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

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

You know those moments, something completely frustrating that you're playing through that you're baffled made it into the final game.

One moment from the top of my head is the infamous lily pad section from Super Mario Sunshine.

What are some of those moments that you've had in gaming?

 

[laggyteabag]

The stories of Halo 4 and 5.

Halo is one of those franchises, where it has games, and then a bunch of books, comics, etc

For Halo 4 and 5, they decided to make the story very reliant on the player's knowledge of the extended universe material. For Halo 5, the developers even released a guide detailing all of the books, and comics that you needed to read, and the shows that you needed to watch.

The developers must know that the people who engage with the EU material are a tiny minority.

I have no idea what they were thinking.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

The stories of Halo 4 and 5.

Halo is one of those franchises, where it has games, and then a bunch of books, comics, etc

For Halo 4 and 5, they decided to make the story very reliant on the player's knowledge of the extended universe material. For Halo 5, the developers even released a guide detailing all of the books, and comics that you needed to read, and the shows that you needed to watch.

The developers must know that the people who engage with the EU material is a vast minority.

I have no idea what they were thinking.

Ah yes Star Wars syndrome

 

[sXeth]

Most recently Doom Eternal.

Like 2016 had some out of place platforming section.


Eternal has like 90% of some levels being platforming. The most obnoxious involving monkey bars (which both act kind of buggy and have weird animations, and there's no actual "grab monkey bar" button, you just auto clip into them while moving when they shove them in battle arenas.


Anyhow, around the end of the second (?) level, there's this long extended thing where you're monkey barring and falling platforming through literally those spinning fireball rods from Super Mario, and thats when you really get the idea that maybe they'd lost the plot a bit.

 

[Dalisclock]

Incessant tailing missions in Assasins Creed 4: Black Flag. Like the least fun missions of any kind in an AC game(or most any game) but man, let's load them up because why not. Even better when you have to tail ships on the open sea...through a sea of other ships also looking for you and made dumber by the realization this only works at all because none of the ships have lookouts keeping watch aft.

 

[laggyteabag]

Most recently Doom Eternal.

Like 2016 had some out of place platforming section.


Eternal has like 90% of some levels being platforming. The most obnoxious involving monkey bars (which both act kind of buggy and have weird animations, and there's no actual "grab monkey bar" button, you just auto clip into them while moving when they shove them in battle arenas.


Anyhow, around the end of the second (?) level, there's this long extended thing where you're monkey barring and falling platforming through literally those spinning fireball rods from Super Mario, and thats when you really get the idea that maybe they'd lost the plot a bit.

Oh man, the platforming sections/environmental puzzles were the worst.

This is DOOM. Im here to slay demons.

Trudging through sludge, or jumping through monkey bars, or climbing walls, or going for a swim, were by far the worst parts of the game, and they were everywhere.

The pacing was ruined, and the buzz was gone. Not to mention how buggy or imprecise they often were, so I kept on falling to my death.

Literally no one thought "Hey, Doom 2016 was great - but you know what the sequel needs? Super Mario jumping puzzles!" - well, I say no one, but apparently the dev team thought so.

I have no idea why they thought Parkour Doom Slayer was a good idea.

 

[Godzillarich(aka tf2godz)]

I have no idea why they thought Parkour Doom Slayer was a good idea.

To be fair parkour Doom Slayer sounds pretty badass on paper.

Anyway that was actually an issue I had with the first game as well. The game had an extreme obsession with collectible items and exploration which was pretty tedious. I gave up trying to 100% that game pretty quickly and that's coming from a collectathon fan.

 

[BrawlMan]

Oh man, the platforming sections/environmental puzzles were the worst.

This is DOOM. Im here to slay demons.

Trudging through sludge, or jumping through monkey bars, or climbing walls, or going for a swim, were by far the worst parts of the game, and they were everywhere.

The pacing was ruined, and the buzz was gone. Not to mention how buggy or imprecise they often were, so I kept on falling to my death.

