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

[TFT-A9]

Calm down bro. Hyperbole and strawmanning doesn‘t look good on you.

Can pretty much guarantee Wargaming deserves all the shit it gets and then some.

 

[SITHRAK!]

Can pretty much guarantee Wargaming deserves all the shit it gets and then some.

No arguments there. Having done some community work for them, I was invited to start platooning with other staff and community moderators/contributors. Suddenly my W/R and K/D ratios for those games went through the roof. I’m talking about a 20% increase in win rate right off the bat.
Wargaming definitely fucks with the numbers. All those super successful WOT youtubers almost certainly have their accounts flagged for vision and pen bonuses and armour and visibility buffs.
The game is also still rife with mods and hacks and whales alting to club seals. I finally quit playing in September last year because I ran out of patience with dickless wonders camping base in top tier TD’s (pro tip: if you’re doing this in a TD, by the time you get to shoot at anyone it’s because the front lines have collapsed and you’re on the losing team). Add to that suicide scouts, cowardly heavies and mediums that think they’re city brawlers and the whole game is a cesspit of retardation.

 

[Fields Of Rye]

Let me tell you another tale from the Smutlands.

The game was called life of spirit. And it managed something quite impressive. You see, you played as an innocent young elf girl who leaves her farm to go to the big city and despite this, it featured surprisingly little...you know... cultural enrichment.

The game's battles came in the form of social interactions and the enemies were you know, people you'd encounter on the street. You had a variety of social abilities that would effect the way people saw you and was actually robust enough to be a pretty neat little game.

The only problem was, the goal was to raise money for your mothers ongoing chemotherapy. Meaning every month you have to return home to pay for the increasingly expensive medicine. And sure you can take out loans but the obvious point of the game is to get enough simps to make that comfortable income. And there's all these other plots going on, so this mom is basically the FEV army from fallout 1.

So once a month you go home. And you have a hidden score that decides if your Cancer Ridden Mother in this Horny Elf Game decides to FUCKING KILL HERSELF AND GIVE YOU A GAME OVER THE NEXT MONTH

The end result is that the game's attitude is less "teehee boner" and more "Glory to Artsoksza"

But what makes your mom decide to off herself?

1. You get pregnant, get a bad reputation, or come home smelling like...fluids
2. You get too dirty. As in, don't take a bath.
3. You get too far in debt.

Combine this with the game being in Japanese, and most people don't in realize what the fuck is happening with the plot until they come home to find their mother SWINGING FROM THE FUCKING RAFTERS

And again, this is a game that tried to avoid other dark subjects.

W H Y

 

[TVStactic]

Let me tell you another tale from the Smutlands.
The game was called life of spirit. And it managed something quite impressive. You see, you played as an innocent young elf girl who leaves her farm to go to the big city and despite this, it featured surprisingly little...you know... cultural enrichment.
The game's battles came in the form of social interactions and the enemies were you know, people you'd encounter on the street. You had a variety of social abilities that would effect the way people saw you and was actually robust enough to be a pretty neat little game.
The only problem was, the goal was to raise money for your mothers ongoing chemotherapy. Meaning every month you have to return home to pay for the increasingly expensive medicine. And sure you can take out loans but the obvious point of the game is to get enough simps to make that comfortable income. And there's all these other plots going on, so this mom is basically the FEV army from fallout 1.
So once a month you go home. And you have a hidden score that decides if your Cancer Ridden Mother in this Horny Elf Game decides to FUCKING KILL HERSELF AND GIVE YOU A GAME OVER THE NEXT MONTH
The end result is that the game's attitude is less "teehee boner" and more "Glory to Artsoksza"
But what makes your mom decide to off herself?

1. You get pregnant, get a bad reputation, or come home smelling like...fluids
2. You get too dirty. As in, don't take a bath.
3. You get too far in debt.
Combine this with the game being in Japanese, and most people don't in realize what the fuck is happening with the plot until they come home to find their mother SWINGING FROM THE FUCKING RAFTERS
And again, this is a game that tried to avoid other dark subjects.

W H Y

uhh... subversion of expectations i guess, kinda like how the main protag in FC5 becomes a mentally-broken follower of the father in new dawn, the hidden failure trigger mechanics are dumb, however it seems this game also has it as a lore finish thing.

i decided to replay oblivion and just got to level 15... the fucking level scaling...

 

[0 0]

I'm learning a lot about Dark Souls II, a game in the series I never tried. One of the gimmicks they pushed was the introduction of a torch.

Dark Souls I was actually dark. There are some areas where you genuinely can't see anything save for silhouettes of objects and monsters. But in Dark Souls II, it's bright enough you don't even need the torch they focused so much on in promotional interviews. So most people don't even bother with the torch, something which would've been helpful in the first game which ironically wasn't intended to have one, at least not throughout the entire playthrough.

