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

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

The fashion show in Disco Elysium: different clothes give different stats boosts and penalties, forcing you to switch clothes before every active skill check. Far too wide selection of skills in the same game. Some of them, like hand/eye coordination, are used at three or four crucial points in the story, eating up skill points better used elsewhere but fucking you over if you don't develop them.

All the "back to square 1" bullshit games like the DXHR DLC campaing or The Witcher and the Gothic series pull with every new installment.

Edit:
The Corprus mission in Morrowind. You have to get the coprus disease at that point and only that point, or else you're fucking yourself over with no in-game solution. Thank Todd Howard for the console, right?

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

Thanks for the heads-up. I wanted to try Sekiro, but I'm not so sure after reading this.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Thanks for the heads-up. I wanted to try Sekiro, but I'm not so sure after reading this.

You mean "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice"? Because Sekiro is way-way better in that regard, even though its "you die a lot - people get corona" mechanic has no real consequences too.

 

[2021Murder]

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.

Thats because those were pay2win. You had to call some number to get the tips back in the pre-internet days. Thats why no one legitimately talks about how amazing pre-Doom PC games were. It was mostly dumb shit like that, or roguelikes. When Oregon trail is the best game on your platform you know its shit

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

You mean "Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice"? Because Sekiro is way-way better in that regard, even though its "you die a lot - people get corona" mechanic has no real consequences too.

So the Sekiro part was just a parralel, and most of that was about Senua? That's good to know, thank you.
This is what I get for not reading the post thoroughly.

Senua I don't really care about. I watched around half of a longplay then I got bored of it.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

So the Sekiro part was just a parralel, and most of that was about Senua? That's good to know, thank you.
This is what I get for not reading the post thoroughly.

Yeah, I brought up Sekiro as a positive example, even though I have one big problem with it - you have to re-discover one location two fucking times with old bosses/mini-bosses, it was really frustrating and boring. Otherwise, great game, would recommend.

 

[AMHOLIO]

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.

I know the exact game and I'm very very sorry bro.

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.

I'll disagree with you on this: this wastes competitive players time, but the original goal was to make each pokemon feel unique to the dumbass kids playing it. If a kid wanted to make a party with two or more of the same pokemon, it makes each team member unique in addition to their natures. "Yeah this murkrow sucks but this one is awesome" kinda thing. Its a small thing for most kids and even adults who just want to kick back and play pokemon. They're trying ro make the world seem alive and thats one way of doing it (at least they give you a choice for IVs later). Its not always successful but its an attempt.

I consider the unskippable cutscenes in Pokemon or any game for the matter to be bad game design. I am replaying the game, do not hold me hostage Unskippable cutscenes between fast travel when I know it's not to cover a loading screen are harrowing.

Games with huge maps but jack shit to do aside from linear quest. I like exploring but when there's nothing to find it hampers the point.

I'll probably think of more specific examples later.

 

[Overcast]

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.

Reminds me of this one stealth sequence in some DLC for the Spider-Man PS4 game.

You sneak past some bad guys with Mary Jane, a cutscene happens where she gets the info she needs, and behind your back a stack of boxes just magically appear where you came from, so you're forced to go down the path the devs want you to go.

It'd be one thing if something happened that actually caused that, but no, they didn't even try to think up a logical reason as to why Mary Jane wouldn't be able to go back the way she came. Absolute laziness.

 

[Rich Evans Apologist]

Any artsy game that decides to pull the old "games don't HAVE to be fun" card.

SUDA51 has a bad habit of doing this. An incredibly tedious, grindy, slow, and utterly pointless section that serves no purpose? Get that in there! One of his earlier visual novels has a section where you're potentially looking at "investigating" literally hundreds of apartments at random until you find one that gives you a breadcrumb, just to waste your time. Even with a walkthrough, the section is a solid 20-30 minutes of walking around doing nothing. No More Heroes 2 has a "level" where you sit in a parking lot and fight enemies for genuinely 20-30 minutes that pose no real challenge.

That's different from a game's mechanics intentionally being so punishing that it's hard to call fun - Pathologic 2 is hard to call "fun," but its punishing mechanics add to a sense of poverty and urgency in the game in active ways that inform the gameplay. Even Dark Souls 2's increasingly-decreasing max health mechanic contributes to the game in a meaningful way and feels thematic.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

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.

That was when you learned the joys of 'staged saving', where you would have save files at certain key points in the game. Learned that one by trial, error, and having Gwydion fall off the fucking mountain repeatedly in KQ3.

To this day I'm not sure if I was just doing it wrong, or what, but I couldn't get my lancemates to accept ANY orders in Mechwarrior 3. Ever. I'd tell them to 'attack my target' and they'd literally tell me 'sorry, nope'. IIRC, you had to use the map to issue commands, which was highly inconvenient at best.

This was especially jarring as I was also playing Starsiege at the time, which had a surprisingly good lance-command interface. Pick your target, open command interface (one key), command lance to attack target (one key). Done. You could do it while circle-strafing some bastard, and then your lance dogpiled him and killed him. Works for me!

 

[Urbanmech]

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.

If they just got rid of the forced progression the game would be so much better. The fact you can miss side stuff because your just having fun with the game was such a stupid ass design.

