Game design choices that killed the experience for you

One such moment for me was Resident Evil 8. The beginning was eerie, and it made me think this would be like a Resident Evil 4, but in first person. Then the game included sections that felt super generic. First one was the Lycan section where they throw dozens at you and you have to keep spamming your assault rifle. Then the Heisenberg boss fight which felt generic and spammy. And then the worst was the Chris Redfield section. It’s like they tried to include sections in the game that weren’t so stressful, but they weren’t much fun either.

How about you, SW? What game design choices killed the experience for you in a game?

Having to swipe the screen to turn around in Kid Icarus Uprising for the 3DS. Excellent game otherwise.

The forced slow cinematic walking and QTE (make the car go broom) crap in Resident Evil 8 was the first time was consciously aware was done paying full price for "AAA" games.

I fucking hate slow cinematic walking, it's garbo.

Think after RE6 they'd learn, but na, back to their old ways.

In mgs5 I was in a really nice groove.... Enjoying the emerging gameplay and stealth choices... Bit of an empty pointless open world, but the gameplay was great....

Then...... Full stop, were going to teach you all about invading bases and all these systems come rushing in that I didn't give one eff about.... I know it was optional but good God the way it rolled out mid story was so bad. Killed my momentum and I never finished the game.

Also, the level Upstream in Uncharted 1 where you ride the jetski against the current was seriously awful game design. Just an exersise in futility and poor controls. I was enjoying uncharted 1 at the time that level came up and I was like w.... T...... F...... Afterwards.

Walking cutscenes is number 1 game design killer. It is the reason i couldn't play beyond 15 minutes of Last of Us 2 and Final Fantasy VII.

Anything that has a fishing mini game. I hate it. I also remember the weapon breaking mechanic in BOTW made Me cuss everytime I played that game back when it came out.

The control scheme for Skyward Sword sucked so much that I couldn't stand playing the game.

Made it to 4 hours in the original game. When it was still boring as shit, I gave up.

Crafting and as a consequence gathering every piece of crap you come around… in some few games it’s well done and add to the gameplay! But most game just have it crammed in there to add needlessly padding to the game!

RE7 and 8 going first person was a massive mistake. But both games were so flawed that even if they were in third person, it wouldn't have changed much, tho.

+1 for re:8. in the first few hours i was doing so little to influence proceedings, mainly pushing forward on the stick with the occasional button press when prompted, that i thought it best to just leave the game to play itself and i'd move on. equal parts disappointing and frustrating

Didn't ruin it for me by any means, but the beloved aspect of Dragon's Dogma really threw me off. I mean, maybe I missed something, but it wasn't super apparent that giving gifts and whatnot means you're going to be boinking that person later on. Lol, I gave gifts to this old crusty merchant in the main city just to get better prices and better items or whatever. Before I knew it, I was watching cut scenes of him dry-humping me.

A recent one is MHRise console port. Mind u I still got 70 hours from the game.

I just don't enjoy the design of this game. They scrapped everything else or just nerfed a lot of other and only focus on combat which is great if u want quick play but then devs also made the game bit too easy.

Also maybe an oversight from Devs, u can experience everything once u get to HR8 which allows u to hunt even the HR100 Valstrax (or whatever the fuk the name of the monster is) and other elder dragons like all mother narwa. Killed them all and means I pretty much experienced everything without even grinding.

Dual wielding in Halo 2. They took many weapons (human pistol, plasma pistol, plasma rifle, etc) and made them less useful and generic. Replacing the magnum with the battle rifle. What they initially showed was a single shot zoomed, fully automatic unzoomed weapon. But what they released was a 3-round burst pos. Removal of health packs, lock-on rockets, boarding vehicles, noob combo (br + plasma pistol), giant hotboxes, weaker grenades, etc.

How BF2042 got rid of the classic class system, and replaced it with specialists. The game had a lot of problems but I think this is the biggest one that raised red flags about how this was going to turn out.

The game has come a long way and I think they are finally going to implement a class system of some sort but its still going to be watered down as all specialists/classes can use all weapons. Its probably going to feel like a sort of BF knock-off still rather than a proper BF game.

---

Another one is Dawn of War 3, how they sorta turned it into a MOBA/RTS hybrid and it just didn't work at all. hugely disappointing game from one of my favorite RTS series. hope they return to that series and make a proper iteration.

---

finally, Back 4 Blood was a huge missed opportunity because instead of going with the classic L4D versus mode, they had some lame survival versus thing. They also got too swept up in their card/weapon rarity system and forgot to make the actual core game and levels fun. also very disappointing for what was supposed to be a spiritual successor to L4D

Lots of cutscenes and long cinematic walking parts. It's deal breaker for me.

