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

[trent]

Checkpoints before an unskippable scene with dialogue.

Usually put in before a difficult part of the game that'll you'll have to redo a bunch of times. I've abandoned games because of this.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

Checkpoints before an unskippable scene with dialogue.

Usually put in before a difficult part of the game that'll you'll have to redo a bunch of times. I've abandoned games because of this.

Seraphic X in Mega Man Zero, anyone?

 

[Francis York Morgan]

The overabundance of loot in action-RPGs and pretty much every western developed RPG. Inventory management sucks ass and having to constantly go through all the junk to find the handful of items that have any value is annoying.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

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.

SUDA51 has a very uneven design style, especially in NMH. The reason I liked Furi was that it was the good parts of NMH (crazy, over-the-top duels between a man with a laser sword and some psychotic weirdo with their own improbable weapon) without any of the bullshit.

 

[Juan But Not Forgotten]

Idol collecting in Far Cry 3. If you get the map of the region, they will be marked on global map, so you think "well, I need to just keep collecting them", but by the end of the game you realize, that number 2 is missing. It's nowhere to be seen. You google only to find out, that you can obtain it only during that one time when you take shrooms in the cave. If you missed it, well, no problem - just start over! God, I was mad.

 

[Gloomy guest]

Excessive tutorials - the Temple of Trials in Fallout 2 and the opening chapter of RDR2 come to mind. I just wanna play the game.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

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

No flashlight.
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I understand Id's intent but jesus christ it did not work.

One of, if not the first mod for Doom 3 was one that 'duct taped' your flashlight to your gun so you didn't have to deal with that bullshit.

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

Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but damn, it felt like herding cats trying to get my lancemates to work with me.

 

[KokoroKoroki]

Any kind of escort mission where the one being escorted very clearly has a way of defending themselves (e.g. they're carrying a gun) but they just don't fucking use it.

Dead Rising is one of the worst offenders of this, the only weapon worth giving to the survivors is the shotgun, anything else you might as well give to a lobotomized monkey because even they would probably be able to use weapons better than the survivors.

 

[Pissmaster]

Any kind of escort mission where the one being escorted very clearly has a way of defending themselves (e.g. they're carrying a gun) but they just don't fucking use it.

Dead Rising is one of the worst offenders of this, the only weapon worth giving to the survivors is the shotgun, anything else you might as well give to a lobotomized monkey because even they would probably be able to use weapons better than the survivors.

Not in my experience. Giving the survivors a gun in Dead Rising almost guarantees they'll shoot you, if you were between a zombie they decided to target. I had the most luck just giving them sledgehammers.

 

[Cyclonus]

I bought this horror game called "Gone Home" once, but they forgot to put any monsters in it.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Excessive tutorials - the Temple of Trials in Fallout 2 and the opening chapter of RDR2 come to mind. I just wanna play the game.

That sucks so bad. I have waited for the game, read about it, watched trailers and clips, seen the screenshots, in short: I really want to play the game. Install/start and... oh I'm not allowed to play the game, not just yet, there's going to be talking and text first.

The Trials in Fallout 2 sucks ass but it is at least gameplay.

Children of Mana is a massive offender in not letting you play the action-rpg you bought. I timed a longplay and it breaks down like this(from starting to enter player name):
00:00 to 1337 - talking
13:37 fight one monster in a coliseum
15:37 back to talking
22:00 fight one scrub enemy to save another character and get a companion
23:00 talking
23:58 traverse the environment, fight some scrubs, three screens total maybe, get launched into a village which means...
27:51 TALKING!
39:17 Now you can play
for a short while
46:45 to 51:15 is more talking.

The intro is 40 minutes long. It's got multiple save points to break up all the dialogue.

One of, if not the first mod for Doom 3 was one that 'duct taped' your flashlight to your gun so you didn't have to deal with that bullshit.

Maybe I wasn't doing it right, but damn, it felt like herding cats trying to get my lancemates to work with me.

