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Horrible Game Mechanics


Sly Reflex
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Inspired by a conversation I had with DifferentClass yesterday we were talking about games that had mechanics in them that were totally awful and really affected the way you played the game

I can think of two games that were spoilt. The first one is Boktai. I got this because it sounded like a great idea, the idea that you fought vampires by collecting light through a sensor on the cart which charged your heros gun. It was only until after I started playing that I found out that the gun was charged with UV light, as in you had to go outside and play under the sun...

I don't know if you ever tried to play a GBA outside, but it was almost impossible. If it was sunny you couldn't see the screen and if it was cloudy you could see what you were doing, but were not collecting enough UV to be viable. It has to be one of the worst ideas in a game that I can remember. I want to know who in the world actually managed to get through that game. I bet they all owned sunbeds or something. To top it off, if you had a GBA SP you were double fucked because the cart faced downwards and had no chance of claiming UV. That's not really a fault of Boktai, but talk about kicking a man when he's down. The prerequisites for playing the game were broken by not being able to play the game in those prerequisites. It was a lose/lose situation.

The second game is MGS3 and the way it made you deal with injuries. I seriously would love to know how that was greenlit to make it into the final game. I know you could avoid being shot at, but the camera was so shit that you'd often end up getting spotted and shot, then you'd have to do the whole field surgery of digging the bullet out and sewing the holes in Snake up. Tedious doesn't even begin to cover it.

What about you lot then? Any horrific game mechanics you'd like to complain about? It's not just Kojima games that have them in, presumably.

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Off the top of my head - Odama on the Cube was built around playing a bastard form of pinball using voice controls.

Not the best working control method in the world, even today you'd struggle to see the point on Kinect even if it actually worked as advertised.

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I quite liked the sun element of Boktai, it was the rest of the game I had a problem with. I'm trying to think of an example, I feel like there's a really recent example that's perfect but I'm missing

if we're talking gimmicky stuff, the yelling in to the microphone on the DS Zelda was never going to happen

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I don't really get that annoyed by gimmicky game mechanics because they're easy to see from the offset. Like with Boktai I never bought that game because no matter how that mechanic is described it sounds like a bad idea, so I'm not likely to play it. And I never did. Same with Odama.

What gets to me more is when standardised and familiar mechanics get fucked up.

Since I'm playing Resident Evil 6 now, when I can gather up the energy to at least, that is what comes to mind (and I name-checked it in the conversation with Sly). It's a game full of ideas from previous Resident Evil games mixed with other ideas from other games that haven't been mixed together well. It's a checklist that couldn't be tied together at all.

The first thing that annoys me is the energy system. In RE4 and 5 there was a standard health bar. It's clear and no-nonsense. But what they did with RE6 is kinda adopt the old system, the one with the red zig-zaggy line when you're low on health... but it only shows that when you're low... so it also kinda displays itself like the Halo style where if you're not totally dead you're fine... but it's not like that, you can still be pretty low on health but not know how much until you're nearly dead.

It so unhelpful for what is a relatively fast paced action game. But you can be revived by an AI partner so it doesn't matter I guess. It has that fail safe since they knew they had a poor system and (sort of) fixed it with that.

But on top of that you have bad level design and enemy placements... well, oftentimes they're random and you rarely have enough room to use the mobility they've given you with this game so I never know how to play it. I don't think the devs do either so how am I meant to?

There's more, but I may keep it for the thread if I feel like depressing myself and others.

Overall, Resident Evil 6 seems like a fascinating game so far in that it seems to be designed by about 2000 people that never spoke to one-another.

I'll also shout out to BioShock's hacking mini-game and Mass Effect 2's resource gathering. Both of those are some 'fuck it, that'll do' design.

But, since I mention Mass Effect 2, I do not want to let the original Mass Effect get away lightly with its awful loot drop and management systems. Because I think I spent more time selling all the massive amount of unwanted equipment, or turning into gel than I did mining in ME2. Every individual gun, armour buffer.. everything. That game has the worst gear management... and the worse is people actually like that game because its 'more of an RPG' due to the straight up worst thing about that game. Madness.

Fuck it, I'm done for now.

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DC has reminded me of a couple. I always hated that you had to find save ribbons in Resident Evil games. I get why they did it, to introduce an element of danger, you couldn't just save every 2 minutes and feel safe. But limiting something so important as saving is ridiculous

similarly, limiting light sources in horror games. Daylight does this but it never turned in to a problem, but it was in Amnesia. You need to be in the light otherwise you go insane, but you can't use your lights because then you'll run out, which means you don't explore so you don't find more, which means you run out any way

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playing an isometric rpg, you're holding a direction on the stick to move off the screen, as the next screen loads, because you're still holding the same direction, you instantly exit.

FFVII does this in a bunch of places and it gets on my nerves every time

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I've mentioned it before, but the soul gem stuff in the Elder Scrolls games are terribly convoluted. Look at it in comparison to the other crafting skills.

Smithing all you have to do is collect the materials you need and then make the stuff that can give you the maximum benefit of the materials you have, then it's just a case of making the stuff you want to wear. In older games you had to keep them repaired after.

Alchemy you just throw everything that has the things you want the potion to do and then make it. In older games you had to carry about equipment, but you could make them out in the field.

Enchanting. First of all you need to find/buy the gems themselves. Buying these gems is expensive compared to the other crafting parts of the game. Then you need to soul trap an enemy that will get trapped in a gem. Each gem and each enemy has a soul size, if you try to capture a bigger soul for a lesser gem you are wasting your time, so that's something you have to take into account. Once you have a soul filled gem you can then start putting effects into equipment, but not until you disenchant another item so you can learn that enchant. Enchants on wearable items last forever, whereas held items have a set charge for some inexplicable reason. Even the strongest set charges are no where as near as good at the standard stats of items made by smithing. Also because of their limited use, you're often left with nothing but a decorative ornament until you go through the whole process of finding more soul gems, filling them and then recharging your weapon. It's a seriously awful concept.

What should happen is that soul trapping enemies should be counted in a soul number. Easy enemies yield a low soul number and harder larger enemies have a large soul number. That way, any souls trapped can fill any soul gem, if a soul size exceeds filling a gem, it spills over into the next soul gem if you have one. The enchants should have a massive buff, but to compensate they should deteriorate the base skills of anything you put them on. Say you have a bow that does 100 damage before you apply an enchant, depending on the enchant it could lose anywhere in between 10 and 30% after enchanting, but it gains more what it has lost via the enchant.

Do away with the refilling enchanted weapons. Let them have a mana bar that refills overtime depending on items used during the enchant. It makes more sense to me that if I have a magical sword and I wade into a fight that it should continue to do the magical thing it's been enchanted with while it's able to. It's magical, not running on fucking batteries. Just make the magic weapons work on the same basis as the man does. If I can fire 10 fireballs from my hands before running out of mana then the sword should be able to do the same thing before it needs a cool down before the next fire damage takes place.

On a sort of unrelated note, think of how cool you could make the enchanted weapons look. They'd be all glowy and mystical and shit when they were fully charged, but as the mana in them was depleting they could flicker and go dim.

You can have that idea for free Bethesda, I know you read all my posts. You crazy stalkers.

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