What aspect of modern game design do you hate the most?

I'd probably say the tendency for games to be watered down to appeal to a broader audience. I've been interested in the concept of a game only to be let down by a shallow protagonist, flat characters or boring gameplay more than a few times. The easiest example I can think of is horror games that streamline you to the jump scares 5 minutes in without bothering to set an actual tone. This is where I'd become THAT GUY and rave about Silent Hill 2 for a while. But seriously! Silent Hill 2, though!

Other than that, most game design choices I can think of can be annoying in one context but not in another, so it's hard to say which ones I dislike universally. Waypoints in an exploration game are sad and in CoD or the like, just insulting. But in a superhero game like Spiderman? Those games wouldn't be fun for me otherwise.

Backtracking is usually a lazy re-use of assets, but if you change the environment to put a cool spin on it, it's entirely forgivable. I don't even need that much to be impressed.

Hmm... Silent protagonists? Yeah, lets go with that. To be clear, I mean "silent" in the sense that your character rarely speaks of his/her own accord, only canonically speaking what you tell him/her to. Even though I love Persona, that would be the one thing I'd change if I could. Granted, it's greatly helped by the fact that there a multitude of OTHER interesting characters. That's why in something like TES or Fallout, I think it's a damn shame that your character doesn't express themself more often. But then, that's the nature of a role-playing adventure game, I guess.

Micro transactions and game play designed to frustrate players into buying them rather than designing the game around fun.

Cluttered HUD and UI (I'm looking at you Ubisoft).

Open world elements. Nowadays it feels like it's bad if a game is linear.

Open world games without any kind of helpful guidance, which makes us spend more time looking at the mini-map than looking at the world.

The whole idea of quantity instead of quality.

Cramming Rogue elements or MOBA elements.

Unlockables, upgrades, carfting and whatever other stupid stuff that makes you spend a lot of time on cluttered menus full of numbers on games that weren't supposed to be those kind of games.

Poorly designed menus.

Transactions, in-game currency you can buy with real money.

Lack of personality, bland and generic worlds, stories, characters, etc, just to appeal to a broader audience.

Sluggish moving characters with imprecise movements (i.e.: GTA IV and V).

Small fonts and hand holding.

Terrible unpractical UI design. Though that issue is larger than just games...

I also dislike the fear of making a game "broken". Every game does in fact NOT have to be 100% compatible with every human alive, or be perfectly balanced to be fun. Sometimes a little chaos in the system actually makes it BETTER.

I've been a RPG fan for 30 years, and while at first it was exciting to see those mechanics basically take over every other genre, I think I'm starting to regret it. I think I'm over loot now, and a lot of progression mechanics just aren't fun.

The way that every game has to have an open world or hub, it destroys pacing in most games.

For me it would be...

Exposing every item of interest in the game to the player, either via on-screen UI (glowing objects, hovering arrows) or on mini-maps and main maps (Assassin's Creed & Far Cry maps, Fallout's compass etc).

At least some games allow you to turn these indicators off though.

This has been an issue for the last couple of generations, but it really ruffles my feathers that it's still so common: Harder enemies acting exactly like regular enemies, except with way more health. It's such a boring, lazy way to add difficulty to your game, just to turn everything into a bullet-sponge that laughs you off for the first ten-minutes you shoot at it. The worst part is it's so prevalent; almost every single first- or third-person shooter falls for this.

For something more recent, I'll say: not committing one way or another to the notion of the player character being a CHARACTER. I'm talking stuff like Shadow of Mordor or Fallout 4, where the developers decide to turn around and say "Hey, let's give this character a backstory, a voice, a tone.... and zero personality, so the player can project themselves onto them". It spoils both ends of the spectrum; the character is so watered-down that spending dozens of hours with them just feels a bore, and their role is so pre-set that I can't truly embody them or mold my own persona, RPG-style. If you want me to embody the character, give me Courier Six or The Chosen Undead. If you want to give me a character, give me interesting dudes like Joel or Geralt or Travis Touchdown. Make up your mind; write a character or let me make my own, not this Sole Survivor garbage!

Regenerating health.

You and I would not get along. At all.

@bananasfoster:

That's pretty crazy that you would go as far to say that you, "HATE" the game. My opinion is way, way on the other side of the spectrum. I do understand your grievances with the game not being able to tell you where to go however.

