Most dreadful game design you've experienced?

For me it's Paper Mario Sticker Star.

The game relies heavily on combat using one-time use stickers. Yet there is no reward for fighting other than coins. Some fights and levels require special stickers. Yet you wouldn't know this until you are deep into that level or fight. Some of those fights you can't run out of. So you have to turn your game off or let yourself die. For the levels, there is no way to pause the game and quit out of the level. So again you have to either backtrack to the start to exit the level, or turn off the game. If you need a special sticker to progress through a level, and try to use one but it's not the right one, the sticker vanishes. This includes other special stickers. It makes more sense to shut the game off and retry at this point. There are other points in the game where it seems to come to a halt, and it's hard to figure out where to go next. There is no hint system on where to go next, where to look, or what special sticker you need to get to progress. Just awful game design all around.

Anyway, what's the worst you've experienced? Maybe for some it's more broken games like Sonic 06, for others it's fundamentally sound games with ideas that just weren't fun like the designers hoped.

The blue shell and coin items in Mario Kart 8

90% of the BS in Uncharted 2

In both cases it's design elements that severely limit the validity of your participation with the game.

In recent memory, almost every aspect of RE6. Also JC2. Having to cause a massive amount of chaos just to unlock the next mission was beyond my patience threshold.

The chains of close bonfires on Dark Souls 3.

Jak 2's checkpoint system. Just awful.

The prerequisite filler quests to do story quests in Xenoblade X. The entire human race is in danger, but before we go do this extremely time sensitive quest, let's help this idiot get a girlfriend first!

I love DS3 but this is a great example. Also fast travel from the very beginning was a very poor choice.

If they made another 2 or 3 of these games they would eventually devolve to this:

Most of UC3, especially the shipyard and the desert.

Almost all modern 3d games claiming "open world" yet having next to zero world interaction.

DMC4 type of design.

Playing through the game as one character and going back through the same areas as another.

@drummerdave9099: that killed the game for me....really badly thought out. good game otherwise.

the 2 zelda games on the DS did a lot of things right also but they both made catastrophic errors.

in hourglass the repeating dungeon was just horrid. in spirit tracks the one hit kill trains were an awful idea.

QTE's. Especially timed QTE's that change the button sequence after you fail at it the first time.

Most over hyped games these days have dreadful design, especially the ones that are still trying hard to copy trend set by Modern Warfare.

I don't usually go out of my way to play the truly bad games with truly bad mechanics.

But since it's on the front page, APB is a shooter made in 2010, that has NO melee system. NO. MELEE. SYSTEM. At all. To this day 6 years later, still none. Not even a bad one like where you have to swap out to your knife on a different key. Which maybe would be fine if it made sense to purely shoot, except far, far too many encounters wind up with you doing a shitty dance in an alley spraying and praying like crazy at eachother. It would be far better and more satisfying if you could rush someone with a bat like in GTA games. I could go on and on about bad game design in that game but that one really stands out to me.

Honorable mentions go to dark souls 3, for poise being literally worthless.

Warlord of Draenor garrison, which isolated and destroyed the community even further, while ensuring there was nothing to do.

AC revelations for the tower defense game that made no sense at all in the context of the rest of the game, and was basically pointless.

Mass Effect 2 and 3 also get to come here for the abysmal mechanics in planet scanning. Hyper slow, takes forever, yet it's mandatory to clear the games 100%. Completely grinds the pacing down and isn't fun at all.

Basically any MOBA with stealth mechanics. Stealth in MOBA's is unfun game-breaking cancer.

Planetside 2 for blatant pay to win options. Like if you pay money, you can get air to air missiles right away, as opposed to other players who have to grind that shit for dozens of hours.

Elder Scrolls Oblivion level scaling, making the crummy bandits in the 1st dungeon wear hyper armor from the depths of hell.

@skektek said:

@jasonofa36 said:

The chains of close bonfires on Dark Souls 3.

I love DS3 but this is a great example. Also fast travel from the very beginning was a very poor choice.