But the kicker is, there's a boss fight in II where there's a ton of poisonous gas which just makes the boss annoying. Near the boss is a windmill. For some reason, you can use the torch to light the spoke of windmill on fire, and for another unknown reason, this clears the poisonous gas. There's no way to know this unless you decided to go up to the windmill with the torch and saw a prompt. And you also can't use logic to figure it out because the spoke is made of metal, so even if you believed you could set wood on fire with the torch, there's no way any person would think they could light a metal rod on fire.

 

[Dojima's Dragon]

While i love the games the arena lockdowns in doom 2016/eternal are awful and the purple goo in Eternal

 

[ChucklesTheJester]

I'm learning a lot about Dark Souls II, a game in the series I never tried. One of the gimmicks they pushed was the introduction of a torch.

Dark Souls I was actually dark. There are some areas where you genuinely can't see anything save for silhouettes of objects and monsters. But in Dark Souls II, it's bright enough you don't even need the torch they focused so much on in promotional interviews. So most people don't even bother with the torch, something which would've been helpful in the first game which ironically wasn't intended to have one, at least not throughout the entire playthrough.

But the kicker is, there's a boss fight in II where there's a ton of poisonous gas which just makes the boss annoying. Near the boss is a windmill. For some reason, you can use the torch to light the spoke of windmill on fire, and for another unknown reason, this clears the poisonous gas. There's no way to know this unless you decided to go up to the windmill with the torch and saw a prompt. And you also can't use logic to figure it out because the spoke is made of metal, so even if you believed you could set wood on fire with the torch, there's no way any person would think they could light a metal rod on fire.

I was curious about this. I thought this was too far fetched for a souls game. So I google this, and the walkthrough says this.

There a a small ledge off the left side of wall leading up to the WINDMILL BLADES. Use your torch to light the windmill on fire as this will remove the poison water from the boss fight area!!! This is the one and only way to do this!

So yeah thats pretty fucking out of left field. I will say it does make sense a windmill will remove the poison water. It's one of the jobs of a windmill to move water.

Ligting it on fire to make it do that, not so much.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

CoD hasn't implemented anything good since Modern Warfare 2, that wall running and slide is pretty dumb because you're more of a fish in a barrel doing either. The maps look like shit too.

That's a great mechanic in Titanfall 2 but that's also set it a world where I can get an orbital drop of a 200 ton mech without it killing everyone on the map with an impact shockwave so...yeah.

The drop rates on rare souls or items across the Handheld Castlevania titles. Look, I get you're catering to completionists and people who want special items to blow through future playthroughs, I'm both of those. But when my luck is as high as it can be and I have to walk in and out of the same room 200+ times because it's the only place one enemy is and the drop rate is 1.07% or whatever, or I have to do the same thing but with the added benefit of some weird fucking action like turning on a generator by casting a specific spell (looking at you Dawn of Sorrow), it's a little much for what's at its core still a platformer.

 

[Corn Flakes]

The drop rates on rare souls or items across the Handheld Castlevania titles. Look, I get you're catering to completionists and people who want special items to blow through future playthroughs, I'm both of those. But when my luck is as high as it can be and I have to walk in and out of the same room 200+ times because it's the only place one enemy is and the drop rate is 1.07% or whatever, or I have to do the same thing but with the added benefit of some weird fucking action like turning on a generator by casting a specific spell (looking at you Dawn of Sorrow), it's a little much for what's at its core still a platformer.

I realize I was really unlucky with the RNG on that one, but trying to get the Tsuchinoko's soul in Aria of Sorrow was such a bastard. Took me hours to finally get it, just going back and forth, in and out of the damn room until it not only spawned, but also deigned to drop the damn thing.

 

[Snekposter]

3. Cruisers that make no effort to help spot and kill destroyers. Despite having radar and sonar (which will detect ships within a certain distance through smokescreens) these fucks would rather camp behind and island spamming HE at battleships.

I'm assuming you're talking about the US CL's here, and as someone who plays them on PC, you're an ass. Every single piece of advice I have gotten from skilled players on how play them is exactly that: camp behind island, chuck HE. Their AP shells have terrible velocity and mediocre performance since Wargaming in their infinite wisdom has denied them the benefits of being superheavy while giving them the muzzle v of being so, hampering them when it comes to engaging enemy cruisers, and the complete lack of torpedoes means they're at a major disadvantage in any sort of knife fight, such as against destroyers and other CL's, and unable to even think about forcing targets to choose between normal evasion and breaking off to avoid a spread.

EDIT: For actual on-topic post. Sword of the Stars 2.

The first game was a magnificently clean and simple turn-based 4x game. Colonize planets, research techs, design ships, blow up enemy ships. Surprisingly little micro-management, and it did a great job letting you focus on the important bits of ruling an interstellar empire: crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their brood castes.

