Make One Change To A Game You Don't Like To Make It Great

@wollywoo said:

I got you fam.

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Forza Horizon, but with Need for Speed's level of vehicle customization.

Dragon Age Origins, but adjust the gameplay so that it's closer to character action.

Grant theft Auto IV, but ease off on the Euphoria engine.

Dissidia Final Fantasy NT, but it's basically the PSP games with better graphics.

Left Alive, but it's an actual Front Mission game where you actually pilot a mech 90% of the time.

And Persona 3, but you can friendzone your female contacts and thus not be forced into ducking and dodging them on certain days in order to avoid their jealousy. Thanks for having that option, Persona 4. I mean, I like Yukiko, but I don't like Yukiko, so just being friend with her is just fine. ...I digress.

Ouch, they made that game and people initially didn't like it very much. So unless this a veiled way of saying you like Front Mission Evolve, that ship has sailed.

Wonderful 101 but make the controls more forgiving. I just can't wrap my head/thumbs around trying to respond to a fast-paced action game and also drawing shapes either on touchpad or via thumbstick at the same time. It feels more stressful and busy than fun. If that game had more standard controls I think I'd probably like it but as it stands...nope. Just not fun for me.

I don't think these would make all of these games "great" per se, but at minimum they would be a lot more tolerable.

• Active Time Battle or other pause+play tactical layer in Kingdom Hearts instead of real time combat
• Make every item a physics object I can pick up and throw around in The Outer Worlds
• Let me pick up and throw around the damn physics objects in Fallout 76
• Put Dragon Age Origins's combat system in Dragon Age Inquisition
• Remove Morgana from Persona 5

Add a simple leveling system to a Paper Mario game. Add the leveling system that you took out, Nintendo. Please, Nintendo. God, Nintendo, please.

@merxworx01 said:

I knew what I was getting myself into, so I waited until I could get the game for $20 so I could get my own opinion on it. That said, I'd sooner go back to Front Mission Evolve or give Metal Gear Survive a chance over going back to Left Alive, but Daemon X Machina gave me a good "mecha game on PC" fix when that dropped in lieu of Armored Core being a thing these days.

Make the gameplay mechanics as good as the story, writing, visuals and acting in Naughty Dog games.

@nexivselecaf: Same. Got it super cheap because I had to find out for myself and if I am being completely honest I don't remember if I liked it or not. I know that the on foot parts weren't very good but I feel like something about the mech combat didn't feel right, the encounters feeling predictable. DXM is an excellent game but I'm still waiting for FromSoft to mention something AC related OR maybe it turns out Elden Ring is a Fantasy Mech Game where you pilot Towering Living Armor powered by the beating heart of murdered dragons, in an alternate reality earth. I dunno.

It's slim pickings for the genre at the moment.

Football Manager but slim down on the press interactions so the stuff you say matters more.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker but with the 5E ruleset

Opinions!

Any Borderlands game but get the writing team for Tales from the Borderlands to write it instead.

I don't know about anything specific but all these devs using crappy batman combat should take a long hard look at Ghost of Tsushima combat!

Dragon Quest Heroes but with a UI that didn't take for-fucking-ever to do ANYTHING.

Seriously, ever line of dialogue adds 2-3 button presses to skip through, plus a very short but not insignificant pause between lines. And those add up when the process of "just saving my dang game" is

• Walk up to priest guy
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• STOP mashing so you don't accidentally select the option to cancel out of the conversation (which itself involves a few more lines of dialogue)
• Move your cursor down to the Save option
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Select the file you want to save to
• Wait for the 3-4 second long "your game is saving" jingle to finish playing
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Stop mashing so you don't accidentally select the option to go back into the "choose your save file"
• Move the cursor down to the "I don't need anything else from you right now, thanks" option
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue
• Mash through a line of dialogue

All told, that interaction only takes like 5-10 seconds, but it's an interaction that should take almost zero seconds. And EVERYTHING in the game is like that: Buying equipment 1 piece at a time, sitting through a 3-4 second "you completed a quest!" jingle each time you turn in one of the 12 quests you've completed, going to an inexplicably separate room 2 loading screens away from the shops and save point any time you want to change your party members...

I wanted so badly to love that game but maaaaaaaaaan does it seem to drag for literally no reason.

Heathen!

There are so many changes I would like to make to Escape from Tarkov but there's one really obvious one that I can't believe wasn't in the game from the start.

A compass.

