What are some games that you've played that have mechanics/gameplay that didn't age well?

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

This is why mecha 3D third person fighters like Gundam versus are the best kinds of fight games

Like the arena fighter genre, stuff like DBZ Xenoverse? I think those are most fun briefly but have no depth or staying power, so they're pretty flawed too. It's a genre I'm really picky about overall, to be fair.

Believe it or not there are people that defend this unbearably short draw distance because "It makes Morrowind feel bigger.

Silent Hill used fog geniusly. If there is a story or thematic purpose it's fine, but it was pretty rare to see that kinda thing. Same for invisible walls acting as play area boundaries, it's always much better when there's an in-universe reason you can't proceed.

 

[el bandito loco]

this won't be specific games but indicative of genre. I'm a big fan of classic JRPGs and Adventure games. A lot of early titles in both genres over complicated themselves with their interface. for example in an older Dragon Quest game (or basically every other RPG for the NES/Famicom) you bring up a menu with a bunch of commands when all you want to do is talk to someone or look in a pot or pick something up or whatever. In remakes/ports/later games in the series and similar ones they smartly figured out to just map all of those things to one button and make it context sensitive. text based and point and click adventure games also have a similar problem, where whenever you are going to click on something for a purpose you have to navigate too many steps in a menu to just do something simple. in adventure games also a lot of the time the UI menu that pops up is kind of unruly and you get a wheel or something on the screen with every option. In that genre I understand that puzzles and specific interactions are important but I think it would be easy to streamline. Click on something, look at it, game says 'pick it up?' Click yes or no. or maybe just a drop down menu with every option. Not having to drag it into another interface to pick x option.

 

[Overwritten Tapes]

@Scarthew

Which games do you disagree on in my post?

 

[Rololowlo]

Not one specific game, but old console games in general aged much worse than they should have.

The reason is simply unmappable controls. You're stuck with whatever bullshit they settled for. Fully customizable controls should have been the norm decades ago, even on consoles... or even controller profiles in PC games, because even now we're still stuck with presets most of the time.

Now with emulators you can brute-force modern controls on old games and they suddenly feel two decades fresher. PS1 shooters are the largest category (even the handful that support twin sticks still benefit from remapping the other buttons), but even SNES and GBA shooters become palatable.

The DS and PSP don't have a right stick and many shooters on these platforms use a workaround where the face buttons control the camera. At first I found it stupid but in actual use it's very natural.

Putting the idea to good use that's how I remapped SNES/GBA/PS1 shooters and wouldn't you know it, there's a wealth of forgotten gems that were held back by arbitrary and nonsensical limitations.

 

[Scarthew]

@Scarthew

Which games do you disagree on in my post?

tenchu.

 

[el bandito loco]

Not one specific game, but old console games in general aged much worse than they should have.

The reason is simply unmappable controls. You're stuck with whatever bullshit they settled for. Fully customizable controls should have been the norm decades ago, even on consoles... or even controller profiles in PC games, because even now we're still stuck with presets most of the time.

Now with emulators you can brute-force modern controls on old games and they suddenly feel two decades fresher. PS1 shooters are the largest category (even the handful that support twin sticks still benefit from remapping the other buttons), but even SNES and GBA shooters become palatable.

The DS and PSP don't have a right stick and many shooters on these platforms use a workaround where the face buttons control the camera. At first I found it stupid but in actual use it's very natural.

Putting the idea to good use that's how I remapped SNES/GBA/PS1 shooters and wouldn't you know it, there's a wealth of forgotten gems that were held back by arbitrary and nonsensical limitations.

the biggest problem with 5th gen console games going back is 3D camera controls. many of those games have only aged as bad as they have specifically because of lack of free camera. graphics are one thing, but for me personally that's never been a problem going back (and people who emulate can upscale easily). it's the fuckin' camera. even a good game with a good camera like Mario 64 or Zelda OoT when I played the PC decompilation ports were night and day just by being able to freely move the camera with another stick. lots of mid-tier platformers and FPS games if you could go back and implement a dual stick control scheme would skyrocket in playability and quality. some platformers, even without analog sticks got it right like Spyro with the R2/L2 buttons fulfilling that function and that's why that game aged as well as it did compared to some others. with fps games it really took until the dual sticks for them to play well with a console controller.

