Tiny, insignificant details in games that really bother you

[XsjadoBlayde]

NFS Payback had a playable character in it that kept swapping between a typical inner-city londoner accent and an unmistakable brand of american accent betwixt different recorded lines. The former sounded pretty legitimate, but I don't know enough about the latter, so googled the guy, and what ho!...he is David Ajala, a born and bred londoner, who also plays in the new superwoman series and new Star Trek, so I assume is acquaintanced with US accent adoption.

What I don't get is how could that happen?? How does one voice actor mistakenly record two entirely different accents for the same character? Did he think he was doing two different people? Did they forget to mention they didn't want his natural accent till too late, so hurriedly squeezed in as many extra recorded lines of their desired accent before realising it wouldn't be enough, and threw them all in with the vague hope that their player base is too dumb or uninterested to point it out? Wha' happun??

 

[happyninja42]

I mean, this is sassy's creed, where the main character goes "Sneaky" by pulling a hood over his/her head. Even in eras and cultures where a hood would not be common and thus likely draw more attention.

That they never bother trying to hide the weapons other than hidden blade.

Hell they don't really bother hiding the hidden blade anymore either. I don't know what it looks like in Valhalla cutscenes, but I know that initial cinematic they did, the blade is CLEARLY on display on the top of his wrist

OT: Easter egg hunting for random stuff. I get it devs, you are proud of the map you made, and want to show off the tiny details to the player. But I REALLY don't want to waste hours of my life, running around collecting little flags or similar junk, just to get some achievement. Especially when you intentionally put them in REALLY annoying locations to find.

 

[Ravinoff]

• Backwards/mirrored guns: yes, we know you have fancy animations for shell casings and bolt handles, but stop literally shoving it in our faces. And don't even get me started on Far Cry 2...
• Auto-hostile wildlife (Far Cry strikes again!). Skyrim's bears being the most notorious example.
• Repairing things by waving a wrench/torch over them for a designated amount of time. With the exception of TF2, even before it went full-on goofball, Engineer whacking turrets/dispensers/teleporters with a wrench just fits that game perfectly.

 

[happyninja42]

Day/Night cycles that only last a few minutes at most. Like 20 minutes before it's dark, or becomes day again, I just...why? PLEASE make them last several hours at least, I'm tired of spending what appears to be several DAYS, slowly walking through an enemy camp and taking out dudes, because you can't stand to have a time cycle more than the attention span of a fruit fly!

 

[Trunkage]

..

• Auto-hostile wildlife (Far Cry strikes again!). Skyrim's bears being the most notorious example.

Bears are the real racists, killing everyone they see

 

[Gordon_4]

Bears are the real racists, killing everyone they see

Surely that makes them misanthropes?

 

[Dalisclock]

Surely that makes them misanthropes?

I was gonna ask if that makes them truly egalitarian since all races are equally tasty. "White Meat, Dark Meat. It's all meat at the end of the day"-A Bear.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I was gonna ask if that makes them truly egalitarian since all races are equally tasty. "White Meat, Dark Meat. It's all meat at the end of the day"-A Bear.

White meat is generally drier, but lighter in calories, and dark meat is juicier but higher in fat content. The conundrum is almost too much to bear.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

I'm playing Titanfall 2 again, and two things that struck me:

First, the cinematic at the start of the game looks great, except for the PS2 era looking destruction physics. Things are just shattering into weird looking debris in ways that aren't natural.

Second, when you bury Captain Lastimosa, you turn around and walk straight past the bodies of your fellow grunts, leaving them to the beasts. I'd think you'd know these grunts even better than the Captain. Jack Cooper is a cold bastard.

 

[Dalisclock]

Does it count if it's less a Tiny Detail and more a "Seriously, did they do the fucking research?"

Because I apparently can't get off this train even when I want to, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.

At the end of Mission 19, you land on the (presumably ''Nimitz''-class equivalent.) aircraft carrier Admiral Anderson to rearm, repair and resupply prior to the final mission. The problem is that the carrier is stated to have run aground and been abandoned at sea weeks if not months prior to the mission, but somehow Osea finds enough crew to reactivate it and begin flight ops within 24 hours. At bare minimum you'd need at least a day to get the reactors started up again if you bypassed every safety check(and risk serious damage to the engineering spaces/crew if you messed anything up), not to mention all the other vital equipment for flight ops. Also, you'd need at least 1000 (normal ship and aircrew is close to 5000) sailors working non-stop and they knew exactly what to do, or significantly more if they were less seasoned and stopping to eat and sleep.

