Your Cardinal Sins of Gaming

[LetalisK]

Level Scaling
I don't want to be wandering around in the starting area of a game or randomly in the woods and be attacked by what should be a low level enemy but is as powerful as the elite enemies I had been fighting previously.

A couple of people have mentioned this, so I have a question. Is it still distasteful if the level scaling is done another way? For example, instead of that rat still being a competitive opponent 20 levels later, instead now you encounter a hellspawn bear that can shoot fire from its eyes. Or how about this model: the percentage chance to encounter something more difficult. So you'll still encounter level 1 rats the majority of the time regardless of your level, but as your level increases the chance of encountering X power level enemy increases as well. So that way you're still clearly dominating the area, but every once in awhile the game throws you a curve ball to make you sweat.

 

[Luminous_Umbra]

Well, if we're going to call them cardinal sins...

THOU SHALT NOT GIVE AI OPPONENTS ADVANTAGES THE PLAYER CANNOT OBTAIN EVER

For games where the AI uses the "same" resources as the player, fewer things are more infuriating than an AI that has some form of advantage that the player can't ever get. It's fine if it can be gotten at some point, even if it's really late, but make it obtainable somehow.


THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ALL BUT ONE AI OPPONENT GANG UP ON THE PLAYER SO THEY LOSE

I first encountered this while doing the contests in Pokemon Diamond, where all but one of the AIs would go out of their way to drag me down. They would do so even at the cost of their own place, so the last AI could easily win. Part of my dislike for this might be because I'm not a fan of this tactic in general.

THOU SHALT NOT HAVE RANDOM MULTIPLAYER WITHOUT PITTING ~EQUAL SKILL LEVELS AGAINST EACH OTHER.

This happens with other games, but I've recently found it when starting Splatoon. The game is great, but it gets a bit annoying going up against level 38 or 50s when you're level 5.

 

[Dalisclock]

THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ALL BUT ONE AI OPPONENT GANG UP ON THE PLAYER SO THEY LOSE

I first encountered this while doing the contests in Pokemon Diamond, where all but one of the AIs would go out of their way to drag me down. They would do so even at the cost of their own place, so the last AI could easily win. Part of my dislike for this might be because I'm not a fan of this tactic in general.

In the game Imperialism, you have to balance your infrastructure, trade and military, trying to keep all them as healthy as you can. However, if you let your military fall behind, at some point the AI will consider you to be a Pussy and that you need to die. You'll know this because no matter how your foreign relations are with everyone, you'll start a turn with the headlines " has declared war upon you!" for every other country still in the game.

Considering that you're in this position because your military fell behind the power curve, you might as well just reload or restart at that point.

I think what gets me about it is that it's not only unfair, but blatantly artificial.

 

[Bad Jim]

Lack of future-proofing
It's incredibly annoying trying to start up a game from my childhood and have it run worse on my current rig with ant sized text.

But there isn't really any way to future proof games that far ahead. In 1999 DirectX 7 was the latest thing. But now NVIDIA and ATI have dropped support for it. How was anyone to see that far ahead? Were you expecting the game to support DX11?

Note that if you are using Windows 8, you may find upgrading to Windows 10 fixes most old games that run really slow. You may alternatively find DdgVoodoo 2 useful. It's a wrapper for Glide and DX 1-7 that wraps to DX 11 http://www.dege.freeweb.hu/

You might also want to visit VOGONS http://www.vogons.org/

Now small text is a problem that was foreseeable, but with most games like that you don't really lose anything by lowering the resolution a bit. A late 90s 3D game still looks crap in 1080p, you may as well play in 800x600 so you can read the text.

 

[pookie101]

sewer and strip club levels.. enough already

mmo seepage into single player games, first game i noticed this really badly with was the war table missions in DAI.. please wait 20 real time hours for this mission to finish

escort missions in general but in particular where the NPC has a walking speed faster than your walking but slower than your running

 

[Ihateregistering1]

Shitty games pretending to "explore" some medical condition or other serious problem they know jack about
"This is a serious exploration of the life of a one-legged person. It is a platformer where you collect legs!" Fuck this.
You don't write this shit in big letters in the description. You don't cheapen other people problems in a clumsy attempt to gain some edgy popularity.
Do lots of research, give it a good though, come up with a relatable story, and pair it up with a compelling game. That's okay to do. But don't pretend you're "exploring" something. You're not a doctor and this isn't a scientific paper you're writing. It is a game. It is merely "inspired by". At best.

What game does this? I can only think of 'Depression Quest', and that was basically just a 'choose your own adventure' in videogame format.

 

[LetalisK]

mmo seepage into single player games, first game i noticed this really badly with was the war table missions in DAI.. please wait 20 real time hours for this mission to finish

The sad thing is it wasn't even effective. Alt+tab, change your clock the appropriate time, and voila! Mission completed.

