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

Modern open-world design. It's fine every once in a while, and I've enjoyed my fair share, but almost every big game has to be open-world now, even if it doesn't fit (which mostly it doesn't). Super tired of empty, lifeless, forgettable expanses and repeating, shallow, filler content. I hate traveling from mission to mission. What boring, filler, non-content horseshit. Why don't developers respect the player's time anymore?

I remember every nook and cranny of Dark Souls. That's a great feeling. It feels like actually learning something, and learning is pure ecstasy. I don't remember a damn square foot of the world from Infamous 1 or 2, Sleeping Dogs, Prototype 2, etc. They are vague blobs of samey architecture. That is a shitty, hollow feeling that I hate more than anything. I played those games. I spent my precious time on them. If I can't even remember them now, why the hell did I play them in the first place? I might as well have spent that time jacking off for all the good it did me.

Most open world games are mechanically less complex and interesting than their linear/smaller-world (Dark Souls) counterparts. Most of them have less interesting stories as well. I just don't see what the advantage is. It almost seems like developers (or their totalitarian publishers) think open-world is a blanket improvement, like better graphics or animations, when that's not the case. It's a design decision that drastically effects how a game is structured, and how it feels to play. Making something open-world doesn't make it better, just different, and in many cases worse. Not to mention costs. If you can make a much better and more interesting game for less money, and the only trade-off is you have to have a smaller playing space, why wouldn't you? It blows my mind that open-world is more popular than linear or small, deliberately designed worlds like Dark Souls in the AAA space, despite the prohibitive costs and other downsides associated with it. Has the entire world gone mad, or am I the one who's crazy?

What happened to painstakingly authored levels full of intelligent design that felt like it was coming from an actual person rather than a gigantic, faceless team making art by way of democracy and focus testing? Those were the days.

Spectacle for the sake of spectacle.

1) The goddamn star-based systems that rate you on open world / RPGs. A LARGE part of the fun is going about a challenge in your own way, and being satisfied that it worked out; OR everything going tits up, and still pulling it out in the end. Then your performance is rated with stars like a kindergarten citizenship mark. Fuck star ratings entirely. Don't give me a lot of ways to go about something, then tell me that the only best way is if I skip everything cool and just do it fast (Metal Gear), or beat some arbitrary list of variables (Assasin's Creed), or... blah. Hate 'em.

2) Mindless collectible padding. A zillion things all over the map that are simultaneously very easy, and very tedious, and rarely have a payoff. They clutter maps, and pad games. This goes for most mini-games in open-worlds. I'm supposed to be immersed in a story when there is a zillion markers for some stupid racing through hoops? How does that fit in with the story? Why am I getting stars for doing it?

It's completely regressive. This crap needs to be trimmed way the hell down, and given story motivation for existing.

The Splatoon/Street Fighter V business model of "here's half a game for full price and we'll give you the rest later". Fuck that.

Alphas/Betas losing all meaning.

I hate standardized controls.

Another one that I find particularly annoying: games that claim to have rpg elements but only provide you with character skills and leveling systems.

Deus Ex is one of the few hybrid games where the devs seemed to understand that one of the most important qualities of an RPG is that they allow you to interact with the world and the characters that populate it in meaningful ways. Unfortunately, it looks like very few fpsrpgs are made that way.

Emphasis on the multiplayer. I want to play some proper AAA project with good story and honed single-player mechanics.

Hyperbolic journalism and the phrase, "X is Y on DRUGS!"

Sorry, that's nothing to do with design. How about Press Start actually meaning something for once, then.

When games pause the experience to tell you to do something so familiar/ubiquitous and basic.

OH yeah, forgot about 'select' and 'start' being turned into 'share' or 'mode' and whatever the fuck Microsoft's buttons are called now. Was that really fucking necessary?

Not every game has to be open world. I can appreciate well crafted linearity.

I miss the days when games didn't die because the servers were taken down, they died because you scratched up your disc or smashed your cartridge.

Tutorials that last longer than a few minutes. I have no patience for that shit.

Everything about rogue likes.

The biggest travesty in modern game design has to be, how its become the norm for the majority of publishers to ship unfinished games and passing them off as final release/a finished product.

