"They Finally fixed X"....But I liked X

DefunctTheory

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Others have mentioned it already - Mass Effect.

The first game had problems. Oh boy did it. But some of them were worth it. The game had a character all of its own, and while that included a lot of warts, I was ok with that.

Mass Effect 2 got rid of the weapon system entirely. I agree, it needed work, but I liked it, particular the replacement of ammo with heat. The Mako was removed entirely, which while understandable, was just sad, especially since it'r replacement (Probing for resources rather then exploring for stuff) was just as tedious as the worst of the Mako bits, but without the joy of being able to jump around.

I can continue, but I think people get the point. By the time you get to Mass Effect 3, you've lost a lot of character that defined the first game. The design choices they made probably did improve the series mechanically, but I think it made it a lot less interesting.
 

Hawki

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Sonic the Hedgehog comes to mind, namely the addition of the boost mechanic. The whole thing where if you press a button Sonic will run so fast that he becomes a blur and just plough through enemies.

I think this was okay in the 2D games (e.g. Rush), but in 3D, it robbed me of any sense of control. I much rather prefer the SA1/2/Heroes system - yeah, Sonic could go fast, sometimes on what was on rails (e.g. the truck scene), but it felt like speed you earnt regardless.
 
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Dango said:
Mass Effect's combat. People said it was sluggish and yeah, I guess compared to Gears of War it was pretty sluggish, but I never really wanted it to be an action game. Mass Effect 2 was a disappointment to me in a lot of ways, and the change from RPG to boring shooter was one of them.
so many can't see this. i loved its 80's sci-fi style
 

Skatalite

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loa said:
Skatalite said:
Your typical Dead Space? What other games like Dead Space are out there? I'd love to know, because I'll probably be buying them. :p
Probably dead space 2 and 3.
Well, I hope he can see the many differences between the first and third Dead Space at least.
I don't see how Resident Evil 4 and 5 are any more strategic either. The first 3 games maybe, but especially not 4 and 5...
 

Fox12

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I liked the voices in the original Persona 4, but apparently some people complained about Chie sounding too old. The answer, apparently, was to replace the original dialogue with a baby seal being tortured.

Sheria said:
Resident Evil 4 and 5 had a certain "identity" as a third person shooter. They had a certain, "strategic" play which separated themselves from your typical "Dead Space" or what not.

RE6's choice to allow the player to move and shoot at the same time, as well as the adjustment in the enemy AI to compensate for the change, ruined the whole thing.
I'm just old enough to think that RE 1-3 had a unique identity, and that RE 4 and 5 ruined the series. Everyone moaned about the game play, myself included the first time I played it. But, looking back, I really prefer that old strategic survival horror experience to the over the top action spectacle the series became. It was all about risk mitigation and item sparsity. That element got ditched when the series moved to third person. Not that a third person over the shoulder survival horror game couldn't work, but it felt like they ditched the survival aspect pretty quickly.
 

Extra-Ordinary

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Having skimmed some of the responses, 'm gonna jump in with a SUPER UNIQUE opinion: Mass Effect

For two reasons, one, the Mako. Yeah, it sucks, it really does, but it at least sucks hard enough to be hilarious.

Two, planet exploration. Alright, so you couldn't really "explore" most of them per se but you could fly up to them and read about them, and you know what, that's enough for me. And call me crazy but I actuall prefer just reading about them to the mining that came in Mass Effect 2 and 3, don't know why, just liked reading.

But a unique answer "for realz", at least I haven't seen it mentioned yet: The long monologues in Assassin's Creed 1.

Yeah, they were long, and they should have been skippable for anybody who wanted to but I absolutely loved them. I had never heard writing like that in a game before and it really made you understand the bad guys position. In the later Assassin's Creed games most of the Last Words cutscenes boil down to "You're a bad guy." "Yeah, I'm a pretty bad guy." In AC1 it was "You're a bad guy." "No, I'm not and here's why." It was good stuff.
 

Sheo_Dagana

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Halo 5's REQ system is fucking stupid. It's just incentive to spend real money on perks that can potentially unbalance a game. A friend of mine got a 'DMR license' straight away and he doesn't even like that particular gun. I got an 'enhanced Battle Rifle' or something that had the zoom of a DMR, and I didn't encounter many players that had one as well when the game first game out. It was all just random chance, and they saw it as balance, because everyone had the same chances, but everyone also has the same chance at winning the lottery... unless you spend more money on more tickets.

This was done in an effort to, what, 'fix' the armor powers from Halo 4/Reach? I happened to LIKE the armor powers... and to go further back, there's targeting reticule-bloom, a feature that forced players to pace their shots appropriately to maximize efficiency instead of firing like a mad man. But too many 'pros' whined about having to learn a new game mechanic. I've been playing Halo since 2002 and the change felt right to me.

So I guess I've been on both sides of change.
 