 

[laggyteabag]

DLC vendors

Nothing breaks immersion for me like DLC vendors. Even little things like the small DLC option at the bottom of Dead Space 3's crafting station can ruin it for me. The worst one so far is the DLC vendor in the camp in Dragon Age Origins, because he tries to give you a quest, he tells you how cool it is, and then when you agree to it, it immediately brings up a purchase screen, telling you to shell out some cash.

Significant pre-order/special edition bonuses

Pre-order/special edition bonuses suck, and there is no way around it. It always does feel like something that should have been in the game has been stripped out and then sold back to you, but at least some are better than others. I don't mind cosmetic stuff, because at least then, I don't feel like I am losing out on playtime, but when stuff like characters and missions are sold back to you, I start to feel cheated. The worst offender, of course, is the Javik character from Mass Effect 3. For those of you who don't know, the Reapers come around every few million years, and wipe out the major civilisations, this guy is the last survivor from the civilisation before yours, and they stuck a huge pricetag on his head. Ridiculous.

 

[Luminous_Umbra]

THOU SHALT NOT HAVE ALL BUT ONE AI OPPONENT GANG UP ON THE PLAYER SO THEY LOSE

I first encountered this while doing the contests in Pokemon Diamond, where all but one of the AIs would go out of their way to drag me down. They would do so even at the cost of their own place, so the last AI could easily win. Part of my dislike for this might be because I'm not a fan of this tactic in general.

In the game Imperialism, you have to balance your infrastructure, trade and military, trying to keep all them as healthy as you can. However, if you let your military fall behind, at some point the AI will consider you to be a Pussy and that you need to die. You'll know this because no matter how your foreign relations are with everyone, you'll start a turn with the headlines " has declared war upon you!" for every other country still in the game.

Considering that you're in this position because your military fell behind the power curve, you might as well just reload or restart at that point.

I think what gets me about it is that it's not only unfair, but blatantly artificial.

Very true, but I more so meant in the "competition" type games. It's like if you were running a race and all but one person "tripped" and fell in front of you to get in your way.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Lack of future-proofing
It's incredibly annoying trying to start up a game from my childhood and have it run worse on my current rig with ant sized text.

How exactly do you think this would work? I don't know how old you are, but I started gaming in the mid-90's and there's absolutely no way that anyone at that time could have predicted the insane tech race that happened in the 20 years since. My first computer was a Pentium 166Mhz with 16mb of RAM and a MIDI sound card, the first graphics card my dad bought some years later was a 3dfx Voodoo with 4mb of RAM. To compare I am typing this on a two year old Core i7 quad-3.2ghz with 32gbs of RAM and a 3gb GTX 780. That means I have somewhere around 80 times the CPU processing capacity, 200(!) times the RAM memory and 750 times(!!) the graphical processing capacity that I had back in 1996. And that's even before we mention the insane increases to buzz and port speeds, the improved hardware architecture and a hundred other small things that no one in 1995 could even dream of.

Future proofing for anything but a few years into the future is hard, because it is hard to predict how technology will advance and at what rate. Locking the physics engine to the frame rate is a good way to conserve resources in a modern game, but it will also render the game unplayable if the standard for frame rates ever goes up, as an example.

 

[pookie101]

mmo seepage into single player games, first game i noticed this really badly with was the war table missions in DAI.. please wait 20 real time hours for this mission to finish

The sad thing is it wasn't even effective. Alt+tab, change your clock the appropriate time, and voila! Mission completed.

yeah thats what i ended up doing

 

[SecondPrize]

Hotbar Combat outside of MMOs
You don't play MMOs for the gameplay. You play them despite the mechanical gameplay. It's understandable that you have hotbar combat in an MMO because of the technical challenges required to get 1000s of people playing smoothly on the same server, it makes no sense to find it in DA:Inquisition. I want to cast a fireball like in Arx Fatalis, not press a button and watch my character cast a fireball, then wait for the cooldown again.

Adding health and damage as difficulty scaling
Just don't. You want difficulty scaling, look at Dark Souls self regulated difficulty. You level up yourself and your equipment to determine how hard that game is. It's your choice where you stop.

Selling content patches for your MMO
Go home, Zenimax Online Studios, you're drunk.

 

[SecondPrize]

what is happening? Double post

 

[Something Amyss]

So many. Here's the ones that came to my mind first, though they're not necessarily the worst.

Long loads directly into an action scene. Especially if you can readily fail it within a couple of seconds. Don't put it directly behind a three minute load screen and ask me to stare at the screen, unblinking until they thing finally pops up.

Unskippable/pausable cutscenes. This can be chained with the above, too.