Literally no one thought "Hey, Doom 2016 was great - but you know what the sequel needs? Super Mario jumping puzzles!" - well, I say no one, but apparently the dev team thought so.

I have no idea why they thought Parkour Doom Slayer was a good idea.

Exactly why I stopped playing Eternal.

Everything in WET aside from the shooting. The character, the bad QTEs, the "artsy" kill screen where everything red with black silhouettes, and the platforming.

Unskippable cut-scenes in Shadows of the Damned. A game from 2011!

I will post more later.

 

[Hawki]

So, not all "WTF" moments are equal here, but:

-Army Men: Major Malfunction (that's right, kill the main character of the series off in the intro cutscene for no reason...yep...)

-Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (something I don't understand is why the writers had the events take place all in the one day. Like, even if you didn't do any side missions, no soldier could do all these operations and live, either from exhaustion or lack of planning. Nothing about the plot requires that the events take place over 24 hours, and if anything, it weakens the intiial premise that the UNSA's main goal is to simply buy time for Earth to re-arm)

-Diablo Immortal (I'm not nearly as offput by this game as many are, but as far as I can tell, there's absolutely no reason to not port it to PC or console)

-Final Fantasy X (I enjoy cutscenes. I don't enjoy cutscenes when they're unskippable, and therefore, I have to see them every time I die after a boss. Jecht's final farewell to Tidus becomes less emotional when you're forced to see it again over...and over...and over...and over...and...)

-Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (like I said, not all WTF moments are equal, but, well, I'll put it this way. GS2 didn't need a sequel, but it did leave two potential hooks, namely Alex, and Anemos. Dark Dawn sidesteps the first, and ignores the second, to draw out new plot points that aren't fully resolved, and now, probably never will be)

-The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age (WTF was up with just skipping from the Peleanor Fields to the heroes being atop Barad-Dur confronting the Eye of Sauron? Did they run out of time?)

-Mass Effect 3 (the ending. I mean, how did they think the original ending would go down? I ask because the extended endings work so much better, I don't get why they weren't there from the start.)

-Mortal Kombat (so they rebooted the series, to reboot it again after the third game? Um, okay...)

-Perfect Dark Zero (the drastic shift in tone and aesthetic from the original. Don't get the choice.)

-Quake 2 (why is this Quake 2? I mean, I know why, but it's the start of an identity crisis for Quake that I'd argue it's never recovered from.)

-Resident Evil: Re:Verse (stop with the multiplayer crap Capcom. Just. Stop. Multiplayer RE is never going to be a thing. Or at least use Outbreak as a template rather than...whatever the hell this is.)

-Sonic the Hedgehog (2006): You could argue the whole game, but while that still had ambition behind it, Elise kissing Sonic...no. Just no.

-Star Fox Zero (said it before and I'll say it again, Nintendo has no idea what to do with Star Fox conceptually. It's why we get another reboot that adds nothing to the series in terms of story/setting, especially since Command had explicit sequel bait in a no. of its endings)

-Tomb Raider (I don't know why they're merging the Original and Survivour Timelines together.

-Warcraft III: Reforged (reportedly, the release was rushed by higher-ups, but I'm going to ask them, how the hell did they think it was going to go down? I mean, if they wanted to kill any chance of a WC3, well done, but aside from that?)

-Wing Commander: Prophecy (what the hell were they thinking killing off Blair like that?)

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Timed mission challenges with long, unskippable walk n talk stuff before the real action starts in Red Dead Redemption 2. Might be in other games as well, but since I just went through a lot of these for a trophy, it certainly stands out. “It’s a special kind of torture”, as one youtube comment put it.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

The "Interloper" chapter of Black Mesa. The devs had done a fantastic job of fleshing out Xen, turning it from "bouncing between floating rocks" to something that looked like Far Cry and Subnautica had had the world's most beautiful baby... but holy crap, the whole "factory/warehouse" section could have been cut down by two-thirds and it would only have improved the experience. It was a slog of straightforward, uninteresting, grindy combat and platforming.

