Your "What were they thinking." Moment while you were playing a game.

[BrawlMan]

The letterboxing for the first Evil Within game. I get why Shinji and his team did it, but it was still stupid. The letterboxing literally interfered with the gameplay and camera. The game was not ready for launch and trying to play a pre patch on a 360 or on PC makes the game near unplayable. Thankfully they patched the crap out of this and you can remove the letterboxing. It's brought back in the second game as an optional bonus feature, but nobody wants that.

 

[Drathnoxis]

In Super Mario World you can replay normal levels by pressing any of the four face buttons (X, Y, A, B), however to replay a castle or a fortress you need to press L and R together. Why? What's the point in making it different?

 

[BrawlMan]

In Super Mario World you can replay normal levels by pressing any of the four face buttons (X, Y, A, B), however to replay a castle or a fortress you need to press L and R together. Why? What's the point in making it different?

INNOVATION!​

 

[BrawlMan]

Everybody watch this! There is a lot of WTFery design they go in to big details.

​

 

[EvilRoy]

I've been playing Civ 6 recently, and while its a clear uprade over 5 there are a lot of perplexing design decisions in there.


In the game, if you've never played, you can earn "great people" who are individuals that bring advancements to your side and are more or less critical for certain win conditions. Great scientists boost your progress on the tech tree, great artists/musicians give you great works for tourism, great admirals give you sea based upgrades, merchants give you money making advances and so on.

If you go for a culture focused approach, its entirely possible to get a bunch of great musicians and artists long before you could actually possibly house their works or even see gains from having them - there are specific buildings you make to store the works and they aren't immediately available. I get that there are era specific artists and they kind of shoot for the great people to pop up in the right times, but if you're optimizing for a specific victory condition you might end up with a bunch of greats just lounging around doing nothing while you work through 100 years of development to get a radio station to actually store their shit. I have Mozart waiting in the wings over here because for some reason only one opera house exists in this universe and it can only be built once by one side and stores two or three songs.

There's also just weird QoL issues, like you can't define a path along which to make a railroad or a road. For a road, you have to make a trader who will eventually establish a caravan path, and a railroad has to be built one block at a time, directed the whole way by player, overtop of that. Caravan pathing isn't horrible until sea travel becomes easy so you can get into these weird situations mid game where you have to strategically move traders city to city to force land paths, or they'll just take the faster water route and you won't get a road. Railroad building depends on that so you might have a city that's perpetually slow to access late game because you couldn't get the caravan to go the right way. NBD until someone declares war and you have to send land assault units either over a slow land route or a water route where they can't defend themselves to react. It actually cost me a city once.

 

[Meximagician]

Everybody watch this! There is a lot of WTFery design they go in to big details.

​

Mega Man Legends and it's sequel did something similar to the Pokemon difficulty setting thing. Want to 'unlock' easy mode? You need to beat hard mode (after unlocking it by beating normal mode) or SPEEDRUN NORMAL MODE. The time limits are pretty generous by speedrunning standards, but still.

At least Legends 2 introduced a license system (you could raise the difficulty midgame by clearing a shorter, timed level) so normal/hard mode could be made 'easier' by sticking to a class B license, but even then that locked you out of some of the side levels.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Everybody watch this! There is a lot of WTFery design they go in to big details.

​

Well, Pokémon as a series is heavily laced with insanity in general, so there’s that. Wish what they said was going to be heard/watched by those in charge but that’s wishful thinking.

 

[BrawlMan]

Well, Pokémon as a series is heavily laced with insanity in general, so there’s that. Wish what they said was going to be heard/watched by those in charge but that’s wishful thinking.

Always known the series had insane idiotic game design, but not to this degree with locking the difficulty behind stupid requirements. Such as having two versions of the game. Then again, I never played Pokemon Black and White one or two. I stopped playing after Crystal.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Always known the series had insane idiotic game design, but not to this degree with walking the difficulty behind stupid requirements. Such as having two versions of the game. Then again, I never played Pokemon Black and White one or two. I stopped playing after Crystal.

Never played any of it myself. Those things are designed to be cute on the surface but are really devils in disguise. The South Park episode for Pokémon was gold-


Yup, just keep our egos stoked with big penis talk and everything will be fine.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

The entire idea of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts.

A beloved collectathon/ 3D platformer series? Let's strip away the basis of the gameplay people fell in love with, and turn it into a build-a-bear kart racer! We'll even throw in a line near the start about how people don't want collectathons anymore. And we'll redesign the characters to look blocky and jagged, too, because we might as well.

To be fair; Rare was always down for dunking on themselves or their own creations, this is the company that, after hearing people dismiss it as "just another mascot platformer" transformed Conker's cutesy platformers into a vulgar and adult adventure game. And I'm saying this as someone who adored Banjo-Kazooie and Tooie, I just don't think the point of that was to be dismissive of platformers or the original games but them making a joke about how it was years later and they were on a system that was clearly intended for a different audience than what they were used to.

And I think the actual issue with the game is that Rare is not Nintendo. Nintendo has shown that they'll experiment with side games or spins on their popular franchises but people know that they're still going to release a new conventional version of their popular franchises at some point. With Rare, we didn't know if another platformer with Banjo and Kazooie was going to come out in addition to this new game and indeed it never did.

