Things you hate about the games you love…

[gh4chiefs]

This would be a general statement about the GTA series. Mission design is often very poor. They have you driving all over the map to do simple chores and it's just driving, there's no time limit, no chase involved, just driving to get from point A to point B for no other reason than to get from point A to point B when all they had to do was start the mission with a cutscene at point B in the first place.

A good example of this was in GTAIV with the mission "Four Leafed Clover" where you pickup the brothers to go rob the bank then you have to drive a LONG ways to the other island for the actual mission to start. I really don't understand why Rockstar does this.

 

[Orac Zen]

It is quite hilarious when at key moments in the game JC tries to act emotionally, including the "A BOMB!" moment.

He sounds really worried, doesn't he?

 

[Zulu Romeo]

It is quite hilarious when at key moments in the game JC tries to act emotionally, including the "A BOMB!" moment.

He sounds really worried, doesn't he?

Another moment is in one of the endings when JC shouts "WHO ARE YOU?" almost out of nowhere in the context of the conversation.

 

[clint g]

Persona 3- Not being to control every part member drives me mad

Halo, Halo2, Halo 3- Some of those single player maps were terrible, at times i felt completely confused on where to go and kept on getting turned around. Halo 1 was especially guilty of this

Xenosaga 2- I loved the story, I loved the look...but that gameplay. Christ was the game play terrible.

Final Fantasy X- It ended

Mass Effect- some of the side planets sucked. Okay, all of the side planets sucked....

Resident Evil 4/ Resident Evil 5-I miss the exploration and puzzle aspect

 

[Jax]

Frame Rate in Mass Effect which can get really dodgy at times though luckily its been fixed in the upcoming sequel.

 

[-Brett-]

Mass Effect: Squad AI. Sometimes it seems that every time I pull the trigger one of them jumps right in the way.

GTAIV: The last mission. The game tells you to mash a button to climb on the helicopter. You mash the button, but it seems to be completely random whether you climb on board or have to repeat the whole freakin' mission.

Kind of an older one, but Knights of the Old Republic: The dialogue system was so damn glitchy. Half the time the characters would end up talking to each others backs.

 

[OdoWanKenobi]

Final Fantasy X- It ended

Mass Effect- some of the side planets sucked. Okay, all of the side planets sucked....

Resident Evil 4/ Resident Evil 5-I miss the exploration and puzzle aspect

Agreed on all three of these. I still dream of a return to roots for Resident Evil, someday. I also hope that someone disabled the copy+paste function on Bioware's computers for Mass Effect 2.

 

[Yoda]

Halo, Halo2, Halo 3- Some of those single player maps were terrible, at times i felt completely confused on where to go and kept on getting turned around. Halo 1 was especially guilty of this

This is a good one. I remember playing those games co-op. There was at least one part where we weren't sure where to go, and everything looked the damned same. In the end we both needed to be close enough to an 'elevator' for it to actually come to life and look like something interactive. We spent like an hour running around trying to figure it out, and we were doing it separately to cover the ground quicker

 

[Bishbot]

The somewhat repetitive mission design in Far Cry 2, as well as the respawning guard posts.

I loved the shooting and driving mechanics but the way the game makes you fight the same enemies over and over again, and the fact that you have to fight games from the same side you're conducting missions for is very "gamey" and stupid.

Basically I love the game for what it almost was. A sequel that fixes it's many problems, and keeps the incredibly evocative setting, could be transcendent.

 

[dark angel_707]

Quick time events that are shoe horned into games - although I found them very easy mostly, its the fact they feel just shove into the game as the designers don't won't to think of new ideas or jumping onto the band wagon, Really enjoyed Uncharted but the QTE bits feel like they have been shoved in as quick reaction test during a cutscene. Some for heavenly sword during the boss fights (screw up the ones in HS and the boss gets some of his energy back and they are bit more difficult than usual)

 

[Zulu Romeo]

The X-Wing Collectors Series - nice gameplay and the graphical update was great for Windows 98 et al., but couldn't they have done something extra special with the cutscenes?

And please come up with a new version for Vista/7!