@davidh219: I'm not a game developer but I think that the fact that they can be "vague blobs of samey architecture" probably makes them a whole lot cheaper than a smaller, more bespoke alternative. I can't speak to Dark Souls' budget, but the game doesn't have a single random encounter - every single thing has to be hand-placed. It is smaller than a true open world game, but it takes a lot more work to fill out. There's also some extreme talent at From software, who have a pretty freaky understanding of how to build 3d worlds.

I think the Witcher 3 - and mind you, I did like the game - is a better example than Sleeping Dogs or Infamous, since it's clear that a lot of work and money did go into that world, while still failing to create a world that is either intuitively navigable or really memorable beyond the point of "there was a forest, and then there was snow".

@milijango: There's budget information you can look up that makes it pretty clear that, for whatever reason (I'm not a developer either but have some basic computer science knowledge), open-world games are generally a lot more expensive to make regardless of how samey that world is. There's always exceptions, of course, but that seems to be a good general rule. Maybe it's a performance thing. The game engine doesn't know how samey everything looks to a human, only that it has to stream in a bunch of art, physics data, AI for pedestrians, etc as smoothly as possible and that's pretty fucking hard to do. Whatever the case, I see where you're coming from with that assumption, but it just doesn't seem like it's correct at all.

And Dark Souls by all accounts had a pretty small budget for what it was, although I don't think they've released specific numbers. Best guesses seem to be around 15 mil. Demon's Souls has had it's budget pretty accurately estimated at 10 mil or lower based on comments about target sales numbers from the publisher. A lot of people seem to believe that even Bloodborne costed no more than 30 million and probably even quite a bit less than that. All of those are much less than the vastly inferior Watch_Dogs 68 million. MGSV was 80 million I believe. Witcher 3 was about the same.

To me a big issue in modern day game design is the insane level of hand holding that goes on to give players an idea where to go. A big example of this is uncharteds yellow items are a linear climable surface. I played enough games in the 90s / 00s to know that the one building in front of me is where I need to go to. As does every other sane person. So I really don't see why they had to start adding it into everything.

@davidh219: Interesting to see numbers (if speculative ones) for Souls games. I wonder how big the teams were. Development time was about 3 years for Bloodborne and Dark Souls 3, 3.5 for the Witcher. Maybe it's silly to compare, but there you are.

The numbers for the Witcher 3 are 46 million USD for development and 35 million USD for marketing, compared to MGSV's 80 million for development (marketing unknown). Maybe purchasing power parity would cause those numbers to shift around but how I can't say.

Are there any other developers making moderate-open worlds like Dark Souls, though? I guess Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the Witcher 2 have a similar scale, albeit without the attention to detail. At least they're not plagued with the busywork of most open-world games.

@milijango: Yeah, it's weird to me that there aren't that many games with smaller but decidedly non-linear worlds like Dark Souls. Witcher 2 is one of the few things that came to mind, but even that's kind of a different thing. Kotor 1 & 2 were kind of that, although less cohesive than Dark Souls because it was split up between planets. The Sly games were pretty much that. They had a small hub-world that was "open" and then some missions you did in the hub, some you did it more traditional indoor levels. I liked that a lot. I didn't play Human Revolution. Is that how that game is structured? I assumed it was totally linear, albeit with slightly different paths through levels. But yeah, I would love to see more of that. It's probably my favorite kind of design. It bucks the problems of 100% linear games and also the problems of open-world games. You'd think more people would be doing it.

Also, wouldn't It'd be nice if video game budgets were as transparent as film budgets are? It would make conversations like this a lot easier. Drives me nuts. I didn't realize that Witcher 3 figure included marketing. 46 is still a lot though. Also I read something a while ago about why it's "unfair" to compare the quality vs cost of Witcher 3 and Fallout 4, because labor in Poland is a lot cheaper than what Bethesda pays here in the states, even taking into account that the US dollar is worth more. No idea if that would play a part in that 46 mil figure though, although my guess is it probably would since that's just a straight currency conversion, right? Is labor cost what you meant by purchasing power parity?

@davidh219: Human Revolution basically follows the Witcher 2 design. Several decent-sized hubs with limited but meaningful side-content. Like the Witcher you can't go back to the previous areas once the story takes you someplace else. The big complexes you infiltrate are often in these hub areas, and as such have multiple entrances, or even NPCs you can befriend/beat up to skip/alter sections.

