Who the hell thought THAT was a good idea?

[maninahat]

It's been mentioned, but almost every minigame hammered in to the Assassin's Creed seems to be purposely made as fiddly, pointless and unfun as possible. There was that stupid street/tower defense mode, which was somehow more fun than what they did for Assassin's Creed 3, which locked your home base construction to a horrible menu navigating game about trading. Assassin's Creed 4 had a fucking terrible game around trade routes, complete with shitty pirate ship sprites and progression based in real time (as in, you'd have to keep your PS3 on for 14 hours for one ship to complete a mission). Not one of these have been fun.

Basically the franchise is damned by awful feature creep, when really they should be trying to do is go in the opposite direction and strip out the extraneous, coupon gathering and icon clearing elements that only exist to pad out a thin experience.

 

[Hero of Lime]

The infamous ''skinship'' feature from Fire Emblem fates.

The gist of it is that the player character can call any unit to his room and pet them to raise their relationship. Its more then a bit creepy when quite a few of those characters are underage, some definitely not being any older then 12. It also makes your character look like quite the psychopath, calling his soldiers to his room one by one so he can touch them.

Do you know if you can still get support with characters through battle and other things? I have no interest in petting my soldiers either. Pokemon Amie makes sense, and it's really cute and silly. The Fire Emblem version is not. It's just too weird for me.

OT: Spoilers for Halo 5

Spoiler

So what happened to Hunt the Truth? Remember all those ads and TV spots that featured Master Chief and Locke killing each other? How about those commercials with Chief running through a collapsing city? None of those happen in the game, at all. Locke does track down Master Chief, but my the time they meet the second time, they have no conflict. All those promotional materials made the story appear to be something it definitely is not. Whose idea was it to have all those ads, when they probably knew the story was nothing like it?

 

[laggyteabag]

Dead Space 3:

Who thought that adding Co-op play

As shit as a lot of things in that game were I would happily stick up for the co-op gameplay. Now I'm probably in the minority there but I played it with a friend while we were both in contact over Skype and there was moments where my friend would be seeing shit that I couldn't because of that character he chose.

It was different enough that we played through it twice as each character just to see the differences.

Don't get me wrong, that was very cool, and a great design choice, but 9 times out of 10, the game just turned into this

Spoiler

OT: Dawn of War to Dawn of War 2. I loved Dawn of War. Sure, it was a bit clunky from time to time, especially when it comes to base building (the buildings were huge, and you often had very little space to build them), but Dawn of War to me was like a flawed gem, and the game had huge potential to go from good, to great.

When the sequel turned up, what did they do? Well, they scrapped the base building of course. Yeah, all of it. To me, base building is one of the biggest parts of an RTS, and scrapping it not only removes a large part of the gameplay experience, but it needlessly simplifies the game.

Then I thought, "Hey, Company of Heroes and Dawn of War are pretty much the same game, so hopefully Company of Heroes 2 will be what Dawn of War 2 should have been!", the answer: Nope, Dawn of War 2 all over again. C'mon Relic: Get Dawn of War 3 out of the door, and actually make it good this time, okay?

 

[lord canti]

Honestly, the parrying system in metal gear rising was horrible in my opinion.

 

[Myria]

The ending of the first Uncharted.

You thought you were playing a cover shooter with puzzle-platforming elements? Hah! Enjoy your out-of-left-field QTE ending against the world's most generic boss.

 

[tippy2k2]

Honestly, the parrying system in metal gear rising was horrible in my opinion.

I heard that! [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.854881-Gaming-Cardinal-Sins#21162426]

(Yes, this is basically the same exact thread I made last year. STOP JUDGING ME!!!!)

 

[JohnnyDelRay]

The ending of the first Uncharted.

You thought you were playing a cover shooter with puzzle-platforming elements? Hah! Enjoy your out-of-left-field QTE ending against the world's most generic boss.

Last hour or so of Uncharted 2 as well. Pretty crazy spectacle stuff that didn't really fit with the rest of the game in my opinion. But the rest of the game was GOTY material.

OT: Only one I can think of right now is Mass Effect 3. That SINGLE BUTTON for all kinds of actions was just ridiculous, made the game so wonky to control. Talk, dodge, roll, leap over shit, take cover, what a nightmare. Doesn't even make sense for console controls, there are more than two buttons you know!

 

[Sable Gear]

All of the voice direction in Other M. I know you guys all probably want to see that issue buried in concrete, but seriously. Admittedly the actors did a pretty good job with what they were given, but whoever was writing and directing that soap opera should also be buried along with the game.

