Things No Game Should Do

[Crispee]

When games just flat out remove good things that were already well established. Like removing the long jump in Super Mario Sunshine and making the characters suddenly have voiced dialogue, (though I love the game otherwise).

 

[Kopikatsu]

DAMN! I can't find the image, but I recall seeing a picture of a fake game cover with the following title:

Stealth Underwater Timed Escort Mission 3

I believe the point is obvious. BEST GAME EVAR LOLOLOLOLOL!!!11!!!!1111!!!one!!!11!!

 

[Bourne Endeavor]

Oh yes. This is terrible. I remember Mass Effect on Insanity, just sitting in the tank against a colossus. It was just so boring. Just keep shooting. They needed to make them smarter, not tougher. My ideal difficulty curve would be:
Easy: Stormtrooper rush. Just running at you, armor is worthless, can't hit anything, no regard for personal safety.
Normal: Mob movie. They take cover, they have full health, and they can hit you. Mostly they sit behind cover, pop out and spray an area, then reload in cover. Can be killed just by standing there, but you will take damage if you're not careful.
Hard: act like characters in a war movie. They have the same health as normal, better accuracy. Big change here is they work together. One draws fire, some suppress without looking. Try to catch you in open m
Insane: Cohesive Unit. Again, same stats, maybe more accurate. Constantly pressuring and flanking. Force you into the open.

Of course this needs a bit of adaptation depending on game type. FPS might throw in grenades as it gets harder. RTS might make unit choice smarter. RPG might add new spells or abilities. But mostly, it's like this list. None of that shooting the same guy a billion times crap.

Funny you should quote Mass Effect, since I just finished it on Insanity last week. To be honest, you are better off ditching the Mako and having at it on foot with those things. Vanguard with maxed Lift is a beautiful thing and if you constant circle them, you will deal significantly higher damage, and without the jarring difficulty of the Mako's awful defense. ME was a strange game. They increased the enemy health bars and defense, yet you were still so ungodly overpowered that even missile attacks could be shrugged off.

 

[ICanBreakTheseCuffs]

quick time events as said by no fucking anyone

 

[bojac6]

They all either save at current key points in the game or you have to travel to a safehouse to save your game. In pretty much all of these games the game saves while your resting. When you think about it traveling back to a safehouse to save and quit makes far more sense then being able to save at any given moment.

I still don't get it. How does being able to jump back to when you woke up in the morning make any more sense then being to jump back to the moment 20 minutes later when you were walking down the street? I get that a safe house is a place where you are protected, but saving is still resetting the game to a specific point in time. Why does it make more sense that sleeping equals saving? It's a situation completely unique to video games, the closest analogies are bookmarks and pausing a DVD. So why should a game force me to play more when I'm ready to stop when it adds nothing to the game?

Having the fixed camera allows the developer to make you see what he wants you to.

It's also a way for the developer to hide things from you in ways that would never actually occur. Such as a box is behind a column, and you are behind the column, but the camera is in front of the column, so you never see the box. How does that make the game better?

You talked about immersion before but being able to see behind you while looking forward is far more immersion breaking then anything you have said

Umm, that's exactly my point. With a fixed camera, you see everything in the stage or whatever you want to call the field of view of the camera, no matter where you are looking. If the character turns and walks into a corner, he still has a clear view of everything going on behind him. A camera set to what the character sees is locked to the character and you can't see around corners or behind you.

not that i believe in any of that bullshit.

What is bullshit about immersion breaking? I don't want to constantly be reminded that I'm playing a game. Think about reading a book. If every other page were blank, so you constantly had to flip an extra page, would you be able to lose yourself in the story or would you be pulled out every time you looked at the next page to see the next word and it was blank? It's the same with video games. I want to interact with what is going on inside the game, I don't want the game to get between me and it's content.

It simply makes sense though that you can only really look in the direction your character is looking at the time.

