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

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Drakengard 1 and 3's final bosses. These games go from shlocky hack and slash with a weird, deranged story to rhythm games. Not good ones, either. Even if you get to the ending of 3's, the game still has a trick up its sleeve. There's one note left at the black screen.
 
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?
Would it of been better if his mom did a Roll?
Rock: Where did you get all the zenny to upgrade the Flutter?
Roll: I sold everything you earned from our last adventure.
 
PGI are bad devs, period.
Oh absolutely but the worst part is how greedy and stupid they are. EGS exclusivity on MW5M, refusal to adequately address playbalance in MWO because "not worth it" (basically penny wise pound foolish in full effect) despite workable proposals from a community that was absolutely willing to do all the non-programming work for them including better fucking maps... Russ Bullock and Paul Inouye are bona fide idiots.

Also def agree with other posters about Fallout 3 being just an endless chain of bad design decisions, par for Bethesda's course really.
 
Oh absolutely but the worst part is how greedy and stupid they are. EGS exclusivity on MW5M, refusal to adequately address playbalance in MWO because "not worth it" (basically penny wise pound foolish in full effect) despite workable proposals from a community that was absolutely willing to do all the non-programming work for them including better fucking maps... Russ Bullock and Paul Inouye are bona fide idiots.

I was a MWO Legendary backer and I'm still mad about it. The most balanced the game ever was was in it's beta.
 
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Drakengard 1 and 3's final bosses. These games go from shlocky hack and slash with a weird, deranged story to rhythm games. Not good ones, either. Even if you get to the ending of 3's, the game still has a trick up its sleeve. There's one note left at the black screen.

My friend sent me Drakengard 3 and told me pretty much nothing about it other than the final boss gave him trouble for over a year. I went through the game, got invested into the story and characters over time, got to the set up screen prior to the last level, upgraded my best weapon, and went in.

"This boss must hit stupidly hard or has multiple phases or something for it to give him that much trouble." I remember thinking.

*Watches as Mikhail flies around for a bit and then gets blasted down by a magical ring leading to a game over.*

"Huh?"

*tries again, dies again.*

"Are you fucking kidding me?? It's a rhythm game now??"

*tries again, gets a bit farther, dies again.*

I texted my friend my reaction and he was laughing his ass off.

Honestly though, I can't help but love this final boss still. Music is beautiful and I guess I enjoy the fact Yoko Taro not only had the balls to do this once before, but decided to do it again for the third game. From what from what my friend told me, initial reactions to the one in Drakengard 1 were so negative that Tari went to hide in a locker in an attempt to calm himself down. Or something like that. He's a very strange man.
 
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all of fallout 3's world, all of fallout new vegas' story, and all of the mapping in STALKER Shadow of Chernobyl. If you want i'll write a fucking essay on how much time and mental strength Fallout 3's stupid fucking blips have cost me.
I tried playing Fallout 3 first and decided I don't understand the appeal of the franchise in general.

It's not really relevant since it's an old PS2 game, but Way of the Samurai's 2 combat system. It's sort of this weird fighting game with multiple opponents and stresses the parry system, but the controls are extremely clunky, attacks are slow so that parrying is always an option, and the game really wants you to master parrying ASAP. The first fight that's technically optional has you fighting three mini-bosses, so if it's your first time playing, you don't know what you're doing.

BTW, the parrying system can be stupidly broken if you figure out that if you lean the stick away or towards the enemy ahead of time, which can give you a fifty percent chance of parrying. It goes up if you learn how to read tells and learn proper spacing. Not my gameplay footage since I could see all sorts of mistakes and I'm not sure how to record an old PS2 game to show just how stupidly broken combat can be at time. Basically, if he played defensively and focused only on parrying, the next enemy would have telegraphed what kind of strike before doing it, which would ideally lead to another parry and so on. There is a reason why later games don't have this mechanic.

 
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FF8's magic system. It specifically incentivizes you to never touch of use magic, and if you don't fully know how to break the junction system, you may end up relying on summons instead. If you rely on summons instead, the game will straight up ass fuck you in the final boss fight by straight up killing your summons and making you waste your time.
 