Even the game's more linear parts felt sandboxy because you could mess around with the environment in goofy ways, like stuffing doorways with vending machines and building paint can staircases to get to higher ground. Best of all it was super comfortable with any cheese tactics you could think of. If you had good hacking and strength you could hack a turret and bring it with you into one of the boss rooms. Come to think of it, the level design actually feels like a building in most cases, not just corridors with waist high countertops.

Also, I did mean labour cost. Not sure why I was thinking PPP.

@milijango: Ooo, that was a cool video, and the most gameplay I've seen of that game. I might have to play that. I think I already own it on PS3 because of PS+. Not being able to go back to areas after beating them, ala Witcher, is the one thing I don't like though. It's the main thing that sort of separates those game worlds from Dark Souls, and that gives them a more linear feel and makes the world a bit less cohesive. I feel like it makes a lot more sense for Deus Ex though, being a sort of sleath RPG-lite about infiltrating corporate headquarters. In real life you wouldn't/couldn't go back into those headquarters after the fact, and would probably skip town as well. In The Witcher it just feels like a weird compromise for the story that they couldn't write their way out of so they designed their way out of it instead. I don't know how you'd solve that problem when your story involves lots of travel without just going full open-world though, which is probably why they did exactly that.

@davidh219: I think the story has you visit some cities twice which lets them do some two-part sidequests, and see rudimentary consequences of your actions.

I wonder, though, if levels are inherently less memorable when they're not specifically intended for conflict. By teaching players that the presence of enemies is the norm, it could be that a game like Dark Souls nudges you into thinking about its layouts and your positioning more. I bet if not for the Hellkite Drake no one would remember the bridge to the parish, and if not for the Black Knight no one would think twice about that alley in Undead Burg. Flotsam might have its share of bandits, but that's not an eventuality remotely worth planning for.

@milijango: Well yeah, if there aren't interesting things in those nooks and crannies then the brilliance of them ceases to be brilliant. In some cases that means an enemy, like you said, but it could also mean a noteworthy item or a secret entrance to another area. I remember a lot of nooks from Dark Souls because of that. But I think a lot of it also has to do with having to remember/figure out how the world is connected together. The intricacy of Undead Burg/Parish takes mental effort to keep straight in your head and you can't progress until you unravel it, and having it memorized makes you a better, more efficient player as a tangible reward. That's actually an aspect of the gameplay, as important as the combat or the RPG systems are. Dark Souls does it best, but most non open-world games have that to some degree.

Most open-world games take place entirely outdoors, and are by necessity little more than a flat plain, open to you in any direction until you hit the boundaries of the game world. Because of this, the entire world is "one setting" in your mind, which can feel super repetitive. Because of realism, which more games strive for than not, the playing space can't change into drastically different climates and architecture just for the sake of variety and fun times. Because you never hit an obstacle you need to solve by navigating, memorizing, and organizing physical spaces in your mind, an entire aspect of game design is ripped away and all you're left with is the combat and the story, which is why those games can feel shallow.

If you've been a gamer since before open-world games rose to prominence, you're used to an entirely other aspect of design to contend with that just isn't there anymore. In Splinter Cell, you had to navigate and memorize levels. In Mario you had to navigate and memorize levels. In Myst you had to navigate and memorize levels. In Zelda, in Castlevania, in Portal, in Resident Evil, etc. It's something that transcends genre and is in the vast majority of games, but is not in the vast majority of modern open-world games where navigating space is thoughtless and easy. A lot of people seem to like that part of their games being thoughtless. I enjoy it occasionally as a snack, but not as my main diet.

@davidh219: It'll be tough to get memorable locations until designers move away from using maps - especially mini-maps - as a crutch for indistinct environment. They split your attention from the actual game, and many games end up being unplayable with them turned off.

The one neat collectible in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate was the Secrets of London, which was a bunch of photos showing tiny music boxes sitting on rooftops or in alleyways across the city. All you knew was which of the six boroughs each one was in. It went on too long, the menu was cumbersome, and the payoff was weak, but it was the most engaging part of the entire game, by virtue of being the only time that I was encouraged to thoroughly explore the world. It turned into a kind of church-steeple triangulation mini-game that actually let me appreciate the environment they put so much work into.

@milijango: It's a bigger problem than the mini-map. You can't turn physical space into an obstacle/puzzle without also restricting player movement and increasing the time it takes to navigate said world. This means the world, by necessity, gets smaller. You'll only spend so much time traveling without getting impatient, and you can only hold so much in your head at once, after all. Also the developer can only make so many areas that are completely unique from other areas and connect to those areas in interesting ways. There's a lot of design and art overhead there. It might be less expensive to do it that way when the world is the size of Dark Souls. Not so much when it's the size of GTA. At what point is a game still an open-world game, ya know?

