Game environments you just can't stand?

So for some reason, there's certain video game environments that I cannot stand. I find them painful to play through and just want out of that area as soon as possible. These areas include, but are not limited to: Glowy mushroom caves/forests, whatever the hell you would call those forest dungeons in KoA, and dwarven ruins (or ruins in general for that matter).

I don't know why, but I really hate when these type of areas show up in the games I'm playing, and unfortunately, they all seem to be a staple in RPG's. At least the ones I've played anyway.

So yeah. Do you guys have any environments you hate too, or am I just being a total weirdo here? :P

I'm cool with ruins. There's always great juxtaposition between grandeur and destruction, and it gives the place a history, it shows its age and all the events that led to it in its current state.

However, I'm full on done with caves and sewers. I'm still into underground complexes, but not the sanitation system and not allegedly natural caves.

I love good ruins.

I don't get the obsession with sewers. They're not actually that big and they're supposed to be full of shit. You'd probably get sick just by stepping in one, and actually falling into the water? Disgusting.

@brodehouse: I'd be down with some caves that were actually more like real caves, though I guess that would only be workable with certain types of games. Sewers are indeed the worst. I hear you on ruins but think that it's really rare for them to be done well, so I think I'm more of a mind with the OP. Dark Souls and Shadow of the Colossus both do ruins very well.

Ice levels, I suppose. Ice and snow can be breathtakingly beautiful, but I can't think of a game that I actually thought captured even a fraction of that. I think they instead tend to the bland. On top of that, they're breeding grounds for awful slipping mechanics in a wide variety of genres. I suppose I tend more toward moderate distaste than actual "cannot stand" level feeling, though.

I think the problem isn't so much the environments themselves so much as a lack of creativity in how they're commonly executed. I can't think of a staple environment that couldn't be done well if it wasn't too often done in a by-the-numbers fashion. Except sewers. Fuck them.

destroyed city or being destroyed city as you play through...Im probably alone in this but Ive seen alot of cities getting destroyed ala Gears,COD, and yes even freaking fallout etc. I know shit has to happen but being in a collapsing building or jumping over rubble, or seeing bodies under rubble...

I would just rather go into the sewers :P

yeah I'm not big on sewers either. There are good ones (the one in Mother 3 was alright) but by and large they're all terrible. Especially the one in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. Fuck that sewer D:

I'm getting pretty tired of "Unnamed Middle-Eastern Country" as a setting, but I guess I've also become a lot more tired of games that use that setting in the first place.

Getting a little sick of Sanctuary. Been playing a lot of Diablo III lately.

I'm jumping on the sewer-hate bandwagon. I've never liked sewers, but I can see why devs like sewers and caves, they aren't open world areas, so they are much easier to create. They can funnel the character exactly where they want them.

I don't care for desert settings either as they always have to do some kind of Egyptian influence with them and its getting really cliche. I'd be up for some Sedona style desert settings though.

I can't stand most COD Ghost maps, they just trash. Kind of sad because I actually like the way they tuned the gunplay this time.

@subyman: I'd be up for Egyptian desert settings that simply delved a little deeper into the culture rather than just the architecture everyone might recognize and the handful of religious figures/stories that are widely known. Though It'd be nice to see acknowledgement of other desert cultures as well.

I'd probably be more down on the desert setting as a whole if Journey hadn't so comprehensively proved how wonderful it can be.

Towns in RPGs.

Sewers are almost always bad and when they're not they're just boring.

Anything in sewers or underwater, with the exception of the amazing deep-sea visuals in AC4.

EDIT: Oh, and Rapture (duh!). Basically anything where you have to swim pisses me off because the controls/camera are usually super frustrating.

@towersixteen: cryostasis does beautiful ice and snow.

Sewers man.

Fuck sewers.

I hate em. HATE EM SO HARD.

The other thing I wanted to share was that I usually find myself yearning for big icescapes (like Antarctica or something) but then you get and it's kinda... boring.

I generally don't like the "inside the monster" type levels. In particular Kingdom Hearts and Devil may cry 3 variants really annoyed me.

Lava levels.

Generic post-apocalypse crumbled grey concrete and brown rebar.

I will take any level design if it has good art direction. I don't like the sewers at the start of Gish though. But then I don't like anything about the way Gish looks. Why do I keep referencing Gish all of a sudden?

I seem to recall Beyond Good and Evil being an early game to do snow right too.

There are good ruins and bad ruins; so that's a little too vague. But if you narrow it down to something like a Sewer level, well there's plenty of shitty sewer levels but you wind with awesome stuff like MGS3 occasionally and pretty good stuff like the Depths in Dark Souls. There are visually boring things that are still engaging on a combat front (Space Marine is the most recent example I can think of); pretty sure you have to go case by case on this issue and not just say all of "type X is bad."