Even if the writing was kept the same, removing all the actual voicing might have made it more bearable. I even tried to add a little culture to the experience because I know the Japanese VA and direction was actually pretty good, but the only language settings in the North American release were English and Spanish. =/

 

[F-I-D-O]

Honestly, the parrying system in metal gear rising was horrible in my opinion.

I heard that! [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.854881-Gaming-Cardinal-Sins#21162426]

(Yes, this is basically the same exact thread I made last year. STOP JUDGING ME!!!!)

Going to continue this trend. I liked most of MGR, but it's parry system was not a good replacement for a quality dodge. Offensive Defense does not count for shit. And I'm adding in the final boss's instant 180 turns here. Don't give the ability to jump over him if he'll just turn on a dime mid-charge and slam you for half health.

More MGS: In Phantom Pain,

Spoiler: Incredibly vague spoilers for TPP. Tells of an event without any specifics

there is a point where you have to navigate your entire base of soldiers to find specific traits to pass an event. This is a game where you can have tons of soldiers with relative ease (I had around 500 at the time). Going through that menu was already tedious, forcing me to do it made it so much worse.

Whoever decided to put a story in Pokemon X/Y was bonkers. I do not care about any NPCs in that game. You can characterize gym leaders/rivals, fine. But giving me a supporting class of idiots that constantly interrupt my adventure to do meaningless tasks frustrated me to no end. Actually put the system down and never came back to X after the damn fireworks. In daytime.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Jedi Outcast is one of my all-time favorite Star Wars games. It was the first title that I felt really NAILED lightsaber combat. Pair that with an arsenal of blasters and a slew of powerful Force abilities and it was clear; Kyle Katarn was the Star Wars equivalent of Chuck Norris. This was the man who almost single-handedly derailed the Dark Trooper project (before he became a Jedi, no less!) and stopped Jerec's bid at godhood, all while leaving a trail of mangled Stormtrooper corpses in his wake.

All of this begs the question; why the HELL did Ravensoft make an entire stage featuring a clunky stealth segment that discourages combat and boasts insta-kill fail states?!

Kyle uncharacteristically pussies out (says some nonsense about too many Stormtroopers or something...he's sliced through veritable armies of Reborn and Shadowtrooper Force users by this point) and spends the rest of the level trying to stay out of sight in a game using the clearly-not-designed-for-stealth Quake 3 engine. If you slip up JUST ONCE around an Imperial officer he'll sound the alarm, resulting in a cutscene depicting your capture, torture and death. Thankfully it's limited to just that one stage, but it was still one stage too many if you ask me.

OT: Spoilers for Halo 5

Spoiler

So what happened to Hunt the Truth? Remember all those ads and TV spots that featured Master Chief and Locke killing each other? How about those commercials with Chief running through a collapsing city? None of those happen in the game, at all. Locke does track down Master Chief, but my the time they meet the second time, they have no conflict. All those promotional materials made the story appear to be something it definitely is not. Whose idea was it to have all those ads, when they probably knew the story was nothing like it?

To be fair, the Halo franchise has a history of misleading marketing campaigns. From Halo 2's now infamous "smoke and mirrors" E3 demo to various live action trailers, commercials and dioramas, most of the scenes depicted are either missing entirely or drastically altered to the point that they're nearly unrecognizable.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

The QTEs in the otherwise quite nice PS2 Quantum of Solace game by Eurocom.

 

[Silverbeard]

I'm very much ashamed to admit this but I... bought Agarest: Generations of War during one of my weaker moments. I'd heard that it was a pretty decent JRPG and I was in the mood for just such a diversion at the time. The game's central gimmick: The story unfolds across several generations of the main characters' descendants and during each generation, he (for it is always a 'he') is charged with knobbing one of the female party members to produce progeny to continue the story for the next generation. How is his potential and always-fertile mate chosen? They literally line up and take turns asking a set of bizarrely specific and suggestive questions to decide who would be most qualified to lie with the bastard. The first time this occurred frightened me so thoroughly that I never opened up the game again. Steam refunds weren't a thing at this time but if they were, I would have moved heaven and earth to get Steam to refund the purchase just to remove the stain of that game from my account.

Although I suppose in this case I know exactly who the hell thought this would be a good idea...

 

[Hero of Lime]

To be fair, the Halo franchise has a history of misleading marketing campaigns. From Halo 2's now infamous "smoke and mirrors" E3 demo to various live action trailers, commercials and dioramas, most of the scenes depicted are either missing entirely or drastically altered to the point that they're nearly unrecognizable.

