The tutorial explains things that are exactly the same as every game ever (like moving around, moving the camera, etc) but does not explain or even mention the mechanics that are unique to this game that not even someone who is an expert in every game ever would think about. Then tell the player to do a thing you didn’t explain at all how to do.
I swear to fuck, this is the standard for a lot of games these days. I really shouldn’t have to look up a guide or wiki to get the fuck out of the tutorial area.
UI is 30 different sections that are marked with obscure pictures instead of words.
Have to make permanent choices early on. Get poor, half-assed introduction into lore that is way overcomplicated.
Just like real life.
Choices once made (purchasing armor) cannot be undone later. Buy a half-assed weapon in round 1, fill that slot forever and never be able to throw it away later.
Oblivion’s leveling system lol. Make it both possible to level yourself too much AND not enough! Then make every enemy in the game scale. Make a skill level up as you move and another level up as you jump!
4x type games that don’t tell you how values are calculated. “Oh, but there’s a wiki!” That’s great, but not an excuse.
Binary morality system where you can only choose between being a normal person or a mass murdering psychopath. Then your decision has no consequences.
Dialogue system that gives you 3+ options which change literally nothing
All dialogue options have previews that are nothing like what you actually say (Looking at you Cyberpunk) so you try to apologise for someones loss but the actual dialogue is your character being an utter piece of shit without warning. Getting the true ending and several important pieces of gear require you to never be mean to multiple NPCs.
NPC: My husband was killed!
1: Sorry for your loss…
2: It’s about time!1: pfft sorry for your loss 🙄 tell someone who cares 🥱
2: It’s about time we found the MF who did this! Let’s go hunt him down!
Reminds me at the start of witcher 3 my brother was playing and some thugs come annoy you, one option was something like ‘I disagree’ which sounds reasonable, so he picked it. That option has Gerald insulting them and jumping straight into a fight, shit escalated fucking quickly lol
Oh, Bethesda is in this?
No feedback when hitting enemies, besides generic blood splashing and maybe a stumble
Way more health than is necessary or interesting on enemies
Combat system is mindless and boring
Quests are full of “go to this cookie-cutter dungeon, clear it out and bring me the MacGuffin at the end” on loop.
The game has lots of bugs that were in the previous 2 games, and were patched in the fan-patches of both the previous 2 games.
2? More like:
The game has lots of bugs that were in the previous 7 games, and were patched in the fan-patches of all of the previous 7 games.
I encountered bugs playing Starfield that I also experienced in unmodified Morrowind, a game from 20 years and 7 games before SF
Its pathetic and embarrassing afaic, I’d be fired if my work had the same issues someone else fixed 7 iterations ago and i keep breaking it again
Out of curiosity what’s the morrowind bug?
I legit can’t remember now which specific one it was a year later. I think it had something to do with items and physics, I just remember being incredibly frustrated at seeing something I’d also seen in a semi-recent unmodded Morrowind playthrough (my first ever so the bugs were FRESH in my mind as I’d never seen them in a playthrough before)
And yet I still see people posting Skyrim screenshots and praising it… What a mediocre p.o.s.
Enemies leap directly at your camera while screeching like howler monkeys.
> Yes
> Sarcastic yes
> Reluctant yes
> No
No, but actually yes but not right now.
> No
Okay, well I’m gonna take that as a yes
Do you want to die?
A. No
B. No way
C. Definitely notAnd one randomly answers “yes” and you need to restart from a save.
Or the tone of the actual responses doesn’t match the text for the selection of the responses.
“Do you accept the mission?”
- Yes
- No, thanks
- Maybe…
Option 3 actually declares war on quest giver.
Oh and one that just happened to me last night:
Your normal actions still work during dialog so if you press buttons to try to exit out of a dialog, you might accidentally attack the NPC you’re talking to. If you let them kill you, they are still hostile when you return. Need to start a new save to recover. At least they drop the unique key from their shop when you kill them (Dark Souls 1, hopefully it’s no big deal that I had to kill the blacksmith. At least I don’t have to listen to the pounding metal when I spawn above him anymore).
In BG3 Lae’zel asked to be with me and she said “if not now, then later” and I said something like “no thanks” and it permanently locked me out of romancing her.
Or just all bad choices.
Fallout 3 lol
Or even worse, there’s an entire gradient, but what they actually bothered to put in the middle is boring and pointless.
