Game Clichés you hate the most

[Mikkel421427]

The excuse I usually see in Science Fiction or Fantasy of "Magic!/Technology!". Now now, I know the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"... That quote, my ass. Behind every bit of technology, there's a theory. While I don't want to demand a theoretical and scientific thesis approved by peer review, I do give out huge freaking points to the writers if they're willing to give me the basic theory of how it works. A shining example of what I'm talking about is something I still find incredibly exciting to read every time I think about it... And that... Is this http://cnc.wikia.com/wiki/Living_With_Tiberium_(blog)
It was created for Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars where the studio asked a couple of people from universities to write a paper on Tiberium as if it was the real deal. Now, say what you want about the game, but that right there, is what I would love to see in every single game. A thorough explanation of the main thing of the game and I'll be happy.

Captcha: More Better. Exactly, Captcha. More of that and everything would be a bit better

 

[Keneth]

I, The Chosen One, must go save Princess Macguffin from the clutches Evil McBaddie! She is the key to averting The End Of The World! I only met her once, for about five seconds, ten years ago, but I'm certain she is my one true love! And even though I'm so incompetent that I let her get kidnapped again mere moments after saving her, MULTIPLE TIMES, it is my Destiny to save her!

Spoiler

Seriously, this game is just one massive cliche .

 

[Brad Calkins]

Realism, pretty much every game I would even consider calling my favorite is so far removed from reality that it wasn't even aware the laws of physics were a thing.

The whole debate basically boils down to, do you want to die from making a single tiny mistake and never be allowed to play the game again, or do you want to ride a dragon to the moon and defeat zombies using the power of rock 'n' roll?

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

The cliche that has the player not play as the protagonist but as some random dude following the protagonist around doing the protagonists bidding. This is especially apparent in Oblivion (Martin is the protagonist) and Modern Warfare-series (with Price being the protagonist). I am fine with taking the backseat for a few levels, quests or missions if it sets up an important plot or character arc. But constantly feeling that I am only re-threading someone else's footsteps or doing the dirty work of the major player? That's bad storytelling right there.

MW really is the penultimate expression of this. The PCs never contribute anything directly to the story, they are only following the guys who actually contribute around. Price and Soap chase Makarov around the world, while Yuri just seems to be their mindless muscle who's along for the ride.

 

[NewYork_Comedian]

Plot-convenient amnesia is wearing thin on me a little bit; I know it's a good (well, convenient) way of answering questions that a non-amnesiac protagonist wouldn't ask, but give me some credit, if I want to find things out, let me look for them, let me plumb a few libraries or something. Sort of in the way that the Elder Scrolls series handles lore, you've really gotta dig deep (or at least take a look at a book), and even then it won't answer everything. I LIKE that!

And sometimes I'd rather develop a new future, not be stuck piecing together the past.

I like this idea, although the thing that annoys me with it is that in all of the Elder Scrolls games, and New Vegas, your character has absolutely no background. At all. One of the thing I loved about Origins so much is that the background your picked could drastically change the reactions characters have towards you. If the games could add even a little bit of history to your character, then it would be much more immerse. And if you wanted to expand upon it, you could have a prologue a la Dragon Age that sets up why you were thrown into prison or traveling on the road of an imperial ambush, ect.

 

[Zipa]

The more recent one that annoys me is killing off the protaginist at the end of a game because the writers can't be bothered to actually write a ending with some drama or a twist so they go for the easy option. It works once in awhile like in

Spoiler

red dead redemption with John Marston

but every game doing it get fricking old.

 

[danon]

That the game world elaborately explains every mystery to the main character as if he is the center of the world before he has accomplished anything.

 

[Falseprophet]

-Tolkien-esque Fantasy (Must it always be elves and dwarves until the end of time?)

Yes, yes, yes! For all their faults, JRPGs have a huge variety of interesting and unique settings. Western fantasy RPGs are still stealing drinks from Tolkien's bar fridge.

Is there anything -other- than Tolkien fantasy? He pretty much wrote the book on the subject(No pun intended). There's always steam punk I guess, but that's less of a genre and more of a stylistic element.

Most fantasy novels stopped shamelessly ripping off Tolkien over a decade ago. It's high past time for games to catch up. I'd love to see an RPG in a setting like Joe Abercrombie's First Law trilogy or Scott Lynch's Gentlemen Bastards books.

 

[[REDACTED]]

Plot-convenient amnesia is wearing thin on me a little bit; I know it's a good (well, convenient) way of answering questions that a non-amnesiac protagonist wouldn't ask, but give me some credit, if I want to find things out, let me look for them, let me plumb a few libraries or something. Sort of in the way that the Elder Scrolls series handles lore, you've really gotta dig deep (or at least take a look at a book), and even then it won't answer everything. I LIKE that!

And sometimes I'd rather develop a new future, not be stuck piecing together the past.