Weapons breaking made me stop playing BOTW. Sucks cuz I really liked the game too. Not sure I'll play the next one if that's still a thing.

Infinite enemy spawns; in any game, really. It's such a tedious mechanic.

Too much talking and fetch quests. Nothing more annoying than going on a mission to deliver some bs to some NPC to then have to click through a bunch of pointless borring dialogue to get credit for your borring fetch quest. It's such garbage and too many games do it.

Lots of good ones here, I'd just repeat them.

Yeah same. Even got excited by the thought. Then the game started sucking and never stopped.

After Evolve and B4B, it's pretty clear that Turtle Rock Studios don't have a fucking clue as to what the hell they're doing. Guess they needed Valve to not suck.

xD

The moment Kingdom Hearts tried to be serious when it's a cheese factory. I enjoy the games to pieces, but they really shouldn't try to be serious when they built their whole franchise off of Disney characters. The most notable scene is when Goofy "died" in Kingdom Hearts 2. When he gets whacked on the head, I didn't think for a second that he died.

Ha, should try Hexen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel.

In base Hexen it has respawns, but in the expansion pack some bright spark thought "let's instead make them respawn almost every 20-30 seconds while you attempt to solve convoluted switch puzzle spread across multiple levels"

Most cancery FPS expansion play. Nightmare.

God of War 2018 when they went to context specific jumping.

Having to travel outrages amount of time to a mission. Looking at you, Ghost of Tshushima.

For me that would be skills that are attached to jeweles instead of a proper skill tree.

That alone made the entire Path of Exile game irrelevant to me.

I was hyped for POE2, see it has the same mechanic --> not even going to try.

Only Diablo 4 is relevant for me now. Unless they decide to implement the same.

BoTW - hated weapon breakage like many others, but I also hated the cooking system just as much. It'd be nice if the next one featured customizable difficulty like in some other games (Control/GoTG) that way I could get around stuff like extreme cold or heat and not have to waste time cooking.

Like others have said cinematic walking is terrible. I've skipped a number of games that have alot of it (RDR2, TLOU1 + TLOU2) and it brings down the experience significantly for others. (Tomb Raider, Days Gone)

Best of all: the game has a room with infinite spawning enemies but it doesn't tell you that it did that. So the player is just stuck there, was thought to beat all enemies. Until you become exhausted and at like 10% or less of your ammo and become aware that the only way forward is moving on.

Here are a few that kill or lessen the experience for me:

- Having to baby sit NPCs that can die, even worse giving them pathetically low healthbars so they die all the time.

- Being about three quarters into a game or close to the ending and still getting tiny amuonts of gold or coin when you're already needing way more in shops. Just giving us scaling amounts of currency. Not the exact same amount I would've gotten when I started the game.

The kaiju and stealth moments in Bayo 3. My Power Rangers loving self should love the former, but no. It's just clunky.

The latter is even more, and I'm not great at stealth action games despite beating a few of them (MGS 2, MGS 3, Splinter Cell GC, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow GC).

I stopped and went back to Cuphead (a harder game, but somehow less stressful... how does that work?).

Oh, another one, my quote from another forum about disproportionate difficulty levels:

Disproportionate balances in difficulty levels. So, for a while I was playing Vampyr, because I got it for free a while back on EGS store, and... oh, boy. Here's the gist of it:

The game difficulty is directly tied to how many named NPCs you kill (embrace) and get their XP, but you are locked-out of good ending, if you do that. Kill too many, and you get bad ending. Normal difficulty: If you do not kill anyone, you are severely underpowered and could get one shotted, because enemies are more than ten levels above you generally. You can, in theory, craft better gear (there are five levels in total, each containing two additional perks, but you can choose only one of them), but it is very hard to find parts. I completed Chapter Two (with the ghoul in the morgue) and was supposed to meat Lady Ashbury near the hospital, and I barely had parts to craft Level Two Weapon with Additional Blood Sucking Perk.

Now, I tried to play it with Story Mode, and... the combat is a joke. You can steam-roll through level 16-18 NPCs like it is nothing when you are level 3 yourself (out of curiosity I tried that). But, OK, I can understand that, it is meant for those who want to experience the story. However, what I can't understand is their decision to make crafting ingredients drop like flies on Story Mode. In Normal difficulty I had barely ingredients to scrounge for level 2 gear (and only one piece of gear) by the start of Chapter Two. Well, on story mode, by the end of Chapter One, I had enough to make Level 4 Gear and 4 items of medicine!

Last game I quit because of design choice was the most recent COD.

First off, buggy mess that crashed on me.