Or there’s a viable third option, but it got scrapped 10 minutes before launch and all the text is at complete odds to the dialogue
Every single shelf, cupboard, sack, discolored patch of dirt, hollow tree, etc. Is lootable. 99.9% of the loot is useless. The remaining 0.1% is key to solving several quests and/or the best stuff in the game.
The inventory is tetris-style. Lots of items arent squares or rectangles. Items do stack, but you can get them only by selecting and choosing “Take one/Take half/Take X”. If you drop something it is GONE.
Oh my wife would love this game, that’s basically all she likes to do in games. Someone needs to just make thief simulator for her.
Months after Red Dead Redemption came out for the PS3, my friend asked me why I didn’t beat it yet. He opened up my inventory and he saw more hunted meat he ever thought someone could accumulate.
All I did was hunt in the game. It was one of the best hunting games of all time.
I had something like this with Final Fantasy IX. Like two-thirds of the way through the game, there’s a minigame that crops up where you have to use a chocobo to walk around these tiny scenes and peck to try to echolocate hidden treasures within a time limit. And I don’t know why, but I got totally addicted to that stupid little minigame, to the point that I kind of broke my brain and had to stop playing the entire game. I did later see some dorm mates in college getting frustrated with that task and get to just zip right through it for them, though, which made it feel slightly less like a savage waste of my lifespan.
Have you played RDR2? Those games have been suggested to me, but I have yet to get around to them. Are they worth playing still?
Bro fucking really?
RDR2 can be very tedious because Rcosktar hates giving players movement control over the character because muh immersion (highly recommend the first person mode), and it has a heavy dosage of cinematic shit, but god damn
It was one of the best games I’ve ever played. I just finished another playthrough recently.
I have only played the first one so all my opinions about the game are from reviews I read. I heard it’s better than the first one and one of the games you should play.
I’m just jealous you’ll get to play RDR2 for the first time. I’ll never have my first time with it again.
I had 2 weeks off work years ago (don’t worry, I’m not American, I get 4 weeks every year, this was just ONE instance of me taking PTO), but my plans for the vacation were canceled… And I had nothing to do. Lo’ and behold, an xbox with RDR2 on it, for me to use when bored.
I essentially worked a full time job playing RDR2 that vacation and regretted none of it. Would’ve been happier to experience it the first time on my PC instead of a base Xbox One, but it’s what I had available to me at that time. This was before the PC release, I’m normally a PC gamer and don’t own any consoles myself.
This did not bother me at all in Skyrim honestly.
That’s just an Elder Scrolls game, and I love it, for some reason.
- Lonely? Don’t worry, the main character is never going to shut up and will comment on every single thing with lines that won’t get old at all.
- Yeah, you can play with your friend… After hours of gameplay, once you both have this super special item and only for certain, boring ass missions.
- You need an account, and we have no native sign up so we’re going to open up a completely different window while you try to drag your mouse awkwardly with the controller. Yes, the cancel button is very close to the confirm, no there’s no confirmation, and yes you’ll have to start this shit from scratch.
- Escort missions, but the escort won’t get out of the fucking way, and your shots can kill them.
- Currency systems that are just currencies within currencies, within currencies.
- The items are easy enough to see, but you have to be in just the right location to pick it up.
- There’s a save screen, but nothing actually pauses.
- I know 99% of games use similar buttons for different functions, but what if we switch it up, just for giggles? Let’s make “jump” the R1 button!
- You can drive, but it’s on ice physics. And, yes, there will be a chase sequence that’s going to take you a very, very long time.
The chase sequence starts with an unskippable cinematic, has no checkpoints, and will force you to rewatch the cinematic every time you fail.
There’s other traffic in the chase sequence, but the traffic is randomized every time, so there’s no way to memorize any pattern.
The mission fails if the target gets too far away.
Any time you bump into anything, it slows you down enough that the target gets too far away.This is also the first time you’ve driven a car in the game.
And there’s an infuriatingly sarcastic fail mesage.
All you had to do is follow the god damned train, CJ.
Rarity tiers but every weapon is the same boring shit.
Fuck you, now I’m never dropping that fancy old stick with a yellow background that dropped 90 levels ago. Who knows, maybe I’m gonna need it some time?
Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don’t get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
Upgrading the equipment has a chance to fail and waste all your resources. The chance to fail increases with every level.