 

[Bluejay]

Mass Effect - rubberball Mako, recycling shouts of enemies, boring unexplored planets, squad getting stuck behind corners / boxes / getting in the way / firing unnecessarily.

 

[Manticore]

The Lord of the Rings Online

Radiance Gating.

Basically, raids have this thing called "Gloom" which gives you an enormous amount of "Dread". As your dread goes up, your maximum morale (hit points) goes down, and your skills lose effectiveness. When your dread is more than 4, you start cowering, which basically stuns you, every few seconds. Dread is incorporated into pretty much all of the instances, but in most cases can be averted through a number of means, typically balanced so that you have 3-4 after doing those means.

The thing is, Raids typically have, say, 160 gloom (10 gloom=1 dread), which is far more than the standard methods of removing dread can negate. So you have to get special gear from 6-man instances (and a few 3-mans) to to be able to get into a raid with one boss, the Vile Maw where you fight the Watcher. When you have the 6-man radiance gear and the two pieces from the Vile Maw, you have enough Radiance to get into the next tier raid, Dar Nargubad.

And it doesn't matter how good or bad the gear is, or how well it fits your build, you have to wear it to be at all effective in the raid. And while the first tier, from the initial 6-mans from Moria and the Vile Maw, is pretty damned awesome, most of the rest...isn't. They're sidegrades at best, with pretty crappy set bonuses.

All in all, it makes me pretty glad that I'm not a raider, but even I like to raid occasionally. But since it's a major PITA to even get the gear from the 6-mans so that I can get into the Vile Maw so that I can get into Dar Nargubad, I've just lost all will to try.

 

[Balthier the Great]

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (and Morrowind) for having a levelling system that actually rewards you for choosing Major Skills that you don't use all the time.

To elaborate for those who don't know what I'm on about:

You have two categories of skills - major and minor. Major skills start out at a basic value of 25% and minor skills at 5%. As you successfully use the skills, they improve. Improve any combination of your major skills by 10% and you go up a level.

Now here's the thing - you can improve minor skills by any amount without levelling up. Which means it's perfectly possible (though involves a lot of skill grinding) to improve, say, your skill in casting Destruction spells to 100% and still be a 1st level character. Since monsters increase in difficulty as you level, the game rewards keeping your level low whilst bumping your minor skills way higher than your major skills. Especially since some skills naturally improve a lot faster than others as you use them all the time (putting Athletics as a major skill means you'll level very quickly since it is used any time you run or swim!).

Halo 2 and 3: Vast improvements over Halo but why did they have to change the button for the fuel-rod cannon on the Banshee to the EJECT BUTTON?!! The former layout was so intuitive for me that even today I can accidentally kill myself by forgetting in a panic (they could at least have made it so you couldn't eject unless below a certain altitude...)

The biggest complaint I have with Obliv is the lack of boss-like battles. The Obliv gates don't feel very epic -- If you live to the top, all you do is grab a stone and go. I'd like to have to FIGHT for the stone, or kill the lord of the whosa whata.

I was somewhat annoyed by the VA -- they were obviously re-using voices. I get that having 50+ voice actors is probably out of the question, but I think they could have had the people they were using try to sound different for the characters they were using. I've run across about 10 townies who sound exactly like martin, and another 5 that sound exactly like Armond Christophe. At least change the delivery people.

 

[PKerr]

Also in some of these games they have different voice actors for different characters say the same exact thing? WTF?

 

[Manticore]

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (and Morrowind) for having a levelling system that actually rewards you for choosing Major Skills that you don't use all the time.

To elaborate for those who don't know what I'm on about:

You have two categories of skills - major and minor. Major skills start out at a basic value of 25% and minor skills at 5%. As you successfully use the skills, they improve. Improve any combination of your major skills by 10% and you go up a level.

Now here's the thing - you can improve minor skills by any amount without levelling up. Which means it's perfectly possible (though involves a lot of skill grinding) to improve, say, your skill in casting Destruction spells to 100% and still be a 1st level character. Since monsters increase in difficulty as you level, the game rewards keeping your level low whilst bumping your minor skills way higher than your major skills. Especially since some skills naturally improve a lot faster than others as you use them all the time (putting Athletics as a major skill means you'll level very quickly since it is used any time you run or swim!).

