambers off with a patch or just refuse to use them (which is what I did), but they shouldn't really exist in the first place IMO, handwaved or not.

3) Stretching the games length by any means necessary, usually done with completely inane plot devices/twist, busywork fetch-quests and powerful-on-paper bosses who are completely irrelevant to the plot. The Witcher/Gothic 3, I'm looking at you.

4) Pointlessly hard jumping puzzles with crappy controls. Dozens of games have done this over the years, and it still isn't funny. The final level of Psychonauts deserves a special mention, being arguably the worst platforming level I've ever played.

5) Redundant combat with no way around it, especially in RPG:s. If I play an Role-Playing-game, it means that I want to play a role of my choosing. Total freedom of choice isn't naturally possible in a video game, but at least let me do something else than beating down those same 50 goblins again. Talk them down, go around them, disable them with traps, lure a pack of bears over, wait until they leave, bribe them etc. Combat in RPG's is very enjoyable when done right, but for every good, balanced fight, there are 100 boring/frustrating/redundant fights to slog through, and it's a damn shame.

 

I agree with all but number 2 I enjoyed that in bioshock allowed me to explore more on how and what I wanted to do I thought it was great