What are some of the biggest examples of bad game design you’ve seen?

[Massively Strong Greed]

I’ll start:

IVs in Pokémon. They’re randomly generated numbers that determine how good your Pokémon’s stats are. Sure, they can be manipulated or even increased in later games, but that’s a Band-Aid fix.

Boss battles in Paper Mario Sticker Star and Color Splash. They have insane amounts of HP that can only be efficiently drained if you use a specific attack against them. However, there’s no hints or logical way to determine what a boss’ weakness is. Why is a cactus weak against a bat? And just how insane are their HP stats? The FIRST boss takes about HALF AN HOUR to defeat without its weakness.

 

[Arm Pit Cream]

How you talk to women OP

 

[Full Race Replay]

Some of the camera angles on the worlds in Super Mario Galaxy 1. They almost did a great job making the camera angle lead to the world layout being easy to understand but sometimes the camera gets stuck behind a wall and obstructs the view, and sometimes it is hard to line up the direction of a precise jump.

 

[Bongocat]

Pretty much any linear sneaking segment in any game. Open world sneaking is fine, especially with good AI, but linear always boils down to an annoying waiting game with almost no wiggle room. You do exactly as the dev intends WHEN the dev intends or it's instant mission failure.

Both good and bad sneaking segments can be seen back to back in Metro: Exodus.

 

[AgriDrThunder]

Civilization VI didn't have a restart button after map seeding on launch, you had to go to a third party site to download it.

Same with Skyrim. Fresh out of the box it didn't display where in the menstruation cycle female npc's were so it had to be modded.

 

[Stephanie Bustcakes]

I’ll start:

IVs in Pokémon. They’re randomly generated numbers that determine how good your Pokémon’s stats are. Sure, they can be manipulated or even increased in later games, but that’s a Band-Aid fix.

Boss battles in Paper Mario Sticker Star and Color Splash. They have insane amounts of HP that can only be efficiently drained if you use a specific attack against them. However, there’s no hints or logical way to determine what a boss’ weakness is. Why is a cactus weak against a bat? And just how insane are their HP stats? The FIRST boss takes about HALF AN HOUR to defeat without its weakness.

The second point you explained why you think it's bad, but not the first. All you did was state a fact, that pokemon have randomly generated stats. Why is this bad game design?

 

[Full Race Replay]

also, how the fuck are you supposed to pitch at pro level in wii sports baseball??

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

The second point you explained why you think it's bad, but not the first. All you did was state a fact, that pokemon have randomly generated stats. Why is this bad game design?

Fair enough, I’ll explain. Why should one member of a Pokémon species randomly be worse than another member of the same species? It just leads to wasted time in preparing for competitive play. You don’t gain battling skill by breeding Pokémon.

 

[Livecorpse]

Puzzles that boil down to "figure out what the dev was thinking when they came up with this".

For a game lousy with examples, look up Ripper, an old FMV adventure game. In one early puzzle, you have to decipher a code. One part of the code is the string "noiaid+1". It translates to 2021.

Noiaid = no eye aid = 20/20

Keep in mind, this is only one part of a bigger code string, and there's no real hints other than the AI you're talking to saying "this number isn't valid". It just looks like scrambled gibberish.

For how much budget Ripper had, it's amazingly bad. It's like a case study in how not to make an adventure game.

Edit: so to bash on Ripper some more, not ten minutes into the game is an utterly awful puzzle. You have to reassemble a shattered mug, in a 3d object viewer, with possibly the worst interface ever. Each piece can rotate, but it's not clear at all how they fit together, and there's several pieces that just look like a mash of polygons no matter how you spin them. Look it up on YouTube if this explanation is unclear; it honestly needs to be seen to be believed.

When you complete the puzzle, you get (drumroll please) a password. A single word, in a tiny-ass font that you could have seen just by putting two pieces close to each other.

Also, Ripper has several board game puzzles that all follow the same rule: Do you have a walkthrough open, with a turn-by-turn list of what moves to make? No? Congratulations, you lose.

 

[Bongocat]

Puzzles that boil down to "figure out what the dev was thinking when they came up with this".

For a game lousy with examples, look up Ripper, an old FMV adventure game. In one early puzzle, you have to decipher a code. One part of the code is the string "noiaid+1". It translates to 2021.

Noiaid = no eye aid = 20/20

Keep in mind, this is only one part of a bigger code string, and there's no real hints other than the AI you're talking to saying "this number isn't valid". It just looks like scrambled gibberish.

For how much budget Ripper had, it's amazingly bad. It's like a case study in how not to make an adventure game.

Adventure games in general are prone to "use Mustache on Cat to open Safe" logic.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

Puzzles that boil down to "figure out what the dev was thinking when they came up with this".

For a game lousy with examples, look up Ripper, an old FMV adventure game. In one early puzzle, you have to decipher a code. One part of the code is the string "noiaid+1". It translates to 2021.

Noiaid = no eye aid = 20/20

Keep in mind, this is only one part of a bigger code string, and there's no real hints other than the AI you're talking to saying "this number isn't valid". It just looks like scrambled gibberish.

