Poll: Worst game-lengthening scheme.

[Kenjitsuka]

Fetchquests barely wins over grinding for grinding's sake.
In a few select examples (for example when you don't HAVE to) grinding can be fun.
Usually when you build your characters in an RPG, you can enjoy seeing your effort reflected in awesome stats and stomping on former bad ass enemies.

 

[Meta 99]

Back packing is a pain,

 

[WindKnight]

one word -

Seriously.

Hey epic, guess what? I beat all the achievements in halo reach in just under a month, but I kept playing it out of pleasure for nearly a year, because being forced to grind for an achievement didn't make me sick of it.

 

[Orcus The Ultimate]

I remember playing WOW when I got cataclysm for christmas when it came out and I just got pissed off because of the fetch quests, my god they take forever to do!!! I'm not ungrateful but damn it did annoy the hell out of me

So I played (not so religiously) for 3 months, got to level 54 (I think) and then cast it to the abyss after I got bored of fetching x amount of things from enemy y that dropped it about 20% of the time.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

that is why i don't play MMO's.

 

[Arqus_Zed]

Drawing magic in Final Fantasy 8?

This! Dear God, this!

They actually invented a whole new kind of grinding with the "draw magic"-mechanic. And why? Just so they could fuel the most paradoxical stat-enhancing mechanic ever.

Imagine if magic wasn't just a series of spells used to attack, heal or buff; but also a form of equipment. Now imagine that magic doesn't work with something silly and easily rechargeable like a "mana" or "MP" statistic. Instead, each spell has its own quantity, up to a 100 max. Now imagine that each time you use a spell, your quantity of that spell decreases with one and as such the statistic bounded to that type of magic gets weaker. And imagine that every time you use a spell, you've got to go and find an enemy that has that specific spell, so you can draw it from him again. For each of your 6 characters. At an average 0 - 3 spells a pop for the stronger (and actually useful) magic and an average 6 - 11 spells a pop for the weaker (and pretty useless) magic.

Welcome to hell.

 

[RandV80]

Xenogears, second disc.

I actually played Xenogears again recently, back in the fall on my PSP. Being far more knowledgeable about games, game design, and game development than I was when I originally played it back in the day I could see it in a new light for what it really was. Disc 2 wasn't filler my friend, rather it was simply just UNFINISHED!

The game was probably only 70% complete. While playing through disc one, from a design perspective you could break down the story into a sequence of chapters or story arcs. From a story perspective disc 2 continues this trend, and I full believe there was intended to be another 30-40 hours of gameplay in there. At some point though you gotta think the development team had to sit down and say holy shit we already have 50-60 hours of game time on disc one alone and we're going over budget, how can we salvage this? And from this was born the infamous Xenogears second disc, where the simply give up and start narrating the game to you. From the figuring out what to do next, story sequences, dungeons, even boss battles, if it wasn't already completed they just jumped from scene to scene narrating what happened.

Anyways, for the OP topic, it's actually a really divisive question. What's a pointless game-lengthening scheme to one person is good game design to another. I mean on the first page someone complained about walking, everything from crossing from city to city in a Bethesda game to walking between stores... all I can say to that is **** you man I like exploration games where you have to walk everywhere! For the poll itself I picked the grinding option, but this is basically the backbone of a Blizzard RPG which millions of people love.

The other popular option is backtracking, but in my opinion this can be a conscious design choice that can be difficult to pull off but really effective when done right, Super Metroid or Metroid Prime are perfect examples, but people who don't like it regardless will apply a negative to these games because of 'backtracking'. I hate it when people argue against Metroid on this, Metroid wouldn't be Metroid if the levels didn't interconnect, which naturally requires backtracking.

 

[TheIronRuler]

When a developer cannot come up with more substance to make their game longer what do they do?

Create artificial longevity, that's what they do!

Which scheme grinds your gears the most?

.
God of War. Oops, did you fall to Hades AGAIN?
Well, it's time for you to climb back up!

 

[VoidWanderer]

All of the above AND regenerating health.