I like this idea, although the thing that annoys me with it is that in all of the Elder Scrolls games, and New Vegas, your character has absolutely no background. At all. One of the thing I loved about Origins so much is that the background your picked could drastically change the reactions characters have towards you. If the games could add even a little bit of history to your character, then it would be much more immerse. And if you wanted to expand upon it, you could have a prologue a la Dragon Age that sets up why you were thrown into prison or traveling on the road of an imperial ambush, ect.

I liked the way Daggerfall handled this. It would generate a detailed background for you based on the way you designed them in character creation. It meant that your character had an actual history, but one that was almost always consistent with your vision for the character.

 

[Theo Rob]

1. +1 for the "chosen one" thing.
god said you'll do it, so shut up and to it.
2. secretly a prince/princess/part god/charged with superpowers
it ruins games when they use this twist, the later they use it, the more annoyed i get.
3. black and grey morality
growing amount of games simply have you root for the lesser asshole
4. betrayal pile up
we don't need each major villain to betray and kill of the previous one
5. tech vs magic
tech is killing the environment! magic is better or some thing along those lines

 

[sXeth]

5. tech vs magic
tech is killing the environment! magic is better or some thing along those lines

Yeah, I always kind of want to see a game with tech and magic where the magic works in Dark Sun fashion and drains the life out of things around you (Either one thing massively for the evil guys, or spread across an area for the goody types).

 

[Canadamus Prime]

Is there anything -other- than Tolkien fantasy? He pretty much wrote the book on the subject(No pun intended). There's always steam punk I guess, but that's less of a genre and more of a stylistic element.

Okay, that reminds me of another cliche that drives me up the wall: Tolkien.

Not, as some might assume, games being Tolkien-esque. The assumption that the so-called "standard fantasy setting" is Tolkien-esque.

I won't pretend to be a Tolkien expert, but I've read many of his books many times. I've also studied Old English, though I've only dabbled in it while Tolkien was an expert. And what people today think of as "standard fantasy setting" is pretty far-removed from Tolkien's Middle Earth. If you* think having elves and dwarves is enough to make the two similar, you only shallowly read Lord of the Rings (or worse yet, never read the books and only watched the movies).

LotR is actually kinda terrible as narratives go. The characters' motivations are often unclear, there are plenty of plot-holes, and the less said about the way women are depicted the better. The appeal of LotR and other Middle Earth stories isn't in the plot. It's not even in the setting. It's in the experience of reading them. Tolkien was a linguist. He wrote his books as though they were themselves written by people from the world in the books. He actually built linguistic drift into the languages he constructed. His character names are not random (though they may appear to be gibberish to modern readers), many of them come from ancient languages or are derived by real-world linguistic principles. Theoden, King of Rohan, is actually derived from an Old English word meaning 'lord'. The prose of LotR is littered with Old English words that don't mean the same things now that they did a thousand years ago, so for example 'fey' means something more like 'crazy' and 'doom' means 'destiny' (not necessarily negative).

The experience is akin to being in a mead-hall, listening to an epic poem read by a proud skald next to a roaring hearth fire. It's an invented cultural heritage for English-speakers, since the real history of English people lacks the poetic origins that so many other European societies had.

So when I see fantasy cliches with wizards casting fireballs with scrolls, I always grit my teeth when people think that's Tolkien and not from D&D. Because that's not from Tolkien. You'll note that in the canonical Middle Earth stories there is not a single human wizard- they are all either Istari spirits who only look like men or "the wise", i.e. people (usually elves, but sometimes people from advanced civilizations of an earlier age like the people of Numenor) whose powers come not from arcane might but simply from skills learned that mortal men do not have- not because mortal men lack arcane powers, but because humans in Middle Earth are effectively a civilization in decline set against much older civilizations (much like how the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms quickly fell into decline when Viking raids shattered their economy. Learned monks in monestaries often died in those raids, and the people who survived lost so much knowledge that people like AElfred the Great ("Elf counseled") had to institute a basic Latin literacy program for his arch-bishops.)

There are also consistent moral messages in all of Tolkien's work that almost never come out in the "Tolkien-esque" works that followed. For example, nearly every evil that is ever done in Middle Earth is done by someone who desires more than their due. There is a sort of polytheism (though mostly in the Silmarilion, not so much in LotR/The Hobbit themselves) but it's a very Judeo-Christian-influenced polytheism.

So this was meant to be a short little comment but has since become almost as sprawling as a Tolkien work itself. So TL;DR: Most things that people nowadays think of as a Tolkien-eque cliche actually only borrows superficially from Tolkien's work and more properly borrows heavily from D&D, and yes, I would include actual video game material from the Middle Earth franchise in that.

*This is a hypothetical 'you', not calling out Devoneaux personally.

It's also interesting to note that you also never see Gandalf or any other wizard in Tolkien's world flinging fireballs around. That is also mostly a D'n'D thing (and anything that takes inspiration from it).

 

[MopBox]

Whenever the narrator or guide turns out the be the secretly evil end boss antagonist!

