Games With Bad Level Design

[Zetsubou-Sama]

Self-Explanatory.


What games do you like that are plagued with bad level designing?


I say this because I've been playing Fallout 3 and I've been getting lost so many times that it isn't funny.

Locations that come to mind:

Megaton (Finding that van/house was ridiculous)
Nuka-Cola Plant
Arlington Library
Little Lamplight
DC in itself
Rivet City
The Pitt ( especially the Mill, I hate that place)
Flooded Metro (or every subway ever)

And also Zelda OOT Water Temple and Resident Evil 5 in some places.

 

[TheComedown]

I got lost in a few of those places too, the Nuka-Cola plant was the worst tho. But a quick check of the local map and it wasn't to hard to find where i was going.

Megaton? how did you get lost/confused in Megaton?

The only other thing that comes to mind when talking about bad level design is Torchlight, yet that is only because it all feels very copy paste. I'm sure I've played many other games were i hated the level design but i cant think of any of them now.

 

[Valkyrie101]

I didn't have as many problems as the OP, but sometimes Megaton can be confusing. I recommend using the local map.

 

[Subzerowings]

Killzone 1.
Every time I had killed the enemies in front of me, I never knew where to go.
Pretty hard to recognise locations to because everything was either gray, putrid green or sepia.
Even the sakuratree garden was gray. How the hell can you fuck up a sakuratree?!

 

[sageoftruth]

The levels in Wizardry, but I don't know if that counts, since the designers mistook bad level design for actual difficulty. For everyone who hasn't played or heard about the wizardry dungeons, you would be asked to answer a riddle. After that, you'd traverse a dungeon in first person without a map. Like any RPG, it would be filled with random encounters. However, if you answered the riddle incorrectly, there wouldn't be an exit in the dungeon. Of course, you wouldn't know you answered wrong until you've explored every inch of the dungeon and mapped the whole thing out on paper (remember: no on-screen map).

 

[Penguinness]

Hmm, would you say Fable 2 is bad level design? I mean games usually hint where to go, but this game is just about following the golden line.

I agree with a lot of games with cover systems like Mass Effect 2 have bad level design.. where you can tell a combat sequence is coming when you walk into a room with random walls. Red Dead Redemption is alright with cover systems though so they're not all bad.

 

[sephiroth1991]

MW2 has some bad level design, when it's incorperated with the poor spawn system well then it's just a big pile of shit.

The thing about Fallout is to save space they use exsiting designs i have gotten lost a lot in the undergrounds

 

[dududf]

Personally, I would have to give the bad level design award to Halo CE. Now, I love the game, and it's a lot of fun, but because of the technological limitations of when it was made, there were very few detailed differences between areas, and I continually got lost because a lot of areas looked the same. Seriously, it's a linear game, and I got lost.

If it makes you feel better, there was a part on the game where I was lost for just over 25minutes, I kept walking back and forth, and since there was nobody to kill I couldn't tell if this was a new area or not. Hot damn that was frustrating...

 

[Davey Woo]

I'll admit the first time I was looking for "craterside supply" in Megaton it took me ages. But I've never really been too lost in Fallout 3.
I can't think of any games where the level design has been particularly bad.

 

[Vianyte]

A certain map on Modern Warfare 2. Wasteland

Everybody sticks to the trenches, the edge of the hedge and the underground bit in the middle. There's lots of other stuff in the map, like buildings and a helicopter, but they almost never get used unless you're playing Headquarters or Free-For-All. A map can't have good design if most of it isn't even used.

Oh and Rust is the shit. I don't care what anybody says, that map rocks.

 

[dududf]

Personally, I would have to give the bad level design award to Halo CE. Now, I love the game, and it's a lot of fun, but because of the technological limitations of when it was made, there were very few detailed differences between areas, and I continually got lost because a lot of areas looked the same. Seriously, it's a linear game, and I got lost.

If it makes you feel better, there was a part on the game where I was lost for just over 25minutes, I kept walking back and forth, and since there was nobody to kill I couldn't tell if this was a new area or not. Hot damn that was frustrating...

Was it the Library, or the covenant ship? (Those were the places I got lost the longest.)

Neither, those proved easy for me as there were plenty of things to kill. If there are bodies there then I'm going backwards. It was about...an hour or so into the game. I can't remember where tbh.