While I can understand that some characters are supposed to have it (Wolverine as prime example), other character's should not (Any military-based FPS)

 

[kasperbbs]

Backtracking.. The game that annoyed me the most with this sort of thing was DMC 4, it even made me fight all of the bosses that i had already defeated again, all in a row.

 

[sniddy_v1legacy]

Backtracking

Nothing annoys me more then going backwards - and seeing the same old stuff AGAIN - I want to move on not back

Grinding I can deal with - stick on some tunes and wash rinse and repeat

Cut scenes are normally OK and painless

Fetch quests - see grinding....

 

[richard misiak]

so much of FF XIII was needless padding
especially that fucking crystal forest section that was like 3 hours of fighting the groups of the SAME FOUR enemies in a completely linear path, broken up only by awful cutscenes

 

[Grant Stackhouse]

The worst for me would be the generic fetch-quests that pad out a lot of games. Zelda games suffer from this in particular, mostly because you (link) are clearly the only competent person in the whole world, most of the time, which apparently makes everyone else see you as the perfect candidate to perform their mundane chores on their behalf. Way to go, Hero of Time; you really caught those chickens.

 

[demonfridge]

I used to play MMOs, i played WoW from european release until a few months back. And the most annoying lazy cheap way of wasting everybodies time is repeatable quests.

For non MMO players, this type of quest is normally the usual "kill x of y" or "fetch x of z" yawner but the developers expect you to repeat this ad nauseum until you have the reputation or tokens or whatever to unlock a dungeon or some important vendor.

In WoW this was usually to the tune of something like "do these 5-10 quests every day for a month so you can start raiding" and is the primary reason i spent almost my entire time in MMOs doing PvP (or PKing depending on how dated your lingo is) and avoiding dungeons and quests like the plague.

 

[Casey Bowen]

I have to go with the endless backtracking. If there is something in an area I'm passing through there should be SOME way to do something with it my first time through. Like all the old adventure games where you picked up every bloody object from every last screen so that hours later when you needed that brick to stick in a gear to a spiked ceiling didn't poke you to death you didn't have to go all the way back, or reload a game.

Making me revisit the same area a half a dozen times when something I need magically spawns in that time because I have the relevant quest... BOGUS! Especially when it is halfway across the world.

 

[TK421]

Unskippable cutscenes piss me off, but tireless backtracking really takes the cake. I hate playing the same part of the game over and over again. It's the main thing that keeps me from starting new characters in rpgs, so I don't see why I should be forced to backtrack just to beat the game.

 

[Mr Companion]

Generally rare checkpoints and grind are the worst culprits.

A specific example and a more obscure one is almost every enemy in Patapon 3. Very slowly exploding Salamanders that make you wait until they blow up before letting you past, wraiths that fly above your party but push it back with their massive hitboxes then fly away, gargoyles that hold boxes of treasure ransom forcing you to wait patiently until they move in such a way that you can kill them without disturbing the box.
I swear next im gonna find an enemy that is just a traffic cone that waits until you reach one side of the map then pushes you all the way back to the start or something. They have no shame!

And thats on top of the fact these creatures are often infinitely spawning or repeated 15 times in the same dungeon backed up by an identical group of canon fodder archers/spearmen. Why bother making the greatest hero there ever was if all he has to do if kill legions of tiresome time sinks?

 

[NorthernStar]

Backtracking.

Fetch quests are terrible and cheap, but at least sometimes they try to 'pretty' those up by adding some kind of story to them.
I don't mind cutscenes, love them actually as I usually play games for the story and character development.
Backtracking annoys me the most. When I've seen a location once already, I don't need to see it again. And especially not 50+ times. I want games to take me somewhere new. If that means linearity, I'll gladly settle for that over endless backtracking.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

For me it's the backtracking. Especially if your first pass through affects what's going to be there when you go back.

That's why I hate Hard Rain campaign in Left 4 Dead 2 -- every health pack, bottle of pills, adrenaline shot, defibilator, or ammo packs have to last you both ways. It's not the regular Left 4 Dead feeling of 'Here's a health pack, I'm low on health, fuck yes, now I have some health'. It's now 'Here's a health pack, I'm low on health, but I should leave this here for future me'. It adds this high level of stress and the whole "but I might need it later" syndrome.