 

[WelperHelper99]

Early call of duty on OG Xbox was tanky as shit even if it was fun (I liked Big Red One, fight me)

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

Your agility and luck are unreasonably low then, at 70 blade you shouldn't be missing at all unless...

You haven't experimented with mechanics enough and realized charge hits are far more effective than spamming attack.

Nigger I've been killing enemies about 10 levels above my own from the very beginning of the game, I know how the combat system works. Not charging your swings also doesn't inhibit your hit chance it just makes your weapon deal like 1 damage if it connects. I suspect the reason I'm not hitting a lot of the time is because the enemies have a higher luck stat than me so my swings miss more often than they should (which is bullshit).

Gaenor (one of the strongest enemies in the game) for example is only as strong as he is because of his retardedly high luck stat.

Freeloading little bitch, good thing I only gave him 50 gold.

 

[anime jetplane]

Half life 2’s gameplay is just jank and boring as hell compared to the first half life and its contemporaries. Even in VR.

They also cut the best part of the game: the myriad of strange sci fi weapons like the portable tau cannon and combine guard gun.

Then they fucked off to go make the unfun l4d series.

The tanks were fair but the horde, as proud as they were of it, was so god damn annoying because of how tanky the normal zombies are when you get mostly headshots. Especially when they imply you can stealth through a level when introducing the car alarm mechanic but spawn them on top of you anyway regardless of where you are on the map.

 

[Scarthew]

Nigger I've been killing enemies about 10 levels above my own from the very beginning of the game, I know how the combat system works. Not charging your swings also doesn't inhibit your hit chance it just makes your weapon deal like 1 damage if it connects. I suspect the reason I'm not hitting a lot of the time is because the enemies have a higher luck stat than me so my swings miss more often than they should (which is bullshit).
View attachment 5739698
Gaenor (one of the strongest enemies in the game) for example is only as strong as he is because of his retardedly high luck stat.
View attachment 5739838
Freeloading little bitch, good thing I only gave him 50 gold.

get more agi

 

[TheHarbinger]

Everything about Half-Life 2's gameplay, from the painfully dull combat with brain-dead AI to the physics puzzles to the vehicle section, has aged poorly.

Half life 2’s gameplay is just jank and boring as hell compared to the first half life and its contemporaries. Even in VR.

The A.I. and enemy variety are notoriously bad. Probably in the top ten for worst AAA games. Some of the enemies in Half Life 2 will stop shooting at you if you pick up a soda can and hold it front of you. They lose line of sight and their A.I. brain just melts and they stand there helplessly doing nothing until you drop or lower the can to the ground.

The entire game is designed around the player playing exactly how the developers did in their QA sessions. If you stray off the intended path by even a pixel it completely breaks half of their set pieces almost instantly. Nothing in the game is reactive to the player. You simple walk from room to room or set piece to set piece. The game environments and enemies initiate some movement or explosion and then the player has to react. Same loop over and over.

 

[Scarthew]

The A.I. and enemy variety are notoriously bad. Probably in the top ten for worst AAA games.

the enemy variety is actually fine. counting all soldier variants as 1 enemy is fine but you still have striders, chopers, gun ships, rollermines, mamhacks, 3 different zombies, 3 different headcrabs, 2 antlion enemies, turrets and snipers, with a few extras in the episodes.

Of course these are also supplemented with setpieces to make them interesting, mounted guns, 2 vehicle sections, the bug bait prison section, grav gun, zombie town traps, super grav gun.

The real issue is the gunplay, the guns feel and sound like cap guns, enemies dont have hit reactions and just eat tons of bullets to the head before dying.

Some of the enemies in Half Life 2 will stop shooting at you if you pick up a soda can and hold it front of you.

All of em do, if you can't see them when looking at them they can't see you.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I think every game that included a trendy mechanic will be dated in some way. Some stuff is things you can't play anymore like MMOs, and I'm sure battle royale stuff that feels tacked on will show it's age in a few years if it hasn't already. I know the industry is already moving away from that as we speak.

It's harder to think of game trends off the top of my head since I played older games too much. I think one is cover shooting in Dead Space 3, but that is technically more related to it not incorporating well. It is a product of its time and shouldn't have been there though, and that mechanic of scavenging for parts to do microtransaction bullshit when you didn't need to also reeks of it.