I didn't really notice this the first time but the 2nd time, I was like "Wait, so Avril got the entire Carrier working by herself in a day?"A simple wiki search tells you the ships complement at sea is about 5000 people, which the devs apparently didn't consider WHY a carrier has such a large crew(apparently just for shits and giggles, apparently). And as a former Nimitz Carrier Sailor and one of those poor slobs who had to come in 2 days before the rest of the ships crew to get the reactors started up before leaving port, it irks me a lot.

Even worse, there's a fucking airport on the other side of the map they could have handwaved you landing at with the simple line "Allies forces captured the airport, so you can repair and rearm there".

 

[Worgen]

Does it count if it's less a Tiny Detail and more a "Seriously, did they do the fucking research?"

Because I apparently can't get off this train even when I want to, Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown.

At the end of Mission 19, you land on the (presumably ''Nimitz''-class equivalent.) aircraft carrier Admiral Anderson to rearm, repair and resupply prior to the final mission. The problem is that the carrier is stated to have run aground and been abandoned at sea weeks if not months prior to the mission, but somehow Osea finds enough crew to reactivate it and begin flight ops within 24 hours. At bare minimum you'd need at least a day to get the reactors started up again if you bypassed every safety check(and risk serious damage to the engineering spaces/crew if you messed anything up), not to mention all the other vital equipment for flight ops. Also, you'd need at least 1000 (normal ship and aircrew is close to 5000) sailors working non-stop and they knew exactly what to do, or significantly more if they were less seasoned and stopping to eat and sleep.

I didn't really notice this the first time but the 2nd time, I was like "Wait, so Avril got the entire Carrier working by herself in a day?"A simple wiki search tells you the ships complement at sea is about 5000 people, which the devs apparently didn't consider WHY a carrier has such a large crew(apparently just for shits and giggles, apparently). And as a former Nimitz Carrier Sailor and one of those poor slobs who had to come in 2 days before the rest of the ships crew to get the reactors started up before leaving port, it irks me a lot.

Even worse, there's a fucking airport on the other side of the map they could have handwaved you landing at with the simple line "Allies forces captured the airport, so you can repair and rearm there".

Yeah, thats something that everyone seems to forget. For a modern military aircraft you need something like 4 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight time. There is a show called Gohdannar which is a pretty awesome giant robot show and doesn't try to take itself seriously but one of the antagonists in it has has his own giant robot and its just him and a little girl and they hid their robot in a cave while the main team has a big ass base with a full maintenance crew who have great shenanigans. But the thought of that guy just letting his giant robot sit in a cave without maintenance always bugged me.

 

[Agema]

Day/Night cycles that only last a few minutes at most. Like 20 minutes before it's dark, or becomes day again, I just...why? PLEASE make them last several hours at least, I'm tired of spending what appears to be several DAYS, slowly walking through an enemy camp and taking out dudes, because you can't stand to have a time cycle more than the attention span of a fruit fly!

In a strange way, it fits some games. If you imagine Skyrim, there's obviously a vast space and population compression: cities with 50-100 in game population are supposed to represent 100-1000 times that. Skyrim is ~15 sq. miles in game, but clearly supposed to represent something at least the size of a large European country like Sweden, France or Italy. Without a speeded day-night cycle, it would seem embarrassing to cross it without any day/night cycles.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

In a strange way, it fits some games. If you imagine Skyrim, there's obviously a vast space and population compression: cities with 50-100 in game population are supposed to represent 100-1000 times that. Skyrim is ~15 sq. miles in game, but clearly supposed to represent something at least the size of a large European country like Sweden, France or Italy. Without a speeded day-night cycle, it would seem embarrassing to cross it without any day/night cycles.

I was actually going to post something like this, but thankfully you beat me to it.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

In a strange way, it fits some games. If you imagine Skyrim, there's obviously a vast space and population compression: cities with 50-100 in game population are supposed to represent 100-1000 times that. Skyrim is ~15 sq. miles in game, but clearly supposed to represent something at least the size of a large European country like Sweden, France or Italy. Without a speeded day-night cycle, it would seem embarrassing to cross it without any day/night cycles.

I was just reminded of this yesterday, doing yet another modded playthrough, when I stopped by Falkreath and its supposedly largest and most ancient of graveyards in Skyrim. I counted about three dozen gravestones. I live within a three-minute drive of two separate graveyards that each have at least fifty times that many.