If they made another 2 or 3 of these games they would eventually devolve to this:

In bloodborne there was one place where you could see 3 lanterns within sprinting distance.

Fast travel is fine though, do you really want a repeat of Dark Souls 1 Tomb of the Giants? You go down there too early get all the way to a boss door you can't traverse then have to get out... first time that happened I almost gave up and turned the game off.

Any game that forces the player to walk for story reasons.

Any game that changes gameplay mechanics for the last boss.

Any game that removes your abilities you have earned for added difficulty.

Any game that has unskippable cutscenes prior to a boss fight. There is special place in hell for those "game developers".

The Bureau: Xcom Declassified

Interaction is very limited to the point that it gets laughable; I mean, they put desk chairs all over so you don't interact with some parts of the office??

Dialogues, dialogues again, reading notes, leading your team strategically which makes the game's pace very slow and boring.

The Library in Halo.

Any RPG where absolutely no status ailments work against bosses. Yeah, I can understand putting every boss to sleep and then killing him would be bad, but come on, at least allow one type of ailment to work against different bosses.

Cinematic Walking.

The way the fight system works in wwe2k15, there's always shit popping up on screen breaking the imersion.

So you hate the beginning of the Metroid Primes? When you lose all your armor and abilities and have to start with just the power beam, jump, and scan visor?

Pre-patch Mass Effect 2... I never liked a game so much that was being totally ruined by an awful game mechanic.

I remember coming home from work one night with a whole evening to play... and hours later I am still scanning planets!! That was a brutal task on the original game... I had to just stop playing because there was no fun in it.

I returned a year later when they increased the scanning recticule and made it faster. Much better, and glad I finished the excellent game. But it was brutal in the early days.

Thats the start of the game. You did not earn those abilities through gameplay and then it was removed.

Hell yeah. If there is no risk, no venture, then the reward is meaningless. I love the fact that DS1 gives you 3 possible paths, 2 of them nearly impossible from the start.

Having fast travel from the very beginning breaks a large coherent world down into individuals levels. After you complete [World 3-1] and move on to [World 3-2] there no reason to look back until you pass through again in NG+. In DS1 you earned fast travel after you had experienced and subjugated the world. You felt like you had achieved something.

Came to post this. What the hell were they thinking lol?

Oh and video game stories. Like a shit load of them. The fact that most don't know how to tie their gameplay into their story or visa versa, is absurd. It's 2016.

Maybe it's difficult to pull off.

Probably saying this because I'm playing it right now, but Uncharted 3.

90% of enemies just spam grenades, or Rocket launchers. Each firefight takes too long, and when you think you've finished it, yet more enemies show up and killing people just get's boring and repetitive really fast. I'm also getting sick of the game recommended I use stealth in areas, but then it requiring you to be seen so more enemies can show up and have the next path open, making the whole thing completely pointless, and if you die you restart the area, but with everyone aware to you been their.

Even the puzzles in this one are trash. 1 and 2 at least had me thinking for a little bit, but had fairly obvious solutions once you took in your surroundings. Here the game goes from such extremes of either holding your hand entirely though the puzzle, or dropping you in the deep end with nothing but a middle finger. It's gotten to the point where I don't even want to try and solve the puzzles, and I'm using a guide just so I can be done with the game.

I know 1 and 2 are similar, but I never felt the issues in those two, and I enjoyed them a lot, but 3 is just ruining the entire series for me, and while I'm gonna force myself though this one, I think it's gonna be a while before I play 4, if I ever do, because I'm hating 3 that much that I REALLY don't want to play another.

They don't need to because sites like Gamespot would give these games a perfect score for focusing more on the story than gameplay.

Entwined.

The game feels like an overly simplistic mobile game that needed analog sticks, which is whatever, but literally your punishment for messing up Entwined is playing more Entwined by knocking down a meter that you're not enticed to fill up anyway.

Expect the same from Uncharted 4. I had the same sentiment with 3 and 4 did not change my outlook.