The problem there is those mechanics often felt bad and dated when they were new. Stealth levels in action games were always bad. QTEs were also stupid outside of a few games that used them well. "Walk and talk" as a replacement for cutscenes. These all died off for a reason.

if it had 2d movement it becomes comically easy which was proven with the RE-make-ster.

It also makes the games harder to control. Look at how many times people complain they were running one direction, the camera changed so they pivoted right into a monster. So they change it again so that the character keeps going straight until you release the stick, only to have people complain again.

The simple fact of the matter is that "tank controls" fine. In games like Resident Evil 4 and Tomb Raider, no one has a problem with them.

I'm reminded of that one review of Aliens Resurrection for PS1 that complained about the weird controls for a FPS, using one stick to move and the other to aim. People make fun of that review as peak games journalism, but the truth of the matter is that it was a weird and unconventional control scheme at the time. The reason Quake had mouselook off by default was because people would accidentally look at the floor/ceiling, get confused, and give up.


What's strange is that Resident Evil, especially the first one, have a lot of dated elements, but no one mentions them. It's always the controls people complain about.

The real dated element of Resident Evil is having to combine gun with ammo to reload, unskipable cutscenes, and a very limited amount of saves.

 

[Scarthew]

Walk and talk

i wish walk and talk would die. how many games are impossible to replay because they have 30-60 minutes of unskippable cutscenes?

The real dated element of Resident Evil is having to combine gun with ammo to reload, unskipable cutscenes, and a very limited amount of saves

You dont have to reload that way, all RE except im pretty sure has manual reload buttons. Limited saves is a good thing.

The real issue is that in a series about resource mamagement you can combime stacks but cant split them. So if you need 12 bullets for the next section and no more you either have to bring 30 and throw away 18 or use a stack and leave a remainder 12 and organize it very awkwardly.

 

[TheHarbinger]

the enemy variety is actually fine.

No it's not. For a AAA game that is the pinnacle release of its generation it had a paltry amount of enemies and weapons. Half Life 2 recycles its enemies and environments and gameplay loop immeasurably. The original scale of Half Life 2 was cut down massively. There is more cut content for Half Life 2 than Fallout New Vegas. They scrapped almost the entire story and rewrote it hastily to get the title out to retail.

Things like the Combine's harvesting of earth's resources were cut down to be far less bleak. The original story has Earth pretty much devoid of life and the aliens are sapping the planet of resources rapidly. The labor facilities and use of child labor were removed so that the aliens weren't enslaving all of humanity. Almost the entire backstory of Black Mesa that would come from dialog was removed. Including a section that detailed the hiring of the science and engineer teams that would have a detailed background of Gordon Freeman.

There were also some cut enemies that gave insight into the new world. Like one of them was a Combine Incinerator. That would wander the streets of cities and towns and execute citizens publicly or burn the bodes of anyone who died for any reason.

 

[Scarthew]

No it's not. For a AAA game that is the pinnacle release of its generation it had a paltry amount of enemies and weapons

It has 17 enemy types 21 in episode 1/2 and thats only if you're not including all the different kinds of combine seperately which would add another 9 and it has 10 weapons what are you talking about?

 

[el bandito loco]

It's not that it's particularly aged poorly but the last generation adding crafting mechanics to every game sucks and is mindless padding for 90% of them. survival resource management doesn't belong in half the games that have them. sometimes it's implemented well and I don't mind it but 50% of the time I start a new game I haven't played and it has that and immediately makes me want to turn it off and play something else.

 

[Caesare]

My Spellsword character with 50 agility and 70 long blade skill still misses half his sword swings so I mostly just run around like a headless chicken casting OP spells.

Don't spam attacks like you'd do in the later games. Your current stamina affects if your hit lands or not, so if you're spamming attacks while your stamina bar is low, you'll miss way more. Attack less while being more mindful of it. You'll hit things a lot more.

With 70 attack skill you should be landing the majority of your swings.

 

[Michael Wade]

Like the arena fighter genre, stuff like DBZ Xenoverse? I think those are most fun briefly but have no depth or staying power, so they're pretty flawed too. It's a genre I'm really picky about overall, to be fair.

No I hate that shit. Too floaty and unresponsive. Gundam is Way better

 

[3D2A]

Collect-a-thons.

Don't play games like Banjo & Kazooie or DK64 in current year if you don't want your nostalgia ruined.