Minor, insignificant thing that ruined a game for you.

Karma168

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Dark Prophet said:
Size scales in Starcraft II, some of the cars are bigger than houses and I mean civilian cars and civilian houses, also Kerrigan is taller than Hydra wtf is this.
Yeah that bugged me when I first played the Starcraft games as well. You see the Hyperion as the ship that's carrying you and your entire army of hundreds of marines and vehicles around the stars but when you use it in battle it's the same size as a siege tank - how? I realise that they needed to scale to fit on the screen but still, when 20 marines has a bigger footprint than the starship they arrived in it just doesn't look right.

That's why I liked the scaling on the DoW1 units, the big tanks (like the Land Raider and the Baneblade) actually looked more believably scaled compared to the infantry units.


OT: Fire selection. The first F/TPS games I played (can't remember the names) had the ability to flick between full auto and single fire, something I got used to and when the more recent games got rid of it, it annoyed me no end. I got used to putting a rifle on single fire, lining up a distance shot, pulling the trigger and just holding it down after so I could watch the shot - obviously not handy if your gun only has a full auto setting.
 
Jun 24, 2009
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Games for Windows Live in GTA 4. I dislike DRM and the like, but I wasn't really bothered by G.F.W.L. That was until I had my account hacked, and I was unable to get it back. I lost my progress all the way up until just before the end of the game. I often consider replaying it, but the beginning section when it restricts what you can do just turns me off (that's my second pet peeve with it).
 
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Dark Prophet said:
Size scales in Starcraft II, some of the cars are bigger than houses and I mean civilian cars and civilian houses, also Kerrigan is taller than Hydra wtf is this.
That bothers me in a lot of Blizzard strategy games. Warcraft III in particular. I remember when I was younger I was drawn to Age of Empires 2 purely for the fact that it looks so much more to-scale and realistic.
 

Casual Shinji

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It didn't ruin the game for me at all, but all the holographic interface stuff in the Mass Effect trilogy always bugged me. Seeing Joker wave his hands across a bunch of orange nothing didn't make me feel like he was actually piloting anything. Same with the things on their arms that dispense medigel and record information and stuff.

I know this makes it way easier for the developer to display an interface in the game, but it just can't beat the physicality of characters handling buttons, switches, and levers.
 

J Tyran

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Karma168 said:
Dark Prophet said:
Size scales in Starcraft II, some of the cars are bigger than houses and I mean civilian cars and civilian houses, also Kerrigan is taller than Hydra wtf is this.
Yeah that bugged me when I first played the Starcraft games as well. You see the Hyperion as the ship that's carrying you and your entire army of hundreds of marines and vehicles around the stars but when you use it in battle it's the same size as a siege tank - how? I realise that they needed to scale to fit on the screen but still, when 20 marines has a bigger footprint than the starship they arrived in it just doesn't look right.

That's why I liked the scaling on the DoW1 units, the big tanks (like the Land Raider and the Baneblade) actually looked more believably scaled compared to the infantry units.
I guess its a design choice for Blizzard, Dawn of War 1 & 2 have notorious pathing issues and the big vehicles make it worse. As much as I love Dawn of War I can see why Blizzard chose the scaling that they did.

Tough choice really, aesthetics Vs gameplay. Relic (<3 those guys) choose aesthetics, thats why you get all the random effects and sync kills. They want to bring 40k to life as much as they want to make a great RTS, so the RTS gameplay can suffer a little (although seeing squads get blown to bits or stomped by a Kult of speed Battlewagon with its deff roller is hilarious). Blizzard want an RTS to be as good as it can be.
 

Abomination

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Crusader Kings II - having to build every stage of a castle before the other one in a province. Why would I need to build a motte and bailey (1 year to build) then a stone keep (3 years to build), then a normal castle (5 years to build), then a bigger castle (10 years to build), then a massive castle (20 years to build which totaled 39 years to build) when all I wanted was a massive castle? I do not see the point of those form of tech-trees for what is supposed to be a realistic game. Who builds a castle like that? You don't just build one then knock the damn thing down to build a larger one afterwards.

Civilization 5 - I love the hex based system, it's so much better than the square of previous games. But they've never been able to drop the "it takes 40 years for your warrior to move from inside your city to outside your city" issue. I know it's so you don't spend 5000 turns playing the first 4000 years of history watching men with rocks hit other men with rocks but it means your units become obsolete before you're actually able to build a combined arms army and use it. Some type of "war time-ratio" would have been nice.

Skyrim - Congratulations, you defeated the Stormcloak Rebellion and restored Imperial authority to the area! Nobody gives a shit. Fine then! You assassinate the Emperor! Nobody gives a shit! You defeated the giant dragon-god-thing! NOBODY GIVES A SHIT!