For how much budget Ripper had, it's amazingly bad. It's like a case study in how not to make an adventure game.

Even acclaimed adventure games have this problem. Remember “shy gypsy, slyly, spryly, tryst by my crypt”?

 

[It's HK-47]

Literally every single Sierra game that thought it was perfectly acceptable to completely fuck your entire playthrough because you forgot one, innocuous item 50 hours ago and unknowingly soft-locked your game with nothing left to do but to start all over again. Oh, did you forget the coin in the minotaur's maze three weeks ago? That's a shame, Charon's going to need that if you want to progress the game but fuck you, start over.

It's been like 30 years and it still pisses me off every time I remember it.

 

[Meat Target]

While I loved Far Cry 5, I hated how the game seemed to be deathly afraid of you getting bored. You can't go half a mile without getting in a drive-by shootout with Peggies.

Also, tying the resistance points to scripted story progression made it go by way too quickly.

The worldbuilding was excellent, Ubisoft, but that game needs to be patched with a hefty dose of Adderall.

 

[whatever I feel like]

Civilization VI didn't have a restart button after map seeding on launch, you had to go to a third party site to download it.

Same with Skyrim. Fresh out of the box it didn't display where in the menstruation cycle female npc's were so it had to be modded.

I see your Civ VI reference and raise you Civ IV resetting your chosen game start settings every time, forcing you to manually click the add new civ button six times if you wanted to play with a full 18 instead of the default 12 on huge. And it wasn't even a list of check boxes, you literally had to move your mouse backwards and forwards to a scroll wheel each time you wanted to do it. Absolute Islamic Content there, buddies.

 

[Big Brown Schlub]

When difficulty levels just boil down to give the enemy bigger numbers and the player smaller numbers.

This especially pisses me off in the Total War games. The really early ones, Shogun 1 and Medieval 1, as well as every Total War game after Shogun 2 had their units get stat bonuses across the board. This would mean that for example in Rome 2 the enemy's barbarian levy spearmen were as strong as your Hastati, or in Warhammer that an enemy Skaven unit, which are basically a spam faction with lots of low quality but cheap trash units, was stronger than your early game Dwarves, who are the opposite, expensive units but high quality and armored as fuck. And don't get me started if you had to fight Dwarves on higher difficulties, you'd swear even their trashunits had unbreakable morale.

I said that Shogun 2 didn't do that, which is good and it makes the game as fun as it is, if not one of the most fun Total Wars in both single and multiplayer, but the problem with Shogun 2 was not on the battlefield, but on the turn-based part of the game. On higher difficulty levels every non-player clan's economy literally didn't matter and any rules regarding unit recruitment were thrown right out the window. What I mean by this is that on Very Hard or Legendary difficulty, if you wiped an enemy army, that clan would literally shit out a full 20 stack samurai-tier army the next turn and often times a player would not be able to maintain the cost of such an army if they were in the same position, let alone have money to recruit them, let alone that it's impossible for the player to recruit 20 units at once in just one castle. To put it into context unless you have certain buildings samurai-tier units take 2 turns to recruit since they're a higher tier than ashigaru-tier units that only take 1 turn to recruit. Additionally the max recruitment slots you can have at a time in a castle is 6, meaning you can only recruit 6 units at once, and to be even able to do THAT you need your castle walls and tenshu upgraded to the highest level as well as having special events active that allow you to have more recruitment slots. The only way to prevent this is to have vision on their castle(s), if they're not covered by the fog of war when you end the turn the AI won't cheat that way. God help you if you have to fight a clan that has many territories though. It's just full stack samurai army after full stack samurai army banging their heads against the player like it's a wall until you either break or you beat them.

 

[Dr Pepper]

Modern first person shooter map/level design. CoD especially has had extremely boring, three lane maps with low elevation for a while now. Black ops 1 has amazing maps with interactive elements, like the elevator in the Pentagon zombie map. Zombies in general had a lot of bitching maps and you could choose where to go and what to do.

Remember Halo Combat Evolved? Big maps, tons of flanking routes, the second mission in particular is great. Compare it with CoD advanced warfare. Only one fun mission where you could use the advanced tech as you wish. I don't really play fps games anymore because of this.

 

[Yaniv’s Hairy Balls]

Civilization VI didn't have a restart button after map seeding on launch, you had to go to a third party site to download it.

Same with Skyrim. Fresh out of the box it didn't display where in the menstruation cycle female npc's were so it had to be modded.

Wait what?

also a poor auto save system. Going through a doorway with 2 hp and 4 enemies after you? Automatic save over the last save good luck faggot. (This is mainly for games you can’t save yourself and have to rely solely on auto saves)

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

We've had somewhat similar thread already, so I will just repost my message from there.