 

[SckizoBoy]

Incessant tailing missions in Assasins Creed 4: Black Flag. Like the least fun missions of any kind in an AC game(or most any game) but man, let's load them up because why not. Even better when you have to tail ships on the open sea...through a sea of other ships also looking for you and made dumber by the realization this only works at all because none of the ships have lookouts keeping watch aft.

"Ship stealth", how's about that stupid swamp mission where you had to sneak past some guard posts barely metres away?! I love AC:BF, but I'm with you on that.

Strategy/non-small units tactics games have always had questionable AI, but in Total War: Warhammer II, the AI for siege defences has genuinely no sense of self-preservation and is truly dumber than a sack of bricks and cream cheese.

Defender 1: Let's bravely man the walls to repel these invaders!
Defender 2: But they've destroyed the tower! We can't shoot back!
1: That's fine, we'll stop them when they scale the walls!
2: But they've got a mage and they're casting spells!
1: That's fine, we'll stop them when they scale the walls!
2: But they've got artillery and we're out in the open up here!
1: That's fine, we'll stop them when they scale the walls!
2: But they've got loads of archers and our allies keep getting shot without getting to draw swords!
1: That's fine, we'll stop them when they scale the walls!

That's more or less it. The game has resource calculated into it's tactical balance of power bar, so why it can't moderate defenders' behaviour based on ammo/winds of magic reserve or the attacker's on-field army composition, I really don't know (probably because shmucks like me play the game nonetheless and find it fun on the whole despite gripes like this).

 

[Kyrian007]

L.A. Noire: Why... Why was there driving? It was never anything but a commute, where generally they would maybe infodump story but nothing else would ever happen. Rockstar's engine at that time was so awful that driving was just painful anyway. It would have been an improvement to just add a travel menu and dump the info on a loading screen.

 

[Bedinsis]

The visual novel Steins; Gate.

Before playing it I had several preconceived notions about visual novels as a whole. Mainly that is mostly an excuse for people to gawk at cute anime girls and/or see cute anime girls in sexual positions. Therefore Steins; Gate was a positive surprise for me, since it featured a fully realized cast in an interesting story that managed to feature character growth, and whenever I think back on it my thoughts are basically "Man, that was SO GOOD.".

If I didn't have my preconceived notions I suspect someone would have had to point out to me that some decisions in its making were probably made to cater to the aforementioned audience, and even then I'd probably defend it since that was not what I took away from it.

There is however one scene that is incredibly gratuitous and feels as if it was only made for fan service: at one point the protagonist walks into the two female leads who are in the shower together. And I am not talking about the regular static talking heads format common in visual novel and in Steins; Gate, they made a separate graphic displaying their bodies in their naked, pink glory. And they let the camera zoom in on their bodies in the scene that plays out over the graphic. To be fair the resulting scene isn't trying to portray this as anything other than the protagonist acting out of the line, but the worst part is probably that it is entirely pointless for the story. It's just a bunch of fan service, and it's obvious. The best intention I can ascribe is that it portrays that the female leads are also bonding with each other (since one of the leads is new to the group of friends that the cast consists of) and being willing to shower together is an indication of this fact, but I sincerely doubt that was the intention.

 

[Dalisclock]

"Ship stealth", how's about that stupid swamp mission where you had to sneak past some guard posts barely metres away?! I love AC:BF, but I'm with you on that.

I'd forgotten that mission. Even worse because I lived in Charleston: SC for years and while I can't say I'm intimately familiar with every swamp in the area, I'm hard pressed to think of one laid out to even make that remotely feasible. I mean, it's based on a real event and all but the execution is just fucking dumb when you think about it for a moment.

It's not unlike that one mission in Ace Combat 7 where you fly a bunch of fighter jets through a canyon to sneak up on an airbase, and have to dodge searchlights all the way down, but somehow nobody fucking HEARS you flying through said canyon. At least the airbase attack part of the mission more than makes up for it. But I should stop picking on Ace Combat logic or we'll be here all week.

 

[Dalisclock]

Most recently Doom Eternal.

