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

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Dead space 3 in general was pretty disappointing. None of the enemies save for the bosses and regenerators are much of a challenge when you fully upgrade stasis. You can just use stasis and then mop the floor with enemies.
 
'Roguelike mode' haphazardly crammed into a non-roguelike game (I.e. Everspace as previously mentioned) just so it can be tagged as a roguelite on steam pisses me off to no end. Those people don't understand why roguelikes are fun to begin with. Don't try to bill permadeath difficulty as something it's not.

In recent memory, a family member and I both went through an adventure game series called Book of Unwritten Tales. It's important to note this series came out between 2012 and 2016. One of them had a puzzle where a villains' club has a guard you need to get past by disguising yourself. The solution to this involves something like a bag, purple paint, glue and green ceramic bowls - you literally dress up as the purple tentacle from Maniac Mansion to satisfy this guy. This puzzle gets on my nerves to no end because not only does it require you to know a specific reference to a 30-year old unrelated game that is never namedropped or referred to in the game itself, but you also need to be able to recall exactly what purple tentacle looks like in order to put the costume together and even if you were to blindly figure it out or use a walkthrough the solution makes no sense if you don't know the specific reference.
 
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?
the tutorial is never a big deal since it' like 10-15 seconds.

I'm just pissy about USUM's cutscenes because it breaks immersion often.
 
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?)

>Become ranked #1 on your countries MP leaderboard
>Become ranked #1 on the global MP leaderboard


Nigga the fuck you think I'm made out of, free time and autism?
 
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?
Mega Man Battle Network had this problem too, which was especially annoying because the games had continuity, so you were most likely playing them in order.

So that means, Lan managed to save the world five times within the past year or so, but completely forgets everything he knew about netbattling after a couple of months, every time. Plus, every time he saves the world, he chucks every single battlechip and upgrade for MegaMan.exe in the garbage. What the hell?
 
Could talk for hours about dumb design decisions, take with grains of salt since I don't actually design games.

1. Matchmaking and pilot skill rating system in MechWarrior Online is an utter disaster, chassis and weapon balance is completely screwed, in game tutorials are a joke.
2. Grim Dawn is mostly good but devs keep doing strange things like putting overpowered mobs that are tributes to skilled players on normal gameplay routes, nerfing niche builds based on one player finding ways to make them over perform in certain game modes.
3. Kingdom Hearts 3 makes movement awkward enough that precise platforming becomes much more difficult than it needs to be.
4. Mechwarrior 5 Mercs has such atrocious base AI routines that modders had to step in and fix them, and will spawn entire platoons of mechs, tanks and VTOLs basically right behind you. Modders fixed that too thankfully.
 
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Another more general thing that really gets on my nerves is any game where there's a noninteractive action you're expected to do a hundred times an hour that takes multiple seconds to execute, often involving picking up items. Binding of Isaac and Don't Starve both handle it well with Isaac not locking you in place during the animation and DS taking a fifth of a second for the entire animation, but fucking Monster Hunter and its 10-second harvests just kill the momentum.

Turnbased RPGs are really horrible with it too. Disgaea and Bravely Default stand out as games that actually understand this, and it's especially great in Disgaea since you can conditionally skip animations (or not) based on if a button is held.
 
Game begins. You are placed right smack in the middle of the action.
As soon as action is about to take place, gameplay is paused/interrupted by a tiny window, nearly unreadable tiny font, with either control explanation, or multiple pages of what the game's progression system is.
You go back to the action, mash some more buttons, run around, then, before a new enemy attacks, at the precise moment you try to back away, another "helpful" vignette interrupts gameplay to explain more shit that you will obviously forget within seconds.
Repeat.

One of the advantages of printed manuals used to be you could read up on those things at your own time, not during the fucking game taking place. Of course I am not making an argument than an interactive tutorial is inferior to printed paper. I'm just saying how all of this horseshit became the standard. Saving on a printed manual? That saving sure as fuck isn't being passed onto my dumb preordering stupid ass. Digital-only distro? How hard is it to have a pdf with the shit the game is gonna interrupt me.
 
Could talk for hours about dumb design decisions, take with grains of salt since I don't actually design games.

1. Matchmaking and pilot skill rating system in MechWarrior Online is an utter disaster, chassis and weapon balance is completely screwed, in game tutorials are a joke.
4. Mechwarrior 5 Mercs has such atrocious base AI routines that modders had to step in and fix them, and will spawn entire platoons of mechs, tanks and VTOLs basically right behind you. Modders fixed that too thankfully.

PGI are bad devs, period.
 
What do you mean? SoC's maps were great.
1)
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2) Linear little square maps with not enough space where you constantly get stuck (horrible running controls) and develop claustrophobia.
 
Just cause 4. Game is promoted to have a better map, some interesting system that allows you to control an army of your own, and there's even a "dynamic" weather system.

Turns out that most of this is all complete marketing fluff, and to pour salt in the wound, they remove one of the major points of the franchise. Destroyed buildings stay destroyed. Just cause 2 was the first game in the franchise to really introduce this feature, 3 adds on it, adding massive physics objects, and while 4 keeps those physics objects, the entire game is shifted to focus on a shitty mission structure to progress instead of, you know, destroying things, kind of the whole reason the game exists. Most of the missions are the same mission copied over and over, the worst of which are escort missions, and missions where you have to defend some guy doing a task over and over, which are basically a more annoying escort mission.