Roboshi

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Alrighty gonna add a new one. When a new game in a series decides to "fix" the main character by suddenly making it a customisable avatar. If your series has been built on it then that's fine (fallout, mass effect, elder scrolls etc), but often these are just lazy replacements for coming p with an interesting character to play as.

one example would be pokemon, and while that sounds crazy I'm not saying the characters you played as were deep in terms of a personality, but they did each have a unique design, meanwhile X and Y had you controlling these bland dolls that somehow managed to have less personality than previous games. This is esspecially annoying when youtube is currently awash with list videos sreaming that the name games "better bring back customisable characters"
 

Sable Gear

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The hollowing system in Dark Souls II. It was like the guys at From, after ignoring/rejecting all input from the original creator, said to themselves "Dark Souls 1 was hard, so let's make this one EVEN HARDER by taking away the one thing that made the trial-and-error learning curve possible! Yeah, that'll do it!" The result was a game that would have been predictably hard, with a mechanic that made it straight up unfair. I'm glad they changed things back for the most part in DS3.

The Triforce Shards segment in the Wind Waker HD remake. I actually liked having to track down the charts through these deadly dungeons, then dredge up the shards in a contrastingly mellow sailing session. I understand why it was like that in the original; they wanted to be sure the player got familiar with the salvage crane mechanic if they hadn't been treasure hunting previously. I also understand why they changed it, I just personally preferred the original setup. I really like the Swift Sail though, that was not a superfluous addition.
 

ChupathingyX

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I'm not a huge fan of how faster paced Musou games have become and the obsession with the '1 v 1000' concept. In the older pre-DW6 games attacks were slower, there were less enemies, attacks had less range, and there was actually some sense of significance to enemy troops.

In the recent games characters can attack much faster, how ridiculous range, have movesets full of explosive AoE attacks, and musou attacks that absolutely decimate everything within 100 metres. Not to mention enemy troops have been nerfed considerably and feel like nothing more than musou bar fillers. Attacks now don't feel like they have any 'impact' at all and outside of grab attacks and grab musous most attacks just aren't satisfying. Hyper attacks in SW4 basically represent almost everything I hate about Musou combat in the recent games.

It's a shame too, considering as of around DW8, they've been making an effort to make weapons movesets feel distinct from each other with little gimmicks and unique abilities.
 

JohnnyDelRay

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I don't know what the consensus is, but I generally find Assassin's Creed combat to just get worse and worse. I really liked the animations and fighting style of the first 2, and then after it just felt boring, cheap and repetitive. It's part of the reason I stopped playing any of them after AC3.

Resident Evil seems to get a pretty bad rap in general, but I am so glad that they included a moving and shooting mechanic. As this contributor so eloquently put it:
Dirty Hipsters said:
I have to disagree with this.

Not because I think that RE6 is in any way good, I just don't think it's the moving and shooting that ruined it. The ability to move and shoot is in Resident Evil Revelations 2, and that game is both significantly better than RE6, and feels a hell of a lot more like a proper Resident Evil game.
Moving and shooting mechanics definitely didn't "ruin" (I say "ruin", but what I really mean is "make a deviation"), the genre, it just changed it up a bit for the better. And it only added more immersion for me. As the graphics and overall standard of technology goes up, it just seems stupid to have these highly-trained and now experienced operatives standing rooted to the spot while zombies come at you, while you shoot and reload. It just gets ridiculous to a point - NOBODY would do that, let alone the BSAA/RCPD/whoever you are controlling.

The games are just entirely different - from the puzzles, to inventory management, to enemy types and behaviors. Walking around the creepy, desolated Queen Zenobia cruise ship in Revelations 1 definitely shared more tenseness and atmosphere with the Spencer Mansion.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Sable Gear said:
The hollowing system in Dark Souls II. It was like the guys at From, after ignoring/rejecting all input from the original creator, said to themselves "Dark Souls 1 was hard, so let's make this one EVEN HARDER by taking away the one thing that made the trial-and-error learning curve possible! Yeah, that'll do it!" The result was a game that would have been predictably hard, with a mechanic that made it straight up unfair. I'm glad they changed things back for the most part in DS3.
Actually to me it seems like they wanted to go for an easier "body form, soul form" thing. In Demon's Souls when you died in body form (the human form analogue for Dark Souls) you would revert to soul form, in which you had half health. It added more tension to being in body form because in addition to having to worry about world tendency and being invaded you also suddenly had to worry about dying and losing half your health pool.

The Dark Souls 2 guys probably liked that idea but thought that it was too strict, so instead of making you lose half your health after one failure they made it so that you lose 10% with each death. It doesn't make the trial and error learning curve impossible, it just teaches you to beat the levels without taking damage. Besides, the ring of binding makes it entirely a non-issue, especially since Dark Souls 2 was the first Souls game with 4 ring slots.

Honestly, I never had a problem with it, and it's an idea that goes back to the roots of the souls games. There are problems with the way hollowing works in Dark Souls 2, but those are mostly thematic rather than mechanical.
 