Mass Effect series - I'm going to have so much fun replaying this from the very start as a renegade *****... oh none of the choices you made has any effect on the final mission. So much for that idea. (Done to death, I know, but in the grand scheme of things it made up like 0.5% of the entire game series so it is a pretty minor thing)

Final Fantasy XII - My characters' outfits. Vann, good choice for pants, they actually look combat practical... why are you wearing a vest? Wait, you're supposed to be a THIEF and you're wearing plate boots and plate pants? Let's try the retired captain then... oh gods what are you wearing? Is that a vest that's done up with belts? I can imagine it would be decent as a type of extra layer for a breastplate and... why aren't you wearing anything else? Oh, you have a small plate on your shoulder... that's it? You're supposed to be a warrior - YOU LOOK LIKE A CLOWN!

Maybe the girls are different? Okay, bunny ears gal, I can appreciate this. You're hot, I do not mind the battle thong because it actually - for the first time in forever - looks like it provides more protection that what your allies are wearing. You other girls though, you look like you changed your mind 5 times while getting dressed but didn't think to remove your previous decision before starting again.

Sky Pirate Captain dude, Balthier or whatever, I can't even remember. You actually look decent. Your voice actor is AMAZING... but you alone can not recover just how horrible your other party members look and behave. You and Bunny Ears Gal, you two should have just done your own thing. It would have been far more entertaining than stuck up princess, main character thief with plate boots and NO agency, girl in the onesy-shorts, and Captain Clown.
 

Abomination

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Casual Shinji said:
It didn't ruin the game for me at all, but all the holographic interface stuff in the Mass Effect trilogy always bugged me. Seeing Joker wave his hands across a bunch of orange nothing didn't make me feel like he was actually piloting anything. Same with the things on their arms that dispense medigel and record information and stuff.

I know this makes it way easier for the developer to display an interface in the game, but it just can't beat the physicality of characters handling buttons, switches, and levers.
That whole omni-display stuff bugged me too. We have AI that can pilot ships but Joker didn't even have a joystick. If there's one thing we know as gamers it's that pushing buttons to pilot something is a BAD IDEA because you have two settings - no throttle and FULL THROTTLE. Perhaps they could have had some quasi-3D interface thing for him to interact with but no, it's always just buttons and dragging and dropping shit. Half of those button selections should have been automated by EDI anyway. The pilot should focus on maneuvering the ship, not sealing bulkheads or... whatever those button pushes were doing.
 

lapan

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Eclipse Dragon said:
The first boss in the first Devil May Cry game, the giant spider.
I wouldn't actually have a problem with it if I could see it, but the camera loves Dante so much that it focuses only on him. The giant spider is looming somewhere off screen and my only clue that it's attacking is a brief flash of light before Dante loses a chunk of his health. I like Dante as much as the camera, but I realize the boss needs to take priority here...
The trick is to not even go ranged. Spaming Helm Breaker on him kills him in seconds.

 

Xukog

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The mop scene in DmC, I was gonna rent the game to give it a try,but after I saw that in a youtube video,I just didn't even care to try it anymore.
 

DigitalSushi

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I can't stand shoddy collision detection, this is particularly annoying on racing games when your no where near anything yet you still get wiped out of the race.

Also no visual clues about whether your hits are doing anything to enemies.... as a comparison I'll use DarkSider' second boss Tiamut (that bat thing) versus Cerberus in DMC3 (ice doggie!)

Ice Doggie - you can only damage him once you've knocked off that snazzy Ice armour he's wearing (its fashion's latest winter collection I hear), now you know your not doing any damage to him when he's got his Ice on because he barely flinches and his health bar doesn't decrease, once he's got no Ice any hits give you the visual clue of slight blood coming out of the point of entry

Tiamut bat thingie - doesn't flinch, no blood or visual or audio clues to denote your hits are connecting, no health bar so you go through your entire arsenal trying to finger out if there is a certain weapon you need to use against it.... then you die because you were faffing about with your inventory instead of bringing on the pain.

Eclipse Dragon said:
The first boss in the first Devil May Cry game, the giant spider.
I wouldn't actually have a problem with it if I could see it, but the camera loves Dante so much that it focuses only on him. The giant spider is looming somewhere off screen and my only clue that it's attacking is a brief flash of light before Dante loses a chunk of his health. I like Dante as much as the camera, but I realize the boss needs to take priority here...
A few of the Japanese game designers from the same sort of era or school of thought such as Kamiya and Mikami use sound cues to telegraph enemy attacks giving you chance to evade off screen enemies, but your right DMC1 did still have some of that Resident Evil's shoddy camera work which worked in RE1 but not so much in an action hackyshootyslashy game.