The sequel... I don't know where to begin because they did everything wrong that the first got right. The UI got turned from easily readable to a complex mess, instead of going from a design to ships you had to prototype first at a massive cost, instead of just ordering ships to go someplace and do something they needed to be constantly assigned and re-assigned missions, the obvious RNG tech tree of the first game had "feasibility studies" get added to it, which instead of being a straight yes or no to get the tech after researching the prerequisite obfuscated the RNG, government and ruling got turned into a complex mess reminiscent of a Paradox game, and on top of that they also made the actual ship design far more complicated, with power and crew requirements instead of a simple and easy designer. In summation, Stellaris, but absolutely every part of it done wrong and intentionally so in the name of "realism". And I really wish i was joking when I said that, but no, the devs even said as much in forum posts.

 

[Cpl. Long Dong Silver]

I'm assuming you're talking about the US CL's here, and as someone who plays them on PC, you're an ass. Every single piece of advice I have gotten from skilled players on how play them is exactly that: camp behind island, chuck HE. Their AP shells have terrible velocity and mediocre performance since Wargaming in their infinite wisdom has denied them the benefits of being superheavy while giving them the muzzle v of being so, hampering them when it comes to engaging enemy cruisers, and the complete lack of torpedoes means they're at a major disadvantage in any sort of knife fight, such as against destroyers and other CL's, and unable to even think about forcing targets to choose between normal evasion and breaking off to avoid a spread.

EDIT: For actual on-topic post. Sword of the Stars 2.

The first game was a magnificently clean and simple turn-based 4x game. Colonize planets, research techs, design ships, blow up enemy ships. Surprisingly little micro-management, and it did a great job letting you focus on the important bits of ruling an interstellar empire: crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their brood castes.

The sequel... I don't know where to begin because they did everything wrong that the first got right. The UI got turned from easily readable to a complex mess, instead of going from a design to ships you had to prototype first at a massive cost, instead of just ordering ships to go someplace and do something they needed to be constantly assigned and re-assigned missions, the obvious RNG tech tree of the first game had "feasibility studies" get added to it, which instead of being a straight yes or no to get the tech after researching the prerequisite obfuscated the RNG, government and ruling got turned into a complex mess reminiscent of a Paradox game, and on top of that they also made the actual ship design far more complicated, with power and crew requirements instead of a simple and easy designer. In summation, Stellaris, but absolutely every part of it done wrong and intentionally so in the name of "realism". And I really wish i was joking when I said that, but no, the devs even said as much in forum posts.

I specifically said I was talking about console. Yes the US CL has a slow RoF and is better suited for finding a good spot to camp, but I was talkinga bout cruiser play in general. As a DD any help I can get via radar/extra shots means I can neutralize my opposite number faster thus removing my major detection threat (another DD). This means I can then assist the team in targeting battleships for deletion.

 

[BScCollateral]

The first Infamous wouldn't let you climb chain link fences. Which is ridiculous because, uhm, chain link fences are easy to climb.

Granted, they wanted something the character couldn't cross for level design ... but why not barbed or razor wire?

Fixed in Infamous 2 where you could actually get an achievement for climbing a chain link fence.

 

[An Ghost]

I'm learning a lot about Dark Souls II, a game in the series I never tried. One of the gimmicks they pushed was the introduction of a torch.

Dark Souls I was actually dark. There are some areas where you genuinely can't see anything save for silhouettes of objects and monsters. But in Dark Souls II, it's bright enough you don't even need the torch they focused so much on in promotional interviews. So most people don't even bother with the torch, something which would've been helpful in the first game which ironically wasn't intended to have one, at least not throughout the entire playthrough.

But the kicker is, there's a boss fight in II where there's a ton of poisonous gas which just makes the boss annoying. Near the boss is a windmill. For some reason, you can use the torch to light the spoke of windmill on fire, and for another unknown reason, this clears the poisonous gas. There's no way to know this unless you decided to go up to the windmill with the torch and saw a prompt. And you also can't use logic to figure it out because the spoke is made of metal, so even if you believed you could set wood on fire with the torch, there's no way any person would think they could light a metal rod on fire.

Dont forget you have to light the oil reservoirs on both sides of the lost sinner fight to be able to see in that fight. Its a metaphor for fire or something?

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

The single worst designed game I’ve ever played was Wasteland 2.
-Shitty graphics twenty five years out of date.
-Awful linear mission design (inexcusable in a sandbox game).
-booby traps on roughly a third of all interactables, even if they contain nothing of value (apparently setting traps is a popular hobby, post-apocalypse).
-Skills are independent of stats, and stats aren’t really used in-game, so just dump everything into Int to max out skill points on level-up.
-You have to constantly travel the same routes and get ambushed by the same people at the same points every fucking time.
-You can be armed with a semi-auto rifle, but the second you fire a single shot, enemies will run sixty yards and start beating you over the head before you can fire a second shot.
I was an early backer for this dumpster fire of a game and years later, I’m still mad about the forty odd bucks I spent.