I think I'm pretty much done with crafting systems in games. Fallout 4 making all the garbage set dressing in the world worth picking up just tired me out. Every building I entered I spent more time looking for desk fans and glue than I did admiring the environmental storytelling or shooting dudes. I get that it fits with the world and everything but man I'm pretty sick of it now. I saw a video of Far Cry Primal and one of the first things you do is go around picking up sticks and rocks to build a bow and that more or less turned me away from that game for good.

Rank up notifications in the middle of an FPS match. Especially when they're in the center of the screen.

Points for actions too.

Intrinsic motivation to do well? Eff that right?!

I have to agree with this a lot!

Developers can make anything! They can make ANYTHING in a game world, from a church that looks like a 500 foot tall man holding a ring of fire to a cat that has spider legs. So, why do so many games even fantasy games look so boring!!!! A game developer will build a giant alien cathedral to alien gods. But what is this seemionly magical place full of? Plane wooden benches and steps.

COME ON !!!! Benches and steps? Where are the glob-nods? Where is the sacred spot where they sticks their flub-nodes into the Gerbalenazz?

Bungie makes Halo rings in space and fills them with what....err, biped gorilla/lizards who are religious freaks on jihad. B-O-R-I-N-G !

@jinoru said:

Yea what the hell is with that? I haven't played COD in a bit but I've been playing Black Ops 3 for the past week and I don't remember all those ranks, emblems, etc. being so obtrusive.

You have a point about the glob-nods, but I can do without the flub-nodes. Think of the children!

I'm not even trying to be hyperbolic. I really do HATE that game. I had a stronger negative reaction to everything that game tries to do than any other game I've played in recent history.

It started right as you fire up the game and it cold opens with Drake in that bar fight in the bathroom. I'm just sitting there watching Drake get beat up for a long time thinking "this is... a really long, dumb cut scene..." Then it donned on me that I was supposed to be PLAYING. Now, I think this is something Naughty Dog did solely because they were so impressed with their graphics engine that the implied boast is, "see! You thought it was a cut scene, but it's really gameplay!" But the problem is that the visuals in any videogame are only "Wow-worthy" for about six months. By the time I was playing U3, the visuals in the game were no longer all that impressive. It didn't strike me as "look how great this game looks!" it struck me as "wow, how annoying that they just throw you into the game without giving you any cue to let you know that you're playing.

From this point, you're in the middle of a fight with a guy in the bathroom. You have to go through a series of quick-time events to defeat him, ostensibly. But the problem is that there is no visual indicator that you are doing anything right or wrong. If you "lose" the event, it just goes to another animation. So really, you have no idea what is going on and if it's "supposed" to happen until you eventually notice that the thing is looping. You finally figure out all the timings and whatnot and manage to get yourself out of this scenario. It's mere minutes into the game and I have had zero fun, and been very annoyed twice. So far the ONLY impression the game is trying to make is, "look how great our graphics are!!!"

I can't remember which annoying section came next, so this may be out of order.

At some point, you find yourself flashing back in time to when Nathan was a young boy. I actually really started to like this part of the game because it seemed like an adventure game. Specifically, it kind of reminded me of a great looking Indiana Jones and the Fate Of Atlantis, or something. I really liked the journal system. But apparently nothing good can last in this game because you are soon put in a scenario where young Drake is forced to run away from a bunch of goons who are chasing him. The game sets you up and prompts you to run away from the goons, who are straight in front of you. "Okay" I think to myself. "Easy enough." I make a break for the right where there are no goons. The screen goes black. Loading. I'm reset back in front of the goons. ... What? What happened? There is no real indicator of what just happened to me. Is this another rooftop? Did I LOSE? What happened? I do literally the same thing again. Black screen. Reset. Goons in front of me. It immediately occurs to me that, oh, I ran out of bounds. So the game tells me to run away from the goons, but I'm actually supposed to run directly AT them or I lose the game. Screw what actually makes sense. So, I run directly at the goons. They grab me. Game over. ... So.... WHAT?!? I do it again, and run directly at the goons but a little off to the side so that I run by them. That works. SO... the game wants me to run directly AT the goons, but just close enough to create drama so I feel like I narrowly escaped.