Like 2016 had some out of place platforming section.


Eternal has like 90% of some levels being platforming. The most obnoxious involving monkey bars (which both act kind of buggy and have weird animations, and there's no actual "grab monkey bar" button, you just auto clip into them while moving when they shove them in battle arenas.


Anyhow, around the end of the second (?) level, there's this long extended thing where you're monkey barring and falling platforming through literally those spinning fireball rods from Super Mario, and thats when you really get the idea that maybe they'd lost the plot a bit.

I heard someone suggest it's like someone on the dev team played CELESTE and decided to add that kind of platforming to DOOM and while I haven't played the game(DOOM, I have played Celeste), what little footage I did see made me think he might had a point.

And by god, I'd hate to try said platforming from Celeste in 1st person. Celeste makes it work because that's what it's built around. DOOM I can say probably not so much.

 

[Zeraki]

I'll be that guy and go with this.


There are plenty other issues with the game of course, but this last 10 minutes basically just threw everything the series had been building up to in the garbage. It's so frustrating when you play Mass Effect 2 and they were clearly planning something very different with all the dark energy foreshadowing that ended up getting dropped entirely in 3.

The extended cut helped at least with closure in the endings, but it was still like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound... to the head.

 

[Dalisclock]

Metal Gear Solid 2: The EE part. I mean, just this entire part of the game rubs me the wrong way. You have to do annoying swimmy bits, you have to do an escort mission with a girl whose afraid of EVERTHING(and of course, you run across all her big fears during the escort so of course it's difficult as possible) and then you have to do a sniper escort mission which ends up as a failure anyway due to PLOT TWIST! The whole thing feels like a massive, annoying waste of time.

Also, we get to hear the lovely story of Huey trying to drown her as a child because he caught his wife molesting his son(Hal AKA Otocon). Which we totally needed to hear. Seriously Kojima, what the hell, man?

To a lesser extent, the sword fight with the final boss, because you get very little chance to get used to fighting with a sword before that point.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Drake and Sully's meeting in the flashback sequence of Uncharted 3. I know it's meant as a 'look how much of a dad Sully really always has been to Drake' and as sort of an apology by Naughty Dog for how little Sully was featured in Uncharted 2, but it puts Sully in an extremely sinister light. He takes a 14 year old impressionable youth, who is already down on his luck and prone to criminal behaviour, and instead of maybe getting his own life in order to do best by this kid, or at least try to take him somewhere where he's well taking care of, he just nurtures him to become an actual criminal with blood on his hands. Yeah, wow, what a wholesome relationship these two have, right?

Instead of just leaving their relationship as it was - two dudes who work in a similar field and got along well enough to actually form a friendship - Amy Henning had to make more of it than it ever was, creating a rather disturbing undercurrent as a result. It also flies in the face of the first game, where Sully gets presumably killed early on and Drake just merrily continues on with his adventure like it's no big deal, and then becomes suspicious of Sully's allegiance when he finds him alive again latter on.

It makes no sense. Neither do the dumbass spiders, by the way. Another 'what were they thinking' moment in Uncharted 3.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

An indie game I've been playing called Hit Zero.
Throughout the game you've been able to do slow mo stuff and killing enemies rewards you with an over the top spray of blood that coats the level. This is a game designed to let you pull off a series of stylish kills with levels basically designed to give you artful or cinematic environments to help frame the mass butchering of enemies.

Then you read the final boss the machine God. The Machine God's health is variable and dependent on the number of enemies you've killed throughout the game. I got to the final boss of the game and he had 26,500 health and each bullet hitting him does 10 damage and he only has one awkward to spot weak spot and can 1 shot kill you multiple different ways. The game only tells you about the fact every person you kill helps make him stronger in 1 message that can randomly pop up out of a number of messages on the games start screen.

So you either have to fight the final boss with the amount of health based on how you did thinking it was a standard shooter game or replay most levels of the game trying to avoid killing people in a game where the mechanics are all designed round killing people, there's no stealth options or non lethal options here.