Biggest bullshit in a video game

[Book Thief]

This is why I have no problem if someone spoils to get information like this when unless you're an idiot, you're not going to grind hours and hours to find out hidden mechanics that are ludicrously complex. I mean I don't in general, it's a single person game and if you cheese it it affects nobody but you, but in some cases I think it's wimpy.

Bullshit mechanics like this deserve no respect or in-game effort to learn.

I think a lot of frustration could be alleviated by a lot if you were allowed to experiment with runes by taking them out, allowing you to rearrange them or even recycle them if needed. As it is, though, it's the perfect storm of punishing obtuse mechanics where attempting to play around with it causes you to lose progress unless you know EXACTLY what you're doing.

 

[marvlouslie]

Any game that makes you pick up a certain item in order to save is the biggest fucking red flag. I don't know if that's been mentioned before, but I think one of the Tomb Raider games had this before they abandoned it with the save crystals. Specific save points also annoy me to no end. At least Final Fantasy VII balanced this out with being able to save at any time when you're in the overworld and not in a town, and the save points were pretty evenly and fairly spread out. I still think it's a dumb mechanic.

 

[SIMIΔN]

Everything from mid-game onwards in Long War.

The Long War team released a game of their own. It's a (mostly) hard scifi game about how to respond to an alien invasion. Humanity is realistically weak so I've lost multiple times on normal
It's on MS gamepass if you want to give it a go.

Anything meant to waste your time or punish you for doing too well, only have 2 examples from things I played recently.

Rubber banding is the bane of racing games.

When a game gives you an overpowered weapon/power/item/whatever after completing 100% of the game. I don't know exactly what games do this but the first time it happened to me was Spyro 2, after you get all the orbs and gems you unlock a permanent flame a powerup that was only time limited in some levels, allowing you to beat any enemy and boss with ease.

No I like it, we spent the whole game being cautious, so it's nice to finally go to town with a wrecking ball.
Post-main campaign powerups can make clearing up the rest of the enemies so much simpler.
My favourite is probably TWW's Chaof Dwarf endgame reward. Any ordinary sorcerer can blow up an entire city with just a single action.

Any game that makes you pick up a certain item in order to save is the biggest fucking red flag.

Save scumming is hard for me to resist, so I like ironman, though checkpoints are a good middle ground.

 

[Jason Wynn]

For the first time ever, I've decided to dick around with Rune Words in Diablo 2. Turns out there's a very good reason I've never bothered with them when I was younger, because the mechanics are grade-A bullshit.

So the idea behind it that if you insert a certain combination of runes into an item, you get special bonuses beyond the listed values on the individual runes, some of which are highly sought after such as the Enigma Rune Word, which allows any character to cast Teleport. Okay, so I just get a socketed item, throw the correct runes in, and I should be good to go, right?

WRONG!

Here is a full list of requirements you need to create a Rune Word:

• You need to put the runes in a SPECIFIC order. Did you socket Ort before Tal? You get nothing.
• The item needs an EXACT amount of sockets as the Rune Word. No more, no less.
• The item must not be enchanted. Found a magic item with a property that adds sockets? That simply won't do.
• The item needs to be of the right type. Try to use a Rune Word for axes on a mace, or Rune Word for shields on body armor? Too bad.

Essentially, the stars and planets need to fucking align in order to take advantage of an integral mechanic of the expansion. If you fuck up at any point, you just wasted hours of grinding and some incredibly rare items, because for those who don't know: sockets can never be undone.

And to top it all off, NONE of this is explained in the game in the slightest. The best you get is a late-game quest reward where the guy hands you Ort, Tal, and Ral runes, and says he was gonna put it in a shield, but it doesn't explain any of the specifics behind how you're supposed to do it. It is literally impossible without outside information.

Dude I was a huge Diablo 2 sperg back when it first came out, and even as much as I loved that game, runewords were bullshit. Had to lookup a guide online of which item, which runes and which way to socket them and nine times out of ten they really weren’t worth all the grind and effort to make them.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Any game that makes you pick up a certain item in order to save is the biggest fucking red flag. I don't know if that's been mentioned before, but I think one of the Tomb Raider games had this before they abandoned it with the save crystals. Specific save points also annoy me to no end. At least Final Fantasy VII balanced this out with being able to save at any time when you're in the overworld and not in a town, and the save points were pretty evenly and fairly spread out. I still think it's a dumb mechanic.