I did LOL at the "camera loves Dante just as much as me" comment though!.
 

J Tyran

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Abomination said:
Casual Shinji said:
It didn't ruin the game for me at all, but all the holographic interface stuff in the Mass Effect trilogy always bugged me. Seeing Joker wave his hands across a bunch of orange nothing didn't make me feel like he was actually piloting anything. Same with the things on their arms that dispense medigel and record information and stuff.

I know this makes it way easier for the developer to display an interface in the game, but it just can't beat the physicality of characters handling buttons, switches, and levers.
That whole omni-display stuff bugged me too. We have AI that can pilot ships but Joker didn't even have a joystick. If there's one thing we know as gamers it's that pushing buttons to pilot something is a BAD IDEA because you have two settings - no throttle and FULL THROTTLE. Perhaps they could have had some quasi-3D interface thing for him to interact with but no, it's always just buttons and dragging and dropping shit. Half of those button selections should have been automated by EDI anyway. The pilot should focus on maneuvering the ship, not sealing bulkheads or... whatever those button pushes were doing.
Piloting a ship in Mass Effect is a lot more complicated than just thrust and vectors like in some scifi, the pilot/helmsman is constantly balancing the mass effect field to retain the best of both acceleration and keeping enough mass on the ship to keep it stable under fire and keep some momentum. They also have to keep the core output and charge under control and control the thermal build up, some pilots would delegate some of that like the core output but some pilots like Joker and Cortez like to micromanage as much as possible because they are perfectionists.

Where did you get the idea that the controls are binary? You have used a touch screen phone or tablet right? They have sliders you know, they are not always just on/off.
 

Abomination

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J Tyran said:
Piloting a ship in Mass Effect is a lot more complicated than just thrust and vectors like in some scifi, the pilot/helmsman is constantly balancing the mass effect field to retain the best of both acceleration and keeping enough mass on the ship to keep it stable under fire and keep some momentum. They also have to keep the core output and charge under control and control the thermal build up, some pilots would delegate some of that like the core output but some pilots like Joker and Cortez like to micromanage as much as possible because they are perfectionists.

Where did you get the idea that the controls are binary? You have used a touch screen phone or tablet right? They have sliders you know, they are not always just on/off.
The reason is most of the actions he takes are button presses, not sliders or anything else like that. So many binary options and you NEVER see him actually pilot the ship.

The reason he is there is to introduce the concept of unpredictability to prevent combat from just being between two VIs. Every balancing act, every tweak to ship movements could be done faster and far more efficiently by EDI than Joker using his hands. It's all to "look flashy" but in a practical scenario almost all of it would be automated beyond where the ship needs to go, how fast it needs to go and who it has authority to fire upon. All of which can be controlled by a throttle and a joystick - which Joker never uses.
 

J Tyran

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Abomination said:
J Tyran said:
Piloting a ship in Mass Effect is a lot more complicated than just thrust and vectors like in some scifi, the pilot/helmsman is constantly balancing the mass effect field to retain the best of both acceleration and keeping enough mass on the ship to keep it stable under fire and keep some momentum. They also have to keep the core output and charge under control and control the thermal build up, some pilots would delegate some of that like the core output but some pilots like Joker and Cortez like to micromanage as much as possible because they are perfectionists.

Where did you get the idea that the controls are binary? You have used a touch screen phone or tablet right? They have sliders you know, they are not always just on/off.
The reason is most of the actions he takes are button presses, not sliders or anything else like that. So many binary options and you NEVER see him actually pilot the ship.

The reason he is there is to introduce the concept of unpredictability to prevent combat from just being between two VIs. Every balancing act, every tweak to ship movements could be done faster and far more efficiently by EDI than Joker using his hands. It's all to "look flashy" but in a practical scenario almost all of it would be automated beyond where the ship needs to go, how fast it needs to go and who it has authority to fire upon. All of which can be controlled by a throttle and a joystick - which Joker never uses.
The Normandy is not a single seat fighter its a frigate, it will be fly by wire for a start. The (non AI) computers on the ship will fly the Normandy, Joker will fly the computers so yes it is automated but not completely. He will take over systems as he sees fit if he thinks the computer response isn't an action he wants.

Take an Airliner for instance, the pilots can take off and fly to the destination and land it again without ever touching the conventional controls. For a time they actually did in some cases until a rash of incidents where the autopliot behaved in unexpected ways and caused some crashes, procedures changed after that.

