When you lost the 'willing' part from willing suspension of disbelief

[King Billi]

Why can't Zeus and Poseidon and all the other gods just haul themselves out of the underworld after Kratos kills them? Why can a mortal man defy death but the bloody GODS can't?

In the real Greek mythology, gods die in one of two ways (that I know of): they die and are gone into nothingness (e.g. Pan, Asclepius), or they die into a state that can be resurrected (e.g. Adonis). I don't think gods are sent to the Underworld.

So we can assume Kratos kills them into nothingness. Not to mention God of War isn't exactly firmly set into the mythology.

OT: I don't really get my suspension of disbelief broken... ever.

It's really just the entire concept itself that's questionable not just how it was implemented in this game.

Once you've established it in your story that people can come back from the dead then death as a consequence for anyone ceases to have any real impact anymore.

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

Hmm..? It probably sounds like this is a bigger issue for me than it really is, but honestly just because I notice these things dosen't mean I don't still like these games, it really feels silly to bring them up like they're some kind of major problem I had because it really isn't.

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

 

[cjspyres]

As much as I like Fallout 3 and New Vegas, I can't stand the damage system. I understand that it's RPG logic, but really? I have to shoot you point blank in the head five times? RPG mechanics don't prevent you from having to make sense.

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

Wait....wouldn't that make there a possibility that Ryan himself would be revived? I never played BS2, so I wouldn't know, but I don't remember hearing anything about that.

 

[Veylon]

"You are the great savior of our land...the only hope of our people. Without you, we are surely lost."
"Sounds great. Can you hook me up with a sword? All I have is this rusty one."
"That will be 800 gold pieces."

Oh yes.

The Ultima series can be pretty bad in this regard. Especially from the fourth game on. Not only have you saved the world multiple times over, you're also pretty much the messiah of Britannia's principal religion and the games make a point of you only being summoned to that world when it is absolutely necessary. So any time you show up, it's a pretty safe bet everything is screwed unless you can prevent it. Yet there are somehow still people who can't recognize the Avatar at a single glance. And every time you need something from someone, you're probably gonna have to do some stupid favor for them, instead of them just giving you whatever you need so the world can escape destruction.

EDIT: granted there is often some reason for all of it, but still

You'd think that, if nothing else, Lord British would foot the bill for whatever you need to buy. It could even be one of those Ultima morals: the game would keep track of how much gold you're draining from the treasury and there'd be some quest/reward/punishment down the line that would depend on it.

 

[King Billi]

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

Oh! Well there you have it then. This is a very good reason why it dosen't pay to let yourself get worked up by these kinds of issues because it's always highly likely there was perfectly good explanation all along that that you just happened to miss.

Doesn't that mean that Andrew Ryan should have been resurrected as well though?

 

[Extra-Ordinary]

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

Oh! Well there you have it then. This is a very good reason why it dosen't pay to let yourself get worked up by these kinds of issues because it's always highly likely there was perfectly good explanation all along that that you just happened to miss.

Doesn't that mean that Andrew Ryan should have been resurrected as well though?

Oh, heh, I never thought of that, that's a good point.
The best I can think of is that Fontaine sabotaged the Vita-Chambers to bring JUST YOU back to life. He was trying to steal the city from Ryan and YOU were the instrument for doing so, after all.
Yeah, that doesn't sound THAT good but that's the best I got.

 

[VanQ]

I stopped bothering altogether around the time regenerating health came romping onto the playing field. It's sad because it will never go away. I just hope to Half-Life Episode 3 doesn't introduce it.

 

[kickyourass]

I can only think of a couple right off the top of my head,
The first few were while playing "The Third Age" for the PS2, now this game is FAR from the best RPG out there, even at the naive age of 12 I could tell the game was bad, but it had a certain charm to it that I both then and still like. This game was so full to bursting with stupid moments that it would be pointless to list them, but I let most of them go since I figured "Well at least it made for a pretty good fight/funny line/something else forgivable." HOWEVER at the very, very end, two things happen in rapid succession. First a member of your party (I forget her name but I remember that she hit like a tank and had cleavage you could lose a horse in) is mortally wounded and it looks like the game might finally have some decent drama NOPE! Instead Aragorn, yes that Aragorn, waltzes up and pulls an honest to goat shit magic healing spell straight out of his ass. My willing suspension of disbelief very nearly committed suicide at that moment.