Ambient_Malice

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Dirty Hipsters said:
The ability to move and shoot is in Resident Evil Revelations 2, and that game is both significantly better than RE6, and feels a hell of a lot more like a proper Resident Evil game.
That's kind of the rub right there. Revelations 2 is built on RE6's foundation, using its engine and assets to knock out the game on the cheap. The game basically stripped out RE6 design innovations and replaced them with bits from Alan Wake and Revelations 1. Movement, melee, shooting, partner AI -- they're all a dramatic downgrade. This becomes a bit of a problem in the Raid mode. You're running around in environments cut and pasted from Resident Evil 6 slaughtering waves of enemies, but you can't perform half the moves from RE6, and the guns feel wrong. Character movement is "wrong". The camera is "wrong".

But of course, since the Revelations games are a separate series, it's not really fair to accuse Capcom of wrongly "fixing" anything, since the game does have better movement and combat than Revelations 1. Such criticism should be reserved for Resident Evil 7. If that game "fixes" RE6's design quirks by removing the improvements completely, it will be a case of fixing something that didn't need to be fixed.
 

Denamic

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Sable Gear said:
The hollowing system in Dark Souls II. It was like the guys at From, after ignoring/rejecting all input from the original creator, said to themselves "Dark Souls 1 was hard, so let's make this one EVEN HARDER by taking away the one thing that made the trial-and-error learning curve possible! Yeah, that'll do it!" The result was a game that would have been predictably hard, with a mechanic that made it straight up unfair. I'm glad they changed things back for the most part in DS3.
Back to what? In both DS 1 and 2 you lose 5% of your max health when you die, up to a maximum of 50%. The only difference between DS 1 and 2 is that you use humanity in DS1 and effigies in DS2. DS3 all but removes this system by having no downside to hollowing and instead having a bonus to your health when you have your ember.

So what exactly do you mean by them 'changing it back' because it's more different than it has ever been.
 

DefunctTheory

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Denamic said:
Sable Gear said:
The hollowing system in Dark Souls II. It was like the guys at From, after ignoring/rejecting all input from the original creator, said to themselves "Dark Souls 1 was hard, so let's make this one EVEN HARDER by taking away the one thing that made the trial-and-error learning curve possible! Yeah, that'll do it!" The result was a game that would have been predictably hard, with a mechanic that made it straight up unfair. I'm glad they changed things back for the most part in DS3.
Back to what? In both DS 1 and 2 you lose 5% of your max health when you die, up to a maximum of 50%. The only difference between DS 1 and 2 is that you use humanity in DS1 and effigies in DS2. DS3 all but removes this system by having no downside to hollowing and instead having a bonus to your health when you have your ember.

So what exactly do you mean by them 'changing it back' because it's more different than it has ever been.
Uh... no.

In Dark Souls, you had two states - Unhallowed and hallowed. Once you died and became hallow, that was it - You never could get worse then that. There was no fractional health, just a straight up health cut.
 

Drakmorg

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+1 to the 'I liked Mass Effect better when it was a Space Opera RPG, and not Gears of Halo' train.

Same for the difference between Oblivion and Skyrim while I'm at it. Only thing Skyrim has going for it that isn't worse or comparatively stagnant when compared to Oblivion is that it doesn't make my eyes bleed to look at it and the people look more like humans rather than sentient potatoes.
 

major_chaos

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Feb 3, 2011
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TIL that if your game has functional combat, it's not a RPG.

OT: Dark Souls 3 being so much faster is really bothering me. Yea Souls games are slow that's the point, not a problem. It makes the combat feel impactful and balances out the game's low tolerance for error. Now that every monster is constantly attacking and has a 0.5 second reaction time on defensive moves (fuck you spear knights) it feels much more frustrating

Dead Space 3 nerfed the shit out of the plasma cutter and while I understand why, having spent 90% of the last two games using it, I still missed how fun that gun used to be.
 

The White Hunter

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Sonic Lost World: let's throw out all that work and energy making our new formula almost perfect and try really hard to fix "running fast" for people by giving them a dedicated "go fast" button, and some parkour because that's fashionable and also some bad weird villain monsters because 2 games with the Dr as the bad guy is too many in a row and while we're at it let's make it all really inconsistent and make the momentum fucked up and generally just make crap again because hey two good games in a row we need to keep on sucking.
 

Denamic

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AccursedTheory said:
Denamic said:
Sable Gear said:
The hollowing system in Dark Souls II. It was like the guys at From, after ignoring/rejecting all input from the original creator, said to themselves "Dark Souls 1 was hard, so let's make this one EVEN HARDER by taking away the one thing that made the trial-and-error learning curve possible! Yeah, that'll do it!" The result was a game that would have been predictably hard, with a mechanic that made it straight up unfair. I'm glad they changed things back for the most part in DS3.
Back to what? In both DS 1 and 2 you lose 5% of your max health when you die, up to a maximum of 50%. The only difference between DS 1 and 2 is that you use humanity in DS1 and effigies in DS2. DS3 all but removes this system by having no downside to hollowing and instead having a bonus to your health when you have your ember.

So what exactly do you mean by them 'changing it back' because it's more different than it has ever been.
Uh... no.

In Dark Souls, you had two states - Unhallowed and hallowed. Once you died and became hallow, that was it - You never could get worse then that. There was no fractional health, just a straight up health cut.
You're right. I forgot about that. I was thinking the straight up health cut was from demon's souls and somehow made a brain fart.