 

[SilentPony]

The proving ceremony scene early on in Horizon Zero Dawn, where you as Aloy, the blonde jock with the heart of gold, and his "friend" the cocky and strong younger sister of a top hunter are gathered together to finally start this anime. We have our cast, can't wait to see how they evolve as people and get into wacky adventures together, I wonder when the obligatory beach/hotspring episode is.
OH. They're dead now. Aloy beats back the enemy ambush, but the rest of the team are just killed off including your mentor/father, and most of the named characters. And I was sitting there like "Wait, did they just kill off the supporting cast? They know Aloy is even in game called awkward and hard to get along with, right? What possible reason did they have to kill off the actual interesting characters and leave us with the awkward one who very specifically needed friends to help her grow and mature?"
And worst of all, they didn't introduce anyone nearly as interesting for the rest of it. I just got bored and stopped playing. They did the great big tragic death scene of the actual likeable characters within the first hour of a 40 hour story, and they never bothered to fill in those roles.

 

[Xprimentyl]

I'm gonna throw it ALL the way back to the original Dead Rising. The in-game text was so ridiculously small, it was completely illegible unless you had an HD television which wasn't the bog standard we enjoy today. I know the PS3/360 were the reasons a lot of us evolved to the latest TVs at the time, but a game that required one was a bit much.

 

[BrawlMan]

I'm gonna throw it ALL the way back to the original Dead Rising. The in-game text was so ridiculously small, it was completely illegible unless you had an HD television which wasn't the bog standard we enjoy today. I know the PS3/360 were the reasons a lot of us evolved to the latest TVs at the time, but a game that required one was a bit much.

Oh I remember those days. Everyone complained about this. What the hell was Inafune thinking?!

 

[Xprimentyl]

Oh I remember those days. Everyone complained about this. What the hell was Inafune thinking?!

I think they were thinking "since the console supports high-definition, we can make the text small, less intrusive, and they can see our hundreds of zombies on screen at once in all their HD glory!" Problem was not everyone had an HD tv yet. The "what were they thinking" issue I have is that they didn't incorporate the option to adjust for SD tvs which still held the lion's share of real estate in people's homes at the time.

 

[Dalisclock]

The proving ceremony scene early on in Horizon Zero Dawn, where you as Aloy, the blonde jock with the heart of gold, and his "friend" the cocky and strong younger sister of a top hunter are gathered together to finally start this anime. We have our cast, can't wait to see how they evolve as people and get into wacky adventures together, I wonder when the obligatory beach/hotspring episode is.
OH. They're dead now. Aloy beats back the enemy ambush, but the rest of the team are just killed off including your mentor/father, and most of the named characters. And I was sitting there like "Wait, did they just kill off the supporting cast? They know Aloy is even in game called awkward and hard to get along with, right? What possible reason did they have to kill off the actual interesting characters and leave us with the awkward one who very specifically needed friends to help her grow and mature?"
And worst of all, they didn't introduce anyone nearly as interesting for the rest of it. I just got bored and stopped playing. They did the great big tragic death scene of the actual likeable characters within the first hour of a 40 hour story, and they never bothered to fill in those roles.

I think the idea was maybe show how deadly the threat was but it doesn't work when you kill a bunch of dudes we've just met and haven't gotten a chance to really know yet. Killing off a bunch of NPCs is basically just that.

Hell, I barely remember those dudes because that's how little impression they made on me.

 

[BrawlMan]

Nintendo forcing motion controls on a majority of their 1st party games on Wii with little or no use of alternative, traditional control lay out. Especially on 2.5D platformers that require precise jumping. Looking at you big time Donkey Kong County Returns.

 

[Drathnoxis]

Wii Music. Let's make a game about playing public domain children's songs and only include like 10 songs from Nintendo games. Because that's what people want. And also let's advertise it with the Mario theme so people get the complete wrong impression about what the game is.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Okay, so this isn't attached to gameplay, but rather the advertising for a game. You see, the song Liquid State was written by Muse's bassist about his battles with alcoholism; it's one of only two songs of the band's that he's sung lead vocals on (the other, Save Me, is on the same subject).

So some clueless goomba in the Crytek braintrust heard it and thought "Hey, that song is perfect for a trailer for our next bombastic overblown shooter game!"

 

[BrawlMan]

Okay, so this isn't attached to gameplay, but rather the advertising for a game. You see, the song Liquid State was written by Muse's bassist about his battles with alcoholism; it's one of only two songs of the band's that he's sung lead vocals on (the other, Save Me, is on the same subject).

So some clueless goomba in the Crytek braintrust heard it and thought "Hey, that song is perfect for a trailer for our next bombastic overblown shooter game!"

While this is more so a Crytek issue, EA was still the publisher. There was a similar thing with Dante's Inferno and "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers. Yet in a weird, cosmic sort of way, the song fits.

​

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

While this is more so a Crytek issue, EA was still the publisher. There was a similar thing with Dante's Inferno and "Ain't No Sunshine" by Bill Withers. Yet in a weird, cosmic sort of way, the song fits.

​

Reminds me of what might be the first trailer that really stood out to me as aiming for that effect -


Nothing in the actual games ended up anywhere near that kind of dramatic tone though; at least not of the first three I actually played.