And then it did for hot on the heels of that disaster, you go straight to the final boss fight against the one and only, SAURON! Yes that Sauron, and not even in his big ass armored self, no they might have been able to twist that into some kind of insane moon troll logic. Your merry band of Jake-and-Jane nobodies (and I mean that, one guy is just some random ass soldier you just run into) fight Sauron, in the form of The Eye of Sauron, at the top of his big fuck off tower without so much as a hand wave explaining how you got there or why. I am 100% certain that was the very first time I stood up from a work of fiction and walked away because of how stupid it was. I still can't believe it happened after like 8 years.


The only other one (at the moment at least) is the end of God of War 2, my vocabulary had advanced quite a bit by this point so when Athena revealed that Zeus was Kratos' father I very damn near lost my voice shouting bullshit. I mean 'no man should kill his own father' but apparently she's just fine with straight up HELPING a father skewer his son with a blade nearly the size of either of them. Yeah I know Kratos more or less deserved it but still, and THAT is the reason she stopped him? Not 'you're an evil monster I'll stop you' or 'I won't let you kill my father' or something like that? I know it'd still be impossibly cliched but it'd be leaps and bounds better and it would actually give Athena (The Goddess of War lest you forgot) an honest to goodness moment to be badass in this series, but no, we got that.

 

[BoogieManFL]

I hate stupid things that block your path that are easy to avoid. Oh no, there is a car wreck and a semi blocking the road. I can't go that way! What? There is a 4ft high gap under the semi trailer? Naw.. that's just crazy talk.

Anyone who has played Dragon Age 2 saw this in abundance when some assclown thought it was acceptable to block half a dozen cave entrances with wooden carts.

I also dislike mobility impaired player characters, where you jump like 2ft high and can't climb up ledges and such, or even worse when you can't sprint for more than 5 seconds without getting tired.

Silent Protagonists are pretty lame too, especially when it means you get blamed for something you could easily prove you didn't, or tell someone that their idea is stupid and they are stupid and should feel bad.

"You are the great savior of our land...the only hope of our people. Without you, we are surely lost."
"Sounds great. Can you hook me up with a sword? All I have is this rusty one."
"That will be 800 gold pieces."

This this and more this. This is really bad in World of WarCraft, made worse because Blizzard has lost all creativity and 50% of anything they make relies upon grinding away at boring daily quests and raising reputation with some new stupid group.

I just want to say NO. NO! FUCK YOU. I don't need to raise my reputation with your little band of douchebags. I've saved the world from fucking dragons, ancient gods, cosmic obliteration, THE LICH KING, prevented The Cataclysm, and all kinds of world destroying terrors. You're going to GIVE ME EVERYTHING I WANT then you are going to lick my armor clean and be happy for the privilege, then give me your clothes so I can sell them to a vendor, and then you're going to throw yourselves face first off a goddamned cliff.

 

[PrinceOfShapeir]

I can only think of a couple right off the top of my head,
The first few were while playing "The Third Age" for the PS2, now this game is FAR from the best RPG out there, even at the naive age of 12 I could tell the game was bad, but it had a certain charm to it that I both then and still like. This game was so full to bursting with stupid moments that it would be pointless to list them, but I let most of them go since I figured "Well at least it made for a pretty good fight/funny line/something else forgivable." HOWEVER at the very, very end, two things happen in rapid succession. First a member of your party (I forget her name but I remember that she hit like a tank and had cleavage you could lose a horse in) is mortally wounded and it looks like the game might finally have some decent drama NOPE! Instead Aragorn, yes that Aragorn, waltzes up and pulls an honest to goat shit magic healing spell straight out of his ass. My willing suspension of disbelief very nearly committed suicide at that moment.