It's here that I realize my whole problem with the entire game. I'M not playing the game. I'M not Nathan Drake. At no point in time are they asking me to actually SOLVE any of the problems that in front of me. Instead, I'm basically marginally in control of an actor playing the role of Nathan Drake. The film is totally scripted, and if I think or improvise, the director yells at me that he's not paying me to think and JUST DO WHAT'S IN THE SCRIPT. So my job is to play out these already blocked action scenes in order to try to make them look as thrilling as they possibly can, but I'm not really participating in any of it. Not really. There is no danger. There is no puzzle to solve. There is no challenge to overcome. I'm just trying to "get the shot".

Never the less... I persisted on.

Then you come to a part where Nathan is in a library. He is meant to climb some bookcases and jump from point to point. The challenge is, I suppose, looking for what single point in the environment that Nathan can next jump to. I was doing pretty well until I hit this point that i simply COULD NOT get past. I had no idea where to go. I could not find any hanholds, and the camera was impossible to navigate in the enclosed space. Finally, after dozens of minutes of looking for where to go, I finally stumbled upon the pixel I was supposed to jump to. You see, Nathan needed to jump backwards off of the bookcase he was latched onto, and grab another hand hold which was on the other side of the room. I didn't notice it because this is a maneuver that would, in real life, see him springing BACKWARDS off of a bookshelf at a distance of around TWENTY FEET. SPIDERMAN would have trouble making this jump.

So... yes. I really do hate that game.

It led me to not buy or play The Last Of Us. Instead I just watched it on Youtube. And you know what? I LOVED it. I will never, ever play it. To me the only way to enjoy naughty dog games is to treat them as though they don't even attempt gameplay.

I think a lot of big games are really safe and focus test driven in a way that sometimes makes them boring. It would be unfair to say that there isn't innovation happening, or that there aren't big games that I enjoy. But... I'm starting to get tired of seemingly every big "AAA" game being a bland open world with RPG-lite progression mechanics and a trillion things to do (half of which you don't want to do). Bonus points for following the Ubisoft template and making me climb towers. In some ways, that has started to become the new "linear brown shooter"

Microtransactions and DLC season passes are here to stay, I think, but I can't name more than a handful of games from the last decade with genuinely great post-release DLC content that doesn't come off as B-team filler made to recoup costs.

The manipulation of our primitive brain function. The use of perfectly nested compulsion loops to make you think that you want to keep doing the thing that you're doing. Blatantly offensive micro transactions that remind you "You're nothing but an ATM to us". etc. Compulsion loops and micro transactions both have their place, but when they are abused it's gross.

@bananasfoster:

It's an action movie man! All of the stuff that you have issues with is the stuff I seriously enjoy. I love the fact that the game breaks out of the usual and tricks you into thinking it's a cut scene at the beginning of the game. Being able to take part in what has always just been presented to me is awesome, it makes you feel like you're part of the action. Or being chased by tons and tons of goons as a young Nathan, scrambling from rooftop to rooftop, through buildings and homes, all whilst narrowly escaping capture, is a goddamn thrill. I'm disappointed you had so much trouble during these sequences but for me what was expected of me was pretty intuitive; especially being someone who has played games my entire life. Most of what that game is asking you to do is rooted in what games have been telling you to do all along.

I understand that opinions are opinions but I think maybe you were just bad at figuring out where to go: or like earlier suggested in the thread maybe you just needed a way-point system. Like I said before, my significant other did have trouble figuring out where to go sometimes and it was very frustrating for her at times but she has no gaming experience so it is expected. Either way it seems we both had entirely different experiences with the game and that to me is fascinating.

Tutorials. Not good/necessary tutorials... those are fine, and even appreciated. I mean every other game starting with "Okay, jump over this thing. Now duck under this thing. Break this crate and shoot this piece of wood blocking your way. Now look up and down. Pull up your map. Put away your map..."

I understand the temptation to treat every game like it's somebody's very first, but it's seriously not necessary. Know what I did when I didn't know how to play a new game? I experimented and figured it out. And back then, controls were all over the place, not standardized like they are now. I'm not one of those guys that pines for the days when games beat the living shit out of you with their difficulty, but I don't want my hand held the entire way either.

At least have an option that says "Yeah, I've touched a controller before. Give me the opening sequence that doesn't throw a million prompts at me". Whenever a game actually gives me that option, I want to hug the developer.

