How was I meant to know THAT?!

[Sniper Team 4]

Most of the mechanics of Dark Souls. Seriously, they say 'At this bonfire you can perfom the rite of unhollowing' and give ZERO EXPLANATION OF WHAT THAT MEANS. I love the game's difficulty in general, but difficulty created by simply not explaining the basic concepts of the game at any point is just bad game design.

Did you figure out how to cast magic? Because that was what killed the game for me. I got to level 50-something and could never figure out how to use magic. No instruction beyond, "Oh, just equip a staff/spell." Okay, so why, when I equip said item, does my character stand there and scratch his head? I thought, "Oh, just increase my stats. Probably don't have the right point level for that." Nope. Increased everything magic-related, and still just head scratching. A tutorial would have been an amazing help--just a simple healing spell would have been enough. Instead, I try asking for help and got this:

"I don't want to ruin the game for you."

My friends, and anyone else I asked, gave me a vague idea of how to do it, but no one ever told me HOW to do it. The game was already ruined when every time someone attacked me, they could kill me from half way across the field. People would often ask, "How are you level 58 and don't know how to use magic?" Because the game never TOLD me how to use it. Clearly there was more to it than just getting a staff. Considering this, I'm surprised the game told you what button was used to swing your damn weapon. As you said, a game that is hard because it's HARD is fun (I like my Ninja Gaiden games), but a game that's hard because nothing is explained is not fun, it's annoying.
I gave up and traded the game in without a second thought.

 

[piinyouri]

There is a lot of stuff they flat out do not tell you in Brutal Legend.
Like how to open the Legend landmarks or how to ungag the dragon statues.

I was halfway through the game when someone else told me I could have been collecting them from the start.

I'll just take this time to say this as well.
Psychonauts aside(since I have not played it), if I were to judge Tim Shaeffers ability to design games based on Brutal Legend alone, I'd have to think he was an amateur.

 

[elvor0]

Final Fantasy IV: So, I have to fight the Dark Elf, who kills all my party members in one hit. Don't worry, the guide says, 'cause Edward will come and save your ass by playing the flute.

Excepet he didn't. I just got a game over screen. Instead, I have to explore an obscure part of the allied castle that contains practically nothing else! The find Edward and talk to him! THEN he will bother rescuing you.

The actual boss was pretty easy. Silence-> Focus ->Focus for more turns -> Kick. Instant win.

Yeah that was total bollocks. Especially considering how you think he'd dead at that point, what reason would you have to go searching for him, or expect anything to happen other than you go fight the dark elf and take the crystal back?

 

[Dango]

It took me a long time to figure out that double clicking the button to open your pip-boy in Fallout: New Vegas actually turns on a lantern.

 

[KoudelkaMorgan]

FFX: who in there right mind would dodge 200 consecutive lightning strikes without knowing they got Lulu's most powerful weapon? (or part of it)

FFVI: Two words, Paladin Shield.

Zelda - A Link to the Past: This one may have just been me, but at the time my friend who was also playing it didn't figure it out either. This was back in the mid 90's. In the Skull Woods, or whatever the 3rd Dark world Dungeon is called, to progress you need to go through a door with a statue that you need to put on top of a button to open it. Problem being that the statue was in the way.

Up till that point you had never needed to PULL an object other than those Handles sticking out of the walls, which had just been introduced in the same game btw, in a Zelda game before. I had never been able to, and therefore stopped trying, to pull the basic square blocks in the simple block puzzles like the one before you get to the Sanctuary.

So how were we supposed to know that statues, unlike blocks and lacking any obvious differences like handholds, could be PULLED as well as pushed. The pushing bit was obvious, and has been since like forever in the history of THINGS in general.

When we had an older friend help us, we felt like complete idiots. I mean it was like a dog discovering it had a tail for the first time lol

 

[In Search of Username]

Most of the mechanics of Dark Souls. Seriously, they say 'At this bonfire you can perfom the rite of unhollowing' and give ZERO EXPLANATION OF WHAT THAT MEANS. I love the game's difficulty in general, but difficulty created by simply not explaining the basic concepts of the game at any point is just bad game design.

Did you figure out how to cast magic? Because that was what killed the game for me. I got to level 50-something and could never figure out how to use magic. No instruction beyond, "Oh, just equip a staff/spell." Okay, so why, when I equip said item, does my character stand there and scratch his head? I thought, "Oh, just increase my stats. Probably don't have the right point level for that." Nope. Increased everything magic-related, and still just head scratching. A tutorial would have been an amazing help--just a simple healing spell would have been enough. Instead, I try asking for help and got this:

"I don't want to ruin the game for you."

