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

[NerdShamer]

It gets worse because basically the end game Fights devolve into "Abuse the fact that every human boss (all of them really) lacks immunity to some major status effects. You can legitimately lock down entire "Trials" because nothing has protection to Paralyze.

It's awful and boring, I will say however..the ultimate weapons (Rare drops from the Trials) are fucking cool at least.

I'm already stuck on the trials. Between this and the second bad ending, it kind of makes you wonder what Square was thinking when they were writing the story.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

I'm already stuck on the trials. Between this and the second bad ending, it kind of makes you wonder what Square was thinking when they were writing the story.

Do you have a Phantom on level 12?

 

[NerdShamer]

Do you have a Phantom on level 12?

Yeah, Results Guaranteed kind of makes me wonder what the actual trigger proc is for the rest of status abilities. It has a lot of potential with the Painter job.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

Yeah, Results Guaranteed kind of makes me wonder what the actual trigger proc is for the rest of status abilities. It has a lot of potential with the Painter job.

Put the Chemist as a sub job and make Paralyze bombs, it will make some of the trials incredibly easy.

Like...free win easy.

 

[StraightShooter2]

in Mega Man Zero 4, you can combine items dropped from enemies to build new parts for Zero's body, but the majority of "recipes" for building parts aren't even in the game - so you have to either use a FAG, or try to build parts through pure trial and error (and if you screw up a recipe, the items you used are gone and you just get a useless "junk part")..

 

[NerdShamer]

Put the Chemist as a sub job and make Paralyze bombs, it will make some of the trials incredibly easy.

Like...free win easy.

I tried the Ranger's paralyze ability and it kind of works, but it turns out that there's a handful of characters who are immune to it. I only have 2 to 4 of these fights left.

Back to stealing item boosters, again.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Battlefield 1's campaign was weird - from the intro it seemed like it was going for a full on horrors of war approach, then you're landing your plane on a Zeppelin and shooting down a whole fleet of them. Or that mission where you are shot down and have to get back to your own lines.......where your crashed plane is laying? That part in the Italian mission where you had to shoot down the bombers was completely broken as well, one of those parts I only eventually got through by luck.

The air war was one of the two things in WW1 that's wildly romanticized (the other being Lawrence of Arabia). It's fitting for it to have a lighter mood. The Runner and Avanti Savoia are dark.

Too bad the campaign was bad overall.
And something that these games seem to be really allergic to is having you fight alongside other soldiers. In BF1, at least, but also in other Battlefield games with campaigns, it seems like you always end up in just one squad or even by yourself. They have a few setpiece scenes and then it could be any other genre but a wargame.

 

[StraightShooter2]

In Borderlands 2 there are a few potentially game-breaking bugs which can make it impossible to finish the main quests without starting over from scratch, and these apparently still haven't been fixed despite many updates and DLC released for the game.

There is also stuff which, while it isn't a big deal, is mildly annoying (such as a dead body which never disappears even after the quest it involves is completed).

Also, the fact that the game forces you to play through it twice to unlock the hardest difficulty, and the fact that you can't auto-level up a new character class if you want to start with a new character on hard difficulties is bad design IMO (though thankfully there are mods which fix this).

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

I just remembered one oldie. In .hack games you have the ability of data drain. The game set in an in-world mmo where some of the monsters are glitched out and will be impossible to kill without using this ability first.
However to balance out this ability, the devs made it so using it will increase a corruption percentage in the main character, when it reaches high level the main character glitches out and you get a gameover. Killing regular monsters reduce the counter.
Now the problem is that you can't escape from fights or avoid most of the , and later dungeons are full of glitched enemies you can't escape from. So it's literally a coin toss if you'll survive the longer dungeons.

 

[Evil Peter Griffin]

Everything in Shenmue 3 and Deadly Premonition

 

[I.B. Niggin]

Everything in Shenmue 3 and Deadly Premonition

I still can't figure out why they would tie your stamina to your health directly. I'm still assmad I waited 18 years for that shit.

 

[Peasant]

Several years ago, there was a major update to Killing Floor 2, a horde shooter for those who do not know. Tripwire proudly announced that they had devised an exciting new system which would freshen up the gameplay and add a new layer of strategy to killing enemies. This radical change came in the form of a damage resistance system for enemies, and their harebrained implementation of this simple concept would make the game damn near unplayable until they begrudgingly scaled it back. Numerous titles have incorporated such a system, particularly role playing games. What makes Tripwire's take on it bad? I'd say there are two main issues with it: Firstly, the damage types are overly specific, and secondly, the existence and details of this system are not effectively communicated to the player.

In the beginning of the game's life cycle, there were some fairly conventional damage types implemented: Ballistic damage from guns, slashing, blunt, fire, poison, and electric. This update broke down ballistic damage much further so that every class of gun had its own damage type, so assault rifles, shotguns, pistols, submachine guns, and sniper rifles can all have differing degrees of effectiveness against any one enemy. Tripwire then gave comically large amounts of resistance to specific damage types to almost every enemy in the game. For example, the stalker, a tiny cloaked woman who serves as one of the game's cannon fodder enemies, could survive a square hit from a powerful shotgun, yet a couple of rounds from a submachine gun would kill her because she took three times as much damage from that class of weapons. It was a similar story with the rest of the enemy roster, and it made previously trivial encounters far more costly than they had any right to be.

The only way for players to feasibly understand this system was to use a Google doc which contains a laundry list of resistances for every enemy in the game. There are no visual or audio cues which alert the player to the fact that their big gun is arbitrarily doing half damage to an enemy. After massive outcry from the playerbase, Tripwire greatly scaled back the whole system, but vestiges of it are still present.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Are there games still being released where you can't even change the controls for them at all? Or games where they just change the control scheme out of nowhere?