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and it's "permadeath" is the perfect example of shitty game design. At the start they make you face two enemies that are immune to your attacks, so whatever you do, you are going to die. Ok, that's a pretty shitty introduction, they could just show this in the cutscene, like in Sekiro, when Wolf loses his arm, despite beating Gen. Then they show that your hand is rotting and inform you, that with each death it's going to rot further and if it will reach your head - game over, start again. I'm not one of those, who started sperging "boo-hoo, it is unfair", I'm ok with challenge in games. The problem is that game is terribly fucking easy and repetitive, even on the highest difficulty. Yeah, I didn't die once and even if I would, it takes 4 hours to beat this piece of crap why bother though, it's not worth it. But wait, there is more - because developers realized, that without your arm progressively rotting, plot will be fucking pointless, they made it so after each boss fight, it rots anyway, because of some "fighting evil makes you evil" bullshit. So get this - even if you didn't die once, like I did, in the end your arm will be rotten almost to the shoulder. But then it gets worse - to beat the game you have to lose. The worst part? You don't know that. The game just throws all three bosses at you and then starts spamming with enemies. My screen was full of bodies and I couldn't see shit, framerate dropped to single digits because of this and in I thought that game just glitched. In the end I just gave up and then boom - final cutscene. First I thought that maybe I did something wrong and went to check - nope, that's what supposed to happen, dying or not dying during the playthrough changes nothing and you can get secret ending only by finding all the pieces of northern mythology, which means you have to play this shit again and fuck that. I just watched it on YouTube and yep, that ending sucks dick too. Fuck everyone who praised this garbage.

 

[Aidan]

When difficulty levels just boil down to give the enemy bigger numbers and the player smaller numbers.

This especially pisses me off in the Total War games. The really early ones, Shogun 1 and Medieval 1, as well as every Total War game after Shogun 2 had their units get stat bonuses across the board. This would mean that for example in Rome 2 the enemy's barbarian levy spearmen were as strong as your Hastati, or in Warhammer that an enemy Skaven unit, which are basically a spam faction with lots of low quality but cheap trash units, was stronger than your early game Dwarves, who are the opposite, expensive units but high quality and armored as fuck. And don't get me started if you had to fight Dwarves on higher difficulties, you'd swear even their trashunits had unbreakable morale.

I said that Shogun 2 didn't do that, which is good and it makes the game as fun as it is, if not one of the most fun Total Wars in both single and multiplayer, but the problem with Shogun 2 was not on the battlefield, but on the turn-based part of the game. On higher difficulty levels every non-player clan's economy literally didn't matter and any rules regarding unit recruitment were thrown right out the window. What I mean by this is that on Very Hard or Legendary difficulty, if you wiped an enemy army, that clan would literally shit out a full 20 stack samurai-tier army the next turn and often times a player would not be able to maintain the cost of such an army if they were in the same position, let alone have money to recruit them, let alone that it's impossible for the player to recruit 20 units at once in just one castle. To put it into context unless you have certain buildings samurai-tier units take 2 turns to recruit since they're a higher tier than ashigaru-tier units that only take 1 turn to recruit. Additionally the max recruitment slots you can have at a time in a castle is 6, meaning you can only recruit 6 units at once, and to be even able to do THAT you need your castle walls and tenshu upgraded to the highest level as well as having special events active that allow you to have more recruitment slots. The only way to prevent this is to have vision on their castle(s), if they're not covered by the fog of war when you end the turn the AI won't cheat that way. God help you if you have to fight a clan that has many territories though. It's just full stack samurai army after full stack samurai army banging their heads against the player like it's a wall until you either break or you beat them.

You have summed up my distaste for Total War's artificial difficulty and why I stopped with Shogun 2. Fortunately it's still very fun and playable but it's so lazy to just make your AI cheat. I understand making them follow all of the same rules would also be a problem but fuck if they can't try something else.

On the same note of lazy difficulty, Bethesda is guilty of just modifying damage and health which I don't understand how people enjoy.

Any game that nearly requires the use of third-party resources to get through something is stupid and many adventure/puzzle games are guilty. I believe I've mentioned before but Professor Layton's puzzles are occasionally so fucking obtuse that you need to go into that series with a "what does the game expect of me?" mindset more than just solving puzzles.
Talos Principle has one exceptional moment that is for extra content only but it pissed me off so much at the time. Basically, the hint for a puzzle that is so obviously an analog clock using Roman numerals is "The Eagle has landed."
There is nothing in the game to further hint what this is about and it ends up being a reference to the moon landing and the solution to the puzzle is the time they landed on the moon.
So unless you're a very specific kind of nerd, you have no way of knowing this and you basically have to brute force or look it up which is the only puzzle in the entire game like that in an otherwise exceptional game. Fuck any game that expects you to use a guide or the internet to figure out anything in it except easter eggs.

 

[JamusActimus]

Fair enough, I’ll explain. Why should one member of a Pokémon species randomly be worse than another member of the same species? It just leads to wasted time in preparing for competitive play. You don’t gain battling skill by breeding Pokémon.

The game is not made for competitive play.
If you want to compete use smogon.

Pokemon is a party game.

Ivs are not that bad if you're not autistic about it.