The Quarry was the worst save system I've seen. It auto saved almost immediately and chapter select only opened once per beat game meaning if you reloaded a chapter you had to rebeat the game to reopen chapter select.

 

[Cats]

 

[Baboeshka]

The Quarry was the worst save system I've seen. It auto saved almost immediately and chapter select only opened once per beat game meaning if you reloaded a chapter you had to rebeat the game to reopen chapter select.

That was an incredibly annoying issue with Man of Medan as well.
Some of the quicktime prompts were easy to miss when you don't know when they're coming.
Then the game immediately overwrites the save data with your mistake and you'd never be able to beat the game with everybody alive in the end. Unless you start over.

 

[GenociderSyo]

That was an incredibly annoying issue with Man of Medan as well.
Some of the quicktime prompts were easy to miss when you don't know when they're coming.
Then the game immediately overwrites the save data with your mistake and you'd never be able to beat the game with everybody alive in the end. Unless you start over.

Man of Medan at least let you have chapter select on beating the game. Using chapter select in quarry turns off chapter select until you rebeat the game under the new save.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

Any game that makes you pick up a certain item in order to save is the biggest fucking red flag. I don't know if that's been mentioned before, but I think one of the Tomb Raider games had this before they abandoned it with the save crystals. Specific save points also annoy me to no end. At least Final Fantasy VII balanced this out with being able to save at any time when you're in the overworld and not in a town, and the save points were pretty evenly and fairly spread out. I still think it's a dumb mechanic.

Resident Evil did this to enhance the Survival Horror™. What actually happened in practice was you beat the game with like two dozen ink ribbons.

 

[std::string]

Who thought that was a good idea? It's so poorly implemented I wonder if it was tested at all.

I've posted about it in the thread before but no I strongly doubt it was playtested.

The difficulty only went down if you watched the whole death animation and let the game kick you back to your last save. So what's the problem? Well, limited healing items. If you were used to other action games at the time you would just quickload if you took too much damage during a firefight since you needed to conserve your pills.

So the difficulty just went up and up until every enemy was shrugging off shotgun headshots. There were a lot of forum posts asking wtf was up with the game's difficulty once they hit Ragna Rock since I think that's when it maxed out.

 

[Friendly Primarina]

I've posted about it in the thread before but no I strongly doubt it was playtested.

The difficulty only went down if you watched the whole death animation and let the game kick you back to your last save. So what's the problem? Well, limited healing items. If you were used to other action games at the time you would just quickload if you took too much damage during a firefight since you needed to conserve your pills.

So the difficulty just went up and up until every enemy was shrugging off shotgun headshots. There were a lot of forum posts asking wtf was up with the game's difficulty once they hit Ragna Rock since I think that's when it maxed out.

I knew about the dynamic( ) difficulty but not the having to watch the entire animation. That does explain a lot. Even if the game detected when the player reloaded after a death, it would still be a dumb system because why not just have three difficulties and let the player switch on the fly? There would be literally nothing wrong with this system.

 

[Pierre D'Olnique]

Having replayed D2 on HC for the oomptienth time I am seriously considering tracking down whoever designed undead midgets and shelling him with frag grenades. Aside from Willowisps this is the only enemy that I legitimately fear and Light save you if a pack of of these little niggers with cold enchanted, cursed, aura enchanted and extra fast bumrushes you on a melee character.

 

[AnOminous]

The Quarry was the worst save system I've seen. It auto saved almost immediately and chapter select only opened once per beat game meaning if you reloaded a chapter you had to rebeat the game to reopen chapter select.

Games that autosave all the time after when you've permanently fucked the game. So you resume at like 1 hp with no ammunition and there isn't shit you can do about it.

 

[TheHarbinger]

Games that autosave all the time after when you've permanently fucked the game. So you resume at like 1 hp with no ammunition and there isn't shit you can do about it.