People have complained about unskippable tutorials. My complaint is no manuals. I shouldn't have to look through GameFAQs or a wiki just to learn basic game mechanics.

..and I can theoretically understand where you are coming from completely. The idea of playing an action movie is compelling. The thing is... I would just rather ACTUALLY play it. It's all about control, really. For me, I get more thrilled, more scared, more excited if *I* am the one in control. If *I* get myself into a bind, and narrowly escape, I an full of giddy adrenaline. I feel amazing and successful. I want to tell everyone about that thing I just did. If I'm just along for the ride while the game constructs a dangerous situation for DRAKE to be in... I feel let out. I'm minorly concerned for him, as I would be a movie character, but for the most part I'm only a fraction as invested as I would if it was ME having to solve the scenario.

While I do still enjoy games like COD and Titanfall for their multiplayer, I know what you mean about the death of exploration in shooters. Surprisingly, the new Fallout game has fairly good shooting mechanics--MUCH better than the shooting in any Fallout game before it--and definitely has a focus on exploring. You should try it, if you haven't already.

@spaceinsomniac: I did play it and mostly enjoyed it.The technical problems on the Xbox One version were a real bummer though.

Burn cards or req packs or whatever the hell these are called, I don't like them. Also, the realization that developers will never sacrifice graphical fidelity for framerate. I guess screenshots get passed around on websites and they don't want lesser graphics of their game getting seen even though in motion it probably looks way better. Hurray for PC gaming I guess.

Pretty much all of it apart from improved graphics etc. As for modern mechanics: I guess I like that inventory management is occasionally less of a ridiculous hassle than it used to be? I'll take Steam Workshop too if that counts.

Everything else sucks and was better before. I spend a lot of time playing old games & remasters of old games, simply because it's refreshing to play something which was designed as a game rather than as a storefront.

@two_socks:I'm with you on Fallout man. 40 hours in (and after speccing to find resources more easily) I used console commands to give myself 10,000 of all the raw materials I needed. Now I just explore and look for weapons, ammo and drugs. It made the game so much more enjoyable.Otherwise I would systematically scavenge everything.

@bananasfoster: I too hate Uncharted (played half of the first 2) and the new Tomb Raiders (played half of the first one). For me they are just so bland and pointless feeling. The stories aren't interesting and the movement isn't interesting (hold up on this wall to climb this wall... snooze) and the combat it trivial and the game is mostly linear. I just don't see the appeal. I can see the comparison to an action movie, but I'd rather watch an action movie. They're only an hour and a half long.

We need to start a club and have secret decoder rings. We're definitely the minority.

Oh, can we wear colour coded outfits like the power rangers? And have secret handshakes and weird club meetings where we wear robes and summon eldritch horrors?

I'm really hating the "shooter with rpg lite" elements going into EVERY genre of games, including RPGs *cough* Fallout4. Really, it's the watering down of genres so that it can touch the largest demographic that sucks.

Multiplayer only games. We had bot-matches in the 90's. It was a great way to learn a map. Or practice flying choppers. Or to just blow off steam. I don't want a crappy 10 hour, scripted, hallway walking simulator campaign. Just let me play on a map by myself with some dumb bots. Attach some dumb achievements like "Kill 20 bots without dying." "Run over twenty bots in a milk truck." and a simply bot match now has more gameplay in it than your usual single player shooter campaign.

The death of server executables in multiplayer games. I can still run a Battlefield 1942 server on an old computer, running Desert Combat mods with hundreds of bots if 4 of my buddies want to relive out college days. I'm dreading the day when I can't mess around in Paradise City...

TINY maps. Why put in jets and choppers when the map's so small you need to fly around in circles or suicide for being out of bounds?

FREE games on mobile. No! I will gladly pay you money. I don't want to play a game balanced on free to play mechanics. I don't want your best value gems or your stamina bars. I don't want my data being used up to feed me mobile video ads. Why can't you just take my $10 and let me match gems in peace?

Day 1 patches are the worst.

Basically waypoints and every design decision that is connected to this.

My biggest problem is, as you say, awful DLC practices, tied to that are permanent online services, lots of games won't be playable once their servers go offline. Another issue i encounter a lot is broken or unfinished PC ports, i'd like more time to be spent on PC ports in the future, MKX is a huge bummer for me, what it really needs is new net code and it's the only version that won't get it.