 

[happyninja42]

In a strange way, it fits some games. If you imagine Skyrim, there's obviously a vast space and population compression: cities with 50-100 in game population are supposed to represent 100-1000 times that. Skyrim is ~15 sq. miles in game, but clearly supposed to represent something at least the size of a large European country like Sweden, France or Italy. Without a speeded day-night cycle, it would seem embarrassing to cross it without any day/night cycles.

Sure if we're just going to assume everything is compressed, it "fits". But it will still always throw ME, the human playing it, off. When you specifically time something like a night mission for stealth reasons, and thus you wait until sunset to start, and the night ends before you even finish the freaking area, it's just a moment of "wait...wut? It's dawn already?!" It just pulls me out of it if everything else is supposed to be "normal" in the game. It really hammers home I'm playing a simulation of reality, and breaks a lot of my immersion. I've learned to live with it, as it's pretty much the standard design for...well basically EVERY game with a day/night cycle for the last 30 freaking years, but some games make it more glaring than others.

On that note, can any of you think of any games, where the day night cycle is either reality accurate, or at least longer than the time it takes a fruit fly to sneeze? I remember many years ago when I was playing MMO's (Everquest I think at the time), that it would be neat if the game day/night, was actually linked to the real world, and so it would transition with you as you played.

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

Sure if we're just going to assume everything is compressed, it "fits". But it will still always throw ME, the human playing it, off. When you specifically time something like a night mission for stealth reasons, and thus you wait until sunset to start, and the night ends before you even finish the freaking area, it's just a moment of "wait...wut? It's dawn already?!" It just pulls me out of it if everything else is supposed to be "normal" in the game. It really hammers home I'm playing a simulation of reality, and breaks a lot of my immersion. I've learned to live with it, as it's pretty much the standard design for...well basically EVERY game with a day/night cycle for the last 30 freaking years, but some games make it more glaring than others.

On that note, can any of you think of any games, where the day night cycle is either reality accurate, or at least longer than the time it takes a fruit fly to sneeze? I remember many years ago when I was playing MMO's (Everquest I think at the time), that it would be neat if the game day/night, was actually linked to the real world, and so it would transition with you as you played.

Speaking of MMO’s, pretty sure that just about any modifiable PC game could replicate what you’re asking for with some .cfg tweaking.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Speaking of MMO’s, pretty sure that just about any modifiable PC game could replicate what you’re asking for with some .cfg tweaking.

In the case of Skyrim, there's a console command: set timescale to #, where # is the number of in-game minutes you want to have pass per real-time minute; the default is 20. (Setting it to 0 or 1 can cause bugs.) I have it set to 5 so that my stealth character has plenty of time at night to sneak around.

 

[Dalisclock]

Yeah, thats something that everyone seems to forget. For a modern military aircraft you need something like 4 hours of maintenance for each hour of flight time. There is a show called Gohdannar which is a pretty awesome giant robot show and doesn't try to take itself seriously but one of the antagonists in it has has his own giant robot and its just him and a little girl and they hid their robot in a cave while the main team has a big ass base with a full maintenance crew who have great shenanigans. But the thought of that guy just letting his giant robot sit in a cave without maintenance always bugged me.

Yeah, I occasionally get annoyed by shit like this. If you can handwave how the people with the giant war machines keep those machines in motion, fine, but when you do this "Well, they have tanks and aircraft with no visible way of supporting them" is where my gears tend to grind.

One of the New Terminator movies had the Resistance running a small Air Force(which implies they have an airbase somewhere) as well as a base on a submarine in the ocean and they keep it supplied....somehow despite Skynet controlling most of the world. It's never explained how they justify it and running an airforce for an UNDERGROUND RESISTANCE ORGANIZATION makes no sense at all or why it takes Skynet so long to find the airbase all those planes and helicopters keep striking from(which has to be between LA and San Francisco since the Resistance can reach both by air). Let alone where they get all the supplies to keep said aircraft running. Who knows how they keep that SUPER SECRET SUBMARINE BASE supplied a good decade after a nuclear war.

That probably explains why I stopped watching them, because I realized the writers didn't care anymore, so why should I?

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

I can't stand it when games let you put a silencer on a revolver and then it works perfectly.

Dear Call of Duty Cold War, yo what the fuck? I know you know better.

 

[Dalisclock]

I can't stand it when games let you put a silencer on a revolver and then it works perfectly.

Dear Call of Duty Cold War, yo what the fuck? I know you know better.

Silencers are magic one size fits all attachments, doncha know?

I'm reminded of that scene in the movie Goodfellas where Henry brings a bunch of Silencers for Tommy to try out and none of them fit. It probably didn't help Tommy had a revolver or too in there.