True, but at least those had some excuse. The Halo 2 demo was pretty early in development. They may have wanted to make it look like that, but realized they couldn't do so deeper into development. I suppose the diorama is a similar situation, but in Halo 3, the Covenant made it to Earth. A scenario similar to the diorama could have easily played out. It didn't really lie about what happened in the game overall.

The ad campaign for Halo 5 really gave off a specific perception of what the story would lead into, but it did nothing of the sort. Remember Master Chief rocking a sweet Destiny cosplay in a big desert? That never happened in-game either. Almost every look we got at Halo 5 was misleading.

Unless the hunt for the truth pertained to the real world. Perhaps our playing of Halo 5 was meant to uncover the true story of the game. That's so spooky, meta stuff right there.

 

[mrdude2010]

Pretty much any time you're forced to babysit an ally who is completely useless and can't take care of themselves. Seriously, escort quests are garbage. Especially on harder difficulties, where it's hard enough to stay alive by yourself, let alone keep other idiots alive.

 

[Something Amyss]

As well, it ruins an opportunity for a really interesting variation on the same idea. Instead of a pitched battle, you could have Templar teams mounting an operation, trying to discreetly sweep a district looking for an Assassin hideout, and you need to fight them with stealth. You send out your recruits to kill or mislead the various Templar agents before they can find your hideout or do harm to your civilian agents in the area. They've already built the open world, it can't be that hard to people it with NPCs with an agenda at the expense of cordoning off the rest of the city. It takes something that is weirdly out of place in both gameplay and tone, and turns it into something that rewards you for building up your recruits and learning the map (and in turn giving you bonuses for how many people you save).

This would have been a much cooler concept and I wish I was playing that instead.

Also from the same game (Revelations) came the Desmond Miles origin story. Putting aside actual story critiques, these side missions were a new, First-Person perspective. Like Mirror's Edge, and you would explore things and stuff.

In reality, you spam Tetris shapes to continue down linear paths. I got stuck a couple of times because I was expecting a puzzle and the real answer was "spam block."

The ending of the first Uncharted.

You thought you were playing a cover shooter with puzzle-platforming elements? Hah! Enjoy your out-of-left-field QTE ending against the world's most generic boss.

That reminds me of Drakengard's final ending. A rhythm game is your reward for slogging through weapons collection.

Yick.

Agarest: Generations of War

Sadly, I've seen not only the mechanic but the way it's done (albeit not identically, but close enough to creep me) in multiple games. I'll click on a description, read about it and NOPE.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

It's only involved in acquiring a particular cheat, but in Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64, in order to unlock the Invincibility cheat, you had to make a run through the Facility level within two minutes and five seconds on the 00 Agent difficulty (the hardest). However, there's one problem: One of the objectives you must complete is to collect a "door decoder" from a character named Dr. Doak, who can spawn in one of seven different locations in the level. Problem is, only three of those seven locations are close enough to the exit to allow you to finish the run in time- if he spawns in any of the other four, no matter how perfect your run is otherwise, you simply can't reach the exit within the time limit.

I can't tell you how frustrated I got when I was trying to unlock that cheat.

 

[Fijiman]

Well for Iron Brigade I have to question the decision to not allow money sharing nor the ability to sell your turrets. Seriously, I can't tell you how many times I've been stuck with a crap load of the games's in-level money that I can't use because everything near me is already fully upgraded and I'm too busy defending the objective to go to the other end of the map or how many times I've put the wrong turret down or in the wrong place.

 

[raeior]

Having just finished the Co-Op of Resident Evil 5: The QTEs. Basically there's no chance at all to get the QTEs right the first time because they are completely unpredictable in terms of timings and buttons to press. Then there is the final battle where one player has to hammer buttons for a minute or two and the boss battle will only progress when he does this fast enough. I guess this battle alone has destroyed countless controllers. From what I read this is pretty much impossible to do on a keyboard (luckily I didn't play the character that has to do this..)

 

[step1999]

Honestly, the parrying system in metal gear rising was horrible in my opinion.

IMO the parry wasn't the problem, it was the way it was explained. You have to flick the analog stick at the enemy at the same time as pressing light attack, but the game doesn't explain it properly, and gives you enough health packs that you can go a while without figuring it out. Once I did figure it out I didn't have any problems with it (well one: camera angle changes right as youre about to be hit making you parry in the wrong direction; those are infuriating). Why did you not like it?