Halo 2 and 3: Vast improvements over Halo but why did they have to change the button for the fuel-rod cannon on the Banshee to the EJECT BUTTON?!! The former layout was so intuitive for me that even today I can accidentally kill myself by forgetting in a panic (they could at least have made it so you couldn't eject unless below a certain altitude...)

The biggest complaint I have with Obliv is the lack of boss-like battles. The Obliv gates don't feel very epic -- If you live to the top, all you do is grab a stone and go. I'd like to have to FIGHT for the stone, or kill the lord of the whosa whata.

I was somewhat annoyed by the VA -- they were obviously re-using voices. I get that having 50+ voice actors is probably out of the question, but I think they could have had the people they were using try to sound different for the characters they were using. I've run across about 10 townies who sound exactly like martin, and another 5 that sound exactly like Armond Christophe. At least change the delivery people.

Didn't Sean Bean only voice Martin? Jauffre though was sounded just like every other bloody Imperial, despite being second in plot importance only to Martin, IMO. >.< What I loved was the beggars who went from begging to haughty Imperial depending on what you asked them.

 

[Chimpy Chompy]

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (and Morrowind) for having a levelling system that actually rewards you for choosing Major Skills that you don't use all the time.

Actually what bugged me about Oblivion was the scaling of enemies to yourself, resulting in features like common bandits charging around in daedric armour. It almost seems like the aim was to keep the challenge of any particular location more or less uniform - go into some tomb and you'll have equal chances of doing it at level 5 (vs wimpy skeletons) or 20 (vs liches or something).

I get why they did it - in Morrowind you could become utterly unstoppable at higher levels without even trying. But I don't like how their implementation turned out.

 

[EnsignRicky]

I love adventure games.

I hate that they don't make many these days.

 

[Balthier the Great]

The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (and Morrowind) for having a levelling system that actually rewards you for choosing Major Skills that you don't use all the time.

To elaborate for those who don't know what I'm on about:

You have two categories of skills - major and minor. Major skills start out at a basic value of 25% and minor skills at 5%. As you successfully use the skills, they improve. Improve any combination of your major skills by 10% and you go up a level.

Now here's the thing - you can improve minor skills by any amount without levelling up. Which means it's perfectly possible (though involves a lot of skill grinding) to improve, say, your skill in casting Destruction spells to 100% and still be a 1st level character. Since monsters increase in difficulty as you level, the game rewards keeping your level low whilst bumping your minor skills way higher than your major skills. Especially since some skills naturally improve a lot faster than others as you use them all the time (putting Athletics as a major skill means you'll level very quickly since it is used any time you run or swim!).

Halo 2 and 3: Vast improvements over Halo but why did they have to change the button for the fuel-rod cannon on the Banshee to the EJECT BUTTON?!! The former layout was so intuitive for me that even today I can accidentally kill myself by forgetting in a panic (they could at least have made it so you couldn't eject unless below a certain altitude...)

The biggest complaint I have with Obliv is the lack of boss-like battles. The Obliv gates don't feel very epic -- If you live to the top, all you do is grab a stone and go. I'd like to have to FIGHT for the stone, or kill the lord of the whosa whata.

I was somewhat annoyed by the VA -- they were obviously re-using voices. I get that having 50+ voice actors is probably out of the question, but I think they could have had the people they were using try to sound different for the characters they were using. I've run across about 10 townies who sound exactly like martin, and another 5 that sound exactly like Armond Christophe. At least change the delivery people.

Didn't Sean Bean only voice Martin? Jauffre though was sounded just like every other bloody Imperial, despite being second in plot importance only to Martin, IMO. >.< What I loved was the beggars who went from begging to haughty Imperial depending on what you asked them.

Full confession -- I didn't read the fucking credits. But the voices do sound samey, and at times it gets ... distracting.

 

[Subspace]

How Crystal Dynamics Took over Development of the Tomb Raider Franchise, The games have never been as good since .