Okay, now I'm sure you're agreeing with me. Maybe I have my terms wrong or something, but I thought fixed cameras were where the camera looks at a specific area and the player controlled character walks through that area without the camera moving, as in the gow games (I am talking about God of War here, not Gears of War). With this method, you see the entire area the camera covers regardless of where the player character is looking.

You also mentioned it was a way to get cheap better looking environments, that is far more important today when games are a massive risk and very very expensive to make.

Cheap as in how much processor resources it uses, not how expensive it is to make. It's why the scenery in GoW looked better than anything else on the PS2, because it was static scenery faking 3D. It was a brilliant idea at the time, but processor resources are not in such high demand anymore as more and more other tricks have been invented.

I have no idea if a fixed camera saves money during game development. I would imagine the difference is negligible.

Edit: screwed up the quotes, fixed now

 

[IamSofaKingRaw]

Base A Game Around Something Cool, Make Bad Guys Immune - Force Unleashed, others. What's the point of the Force Unleashed? I would say it's using Force powers. Zapping and choking dudes left and right, shoving them off cliffs with your mind, it should be awesome. So why are the majority of the enemies in magic suits that protect them from the Force and can only be killed by doing the same stupid lightsaber move three times in a row? This is dumb and ruins the game. Do what the Jedi Knight games did, introduce more bad guys, not more powerful bad guys. The last level of Jedi Knight is fantastic because you just cut down a hundred stormtroopers. It's tough because there's a lot of them, but it's fun because you're amazingly powerful. Compare that to fighting the Dark Troopers in Force Unleashed. Repetitive, dull, and frustrating. Halo doesn't suddenly introduce bad guys that can't be shot. Why should a Star Wars game introduce bad guys that can't be choked.

If they didn't so that then the game would be fucking easy. Thats like asking why the enemies have snipers in Halo when I have one. The point of the game is to kill aliens so shouldn't the devs make the enemies stand there for me to kill them? What would the point of lightsabers be if you didn't need to use them. It diversifies the game and forces you to play the game differently according to the situation.

I think it does the opposite, which is my point. You have a dozen different force powers, but you spend more than half the game limited to your lightsaber. In the Jedi Knight games, you used your lightsaber a lot, but you also electrocuted and choked and did all kinds of things. It was challenging because there were so many bad guys. There were bad guys that you couldn't hit with a light saber and had to use force powers on, which worked because you still had options. Force Unleashed takes every action away from you except the lightsaber. It's not saying "make the bad guys stand in front of me" it's saying "Don't make me a bad ass, then introduce bad guys that are completely immune to me." There's really no story reason for them to be Force immune, they just are. It's not saying the bad guys should stand there and let you kill them. It'd be like setting a Batman game in the desert with no buildings. Sure, you've got a kick ass grappling hook, but there are no buildings, no places to hide, and nothing to do but run.

You make it seems as if at a certain point in the game all the enemies have armour that blocks force powers. Around the middle and movingforward you'd encounter 1-3 guys like this in a group of 10-15 enemies. I'm not a Star Wars fan but I do remember the game teling us that the armour they were wearing was made of a rare crystal that can repel force powers. Thats why you RARELY see those guys out there. If they just made a lot of stormtroopers rush you as opposed to having varied enemies the game would in fact be terribly easy. Around the middle of the game you have access to the power to turn a storm trooper into a lightning grenade.. Throwing him inot his allise insta kills thm. No matter how many they bring I sould just spam that attack and finish the game without dying.

On the other hand, your view on how the game should be can create a very good experience. EX InFAMOUS. The Enemies are never immune to your powers but they always come in packs to gun you down.

 

[Amerikhan]

No game should not let you skip cut scenes. Staring at you FFX... staring at you with sincere hatred.

 

[aLivingPheonix]

Sacrifice singleplayer for multiplayer. Especially game's like MW2, and Halo 3, that have fun gameplay, but put little or no effort into singleplayer, because they assume everyone will play multiplayer.

And, random quick time events. I don't mind if they're a normal occurance, but if it's random, like in one cutscene, then they're annoying.