The Witness is technically an open-world game where you have to navigate around and memorize the landscape using the unique architecture around you, but people don't really think of it as "an open-world game," because the world is so small, because it has to be for that to work. If it was just enormous like an Infamous game, you'd be lost for days and it would've cost a billion dollars and probably a lot more time.

I don't know if any games have done that kind of a thing while still managing to be big enough to be seen as an open-world game and not just whatever people see Dark Souls or The Witness or Darksiders as, even though all three of those are technically, in a manner of speaking open-world games that solve all the problems we're talking about by making their physical space memorable and part of the gameplay. Dying Light maybe? I haven't played it, but my impression is that it's maybe sorta like that?

As for Assassin's Creed, the last one I played was II and my favorite part of the game was the optional indoor puzzle platforming missions to collect pieces of Altair's Armor. I would've liked the game a lot more if that was a common occurrence instead of a few optional missions.

@colony024: I liked how in Final Fantasy VI, the merchants in Edgar castle would refuse to take Edgar's money if he was in front of the party, and he told them to shut up and take it. Nice touch. (Although free Phoenix downs would be nice)

Get ready to hate me but I can't live without markers. I have absolutely NO sense of direction when it comes to games. Making them optional would be ideal, I guess.

As for me, forced tutorials aren't great but absolutely none is even worse. I'm looking at you, Xenoblade Chronicles X.

Hm. I think it's when developers implement the choice to turn off the HUD/cross hair, and then when they do it, it's not contextual. I like turning off the HUD and cross hairs in first person games among other games, but I also want to see how much health or ammo I have at the click of a button, or by getting hurt. There are some games, like Killzone: Shadow Fall, and the Metro games that let you do this, but it goes so far to take the QTE prompts out as well. I want to immerse myself in it with those things off, but not at the cost of losing it all together. I'm not quite sure if that's an aspect of modern gaming, but it still happens.

People complaining about open world games. Is someone forcing you to buy these games? I can't stand Jrpg genre so I don't bother with it. There is enough room for all kind of games. The main selling point of open world is being in the open world, not tight combat and level design ala Souls, nor the pure emergent gameplay in sandbox games like Just Cause , Mgs 5 and to some degree Bethesda games. Witcher 3, Syndicate, Red Dead and GTA games strong selling point is the scale and environmental design to make you believe you are in London or in Witcher 3 case in a low fantasy universe. All the vistas, the ambient life, 24 hour cycle with sunsets and changing weather it's all part of the open world appeal. Good games are good games no matter the genre, but if you expecting different things from the core open world experience, then it might be your own fault.

@edgaras1103: That's not a complaint against a game design decision. That's a complaint against gamers. Not really on topic. Haha

The rogue-like, permadeath or poorly implemented checkpoints of some games. The concept that I have to do particularly well in my run, otherwise the whole time spend just goes to the garbage. My gaming time is limited so, if a game insist 95% of the time spend to feel pointless (unless I am overly competent in the game), I have no time for it. At least games like Rogue Legacy has the chance of grinding and upgrading your hero, so it was not entirely pointless...

Please notice that this is my personal grudge. Some people like that genre and find it rewarding, and more power to them. I just don't feel like taking the time with a game that will take a sizable piece of that time as pointless.

I'm going to jump in the small fonts boat. Xenoblade Chronicles X is the best example of this right now. It's already in a horrible 720p, then it has the tiniest font ever used in any console game. Even using a PC monitor doesn't help, which is almost unheard of.

When you're playing an open world game, let's say a mission arc. So you do one mission, and then the next one is all the way across the fucking city.

@sparky_buzzsaw: I game on both a 1080p 19" laptop screen and a 1080p 48" LED TV, and I can honestly say I've never had a problem reading the text. If you do, your TV is too small and/or too far away, or you might need glasses :)

@edgaras1103 I feel like complaints about open world games are reaching the same critical mass as people complaining about world war 2 shooters last decade.

This has probably been the most depressing part of this generation for me is that the smaller, more time/budget constrained "indie" games don't really have the space to dive deep on any interesting theme or issue they bring up.