Bonus points: Failing destroys the equipment and you need to start over from scratch.
Ahhh the Ragnarok Online upgrade system! Safe up to… oh god it’s been a while… +7, then the upgrades get much more strong for the next three levels, but with a 50% chance for your weapon to break.
For armor, it was +4 I believe. I bought an insanely expensive card to make me immune to an element and ended up setting with a +7 coat to put it in after breaking tons of coats.
Wait but I actually like this (without the bonus points part)
(I do have a system somewhat like that in a game I’m working on in my free time lol)
You’re a villain. Sorry, the evidence is incontrovertible.
nooooo ;-;
I guess to elaborate, the way I designed it, it doesn’t take very many resources to upgrade, and there’s something akin to checkpoints every 3 levels.
(i’m assuming that, as usual, managing your upgrades is a secondary part of the gameplay, and that we’re talking about a random chance based danger of failure )
why are random setbacks better than just getting out of the player’s way, and getting back to the main action of the game as soon as possible?
if upgrades are rewards for playing well enough to gather resources, why waste the player’s time and effort when they aren’t doing anything wrong?
“wasting” resources can be fine, if you learn something from it, even by process of elimination, like experimenting with different ingredients to find a recipe.
but it sounds here like your game would just slap the player in the face sometimes, to try to make them feel better about when they don’t get slapped.
To give some more details, this isn’t something that happens rarely, the chance of getting to the next checkpoint is actually quite low towards the highest upgrades. To get a weapon to max level (+15), it takes on average around 230 attempts (would be 280, but there’s a sort of pity system that very slightly increases the chance of success for every failure on that weapon). Though it’s also important to mention that this is something only really feasible in the mid to late game, and there’s a mechanic to do multiple attempts at once. Technically, I could also make it so that there is no chance of failure, and instead drastically increase the amount of resources required for the upgrades. But I’m designing the resources needed around the average amount of upgrade attempts it takes.
The reason I’m doing it this way is a similar reason to why I enjoy farming bosses or special enemies in games like Borderlands, it’s fun to get that rare drop (my game also has loot with rarities etc). So it’s not that you’re upgrading and rarely get unlucky and get a failure, but instead you’re farming enemies to get the resources and try to get to the next level checkpoint on your weapon. In looter shooter games (or any loot-based RPGs), you kill bosses again and again to get a special drop, and all the attempts where you don’t get it are technically a “waste”. I think that, because failure is the expected outcome, it’s not something the player gets surprised and annoyed by. Rather, it’s the hunt for getting that success that’s the focus.
I also remember playing older MMOs etc that had weapon breaking mechanics upon failure, but premium items that protected your weapon from breaking. Usually you could get some of those for free, but they were very limited, so those games always were quite P2W. But I did enjoy those systems, just hated the real money aspect.
ah, i was looking forward to saying “you’re not a villain” with more context, but… it seems like you’re making a gacha game. this sounds just like, for example, Genshin Impact wishes. the diagnosis stands :(
There are also four normal endings and a true ending. You can only see the true ending after getting all four normal endings. There are multiple branch points in the story leading to the different endings so you have to start almost from the beginning to find a new one. The true ending is on a wholly separate route that is 99% identical to the one leading to Ending A. There is no new game plus, so you have to start from scratch each time. The true ending boss, unlike the other ending bosses, is absurdly over tuned and the only enemy in the game that requires you use or even know about several obscure mechanics, and even then requires you to have all upgrades maxed out and be near the level cap to even stand a chance.
Although it has a PC version nothing can be configured.
30fps
Full screen only. Game crashes if you try to exit in any way.
You mean erratically fluctuating 3-30FPS just as the game wants you to go through a jump puzzle that requires precise timing and of course physics calculations are based on display FPS.
Doom3
ah, I can’t believe you’ve done this
Ugh the worst. No graphics settings beyond “vysnc” and whether you want a fullscreen or not.
The 7 minutes walk and talk segment reminded me of Forza Motorsport 6. A fucking car game with a fucking UNSKIPPABLE, long ass stupid fucking intro nobody asked for.
Was that the one with the stupid “car launched from plane” bit?
No, it was some bullshit narrator talking about how USA loves cars, how Japan loves cars, how Germans love cars, giving a short rundown of the history of racing or whatever
Game is not open-source.
Does not run fluently on a modern computer in 2024.