Bethesda/Gamebryo titles have hilarious examples of this. Of the game autosaving when you leave a building and a Deathclaw kills you the second you walk through the door. And now you are stuck in some infinite loop of getting decapitated over and over with almost no chance of surviving. But you have a 25 hour save file and now need to spend an hour getting that .1% chance of avoiding getting one-shot and being able to run away.

 

[analrapist]

Imagine not playing Fallout on the PS3 the way it was meant to be experienced.

LMAO

Biggest bullshit in a video game is devs taking a series known for one kind of gameplay, completely discarding that gameplay, and strapping the whole fucking thing into Generic Shooter Engine.

Fallout is a turn-based hex combat game. It's a shame they never made any sequels after 2.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Bethesda/Gamebryo titles have hilarious examples of this. Of the game autosaving when you leave a building and a Deathclaw kills you the second you walk through the door. And now you are stuck in some infinite loop of getting decapitated over and over with almost no chance of surviving. But you have a 25 hour save file and now need to spend an hour getting that .1% chance of avoiding getting one-shot and being able to run away.

That is when I saw screw it and open the console and give myself a ton of stimpaks. Or just kill command him.

 

[NerdShamer]

Bethesda/Gamebryo titles have hilarious examples of this. Of the game autosaving when you leave a building and a Deathclaw kills you the second you walk through the door. And now you are stuck in some infinite loop of getting decapitated over and over with almost no chance of surviving. But you have a 25 hour save file and now need to spend an hour getting that .1% chance of avoiding getting one-shot and being able to run away.

 

[Kheapathic]

Bethesda/Gamebryo titles have hilarious examples of this. Of the game autosaving when you leave a building and a Deathclaw kills you the second you walk through the door. And now you are stuck in some infinite loop of getting decapitated over and over with almost no chance of surviving. But you have a 25 hour save file and now need to spend an hour getting that .1% chance of avoiding getting one-shot and being able to run away.

I got stuck in an fail-state load loop in Assassin's Creed Unity. My problem is I'm an achievement hunter, so I have to fucking do everything, and AC: Unity was a fucking bug fest when released and continued to be so after their 20GB patch. Anyway, there's one mission where you're escorting this girl through a hedge maze and you need to kill enemies in certain ways; if I'd screw up, I'd reload last checkpoint. In the process of doing this, the game hit me with a checkpoint in some weird state it saw and when it reloaded me into the checkpoint, it had my escort too far away from me, and thus I would fail the mission and get kicked back to most recent checkpoint, only to load back in to the "your target is too far away" and fail again.

The only thing that saved me, was that the console started to have cloud storage and would do an auto-upload if you set it up. Luckily, because of the cloud save, I only lost like an hour or two of progress; but either way, that shit fucking burned. I've hated auto-checkpoints ever since; convenient, yes, but this was that strong to make me feel otherwise.

 

[AnOminous]

Bethesda/Gamebryo titles have hilarious examples of this.

I knew there was a reason I've never played any Bethesda games.

I honestly can't think of any game I remember playing that had this, because any game I've had it happen on, I immediately said fuck this and quit playing it. I remember having had it happen, just not the games. Half-Life 2 and its two subsequent "episodes" had the very occasional incidence of this because of the fairly frequent checkpoints, but not enough to infuriate me enough to stop playing it. Also you could actually have 10 save slots so as long as you were conscientious about saving any time you were in a reasonably good spot, the worst that would happen is you had to go back to your last unfucked save.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

The difficulty only went down if you watched the whole death animation and let the game kick you back to your last save. So what's the problem? Well, limited healing items. If you were used to other action games at the time you would just quickload if you took too much damage during a firefight since you needed to conserve your pills.

So the difficulty just went up and up until every enemy was shrugging off shotgun headshots. There were a lot of forum posts asking wtf was up with the game's difficulty once they hit Ragna Rock since I think that's when it maxed out.

Heh, I only learned about the difficulty thing after I finished playing the game (that was a couple years ago)
Did the entire thing with just qs/ql