The weather system, one of the most talked about features of the game, ends up just mostly being tornadoes that are spawned and follow a set path, destroying whatever is in their way. The "Army of Chaos" as they called it, is just points given to you that allow you to "purchase" land once you've done the story missions, and there's just an infinite fight between your guys and the enemy on the borders of areas. The "upgraded map" has massive empty areas, more so than either of the previous games in the series.

Completely removed any trust I had in the developer Avalanche, and especially opened my eyes to the business practices of Square Enix. 4 had likely over a year less time allotted to development versus the previous game in the franchise, not that it would have really helped this game beyond potentially giving them time to have patched up some pretty egregious performance problems and bugs.
 
Designers conflating more damage and health = more harder. While Bethesda is notorious for it (Oblivion's atrocious level scaling), other developers are guilty as well.
Bullet sponge enemies don't make me sweat bullets, they just make me not want to put myself through more tedium. If combat feels like a chore instead of enjoyable or tense you've fucked up as a game designer.

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.
Iirc IVs were intended to be like Pokemon "genetics". Unlike EVs (effort values/stat exp), they are supposed to be static. The idea goes that not every member of a species is entirely alike. Some do better, some do worse; they all have quirks. In practice it led to every competitive player, myself included, becoming eugenicists the likes of which haven't been seen since the Third Reich.
If a Pokemon isn't at least 5IV perfect it's useless for competitive play and thus trash. Add onto that hidden abilities, natures, and egg moves and you can go through hundreds of eggs just to get that one übermensch 6IV perfect Wonder Scale Dratini with desirable egg moves.
Thematically IVs fit the world but they make competitive a nightmare to prep for. Only the most autistic contenders stand a chance, especially when tourneys allow for legendary Pokemon to be used - which may need dozens to hundreds of encounter resets just to get that 5 or 6IV perfect Suicune, Landorus, or Articuno.
 
Just cause 4. Game is promoted to have a better map, some interesting system that allows you to control an army of your own, and there's even a "dynamic" weather system.

Turns out that most of this is all complete marketing fluff, and to pour salt in the wound, they remove one of the major points of the franchise. Destroyed buildings stay destroyed. Just cause 2 was the first game in the franchise to really introduce this feature, 3 adds on it, adding massive physics objects, and while 4 keeps those physics objects, the entire game is shifted to focus on a shitty mission structure to progress instead of, you know, destroying things, kind of the whole reason the game exists. Most of the missions are the same mission copied over and over, the worst of which are escort missions, and missions where you have to defend some guy doing a task over and over, which are basically a more annoying escort mission.

The weather system, one of the most talked about features of the game, ends up just mostly being tornadoes that are spawned and follow a set path, destroying whatever is in their way. The "Army of Chaos" as they called it, is just points given to you that allow you to "purchase" land once you've done the story missions, and there's just an infinite fight between your guys and the enemy on the borders of areas. The "upgraded map" has massive empty areas, more so than either of the previous games in the series.

Completely removed any trust I had in the developer Avalanche, and especially opened my eyes to the business practices of Square Enix. 4 had likely over a year less time allotted to development versus the previous game in the franchise, not that it would have really helped this game beyond potentially giving them time to have patched up some pretty egregious performance problems and bugs.
Well in all fairness, they had to basically rebuild Just Cause 3 from an online-only turn of the generation shitfest into an.... acceptable game in only a year. So making a new map and weather/army systems shouldn't have been that much harder.

Either way, they really pooched it. Just Cause 3 was ready to break out like Witcher 3 or Oblivion, but then people played the game and realized it was shallow, had enemies spawning in right up your but and very buggy on PC (which is where most of the die-hard fan base prefered to play.) Now they have a dead franchise and their A team, which did Mad Max instead, has little to show for that either. Avalanche really, really, really fucked up.
 
Well in all fairness, they had to basically rebuild Just Cause 3 from an online-only turn of the generation shitfest into an.... acceptable game in only a year. So making a new map and weather/army systems shouldn't have been that much harder.

Either way, they really pooched it. Just Cause 3 was ready to break out like Witcher 3 or Oblivion, but then people played the game and realized it was shallow, had enemies spawning in right up your but and very buggy on PC (which is where most of the die-hard fan base prefered to play.) Now they have a dead franchise and their A team, which did Mad Max instead, has little to show for that either. Avalanche really, really, really fucked up.
3 was also a downgrade in a few ways from 2, but it at least did a lot better at being a Just Cause game than 4. The only "fixes" other than bug fixes are shoddy dlc that mostly misses the point, and it's launch was far worse than it was for 3.

One of the weirder things about 4 is they claimed that it was somehow running on an "entirely new engine" even though it is pretty obviously running on a newer iteration of 3's.

Avalanche has definitely screwed up. Some of their other projects include a failed sort of MMO, and the mess that was Rage 2. I only see a further decline in their future. Just checked their website and they have seemingly rebranded as "Avalanche Studios Group" rather than their previous name of just Avalanche Studios, and they even have a new logo. The only new games they have to show are a sequel to that hunting franchise of theirs and some game called "Second Extinction" some co-op shooter where you kill dinosaurs. It's been out for a few months, and currently it's doing worse than JC4 is right now, and it's even behind Gen Zero, the other botched launch. However it's still in early access, and has better ratings than I'd expect so maybe they've actually got something decent on their hands, but time will tell if it's actually any sort of success. I definitely don't think it'll do well enough to justify how much the studio has bloated over time.
 
I'm completely lost here (especially on #1). What are you trying to show there?
Well first of all, the zone is not a linear rectangle that teleports you to a starting point where you go "deeper" into it.
 
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