For me it's the whole batman combat thing, or any other gameplay that is basically just button prompts.

One thing that hasn't been covered yet is lack of cool overworlds in jrpgs and the like. I miss the feeling of exploring a world in games like FF6, Seiken Densetsus, Chrono Trigger and especially Skies of Arcadia.

Man, Skies of Arcadia was so cool.

Also, QTEs need to die. Shenmue was the only game that did them well, putting them in a fast paced game is just stupidity.

@poobumbutt: I'm getting tired of silent protagonists but I still wouldn't change that about persona. I think it makes it easier to insert myself into the story. To each their own.

Btw I accidentally flagged your post, sorry about that.

I dislike how everything these days have to be connected at all times for leader boards, social networking, and mulitplayer. To me, a game loses some value if I can't play it 5 years down the line and have a similar experience.

^ Oh yeah the whole leader boards and networking crap for single player games is really annoying.

funny, I'm getting tired of the opposite. I hate when games make you play named/voiced character, and then have you make decisions for them that you are completely unqualified to make.

The Walking Dead does this, if I'm not mistaken. I'm introduced to my character for the very first time ever, and immediately an NPC goes "So... what were you doing 30 minutes before the game started?" Then I'm given a list of options and I have no idea which to pick because... I JUST MET THIS GUY.

I think the systems/pcs are too powerful for their own good. Hardware limitations require designers to think outside the box and now all they do is just throw more power at their problems on PC and on console the games just run like shit as a result.

@fancysoapsman: That's the thing! I actually think that Persona is the one game where I don't mind that at all. I just said Persona specifically because if I don't mind a change like that in one of my absolute favorites, I can probably say it universally. But the truth is, I associate Persona 4 so much with Summer (I beat it the first time over school break), which is my favorite month, and that's exactly because he was silent, because I might as well have become Li Shenshun (my PC name) for those two months.

I love the idea of personifying the character so well in Persona, but I also love when a game series with a regimented formula decides to do something different just to experiment. If I was Austin right now, I'd say I have "complicated feelings" about this.

Goddammit, I'm going back on it. Silent protagonists in general are still touchy. But I love how Persona does it too much. I guess I could live with either, but if you put a gun to my head, I'd say silent Persona PC is best.

Great. Now what do I have? Uh, here's a dumb one. I dislike it when a game doesn't say "And thank YOU!" or some variant during the end credits at some point. I guess there's a whole discussion to be had about why that's different for games than movies/books and the unique relationship game creators have with their audience. But whatever! Soapman here turned me over, so now I'm floundering.

Definitely on board with the 'every game is open-world now' stuff. I'm also not at all a fan of 'emergent gameplay' or whateverthefuck buzzwords people use to describe Far Cry/MGSV/Skyrim/Minecraft/etc., so trying to prop your game up with those systems just makes me not want to play it.

I agree with your point completely, but are you implying that Souls games don't let you save where you want? Because they actually save wherever you are at that time; you don't even have to go back to a checkpoint or anything. If you exit/close the game, when you start it up again you'll be in the exact spot you were at when you closed it with the same enemies dead/alive.

This is hilarious to me because I stopped playing FPSs because they are all toorealistic and slow now. I miss the speed of Doom/Duke/UT/Quake/etc. I'm actually having trouble remembering the last FPS that I even played.

Yeah, we went from Serious Sam to cover shooters.

Sidequests that are basically repeatable minigames, e.g. Arkham Knight, Assassin's Creed.

@isomeri: If you haven't played the Wolfenstein game from a year or two ago I would recommend it. It's not "gods gift to shooters" or anything, but it's a good game that's willing to be out on it's own versus the trend you're talking about.

The idea that there needs to be a standardized control scheme for every game.

COD4 ruined the FPS genre and dumbed it down for many years it's slowly starting to recover PC gaming FPS shooters having gone backwards thanks to what this series started.

Regen Health call me old but I'll take health pack over this shit anyday.

No quick save or quick load.

Most FPS with MP these days don't even have dedicated servers or even a server list where stuck with matchmaking garbage and this P2P bullshit.

Awful FOV on the gun models not made for monitors but for tv the gun models are way to huge and look out of place.

No lean not every FPS needs this but I wouldn't mind if it did gives more tactics in gameplay.

Guns needs more recoil.

To many worthless weapon upgrades.