Not explaining the rules: there's a difference between not holding me by the hand, and not explaining the basics of the game and making me have to look up an FAQ. Especially basic controls. I should not have to look up basic controls in a modern game. If bad game design or poor explanation is what it takes to make your game difficult, you probably suck at game design.

Escorts: Escort missions probably wouldn't suck so much if you didn't always get stuck with an AI that wasn't just suicidal, but proud of it. I'm not expecting them to be awesome warriors or even necessarily useful, just for them to not pick a fight with everything from dust mites to dragons. Or to charge into danger.

Non-configurable controls: there's no excuse for this one. Also, no reason to not let me pick whether my Y-axis is inverted on a game pad.

NO SUBTITLES. On top of playing games with the volume down, I have a partner who's hard of hearing and it impacts both of us. It's annoying as hell. Worse when the dialogue mix is bad.

Collectable busywork: Assassin's Creed has just gotten insane with this. There are hundreds of data fragments and chests in Syndicate which aren't even tied to achievements anymore. They do count toward's the game's completion percentage, but if I might say screw that....

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

When an NPC you have to follow somewhere is moving just fast enough that your walk speed can't keep up, but just slow enough that if you run you'll out pace them. DAMN IT DEVS JUST PICK ONE.

 

[Something Amyss]

A couple of people have mentioned this, so I have a question. Is it still distasteful if the level scaling is done another way? For example, instead of that rat still being a competitive opponent 20 levels later, instead now you encounter a hellspawn bear that can shoot fire from its eyes. Or how about this model: the percentage chance to encounter something more difficult. So you'll still encounter level 1 rats the majority of the time regardless of your level, but as your level increases the chance of encountering X power level enemy increases as well. So that way you're still clearly dominating the area, but every once in awhile the game throws you a curve ball to make you sweat.

It probably won't, though. Unless there's the risk of running into an enemy that's higher level than me in that mix. I'm torn on level scaling, though, so I'm probably not the target audience. Still, part of what people like about fixed levels is that sense of accomplishment you get when you go back to Starting Town and see how far you've come from struggling to beat those rats.

And tBH, I do kind of like the occasional curb stomp.

How exactly do you think this would work? I don't know how old you are, but I started gaming in the mid-90's and there's absolutely no way that anyone at that time could have predicted the insane tech race that happened in the 20 years since. My first computer was a Pentium 166Mhz with 16mb of RAM and a MIDI sound card, the first graphics card my dad bought some years later was a 3dfx Voodoo with 4mb of RAM. To compare I am typing this on a two year old Core i7 quad-3.2ghz with 32gbs of RAM and a 3gb GTX 780. That means I have somewhere around 80 times the CPU processing capacity, 200(!) times the RAM memory and 750 times(!!) the graphical processing capacity that I had back in 1996. And that's even before we mention the insane increases to buzz and port speeds, the improved hardware architecture and a hundred other small things that no one in 1995 could even dream of.

Future proofing for anything but a few years into the future is hard, because it is hard to predict how technology will advance and at what rate. Locking the physics engine to the frame rate is a good way to conserve resources in a modern game, but it will also render the game unplayable if the standard for frame rates ever goes up, as an example.

God, I think the first PC I gamed on was a 386. I'm just trying to imagine them successfully predicting the next 30 years when they designed that series. And even if they could, I'm not sure how they could reasonably program to factor in all those different things that hadn't been invented yet. Especially with the resources available at the time.

Well, unless we go this route:

Adding health and damage as difficulty scaling

Good god yes. The challenge should not be whether I can fight the guy that used to take ten seconds to beat for ten minutes without my finger slipping.

I mean, I don't mind if it ups health and damage a little, but when everyone becomes a bullet sponge (or arrow sponge, or whatever), yeah.

 

[Bad Jim]

When an NPC you have to follow somewhere is moving just fast enough that your walk speed can't keep up, but just slow enough that if you run you'll out pace them. DAMN IT DEVS JUST PICK ONE.

That shouldn't be an issue. If it gets on your nerves, the real problem is that you are spending too long just following/escorting an NPC without anything interesting happening. Either there should be lots of fighting on the way, or it should fade out and skip the journey entirely. Or have a cutscene if there is exposition.

 

[JUMBO PALACE]

When an NPC you have to follow somewhere is moving just fast enough that your walk speed can't keep up, but just slow enough that if you run you'll out pace them. DAMN IT DEVS JUST PICK ONE.

That shouldn't be an issue. If it gets on your nerves, the real problem is that you are spending too long just following/escorting an NPC without anything interesting happening. Either there should be lots of fighting on the way, or it should fade out and skip the journey entirely. Or have a cutscene if there is exposition.

Sorry if I'm way off base but the way this is worded makes it sound like I'm part of the problem in this situation. I'm sure you just meant the devs shouldn't make you follow anyone for that long though.