You backed a game that promised a return to 90's PC jank, then they made a 90's PC jank style game with that money. idk man.

Dont forget you have to light the oil reservoirs on both sides of the lost sinner fight to be able to see in that fight. Its a metaphor for fire or something?

It was said that the torch would have been a huge part of the game but they couldn't get it to work on a technical level and it was scaled back pretty late in development. It tanked performance if I remember the rumor correctly. It seems plausible and if they had to pull out their lighting system and replace it with something faster it would explain why, when compared to DS1, the lighting looks like garbage in some areas and pretty good in other areas.

 

[Shield Breaker]

I'm learning a lot about Dark Souls II, a game in the series I never tried. One of the gimmicks they pushed was the introduction of a torch.

Dark Souls I was actually dark. There are some areas where you genuinely can't see anything save for silhouettes of objects and monsters. But in Dark Souls II, it's bright enough you don't even need the torch they focused so much on in promotional interviews. So most people don't even bother with the torch, something which would've been helpful in the first game which ironically wasn't intended to have one, at least not throughout the entire playthrough.

But the kicker is, there's a boss fight in II where there's a ton of poisonous gas which just makes the boss annoying. Near the boss is a windmill. For some reason, you can use the torch to light the spoke of windmill on fire, and for another unknown reason, this clears the poisonous gas. There's no way to know this unless you decided to go up to the windmill with the torch and saw a prompt. And you also can't use logic to figure it out because the spoke is made of metal, so even if you believed you could set wood on fire with the torch, there's no way any person would think they could light a metal rod on fire.

DS2 is a mess because the original team lead was fucking up and was replaced halfway through. It's actually impressive how well the final game ended up being since they had to use the reuse the assets already designed. There's even pathways hidden in the maps where the maps were going to connect differently.

 

[SITHRAK!]

You backed a game that promised a return to 90's PC jank, then they made a 90's PC jank style game with that money. idk man.

80’s jank, thank you very much. And there was a strong suggestion that it was going to be a spriritual successor to the original isometric Fallout games, which I loved.
And even if I hadn’t backed it, the game design would still have been just as shit, because InXile are a pack of fucking retards who got more money off Kickstarter than they knew what to do with.
I don’t back stuff off Kickstarter any more.

 

[Bender]

Ratchet and Clank 2's Lava Gun was a fantastic crowd-control weapon, it shot a stream of lava that would travel further if you span in circles or jumped around. It upgrades to the Meteor Gun, which removes the lava stream and it shoots flaming rocks, making it a weird, shitty mix of the Blaster and Bomb Glove (less range and ammo than the Blaster, less damage and AoE than the Bomb Glove), and it's terrible for use against largs groups of weak enemies like the Protopets.

It was such a terrible upgrade they bought the Lava Gun back in Ratchet and Clank 3 and changed the upgrade to the Liquid Nitrogen Gun, which worked like the Lava Gun but froze the enemies, almost like an apology for how badly they messed it up before.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

And there was a strong suggestion that it was going to be a spriritual successor to the original isometric Fallout games

Yes! It was!

the game design would still have been just as shit, because InXile are a pack of fucking retards

Yes! They were!

I don’t back stuff off Kickstarter any more.

Yes!

All positives in my opinion.

 

[Pope Negro Joe the XIIIth]

All positives in my opinion.

The only thing I've ever KS'ed was Sunless Skies and there's no way I would've without having played Fallen London for years and knowing they could pull it off because Sunless Seas exists. Now Failbetter wants me to back a fucking FL visual novel. I know they were having funding issues and the coffers are still low from the costs on Skies, but fuck what a step backwards. I'm not super impressed because I feel like this is product of the idea of the "easy" money that comes with crowdfunding and I think if they were pressed to do something to bring in money for the company to survive they would've gone more creative than "It's a Fallen London monthly just like the ones you pay us for, but with different art!"

ETA: took out word that didn't make sense.

 

[Corn Flakes]

The only thing I've ever KS'ed was Sunless Skies and there's no way I would've without having played Fallen London for years and knowing they could pull it off because Sunless Seas exists. Now Failbetter wants me to back a fucking FL visual novel. I know they were having funding issues and the coffers are still low from the costs on Skies, but fuck what a step backwards. I'm not super impressed because I feel like this is product of the idea of the "easy" money that comes with crowdfunding and I think if they were pressed to do something to bring in money for the company to survive they would've gone more creative than "It's a Fallen London monthly just like the ones you pay us for stay, but with different art!"

Isn't that just them letting "the writing is the best part of Fallen London/Sunless Skies" opinion get to their heads? If the writing is the best thing about their games, it's natural for them to think all everybody wants from them is text.