FF8's magic system. It specifically incentivizes you to never touch of use magic, and if you don't fully know how to break the junction system, you may end up relying on summons instead. If you rely on summons instead, the game will straight up ass fuck you in the final boss fight by straight up killing your summons and making you waste your time.
This creator is pretty solid. Could have a future in this business.
 
- not being able to save during combat
Is this really bad design though? Sure there are games that let you literally save anywhere with no real problems, but they can also cause situations where you save yourself into a deathloop and softlock your game. From a design standpoint, it's probably less of a headache just to put saves outside of combat.
 
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.
Mario Galaxy 2 was generally much better with the camera, until you get to this bastard star:
1600px-SMG2_Flipsville_Green_Star_3.png

Good luck having the depth perception to land on this star. It would be bad enough even without the reverse gravity.
 
Why is almost everything on screen untextured?
Shoestring budget, possible development hell, aesthetic. This is a PS3 game that barely goes above 25 fps when there's textures. The framerate sometimes drops to the single digits when riding dragons.

Keeping the blood splatter option on makes this worse.
 
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Maybe your Ratatta is faster than my Ratatta, but my Ratatta is stronger.
Listen fucker my ratatta needs to be in the top 10% of ratattas or Billy Spergman will laugh me out of competitive and throw real stealthrocks at me this shit is fucking important.




Anyway, games forcing you into new game plus. Arkham Origins had a challenge branch you could only accomplish within specific encounters in the game. If you didn't preform a stealth attack here or go unseen there, sorry, you're gonna have to either redo the mission or wait until new game plus! I remember at least one of the branches was bugged anyway, so if you tried to complete it on PS3 it wouldn't give you the reward, whoops. I blame wb because they said "fuck it we won't tell you to fix it in post next game is going to make bank paypigs". But whatever.


2d maps for 3d spaces: Borderlands the PreSequel had this problem hard since more vertical areas were introduced due to moon jumping. The levels themselves weren't bad, but they didn't separate anything by floors or terrains on the maps themselves.
Cluttered or unfocused mapping: if you have to put a literal arrow on the environment for the player to follow, something tells me you screwed up somewhere. Another borderlands 2 thing.
Oh, and a third Borderlands thing: why can the enemy tuck and roll when I can't and have to just jankly run for cover? Fuck you.

Walking sims that make me travel at the speed of molasses can fuck themselves. Either figure out your engine so shit in the distance loads in faster, put more interesting stuff between point a and point b, or boost the walking speed you cunts.

Whoever said shit about menuing I second wholeheartedly. Unless I'm in a text adventure or rpg where combat is done through menus, the less menus a player has to see the better.
 
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I was a MWO Legendary backer and I'm still mad about it. The most balanced the game ever was was in it's beta.
The funniest thing I think was how so many players would screech about Jenners being OP, muh lagshield, muh impossible to hit. PGI rolls out Host State Rewind to nix any kind of "missed because of latency", people STILL screech that Jenners etc. OP. PGI eventually nerfed the Jenner so bad it's a goddamn joke now, almost nobody plays the fucking thing, and honestly most of the mechs from early game are rarely played because ANYTHING ELSE IS BETTER. Atlas? There are so many better assault class mechs out there it's not even funny. Dragon? One variant still has a niche use due to quirks, the others are practically ignored. Hunchback? Almost nobody uses them above Tier 4-5. Awesome? Largely considered one of the worst assaults, the 8Q has a niche use with triple Heavy PPC after Civil War tech dropped, idiot LRM players occasionally use the 8R and usually suck in it. Cicada? Rarely used, has horrific "back armor hit from front" issues, it's a suicide sled and you're better off with nearly anything else. Raven? Only the 3L has an edge-case use as a Stealth NARC mech. Commando is actually pretty solid, it's the exception here. Stalker? Surprisingly prevalent, but generally only as an LRMboat and most LRM players are hilariously bad. Centurion? Considered to be such a lackluster medium that it only gets played out of sentimentality. Most anything from Founders beta or slightly after is just considered outright obsolete, and players REFUSE to call it what it is (power creep).
 
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