My friends, and anyone else I asked, gave me a vague idea of how to do it, but no one ever told me HOW to do it. The game was already ruined when every time someone attacked me, they could kill me from half way across the field. People would often ask, "How are you level 58 and don't know how to use magic?" Because the game never TOLD me how to use it. Clearly there was more to it than just getting a staff. Considering this, I'm surprised the game told you what button was used to swing your damn weapon. As you said, a game that is hard because it's HARD is fun (I like my Ninja Gaiden games), but a game that's hard because nothing is explained is not fun, it's annoying.
I gave up and traded the game in without a second thought.

I enjoy the game too much to give up on it, so I've just taken to looking everything up on the wiki that I don't understand. Probably not in the spirit of the game, but whatever, I'd never get anywhere otherwise.

 

[Rawberry101]

How to solve the Regi puzzle in Pokemon Gen III. As a kid, that shit was hard as hell.

Oh dude yes. I was in third grade when Ruby and Sapphire came out. My friend and I spent 2 days trying to decipher that thing. Why in a kids game??? Although it was fulfilling when we did accomplish it. It seems like each generation, for the first 3 at least, that the 3 legendary pokemon got harder and harder to find/catch.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

Lamest example ever. It's like saying it's microsoft's fault that you don't know how to click up the start menu when you've never used a PC before. "Durr, how do I click? OH IT'S A LEFT-CLICK, WHY DIDN'T THEY TELL ME?!". Your example further fails on the fact that DOTA 2 isn't even out yet. It's still in beta...

1. It's right-click.
2. You're straw-manning.
3. With all that money Valve has been spending on tournaments for a game that's in beta, they could have already made a decent tutorial, or at least a pop-up box.
4. Windows XP at least said "Click here to begin." when you moused over the Start menu.
5. You're clearly a fanboy.

 

[JonnWood]

A certain puzzle involving an inner tube in The Longest Journey. And another one involving candy, and another one involving a junction box, which require the protagonist to do things that are completely unintuitive and, in fact, actively dangerous.

It's even worse because the game generally avoids those "rub everything in your inventory on everything" puzzles.

 

[Overusedname]

I would be incredibly surprised if there wasn't some random NPC hidden somewhere that told you how to evolve Pikachu.

I think there was, but when you're a kid, you don't wanna talk to strangers, ya wanna make the thunder guy make the other guys go boom.

 

[SextusMaximus]

Ctrl+Space on Mount and Blade Warband to 3x speed the campaign map.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Currently having that happen with the L4D level in Payday the Heist. I listen to the doctor, it's really obvious which one is the infected patient. Then nothing. The objective screen doesn't change, Bain doesn't tell you what to do, and no matter how fast I kill the guards the alarm goes off. Doesn't help that the first segment of that mission is tedious as hell.

You can hotkey spells (or items) in Skyrim. After 30 hours playing a fire/resto mage a friend told me. I was shocked.

...Are you shitting me?

 

[mooncalf]

Morrowind. Sanguine equipment. Good luck turning every stone. There are about 30 of them, but most of them aren't even mentioned in any way, so you don't even know they exist until you get them (or read a guide). The only way to get them is thus to stumble upon them through dumb luck or sheer persistence; or to pick them up with a guide.

I found and sold a bunch of them before I even got the quest and then couldn't for the life of me remember WHO I sold them to, I figured they were just boring magic items... No regrets though, my original playthrough morrowind save is that much more precious to me because of it's flaws.

Also, ANY boss fights that you are disallowed from winning, I hate having to struggle through a particularly ardous fight over and over only to discover that a loss was in fact the only option. It would be a spoiler to tell you in advance, so they just let you flounder against impossible odds.

 

[BoredWalker]

In COD: Black Ops, there's a part in the campaign where you have to activate a bunch of barrels to clear out a bunch of otherwise infinitely respawning Korean soldiers. These barrels are never mentioned in dialogue or objective markers, are in the direct line of enemy fire with no cover (meaning that you would never go up to them out of curiosity or necessity), and look nondescript, like all of the other environmental objects. It wasn't until after several deaths and one stand that, in any other situation, would have advanced the plot, that I took cover behind one of the barrels during a panic moment and saw the little "press X to durby durby durr" that I actually got any sort of hint.

Also, I really need to repeat another one that's been constantly mentioned: The Zodiac Spear in FFXII. I had a guidebook in front of me for almost the entire game, and I still got gypped out of it.

 

[lacktheknack]

Fun little story: I tried to introduce a friend to Myst Online. I always thought the interface puzzles were easy to figure out (it runs on "mystery meat" design on purpose, but I always figured them out immediately), but maybe I'm wrong.