One game that comes to mind is WWE 2K20, which in addition to how much of a horrible glitch-fest that it was, introduced a new control scheme that received mixed reception, but felt unnecessary and needlessly complicated for no reason:



The most notable change was that Reversal was moved from R2 / RT to Triangle / Y, and Triangle / Y was previously used for Signature or Finishing Moves. In 2K20, you have to press Square + X / X + A to do a Finisher now. And the game doesn't have the option to either change your controls, or change it back to 2K19's control scheme.

Another thought that comes to mind was the driving combat game Streets of SimCity, which was also very glitchy, but the weapons (machine gun and missile launcher) fire from the front of your car, which means that you have to steer your car to aim at the right place, which can be a pain since the driving physics for the game were very terrible.

 

[trent]

Are there games still being released where you can't even change the controls for them at all? Or games where they just change the control scheme out of nowhere?

One game that comes to mind is WWE 2K20, which in addition to how much of a horrible glitch-fest that it was, introduced a new control scheme that received mixed reception, but felt unnecessary and needlessly complicated for no reason:

View attachment 2275147

The most notable change was that Reversal was moved from R2 / RT to Triangle / Y, and Triangle / Y was previously used for Signature or Finishing Moves. In 2K20, you have to press Square + X / X + A to do a Finisher now. And the game doesn't have the option to either change your controls, or change it back to 2K19's control scheme.

Another thought that comes to mind was the driving combat game Streets of SimCity, which was also very glitchy, but the weapons (machine gun and missile launcher) fire from the front of your car, which means that you have to steer your car to aim at the right place, which can be a pain since the driving physics for the game were very terrible.

The controls in wrestling games are usually terrible because everything is contextual to where you/your opponent are situated in-ring and there are usually multiple actions that can be performed from any particular position.

 

[Sneak 'n' Snore]

Niche example but I hate how unit deployment slots work in Fire Emblem Thracia 776.
For those who don't know, this was the last Fire Emblem game where you can't select where your units start during battle preparations and Thracia had lots of tricky in-door maps with chests or locked doors that you either need specific keys or thiefs for.
Problem is these maps usually split your army into smaller groups at different starting points which are determined by their deployment order going from the previous chapter so unless your thief had a very specific deplyoment number he would very likely start in an awkward position and another unit would spawn in a room with a locked door.
I bothered with this nonsense on my blind playthrough and went with the "Lil Manster" patch since which re-adds the option to arrange your starting positions and it makes these chapters so much more tolerable.
I highly recommend that patch for anyone who has never played the game.

 

[66andtwothirds]

The controls in wrestling games are usually terrible because everything is contextual to where you/your opponent are situated in-ring and there are usually multiple actions that can be performed from any particular position.

i still play SvR 1 (2004) and it is actually good in terms of the controls, possibly because it is so much simpler than today's games. but one thing that makes no sense is, if you are near the opponent while he is running (even if he is running away from you) you can do a "opponent running towards you" move (hiptoss/back body drop etc). it looks ridiculous.

 

[Jerri's Kid]

Bosses that regenerate health. Quit prolonging the fight with cheap mechanics.

That was one of the things I didn't like about Yakuza Kiwami. Eventually I was able to purchase abilities that allowed me to hurt bosses during their health regen phase, but when I fought Shimano for the first time I didn't have these and it made the fight go on forever.

 

[Jaimas]

It's not even fun to watch speedruns.

Phantom Pain is no different. I don't care what anybody says. No single-player game should be this monotonous.

Speaking of monotony: Phoenix Point. Now, we all all know Julian Gollup only had one good idea in his miserable life. Which is fine. Few games have the impact UFO Defense did.

Rebelstar. Shadow Wars. Still fucking that chicken. And now Phoenix Point. Bigger maps! Longer missions! Tougher enemies!

XCOM's strength is that it doesn't outstay its welcome. This is a common complaint about Terror from the Deep; and it's why many OpenXCOM mods fall short. Nobody has the patience to play "hunt the bug" for two hours.

Basically, he took out everything fun about XCOM, and amped-up the annoyances: Enemies are unbalanced, the research tree is full of dead-ends, and there's no clear objectives which results in wasting time and resources. The free-aim gimmick adds nothing, because your accuracy is awful regardless. We're basically fighting our dinner at Red Lobster. Shady-as-fuck money hatting from a company with close ties to Tencent. You know, the Chinese spying company.

It's abysmal. And made worse by Gollup masquerading as a creator with a passion project, who turned out to be a grifter who never cared in the end, and lied for the sake of cashing in on goodwill from his loyal fans. (Well we crunched the numbers and decided we could fuck our backers and only 6% would ask for their money back.)

I love me some TFTD, but anything involving ship missions can fuck right off. I'll take the L. No one wants to hunt down a single fucking Calcinite that keeps walking in and out of the same closet in some obscure corner of the map for 3 hours.

 

[Dysnomia]

That stupid puzzle in Landstalker where you have to ride on ball bearings to hit switches that all stay lit for about two seconds. If you don't get to the next one in time a block appears over it so you have to start all over again. The timing makes my head hurt. I thought maybe it would be easier when I'm not stuck as a dog so I used the debug code to enter the map as normal Nigel. It didn't make a difference.

 

[Haramburger]

The controls in wrestling games are usually terrible because everything is contextual to where you/your opponent are situated in-ring and there are usually multiple actions that can be performed from any particular position.

It's always amazed me that fighting games got it so right in comparison to wrestling games, even Smash controls are better. I never understood how some friends could play both fightan & wrasslan.