I honestly can't think of any. A lot of people complain about "sewer levels" and "fire levels" or whatever, and they don't bother me at all. Hell, even "water levels", which are almost universally reviled don't bother me.

@subyman: The real, best "benefit" of a sewer level is they're basically graph-paper mazes. You can copy-and-paste all over that shit.

I think sewers are cool. Caves can fuck right off though, it's an annoying excuse to have really linear levels, with dank boring art. I mean I guess a cave could be cool, but I haven't seen one yet.

Warehouses, derelict buildings, jungles, forests, sewers, tunnels of any variety..

Snow levels, which most take as an excuse for generic, white, empty spaces...

Swamps and sewers, yuck.

I don't if there is any particular environment I'm tired of, but I am tried of the fact that many games in a series often use the same ones in more or less the same ways.

Take the Mario games, they pretty much always have the Snow world, the Desert world, the 1-1 green area, the world eight lava/Bowser area, etc etc etc.

Fucking swamps.

The sewers in Resident Evil 4 are cool...

Ice levels. Fuck ice levels. To be more specific, any "level" where your mobility is impaired in some way. Sliding around all over the place is not fun.

swimming in water levels or the modern military setting is what i'm sick of. just so bored when i see either.

Yep, even when the level design is cool, sewers just look fucking boring. The Depths is the most boring-looking place in Dark Souls, even though it has so many cool stuff in it.

I thought of two examples of sewers and caves that I am okay with.

Connecting caves, or caves that open due to a fissure in the ground where if you explore into it you find a massive buried magical city? Those caves are cool because they lead to something cool. If it's just a cave that ends in... cave... then fuck it.

And sewers are okay if they are sewers or sanitation system of an active space ship. The reason sewers show up in fiction is almost always surprise attacks; sneak through the sewers. Or sometimes people get stuck down there after a big collapse. Imagine that on an active space ship. You'll see all sorts of weird mechanical shit that you don't know what they do. The only interesting thing you'll see in real sewers is a sump pump.

I think sewers are fine in fantasy games. The labyrinthine nature of them can be really cool, albeit maybe a bit unrealistic. Some sewers I think work well are the ones in Oblivion and Skyrim, but one recent game that had bad sewer levels was Diablo 3. There was nothing interesting about them and that game's combat isn't at its best in corridors.

I honestly can't think of environments I don't like. As long as they're done well, any environment can be fantastic. Of the things mentioned, "glowy mushroom" areas, caves, ruins ("Dwarven" ruins are overdone and trite, I'll admit), swamps, sewers, and fire and ice levels are all capable of being cool. I can think of examples for each that I enjoyed. It just comes down to the level design, art, and mechanics of each individual game.

I usually can't stand deserts. Large golden-brown areas of snoredom.

Maintenance areas. Pipes, machinery, steel grating catwalks, lots of grey.

@hunter5024 said:

Did you ever play the original Gears of War? I felt like that was the only game I ever played where I walked into a cave and went "Woow it's so amazing!". That affect could be lost now, but man they looked good.

And yes, I felt dirty being excited about caves.

@geraltitude said:

They cheated, because their cave was enormous.

Ships as in large boats. Worst levels of any game. I have uninstalled games when I got to a level inside a ship. Fuck your ships, they suck and are boring levels. Game developers seem to like boat levels because its easy to copy/paste some narrow corridors with lots of doors.

The worst offender is that fucking boat city in Fallout 3.

hahaha yup - and now that you mention it, maybe my whole problem with caves is how cramped they are. There are probably a lot of big ass caves in games that I really like. Didn't Half-Life 2 have a kind of cool cave early on? Don't think it was that big..

It warms my heart to see I'm not alone in dreading the inevitable sewer level, the dumbest, laziest game environment.

Hell, a sewers defining feature (stench!) can't even be conveyed in a game.

I always felt like Matrix series of defined just dull video game settings. Warehouse, sewers, abandoned buildings, ect, at some points it feels like a parody and I just laugh at them.

The sewers in Dead Island killed the second area of that game so hard.

I can't think of any specific environment that I'm adverse to, as any environment can be designed well and made to look interesting if there's enough detail and enough going on to still make it stand out.

FUCKING. SEWERS.

Ah, um, Aside from that I find that generally it is all down to execution. Although, I guess I find ancient ruins have a tendency to be overly-drab and often fail to convey the same sense of awe that real ruins can inspire in me.