Apparently the elite PMCs of the year 2028 don't have the advanced technology known as a compass. They don't have GPS or working cell phones either. They only way to gain a concept of "north" in that game is by buying paper maps that aren't useful for too much else (You're better off bringing up player-made maps on a second monitor). The game is so impenetrable for new players; one of the bigger obstacles is just trying to get a sense of direction and the map knowledge to make callouts for your teammates (there's no HUD element to distinguish your teammates from enemies either). I could say a lot more about why EFT is fucked but adding a compass is the most obvious and easiest improvement they could make. At this point though, I have to assume the lack of one is intentional, and that sucks.

Horizon: Zero Dawn, but with Breath of the Wild's climbing and world design. (Hopefully this is what the sequel is.)

Spider-Man (PS4), but where you can slam George-of-the-Jungle style into buildings so that webslinging actually requires some finesse.

Tomb Raider reboot, but Lara Croft is a confident, witty and strong badass.

Anodyne 2: Return to Dust but with twin-stick shooter controls in the 2D parts.

Starcraft 2, but it's balanced as well as Brood War

I felt the exact same way until Last of Us 2 - was shocked that I finally enjoyed the actual playing part of the game as much as the rest.

Borderlands 2 but with usable weapons and quest design more similar to Borderlands 1 (as in, you can clear all the quests in an area in one nice route rather than walking back and forth across this huge map).

Astroneer but with better tooltips/UI.

I forgot what I needed to do to craft and was stuff at the starting base because I couldn't get a handle on what to do next. I could have played through the tutorial again, but what should have been a chill zone out game got SO frustrating, just trying to fight the controls and menus.

@shindig: You can let your assistant handle all the pressconferences. Or only do the ones in the tunnel before a game, which tend to be more tailored to the situation you're in.

I know, I just don't like them being there. And letting the assistant handle them doesn't negate any positive or negative effects from whatever dumb words they might be saying.

Assassin's Creed: Get rid of the objective log.

There's a lot more needed to make that game live up to its own potential, but that's a huge one for me. Mechanics like eavesdropping and hunting for clues as to the location of your target could be so cool, but the game just gives up all that information. "Eavesdropping" becomes "walk up to a bench and press A". You could get up and go eat a snack and come back and you've got an icon on your map. How cool would it be if you had to actually listen, and parse what people are saying to come to your own conclusions about where you should go next? Actually encourage the player to be observant about their surroundings, a la Breath of the Wild or Return of the Obra Dinn? Assassin's Creed is hardly the only open world example of this, but it's one of the more egregious I think.

- Alpha Protocol: completely rework the boss fights to be something more dynamic than direct shootouts with bullet sponges (especially the Russian gangster)

This seems to be more 'take a flawed game you like and make it better," so I have beaten this game 3 times with 3 fairly different builds and the boss fights suck for every. Single. Character-type. The Russian gangster one is especially egregious if you haven't done the optional, missable Steve Heck recruitment by that point (the fight is essentially impossible).

-A Persona game where your S.Links actually get acknowledged in the storyline.

This is the dream, and probably not terribly practical with how many permutations it COULD have, but it's a little disheartening to see such an integral part of the game essentially side-lined as "optional content." It makes it feel less impactful, especially in situations like what Persona 4 presents. Even "Royal's" add-on content felt VERY linear compared with "The Golden's."

Sunset Overdrive but without the alleged 'humour'. Comedy to me ought to be a force for good, something to lift the spirits or soothe the soul in difficult times. Whatever was in that game was the complete opposite; hideous anti-comedy that did nothing but make the world feel a little darker. Praise be the mute button and the blissful silence it brings.

Pretty much every Telltale game, but with dialogue options which actually correspond to what your character blurts out.

Whatever else you may think of it, Life is Strange Season 1's time traveling gimmick actually solves this problem beautifully by letting you reverse time to the beginning of each conversation after it's over. I think knowing the players could easily check the other options out also made the developers more self conscious about making the character say really stupid stuff and so reigned it in. I genuinely wish more story based games did that, and Life is Strange Season 2 not having it makes me much less interested in playing the game even if the story is great.

School Girl/Zombie Hunter, but actually make it a competent shooter.

While I personally don't love the ending of FF7:R, the main thing I'd actually change is to basically remove huge portions of the game. The cliche ghost part, going through the broken highway, the sewers. A lot of sections of the game just felt like filler and killed the pacing for me.

Any modern Persona game minus the time management sim.

I don't have opinions on Ghost of Tsushima but Batman combat is not crappy, at least not in the three Rocksteady titles. Their main sin is not requiring a full understanding of the combat to progress through the story, but once you get into the challenge rooms the variety and sheer amount of options at your disposal is staggering. And in City, if you played the game on the hardest difficulty, the Mr. Freeze boss fight was a super tense stealth puzzle that made you use literally every single tool in your arsenal in stealth, and it opened up so many interesting avenues to explore.