Besides Joker only presses like crazy on the two instances of the ship being blown apart, most of the time he was fairly sedate. Being blown to bits is a good enough reason for dramatic looking piloting.
 

MorganL4

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The fact that in Star Trek Online, for over a year, you couldn't right click on a chair and sit in it. They fixed it now FINALLY but the game was released in 2010.

Also, form the same game, a MAJOR emersion breaker: Forward Shields Rear Shields Left Shields Right Shields...... NO! WRONG..... Forward Shields Aft Shields Port Shields and Starboard Shields!!! That is how it is supposed to be.

Pirates Of the Caribbean Online is a game for 10 year old kids, and THEY use Port and Starboard.... The Right, Left thing is so immersion breaking it is not even funny.
 

an annoyed writer

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wombat_of_war said:
only thing that annoyed me over multiple games that was relatively minor was femsheps walking and running animation in the mass effect series. it was bad in mass effect 1 and they never fixed it despite people pointing it out.as far as i know they used the same animation for male and female shepard so femshep looked very.. off... just sloppy design
Having "off"-looking animation is something that really bugs me a lot too. And they did do a new animation for ME3, so I guess that game has that going for it.
 

Abomination

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J Tyran said:
The Normandy is not a single seat fighter its a frigate, it will be fly by wire for a start. The (non AI) computers on the ship will fly the Normandy, Joker will fly the computers so yes it is automated but not completely. He will take over systems as he sees fit if he thinks the computer response isn't an action he wants.

Take an Airliner for instance, the pilots can take off and fly to the destination and land it again without ever touching the conventional controls. For a time they actually did in some cases until a rash of incidents where the autopliot behaved in unexpected ways and caused some crashes, procedures changed after that.

Besides Joker only presses like crazy on the two instances of the ship being blown apart, most of the time he was fairly sedate. Being blown to bits is a good enough reason for dramatic looking piloting.
Of course taking over certain systems with manual inputs can be handy during an emergency but they're still just buttons... not sliders or throttles - all binary. If it's about 'balancing' systems then there need to be sliders or values being punched in. Not his hands darting all over random buttons that are all coloured the same and look the same - that's just a problem waiting to happen.

And as you said with the airliners - the manual controls provide more reliable and superior in the most important situations the plane was in: takeoff and landing. The most important situation for a frigate? Combat... but we never see any form of 3D environment control scheme - just buttons.
 

LAGG

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Karma168 said:
Dark Prophet said:
Size scales in Starcraft II, some of the cars are bigger than houses and I mean civilian cars and civilian houses, also Kerrigan is taller than Hydra wtf is this.
Yeah that bugged me when I first played the Starcraft games as well. You see the Hyperion as the ship that's carrying you and your entire army of hundreds of marines and vehicles around the stars but when you use it in battle it's the same size as a siege tank - how? I realise that they needed to scale to fit on the screen but still, when 20 marines has a bigger footprint than the starship they arrived in it just doesn't look right.

That's why I liked the scaling on the DoW1 units, the big tanks (like the Land Raider and the Baneblade) actually looked more believably scaled compared to the infantry units.


OT: Fire selection. The first F/TPS games I played (can't remember the names) had the ability to flick between full auto and single fire, something I got used to and when the more recent games got rid of it, it annoyed me no end. I got used to putting a rifle on single fire, lining up a distance shot, pulling the trigger and just holding it down after so I could watch the shot - obviously not handy if your gun only has a full auto setting.
They scale it so it wouldn't hide units behind it and make it annoying to select them.

Click on the marker that says "Clean (Why the artists hate me)":
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014488/The-Game-Design-of-STARCRAFT
 

C. Cain

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Abomination said:
Of course taking over certain systems with manual inputs can be handy during an emergency but they're still just buttons... not sliders or throttles - all binary. If it's about 'balancing' systems then there need to be sliders or values being punched in. Not his hands darting all over random buttons that are all coloured the same and look the same - that's just a problem waiting to happen.
How do you know that it's just buttons and binary choices? I have to admit that I didn't look too closely at the actual interface, but I don't see why it shouldn't have digital sliders akin to, say, your typical Windows OS sound mixer.

Don't get me wrong, though. I concur with your assessment. Proper manual inputs would have been the much better choice. For several reasons.
 

HellbirdIV

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Dragon Age: Origins tried very hard to be "dark". "Dark" storytelling is not and never has been an adequate substitute for GOOD storytelling (see also the remake of Battlestar Galactica).

Ultimately the only thing that kept me interested in Dragon Age's story were the lighter characters like Oghren, Alistair, Wynne and Leliana. They added some much needed fun to the proceedings.