And then it did for hot on the heels of that disaster, you go straight to the final boss fight against the one and only, SAURON! Yes that Sauron, and not even in his big ass armored self, no they might have been able to twist that into some kind of insane moon troll logic. Your merry band of Jake-and-Jane nobodies (and I mean that, one guy is just some random ass soldier you just run into) fight Sauron, in the form of The Eye of Sauron, at the top of his big fuck off tower without so much as a hand wave explaining how you got there or why. I am 100% certain that was the very first time I stood up from a work of fiction and walked away because of how stupid it was. I still can't believe it happened after like 8 years.


The only other one (at the moment at least) is the end of God of War 2, my vocabulary had advanced quite a bit by this point so when Athena revealed that Zeus was Kratos' father I very damn near lost my voice shouting bullshit. I mean 'no man should kill his own father' but apparently she's just fine with straight up HELPING a father skewer his son with a blade nearly the size of either of them. Yeah I know Kratos more or less deserved it but still, and THAT is the reason she stopped him? Not 'you're an evil monster I'll stop you' or 'I won't let you kill my father' or something like that? I know it'd still be impossibly cliched but it'd be leaps and bounds better and it would actually give Athena (The Goddess of War lest you forgot) an honest to goodness moment to be badass in this series, but no, we got that.

Oh man, I loved that fight. I was laughing my ass off the whole time. You didn't miss anything by walking away, just more Gandalf narration. Satisfying conclusion? Fuck that!

 

[Mocmocman]

A lot of things in the Left 4 Dead games do this for me. From zombies that swarm for every other radio call to having to run a roller coaster because you can't get over a 3 foot barrier, I've had plenty of moments of WTF. It doesn't bother me though.

EDIT: And Zombies hate Elevators.

 

[darth.pixie]

Not being able to continue with a quest for no good reason or making it have a ham-fisted end by only allowing stupid options.

Example: In Skyrim, Riverwood...who got pissed off at the Faendal/Camilla/Sven quest? It makes no sense to even do it.

Or in DA2, there's a quest that ends up tragically (you guys know which one) and continues over the course of two or three chapters (I forget) but in the first chapters, when you first get it, you can't continue investigating. I thought I was doing something wrong and continued running around, talking to everyone. You just drop it for a couple of years because hell, it's not like it's important huh?

 

[Xarathox]

Armor clipping in cut-scenes. Mass Effect two and three are some of the most recent ones from memory. If armor pieces constantly clip during normal character animations, then they're over designed from the start.

Also, Krogan's head-plate thingy always clipped through there stupid armor humps. Every .Goddamn. Time.

 

[Legion]

Skyrim - The peace council.

"Hey, there is an all powerful dragon that can't die, and if we don't find a way to defeat him the entire world will end."

Ulfric/Tulius: "Well I want the other side to hand over one of their cities to agree to this plan!"

Me (if only it let you): "Hey fuckwits, if you don't agree to the plan, there wont be any bloody cities for you to have anyway. Because the Godamn world will end."

It would have been okay, if the game didn't expect you to care about which city each army wanted. As it stands , it makes the Dragonborn look just as moronic as they are.

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

Oh! Well there you have it then. This is a very good reason why it doesn't pay to let yourself get worked up by these kinds of issues because it's always highly likely there was perfectly good explanation all along that that you just happened to miss.

Doesn't that mean that Andrew Ryan should have been resurrected as well though?

Wait....wouldn't that make there a possibility that Ryan himself would be revived? I never played BS2, so I wouldn't know, but I don't remember hearing anything about that.

A source of a lot of discussions by Bioshock fans all over. The most common argument for why he didn't is because he didn't want to be. Remember that he chose to let you kill him. He used the trigger words that made you do it.

Alternatively, perhaps he did get resurrected, but we just don't know it yet.

 

[Jubbert]

The new Tomb Raider game.

After about the 10th time that whatever Lara's standing on decides to go "fuck you" and collapse, setting in motion a series of events that serve NO purpose whatsoever other than to BEAT THE LIVING SHIT out of Ms. Croft, I kind of got to the point where I was going "wow, a whole ten minutes without me jumping at something and it collapsing!"