@shindig: To be fair it does mean it's a very accurate representation of a sports manager/coach dealing with the media. 99% of questions are generic, boring and completely pointless

NBA 2K: Expand the court to be proportional to the players that occupy that court. That series plays like a brick these days and I think giving those massive humans the space to operate in that they have in real life would solve a lot of problems. I have a lot of other issues with how that series has progressed through the 2010s but this is an increasingly obvious one.

Sekiro: Either have an experience/leveling up system, or a difficulty setting. I loved that game until I just couldn't get past the initial difficulty spike in Ashina, and now I fully resent it for not offering any sort of olive branch to ensure players could get their money's worth if that happened to them. I get the argument in favor of why they did what they did, but as somebody who willingly put Resident Evil 2 down as soon as Mr. X showed up because I knew that was going to be too stressful for me and felt like I got everything I wanted out of that game, has beaten Bloodborne and is currently playing Ghost of Tsushima on Brutal despite usually being a Normal/Easy kind of guy, something about Sekiro's refusal to play nice just sucks to me.

Watch Dogs 2: Dial the "attitude" back about 85% and dial the side content back about 90%. I liked the world and I liked...Marcus?...but the side characters and information overload left me exhausted after 8-ish hours.

Mass Effect: Andromeda: Drop any pretense that your character is The Only One Who Can Stop This, get rid of the Baby's First Reapers bad guys and just make the damn game Andromeda is in its first handful of hours because that game would have been great. When it gives the impression that you're just a scrappy bunch of lost humans trying to figure out if they can even survive in this new galaxy, with no idea if the people they've left behind have survived, there's so much room to explore aspects of human nature and space science...but instead they just gave up and did a bad cover version of the first trilogy.

Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry: Make the game feel good to control. Just straight up steal whatever makes a game like inFamous or Spider-Man or Horizon (I didn't mean to name 3 PS exclusives, I'm just scrolling my trophies list) feel good to play and then let me liberate colonial slaves and enjoy it.

Spec Ops: The Line: I've seen some people say that the bland/bad gunplay plays into the point of the game's narrative, but I've got to admit I only finished this one because everywhere I looked people were raving about what it had to say about military violence and violence in video games. But the actual game was such a chore, I shrugged at the Big Ideas about as aggressively as the Waypoint kids laughed off The Last of Us 2's Big Ideas. I often wonder how I'd have felt if I liked anything about the game.

inFamous 2: This is a weird one because I liked it enough, but I platinum'd the first game (or I would have if trophies had existed when it came out, anyway...) and played it over and over, but this one I just collected all the blast shards, finished an evil campaign and called it a day. I can't pin down one single thing I'd want to change, but as memory has faded my biggest gripe with the game was it being set in New Orleans and thus having a ton of water areas that just made getting around the map a real pain. I don't recall the setting actually mattering that much, so I wish they'd have just made a map that flowed better.

Yeah but that doesn't mean I want to participate in it. I like the old Championship Manager ways where any interaction would be seen as crucial and infrequent (tipping a player for international success, defending someone's poor performances, bigging up your title ambitions, etc.) I don't want to start every weekend with the same, "I get on really well with <blank>. He's one of the nicest guys in football."

Take all the RTS elements out of Brutal Legend and just let it be a pure action-platformer with linear-ish levels.

Yeah i'd like that approach better too. Like i'm sure there are minor effects from doing successful team talks but i never do them and it turns out that if you have decent players + good morale + good tactics, you will do just fine. It only becomes a problem when you want to join a team that wants to have a manager that's good at talking to the media.

The only talks that matter to me are 1 on 1 conversations with your players, internal team talks and the pre-season prediction.

Warcraft 3 Reforged but Blizzards delivered on promises made and then broken.

AC Origins/Odyssey with half the objectives. I loved playing those games, but I found that the insane amount of stuff to do slowed down the game and the story progress resulting in me completely losing interest.

That goes for most Open World games though. I'm initially interested, but because they go the RPG route by tying story progress to a level cap and than giving you a metric ton of the same stuff to do to level up, makes me lose interest and never finishing any of these games.

Borderlands 3, but not written by a shit-flinging toddler banging on the keys to his daddy and mommy’s keyboard.

Sekiro, but the souls-like mechanics are replaced with a mix of Ninja Gaiden and Hitman.

Destiny 2, with No Man's Sky-esque things to do on the planets instead of doing the same content over and over.

@wollywoo: After my kids wrung everything they could out of BotW we went looking for another open-world game that was age appropriate for them. We landed on Horizon, and it was going ok until they realized they couldn't climb anything and everything or paraglide down from high points. They lost interest pretty quickly.