Yep, it came out fast. I think there was a technical reason(technical reason: Carmack had the final say) behind Id's decision in addition to that and that was to limit shadow casting lights in a scene for performance reasons. Stencil shadows used a lot of geometry transformations per shadow casting light source.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

I bought this horror game called "Gone Home" once, but they forgot to put any monsters in it.

LOL. Thankfully, when I got that game it was on sale, so I was only out five bucks. But God damn, that pissed me off. It was pitched as a supernatural-horror puzzle game... nope, it wasn't.

 

[Alexander Thaut]

unskippable cutscenes.

fucking pokemon ultra sun/moon takes an otherwise enjoyable game and fucks it with this.

 

[Massively Strong Greed]

unskippable cutscenes.

fucking pokemon ultra sun/moon takes an otherwise enjoyable game and fucks it with this.

Honestly, it’s not even the actual cutscenes in that game that are the problem. I’ll watch “just a kahuna on a stroll to the laguna” every time. It’s the mountains of useless dialogue that kill the replay value.

 

[KingofNothing]

Children of Mana is a massive offender in not letting you play the action-rpg you bought. I timed a longplay and it breaks down like this(from starting to enter player name):
00:00 to 1337 - talking
13:37 fight one monster in a coliseum
15:37 back to talking
22:00 fight one scrub enemy to save another character and get a companion
23:00 talking
23:58 traverse the environment, fight some scrubs, three screens total maybe, get launched into a village which means...
27:51 TALKING!
39:17 Now you can play
for a short while
46:45 to 51:15 is more talking.

The intro is 40 minutes long. It's got multiple save points to break up all the dialogue.

Even though it's not as bad as that, this shit was the reason I specifically made a save at the character creation whenever I wanted to try new shit in Skyrim. Forcing players to sit through long cutscenes they can't skip before the gameplay even starts is awful

 

[Jonah Hill poster]

Not sure if bad game design or just bad programming, but:

Still makes me laugh either way.

 

[Livecorpse]

unskippable cutscenes.

fucking pokemon ultra sun/moon takes an otherwise enjoyable game and fucks it with this.

Here's the thing about Pokémon. Why, after so many generations, have they never given you an option to skip the tutorial at the beginning? Game Freak, this is not my first Pokémon rodeo. I know to weaken the guy before I throw the ball, can you please just give me the balls and let me get started?

 

[Meat Target]

Here's the thing about Pokémon. Why, after so many generations, have they never given you an option to skip the tutorial at the beginning? Game Freak, this is not my first Pokémon rodeo. I know to weaken the guy before I throw the ball, can you please just give me the balls and let me get started?

Because Pokemon is marketed towards kids playing it for the first time.

 

[Cyclonus]

LOL. Thankfully, when I got that game it was on sale, so I was only out five bucks. But God damn, that pissed me off. It was pitched as a supernatural-horror puzzle game... nope, it wasn't.

You lucky bastard, I wasted a whole twenty quid on it. "The most important game of the decade!" squawk the journos. I guess they were right about that, because it was the game that woke me up to the incestuous self wanking mess game journalism has turned into.

 

[Keystone]

Bloodborne's camera. Been a few years since I played it but I still remember half of any fight was with the enemies, and the other half was with the camera. That still applied even after you got good at the combat, too.

Oh and even though achievements don't really matter, I still fucking loathe when they add Multiplayer achievements in with the Singleplayer ones instead of making them a separate category. This is the absolute fucking worst in games that are 99% singleplayer oriented. It's like "Hey good job beating the game and getting all those pretty tough achievements through patience and skill. Now go earn these MP achievements that you would never get in a normal match unless you and random strangers deliberately band together to unlock for each other."

Now unless it's some super popular game that stands the test of time the player count inevitably will dwindle and you'll never get them because nobody's playing the multiplayer any more. So if you didn't play the game at release or don't have anyone to help then you're shit outta luck. Someone mentioned DOOM 3 before and its infamous flashlight. Know what else DOOM 3 has? A multiplayer mode nobody plays any more with achievements tied to that MP. If not for that I'd have a 100% completion. Doom Eternal is guilty of this too.

Multiplayer/Co-op only games are the obvious exception.