By god! Is that annoying, each time it appears in a new title it's treated like it hasn't already been done in Overlord, Bioshock, and Assassin's creed, along with countless others.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

It's also interesting to note that you also never see Gandalf or any other wizard in Tolkien's world flinging fireballs around. That is also mostly a D'n'D thing (and anything that takes inspiration from it).

IIRC Gandalf makes some acorns explode in The Hobbit (been a while since I read it, the scene where the goblins and wargs chase everyone up a tree), and IIRC he makes some sparks spring from his staff at one point. But otherwise, yes, your point is well taken. And this is the way much magic is in Tolkien's work. It's subtle, even spiritual. It's not a nifty machine for solving problems, it's a metaphor for untapped potential in the human heart.

Spoiler

In fact, it may be that Gandalf has no "spells", that everything supernatural we see him do is actually a result of him wielding Narya, the Ring of Fire. But even in what little is said about Narya, it may not be that the magic of the ring results in the actual ability to literally conjure fire. '"Take now this Ring," he said; "for thy labours and thy cares will be heavy, but in all it will support thee and defend thee from weariness. For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill"' (Cirdan the Shipwright to Gandalf) This is typical of magic in Tolkien's Middle Earth- that aside from a few token objects (Elven swords glowing in the presence of orcs or spiders, the One Ring actually making people invisible) most magic may be thought of simply as really, really well-made versions of ordinary real-world analogues.

Oh yeah I forgot about that. Still it's hardly the equivalent of throwing fireballs around and summoning what essentally amounts to an orbital bombardment.

 

[Phuctifyno]

I hate when potentially realistic games cling to some kind of supernatural or sci-fi element that does nothing to enhance the game but continues to infantilise gamers by assuming a reality played straight would be too boring. Why is Agent 47 a genetically engineered clone? Why do we need future Desmond in Assassin's Creed? Why were there steampunk robot-things in Dishonored? etc. etc.

I see a lot of complaints on this post about "dark, gritty, grey, realistic" games, and I can relate, but I think a big part of the reason it feels so grating (beyond just being overdone) is because those games don't fully commit. It's being used as means to an end instead of an end unto itself, where it could truly flourish and become interesting.

For example, I just saw a kind of exciting trailer for a game called "Phantom Pain" which started out looking really interesting, leaning very heavy on realism, with a protagonist waking up in the hospital finding out he lost an arm. Then we get some kind of military invasion; a little less realism, but that's fine since it seems to be the main drive of the game. By the end though, we've seen supercharged enemies emerging from flames, demonic looking horses, and a freaking whale swallowing a helicopter. There's a good chance a lot of that stuff could end up being hallucination, but still, the fantastic imagery (while looking pretty cool) feels soooo... video gamey, like they were afraid to set the entire thing in reality.

I think a big part of why video games are still not taken as seriously as literature or film, though we protest, is because the medium has shown an inability to create any interesting drama that resembles real life. There have been a few good attempts; Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire come to mind, but even still, those titles leaned very heavily on movie tropes and for most gamers, murder isn't a regular part of real life.

I think what I'd like to see is a really well done, realistic rendition of Super Busy Hospital 2.

 

[Phuctifyno]

It's also interesting to note that you also never see Gandalf or any other wizard in Tolkien's world flinging fireballs around. That is also mostly a D'n'D thing (and anything that takes inspiration from it).

IIRC Gandalf makes some acorns explode in The Hobbit (been a while since I read it, the scene where the goblins and wargs chase everyone up a tree), and IIRC he makes some sparks spring from his staff at one point. But otherwise, yes, your point is well taken. And this is the way much magic is in Tolkien's work. It's subtle, even spiritual. It's not a nifty machine for solving problems, it's a metaphor for untapped potential in the human heart.

Spoiler

In fact, it may be that Gandalf has no "spells", that everything supernatural we see him do is actually a result of him wielding Narya, the Ring of Fire. But even in what little is said about Narya, it may not be that the magic of the ring results in the actual ability to literally conjure fire. '"Take now this Ring," he said; "for thy labours and thy cares will be heavy, but in all it will support thee and defend thee from weariness. For this is the Ring of Fire, and herewith, maybe, thou shalt rekindle hearts to the valour of old in a world that grows chill"' (Cirdan the Shipwright to Gandalf) This is typical of magic in Tolkien's Middle Earth- that aside from a few token objects (Elven swords glowing in the presence of orcs or spiders, the One Ring actually making people invisible) most magic may be thought of simply as really, really well-made versions of ordinary real-world analogues.

It's been years since I read it, but I'm fairly sure that, in the book, Helm's Deep was breached by Saruman firing a magic-wizard-fireball from atop his tower (as opposed to the Olympic bomb he constructed in the movie). It's the only instance I can recall.

Not that that deflates your point, since just a few pages later Gandalf shows up and poetically uses the natural sunrise as a weapon. I think the way magic is used differently by good and evil is quite important in Tolkien's work as well.