 

[mxfox408]

The latest avp sucked in single player missions the levels where small and short.

 

[notyouraveragejoe]

I have to say that Demon's Souls (while pretty good) is a huge pain in the ass. Especially when you're starting. There is no indication of where to go, everything is really dark and its quite hard to see a lot of the time. Also quite a bit of it is same-y. However the game is brilliant.

 

[Ickorus]

The Deling Sewers in FFVIII were a pain in the ass, they re-used a lot of the maps so the only way I could get through was aimlessly wandering for about a couple hours.

 

[Good morning blues]

I actually didn't think that fallout 3 was that bad, there's tons of landmarks in each location, so it's usually pretty easy to figure out where you're going if you make sure to look around at the environment once in a while.

Personally, I would have to give the bad level design award to Halo CE. Now, I love the game, and it's a lot of fun, but because of the technological limitations of when it was made, there were very few detailed differences between areas, and I continually got lost because a lot of areas looked the same. Seriously, it's a linear game, and I got lost.

I guess it's not necessarily bad level design, but it is unintuitive.

Please, don't take this as me just railing on Halo because it's "what's cool" on the internet right now. I'm actually a fan of the franchise, but even as a fan, I'm not above pointing out the games' flaws.

I really, really don't think that the "technological limitations of when it was made" can excuse a level like The Library . . . or any indoor environment in that game for that matter. There were no technological limitations preventing them from at the very least having differently-colored walls in different areas, for instance, although much of the level design would still have suffered from an absolutely inexcusable level of repetitiveness. I loved Halo when it came out, but these parts were always awful.

The game I played most recently that had particularly bad level design, though, was the original Red Faction. This one was from back in the day when developers saw no need to make game environments in any way representative of the real world, so an "office block" would be a big plaza with two or three stairwells with one office that you needed to get to hidden amongst ten identical empty rooms.

 

[Diligent]

Personally, I would have to give the bad level design award to Halo CE. Now, I love the game, and it's a lot of fun, but because of the technological limitations of when it was made, there were very few detailed differences between areas, and I continually got lost because a lot of areas looked the same. Seriously, it's a linear game, and I got lost.

I guess it's not necessarily bad level design, but it is unintuitive.

Please, don't take this as me just railing on Halo because it's "what's cool" on the internet right now. I'm actually a fan of the franchise, but even as a fan, I'm not above pointing out the games' flaws.

Ah yes, the original Halo. I was going to say pretty much the same thing as you. Back when it came out and everybody was talking about how great the single player was, I felt like I was the only one who didn't "get it" because it was the same rooms and corridors cut and pasted over and over, and then they have the nerve to make you practically replay most of the game in reverse after the half way point.

 

[Liberaliter]

The Force Unleashed. I never truely understood bad level design until I played that game.

 

[cyrad]

Well, this is the thing. Every game I played that I hated the level design, I hated the game because the level design sucked.

If anything, I guess Kingdom Hearts II? The level design wasn't bad, but very boring. The levels look nice, but there's hardly anything to to explore in them. The worlds don't feel big. Sometimes, it's really baffling and disappointing. Some worlds are fun and look fricken awesome, but you hardly spend any time there.

Timeless River is a good example. Exploring a 3D interpretation of a monochrome retro-cartoon is a unique and inspiring experience, but you're there for only 20 minutes.

 

[JBGigas]

F.E.A.R
Too many times, I didn't have any idea where to go.

 

[L4hlborg]

Halo Combat Evolved. The earlier levels were fun, but the second half of the game contained levels that were the same three rooms repeated several times, The Library (AKA The most poorly designed level in FPS history), and the grand finale is on a repainted version of the first level.

I hate the Library, but I'm pretty sure that earlier (or even later) FPS games have done worse. And you do realize, that the grand finale is set in the same place as the first level?

In the multiplayer front, the Halo 3 DLC multiplayer maps are mostly horrible. Rat's nest is boring and you can't find anyone, Foundry at it's original state is just ugly, Ghost town is boring, Avalance sucks compared to Sidewinder and Sandbox is really boring too.

I usually love to complain about MW2 multiplayer, but the level design in the multiplayer is actually pretty solid, it's just the spawn system that sucks. Moving to singleplayer on the otherhand, I did hate the first favela mission. I got lost in the houses, killed every other second by a hiding NPC and it had dogs. It was pretty much the worst mission I've played in ages.