Him: "How did you link over THERE instead of the start?"

Me: "You did realize that there's a second page in the linking book, right?"

Him: "You mean with the little cloth on it? What was I supposed to do with that?"

Me: "I suppose you could click on it and find out."

Him: "Or you could just tell me."

Me: "It links me over here at the last hand-cloth I touched."

Him: "What the hell?! how was I supposed to figure THAT out?!"

Me: "By clicking the things you haven't clicked, I imagine. And then make note of what they do. That's what I did."

Him: "That's STUPID and BADLY DESIGNED."

Me: "You seriously think the concept of touching a piece of cloth in a linking book and linking to the last large cloth you touched is unintuitive?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "Wat."

I guess adventure games just aren't for everyone.

 

[crazyrabbits]

The one example I remember is saving Paul Denton in the original Deus Ex. Whenever I got to that part of the game where he tells me to go out the window, I just did it without questioning it, then learned later that he died. I then tried fighting all the MJ12 troops in the apartment, then assumed because they all died, everything was cool. He still died. It wasn't until I fought and cleared out the entire hotel and exited through the front door that he survived.

 

[lacktheknack]

A certain puzzle involving an inner tube in The Longest Journey. And another one involving candy, and another one involving a junction box, which require the protagonist to do things that are completely unintuitive and, in fact, actively dangerous.

It's even worse because the game generally avoids those "rub everything in your inventory on everything" puzzles.

That's good, because I just finished those puzzles, and it was starting to really annoy me.

 

[lacktheknack]

Fun little story: I tried to introduce a friend to Myst Online. I always thought the interface puzzles were easy to figure out (it runs on "mystery meat" design on purpose, but I always figured them out immediately), but maybe I'm wrong.

Him: "How did you link over THERE instead of the start?"

Me: "You did realize that there's a second page in the linking book, right?"

Him: "You mean with the little cloth on it? What was I supposed to do with that?"

Me: "I suppose you could click on it and find out."

Him: "Or you could just tell me."

Me: "It links me over here at the last hand-cloth I touched."

Him: "What the hell?! how was I supposed to figure THAT out?!"

Me: "By clicking the things you haven't clicked, I imagine. And then make note of what they do. That's what I did."

Him: "That's STUPID and BADLY DESIGNED."

Me: "You seriously think the concept of touching a piece of cloth in a linking book and linking to the last large cloth you touched is unintuitive?"

Him: "Yes."

Me: "Wat."

I guess adventure games just aren't for everyone.

Adventure games are for the people who designed them or those who have already beaten them.

The Myst series is a good damn series the first time you play it. BAD adventure games are for the designers and replayers.

 

[Hawk eye1466]

The final mission with brucie in gta 4 I thought you could shoot people because that was the first way I figured I could win the race, according to some rules that they'd forgotten to share with me I wasn't allowed to shoot anyone so I lost and lost a few times because of my awful driving skills but the point is they should have told me I wasn't allowed to kill the asshole drivers that kept ramming me off the road.

 

[Black Reaper]

The tales series comes to mind
I fucking love those games,being rpgs with all the rpg bits but none of the stupid turn based combat,but one thing i hate about all of them is that you need a guide if you are planning to play trough one

I remember a part like this in Symphonia,on one of the last dungeons of the game,at one point you cannot advance due to a locked door,i spent a few hours wandering around the dungeon,looking for a way to continue,eventually giving up,i had some fond memories of that game,so i picked it up again a few years later,the strange part is that i was using a walktrough when i got stuck,it mentioned activanting a switch to open the gate,but i couldnt find said switch,so i decided to use a video walktrough,normally the game have flashes a very noticeable A somewhere on the screen if you can use something,but not for this switch
How the FUCK was i supposed to figure out that to continue,you had to activate an object that looked like it was part of the scenery!?

Sidequests in these game are also very annoying,basically you have to talk to someone,out of the dozens of people in the game,at specific times,which are often very short,so you have to see a guide every 5 minutes to avoid missing important parts of the game

Another Symphonia example is Hi-ougis(limit breaks),these are very flashy attacks which dish out damage quicly,they would be very useful,were it not for the fact that you have to do shit that is never hinted at before,and is completely unrelated to them,to do the main characters you have to see a cutscene where he gets a plot advancing sword,and gets a title,afterwards if you equip him with a weapon related to that sword you just got(you cant actually use it),get his health before 15%,and press B and A while blocking,you will do an attack that is very sweet and shiny,how the hell were you supposed to figure that out?,this is very annoying since the weapon you have to equip is usually worse than some other weapons you should have at this point

I could mention some metroidvanias guilty of this,but i am feeling lazy at the time