 

[Sexy Senior Citizen]

Long spawn times, especially if my team is getting clobbered.

Games with interactive cutscenes. It's one thing if it's a stealth mission and you're trying to listen in on a conversation. It's another to press forward while listening to the characters drone on and on.

 

[The Penultimate Warrior]

Stealth sections where you don't know what the enemies cone of vision is (e.g Wolfenstein)

Unskippable cut scenes, or placing a checkpoint just before them.

Achievements that require a ridiculous amount of grinding (Gears of War being a prime example, who wants to re-up 40 times or get 100,000 versus kills FFS?)

Collectables where they don't break it down to tell you how many you have on each level. I remember those damn coffee cups in Alan Wake, I followed a guide and was sure I didn't miss any but ended up on 99/100, and am not going through all that again.

Thankfully no longer seems to happen, but having to hold the stick down to sprint

 

[User names must be unique]

Power scaling, in most games it's pretty bad what's the point in progressing and building your character if you're going to change enemy health/defence and damage values to match? Its so bad in some games players have intentionally worn bad or no equipment because the boost from scaling was often far more powerful than any gear.

Titanforging in world of warcraft, you put in the same effort to kill the same boss as someone else, get good RNG to have the item you want drop, then on top of that you get another dice roll to find out if it's good or not. It was a terrible idea that made people care less about gearing up.

 

[KingofNothing]

Missable content because you passed through the main story too quickly. In Yakuza 1 on the PS2, unless you were constantly scrubbing the entire map, you basically needed a guide if you wanted to do every substory since if you didn't trigger it in a specific chapter, it was gone forever. This even counted for substories you already started. Oh that guy you were talking to in chapter 2, well you forgot to talk him again in a corner of the map on chapter 5 so that substory is gone now.

Really glad they fixed it in later games so you could do the substories at any time.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Doom 3. Gun, flashlight, choose one. That game was DARK and remember the rich, deep blacks of a CRT and the shiny glass that made things even harder to see even when they were lit? In some areas of the game it felt like playing Ray Charles on a shooting spree.

Imagine getting rid of the flashlight so you can blast that guy.

No flashlight.


I understand Id's intent but jesus christ it did not work.

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)

That's Oni in a nutshell. I had one autosave mid flying kick through a door way, had no health, the boss punches in the air and I die. Autosave loads flying into the room, punched in the air, dead, reload, dead, reload. It was funny in a way. Then Bungie announced that the autosave team from Oni had joined the Halo team and I guess they learned that having regenerating shields would be a good idea. And no quicksaves while in combat.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Putting long readables in an action scene or action game.

Level grinding. It's padding of the worst sort. It could be removed from any game and you'd only gain.


Maybe it's because I'm a game dev, but there's two sighs of bad design that often go hand in hand for reasons that have more to do with development than design.

This won't go over well, but high difficulty. It's trivial to up stats on enemies, give the computer perfect knowledge, etc. I struggle to think of a game that had a tough-but-fair challenge. N+ and Geometry Wars are the only ones I name off the top of my head. This bad difficulty can come from anything from beginners traps, to buffed enemy stats. This seems to be done to pad the game, and avoid having to do the tricky task of balancing it. Plus it makes your game criticism proof as you can just say "git gud" to anyone who complains.

Randomised levels. Not bad on it's own, but as with high difficulty, it's mostly use as a crutch to pad the game. Designing levels is hard and time consuming. Spend a little extra time and you have a game you don't have to design levels for, and has infinite replay value. The only game I can think of that did randomisation well is Xcom 2. You can add randomised loot for the same reason. Borderlands doesn't feel like it has infinite guns, it feels like has about 10 with slight tweaks in numbers.

These two things often go together. So many potentially good games are ruined by this rogue-like trend, and to me it comes across as lazy more often than not. eg. Lobotomy Corporation was meant to be a SCP management game, but it's a rogue-like so you have to keep replaying the game over and over and over, slowly gaining in power and hoping for a good run. Everspace was well made, and could have been a fun space action game, but they put rogue-like elements in and ruined it.

 

[Considered HARMful]

To this day I'm not sure if I was just doing it wrong, or what, but I couldn't get my lancemates to accept ANY orders in Mechwarrior 3. Ever. I'd tell them to 'attack my target' and they'd literally tell me 'sorry, nope'.

It worked for me, at least most of the time.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

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.

If they don’t want me to consider playing actual competitive, then they should bring back the Battle Factory. And I’m not talking about the Battle Agency, I mean the real Battle Factory.

 

[Fek]

Even though I enjoy the hell out of playing 'em..

Spoiler: These faggots.

 

[Tanner Glass]

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.

Because not everything in the same species acts exactly the same.

Maybe your Ratatta is faster than my Ratatta, but my Ratatta is stronger. It's a small way of making an individual pokemon feel unique and that it's your pokemon.

The game doesn't get this across super well, though and I think Pokemon as a whole would benefit from either
- Getting rid of "advanced mechanics" (evs, ivs, egg moves, egg chain moves, hard to get items, etc)
- Making "advanced mechanics" much easier to get into (EVs/IVs are no longer "invisible", breeding is no longer 7 seperate dice rolls you're hoping all land on "32" {if you use these 2 items it's only 5 dice rolls!}, more moves moved to TMs/HMs, etc).