It's difficult to pull off trying to do something from cinema or literature into gaming, because it's not a passive medium nor one that is actually an organic story telling medium. It has some very specific limitations, that said, plenty of examples exist of games tying their narrative or tone to the play. Be it Metroid Prime and Dark Souls for making the plot simple, and the backstory a readable, Bioshock (bad game design, but the story telling has never really been an issue), the Half Life (shit story, but the presentation, narrative, and world building is top notch) games, Silent Hill, Shadow of the Colossus, Journey, Ico, etc.

Starfox Zero has the best game storrytelling

I didn't play star fox zero but saw a guy trying to play it and felt bad for them.

Where the heck did this come from? What does this quote have to do with game design?

Unskippable boring unneccesary cutscene

1 minute of Gameplay

Another unskippable boring unneccesary cutscene

^!%& you Max Payne 3!

The you will love Quantum Break and Uncharted 4. :)

Press X to not die.

Unskippable cinematics before any sort of boss fight and/or combat scenario.

QTEs.

RE6 always jumps out to me as well. It had some of the worst level layouts of any game ever.

Dragon's Dogma's "fast travel system" (or lack theorof) was highly annoying. Tons of inane back-tracking in that game. You know what was also annoying about Dragon's Dogma? The "save glitch" that cost you everything - and as far as the game design - the big flaw was that the game only had ONE save file. So if it got corrupted, that was it, game over. Had that happen to me after 40+ hours and I never went back - even though it was actually a pretty cool experience up to that point (bad travel system and all). Not sure if it was ever patched, but after several months of waiting for a fix I no longer gave a shit.

I never experienced a "corrupted" save in all my years of gaming on old systems. Last gen it seemed to afflict several games. It happened in Battlefield 4 too. Sure, it's no big deal to lose Battlefield campaign progress - but it it's still absurd to release a game, where a COMMON glitch is for your entire save file to become corrupted. My understanding in Battlefield 4 was that if you play multiplayer you would likely lose your campaign progress. It seems this one was impacting huge numbers of people, and to have a massive coding error like that in a released product is just silly.

Cinematic walking in all of its forms.

These come to mind.

Especially if the QTEs result in instant death for failing.

I agree. At the same time, games like Uncharted for example needs to limit it's gameplay to blend it with the story telling. Regardless of how good the writing actually is, to me it doesn't really work well. There are times where I barely do anything in these games. I could literally put the controller down every 10 mins or so to watch more cutscenes, do another linear action sequence. These games are probably the best you'll get at the moment in terms of trying to put something from cinema/literature into gaming. What's left is a limited gameplay experience. Of course they'll dazzle you with visual flare. RoTB and UC4 have stunning visuals and this easily persuades. Uncharted-like games are just an alternative attempt at trying to blend gameplay and story. Apparently, it's working pretty well. 10/10 and stuff.

"plenty of examples exist of games tying their narrative or tone to the play"

This is true but you can't really compare games like Dark Souls and say Bioshock. Dark Souls is vague and basically tells it's story through the areas and bosses/enemies you face. Honestly, I can't really say that the japanese are good writers. I only know a few that are great but so many are on the naughty list. Perhaps it's because there are way too many writers in japan ? Just guessing. Usually, the story ends up being a mess. Metal Gear Solid is basically unsalvageable. They are the kings of creating great atmosphere and obviously godly with their unique art styles. Bloodborne.

What I'm saying is that each game might have a different focus and one might just be easier to pull off. Or not. I don't know. But I know that I'm constantly frustrated with games when it comes to the tying of gameplay to the story, as you said. Either we end up with solid gameplay mechanics and a forgettable story or we end up with something like Spec Ops The Line.

Stealth mechanics in MOBA's ?

What like Rengar form LoL or Loki from SMITE ?

Perks, killstreaks, XP and unlocks in online FPS.

I hate that crap, get it out of my games please. It's only there to reward players ever 5 seconds so they don't get bored with your game, but to me it's just annoying and takes up way too much screen space.

Not sure, but Sonic is up there. The games encourage the player to go fast, then punish the player for going fast. Hate that shit.

That's nothing compared to this.

Bioshock 2 - Whoever thought babysitting would be a fun thing to do should be shot