 

[bartholen_v1legacy]

Why can't Zeus and Poseidon and all the other gods just haul themselves out of the underworld after Kratos kills them? Why can a mortal man defy death but the bloody GODS can't?


Honestly though farfetched leaps of logic and ridiculous plot holes are present in so many of my favourite games that it seems pointless to complain about them, especially when none of them really affect my overall enjoyment. I'm fine with letting a game dictate it's own rules as far as reality goes.

Never let facts get in the way of a good story I suppose...

My guess is that when Kratos kills Hades the souls of the dead have nowhere to go anymore. They kinda get stuck in Limbo and just wander aimlessly around. In the final cutscene you can see all those white wisp-like things floating in the air. That's my theory anyway.

OT: The entirety of Prometheus. Suffice to say it has one of the worst and stupidest screenplays I've ever seen in a movie. I could list all the things that broke my suspension of disbelief, but this video does it far better.


The biggest deal breaker was the moment when the stupid, stupid scientist guy was MOPING after DISCOVERING ALIEN LIFE because "he wanted to talk to them". Jesus Christ!

 

[karma9308]

Another example would be Bioshock... Why aren't any of the NPCs or regular enemies resurrected by the Vita Chambers?

There's an audio log (that I guess you didn't find) where Dr. Suchong was talking about how IMPOSSIBLE it is to bring a man back from the dead but he still has to test it because it's his job and the log ends with Suchong saying that the Vita-Chambers will be tuned to Andrew Ryan's DNA for the testing.
The idea was that the character you played was Ryan's illegitimate son.

Oh! Well there you have it then. This is a very good reason why it dosen't pay to let yourself get worked up by these kinds of issues because it's always highly likely there was perfectly good explanation all along that that you just happened to miss.

Doesn't that mean that Andrew Ryan should have been resurrected as well though?

Oh, heh, I never thought of that, that's a good point.
The best I can think of is that Fontaine sabotaged the Vita-Chambers to bring JUST YOU back to life. He was trying to steal the city from Ryan and YOU were the instrument for doing so, after all.
Yeah, that doesn't sound THAT good but that's the best I got.

If I remember right, the Vita-Chambers were turned off before he died by Ryan or Fontaine. Why it didn't resurrect him after it turned back on though...

And then it did for hot on the heels of that disaster, you go straight to the final boss fight against the one and only, SAURON! Yes that Sauron, and not even in his big ass armored self, no they might have been able to twist that into some kind of insane moon troll logic. Your merry band of Jake-and-Jane nobodies (and I mean that, one guy is just some random ass soldier you just run into) fight Sauron, in the form of The Eye of Sauron, at the top of his big fuck off tower without so much as a hand wave explaining how you got there or why. I am 100% certain that was the very first time I stood up from a work of fiction and walked away because of how stupid it was. I still can't believe it happened after like 8 years.

Heh, I remember that. I thought I skipped a cutscene or something. I kept trying to replay that part seeing the cutscene that at least explained how the fuck that happened. I've always thought I wasn't doing something right.

 

[Zykon TheLich_v1legacy]

How people live in Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls, its just such a lethal place to live. Want to visit you family in the next village? No chance, you are going to be bitten by a vampire, half eaten by trolls and a necromancer is going to make off with your nekkid corpse (bandits took your clothes).

Well, to be fair, if you're some low level chump you'll somehow only get attacked by wolves, goblins and bandits, which is perfectly reasonable and not strange in any way whatsoever. (Going by Oblivion here, never played Skyrim)

So, on that note, the way enemies scaled to you in Oblivion. Suddenly every 2 bit bandit is rockin ebony armour and weapons and goblins are tougher than daedra.

Maybe if they'd put some story elements into it I could have ignored it, say the bandits were loosely organised rather than individual groups and had managed to hijack a shipment of armour & weapons or some other in world justification for it, IDK, being supplied by agents of the Mythic Dawn in order to cause trouble. Get sent on a quest to stop it and bandits lose their fancy equipment when they re spawn after being killed, something like that. Super goblins are utter bullshit to me though.