But their overreliance on prop mechanics and immersion-killing cutscenes is what got me.

Absolutely hated being anchored to that gunship, circling around a house for minutes on end waiting for my little buddies to go in. Oh no, I blew up a house, restart it all over again. I'm waiting....I'm waiting....oh goodie now I can shoot some enemies. Oh no they got to close to the house and I either failed my team or blew up the house. Start over. I'm waiting...

Oh look, now you're in a helicopter. OH NO you fell off the helicopter but your foot is stuck in the rope. Whee now you gotta shoot while upside down. Now you're on a truck. Now you have to hop on the other truck. Then another. Oh shit you fell off, start over.

Mother****** just let me drive the truck and have a remote machine gun. I don't need all these setpieces. This isn't Michael Bay!

Vampyr had interesting, almost experimental, game design choices to it.

I admire their ambition, but I do wish it worked better than it did.

I still need to beat that game. Really good story, good immersion. But yeah that difficulty/choice system was kind of a killer. Felt like there wasn't much of a middle-ground, had to either be pacifist hero or bloodthirsty bastard.

+2 for Resident Evil, except 7 instead of 8.

Stalker enemies.

Hate them. HATE them. They are an abomination of game design; I've no idea why developers think running around unfamiliar levels like a chicken with its head cut off wasting resources on an undefeatable enemy adds tension. It doesn't, it's just plain poor game design. This is my biggest fear with the RE4 remake, because for some reason present day Capcom developers have a hard-on for this garbage......which is exactly what it is. Let me explore the levels at my own pace.

GTA mission design.

GTA III was immense fun when it originally released. But after no significant evolution in mission design since, what.....2001.....22 years ago....I'm done and have no interest in this franchise until foundational mission design structure is addressed. In fact, R* seems to have gotten even more restrictive with their 'take one footstep outside of our scripted go here do this go there do that' chorefest mission structure. RDR2 was laughably insulting to the intelligence in the credit R* granted its players. It's been a de-evolution. They create these immaculate, incredibly detailed game worlds, and then handcuff you to linear set pieces within it. It's ridiculous, and they seem to have no further ambition to allow you freedom in it except to make it 20 times bigger with 50 more ways to blow shit up. Whoopee. And why shouldn't they? Gamers eat it up without expecting anything more. These games could be SO much more than they are, it's a downright waste.

Those two are the most prominent that come to mind.

Any game that doesn't have the option to change the controller layout. Hey, if I want the jump button to be on L2 instead of A, it's my own goddamn business.

This. 1st person Resi can go f itself.

@uninspiredcup: Level design in that game is brutal. I'm not sure how I beat it as a kid. I tried playing it again on GZ Doom and got stuck in the first world.

@robbie23: Yea def had to dip into watching Youtube vids a couple of times. Felt dirty doing it, but even by the intricate design of 90's FPS, it was overwelming.

wow, do you do that a lot? I don't think I ever change controls.

@SolidGame_basic: In most games the controls are fine, but there have been a few games where I couldn't change the controls to my taste.

These are games that had design decisions where i just had to stop playing basically:

• The 2 Zelda games on the DS (Phantom Hourglass and Spirit tracks). The central dungeon just broke me. It wasn't fun. You had to go back to it several times. Just....no. The Train system in ST was also complete pants with 1 hit trains...No. Just no.(anything with 1 hit kills is on very thin ice anyway).
• Infinite Space on the DS too. I really REALLY wanted to like this game. The setup for it all makes it seem really interesting. But the combat just seems to be a complete lottery, the level of grinding in the game is insane and progress is basically a joke. Games broken basically. But that's a real shame as it could have been brilliant. A lot of potential there.

Some really bad decisions were i put up with it:

• Level scaling in oblivion. When you are better off not levelling up then you know something is very badly wrong. A really really bad idea that was horribly implemented.
• Magic draw system in FF8. Drawing magic sucks but maxing out the number of a specific spell you can have has its perks soo.....suck it up. Tying it to your stats makes it worse. Avoiding magic use as a result.....did no one spot this during development? Awful system.
• Combat system in Xenoblade 2. Xenoblade 1 has a fun system that gets quite hectic as the game progresses. You gotta be in the right position and execute the right skill at the right time to rack up the damage. Xenoblade X...the same but better in every way...with Mechs! Xenoblade 2....well they took all that out and made it a slow, dreary, plodding chore. Then there was something with bubbles and counter element damage and....by that point i couldn't care less to be honest.

Difficult for the sake of being difficult. Could never get into certain games for that reason. I really wanted to like Bloodbourne due to the hype, but those style of games aren't for me.