Board 8 > Let's discuss game design traits that we either LOVE or HATE

(+) Yeah! (+)

Please put the game you're referencing and describe what you love/hate about it.

I'll start.

Final Fantasy IX
Trance (HATE)

Why does this have to trigger as soon as you fill up the trance meter? So annoying.

flOw (VITA)
Gyro motion controls (HATE)

This game is probably fine on the PS3 with gyro motion controls. You tilt the controller to move your creature. However, when your controller also has the screen on it, it's really frustrating trying to look and tilt at the same time. Playing this on the VITA hurts your neck and gives you a headache. Whoever designed this port should've put in an option to move the controls to the stick.

Furi / EOE: Eve of Extinction
Boss rush mode (LOVE)

I love boss rush modes! They're really fun. If it's timed, it adds a bit of a competitive arcade feel to it cause you're really wanting that fastest time. It also let's you fight some of the most interesting fights in any game back to back to back. Boss fights are great. More games should have them.
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Dragon Quest 8 on PS2 had a super obscure feature where pressing the left control stick registered as an X input (confirm).

For a game where you're doing a lot of running around talking to people and opening doors/chests outside of battle, I actually used this a lot. You could play the game with your left hand while doing something else with your right (browsing the internet because DQ8 while great, is very slow). I haven't seen any other game do this.
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Hate: RPG's that feature instant death spells while also having a "party leader death=Game Over" mechanic.
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Love: Earthbound's Rolling HP meter.
- Hits could be much more devastating and lethal, and you'd need to act quickly to save everyone.

Hate: Slow Walk Areas (most recently seen in KotOR)
- There's an environment your character naturally shouldn't be able to traverse, but you can unequip everything and put on this environmental suit and slowly, slowly, slowly walk across a part of a map just to go an open a door.
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Love: Guest party members that are crazy overpowered
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Love: Quick Shot (Resident Evil 6)
RE6 may have it's flaws in many areas both as a horror/RE game and third-person shooter, but I've always loved this feature as it's fluid and helpful in a tight jam. Why it's still not in more TPS games is beyond me.
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Whatever game it was that inexplicably made you close the ds to solve a puzzle.

pyresword posted...

Hate: RPG's that feature instant death spells while also having a "party leader death=Game Over" mechanic.

Oof let's go over RPGs.

Hate: Grinding. Who thought this was fun? There is nothing fun about killing things over and over and over again for EXP points. It's repetitive and lazy. I don't care what I get after I level up. Don't make me grind. Give me enough content to where I can go do side quests or something to level up instead of running around the same area to kill random encounters.

Hate: Random Encounters. These can be done right, but they often aren't. An area that has one enemy who has a 10% chance of showing up but can fuck your shit up is poorly designed. An area that has 5 different enemy mobs in it, all of which have a different status effect that they can put on you and exploit heavily, is poorly designed.

Hate: Boss battles that have completely unpredictable death moves, practically forcing you to die and retry. Alternatively, boss battles where the boss only has one real weakness and it's trial-and-error to figure out what their weakness is. Or both of these things at the same time. FFX was a real big culprit of this. Zombie seemed to be the favorite/least favorite status ailment of a few of the final bosses, and they're really the only ones where you have to worry about zombie. You could either exploit zombie heavily yourself, or you'd have to be ready to defend against it, otherwise you get 1-shotted. If you aren't well equipped, guess you get fucked up, then you gotta backtrack to get some zombieproof equipment which won't be useful outside of those boss battles.

Hate: Too many status ailments / elemental types. Persona 5 did this. You have fire, ice, wind, electric, physical, gun, nuclear, psychic, light, dark, and almighty to attack with. Then for status ailments, you have burn, freeze, shock, dizzy, forget, confuse, sleep, fear, despair, rage, hunger, and brainwash. That's just too much. You aren't gonna have any really intuitive or meaningful use of all of those. It's just extra stuff to keep up with that doesn't really add anything good to the battle system.

Love: Final Fantasy's Active Time Battle system. Pretty good game design IMO. Retains a bit of turn-based combat, but also keeps the action moving. Forces you to make quicker decisions but also limits how much you can attack in a given time. Simple but effective, which is what I like.
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ATB has a major flaw in that it causes heavily cinematic moves to grind action to a halt and games haste/slow status effects.
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Love: Ar nosurge's Random Encounter Wave System.

I don't really know what else to call this so yeah. Basically, every area where random encounters exist there's a set number of them. Now, once you get into battle you're technically up against every encounter in that area. They come in waves. So, let's say there's 10 encounters in an area. You'll start battle against the first wave and if you defeat it the next one will come in. The way this works is there's a 10 turn limit to each battle and it alternates between player and enemy turn. Your team is split between a vanguard fighter and a caster. You choose a spell for the caster to use at the start and they charge it as the battle progresses while you control the vanguard fighter and fight more conventionally.

You can see the number and configuration of the later waves in a bar at the top of the screen. Now you can also order the caster to launch the spell at any time on your turn. Here's where it gets fun. As the caster's spell charges if it gets into overkill territory (and it will) you can see on that wave status bar just how much damage it'll do to the future waves. So after it's charged enough to deal with the wave you're fighting it'll start working on the next wave... and then the next... and the next... Charged enough/you do enough damage with the vanguard while that happens and you can defeat the entire area's encounters in a single battle. Spell charge goes down if you fail to defend the caster from incoming attacks and the battle also ends after the spell is fired off regardless of turn count. If there are waves remaining at the end of battle that persists. So if you only killed 6/10 waves in your first fight, there are 4 left in the area and you'll pick off from there in the next battle.

It's fun coming up with ways to clear the entire enemy group in one battle.

Hate: Gating content behind NG+ or otherwise limiting your options when the content is important.

This is a bit conditional because it can (rarely) be done well. Nier's NG+ is perhaps one of the biggest examples. But generally speaking it's annoying to me when important/good content is stuck behind stuff like NG+ because augh making you play it again just to see it?
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trdl23 posted...

ATB has a major flaw in that it causes heavily cinematic moves to grind action to a halt and games haste/slow status effects.

IMO that's the move animation at fault. Those kinds of moves slow the action down no matter what's going on. Before I realized that you could disable the long animations in the newer Pokemon games, I was always turned off to playing those because it just took too long to sit there and watch that.

Haste/slow status effects are typically fine as long as there are ways to heal yourself from having slow or for the enemy to debuff you from having haste, and vice versa. Like you shouldn't be able to just cast Haste on yourself and then be an unstoppable God who gets to attack twice as fast all the time. But that's not ATB's fault either. That's the game developer forgetting to implement balance to one of the status buffs/debuffs.
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HATE: Boss battles, particularly in the late game, that are designed around mechanics completely different from the battle system in the rest of the game. I'm mostly thinking of RPGs here, but I'm sure there's examples in plenty of genres. You spend all game becoming accustomed to and mastering the battle system only for the very end to turn everything on its head in an attempt to make it "epic."

KH1, as much as I love it, is one of the worst offenders of this. Fighting multiple Ansem forms while flying, despite having spent hardly any time flying in the entire rest of the game, is just so disappointing.
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NBIceman posted...

HATE: Boss battles, particularly in the late game, that are designed around mechanics completely different from the battle system in the rest of the game. I'm mostly thinking of RPGs here, but I'm sure there's examples in plenty of genres. You spend all game becoming accustomed to and mastering the battle system only for the very end to turn everything on its head in an attempt to make it "epic."

KH1, as much as I love it, is one of the worst offenders of this. Fighting multiple Ansem forms while flying, despite having spent hardly any time flying in the entire rest of the game, is just so disappointing.

Don't forget MGS2 with the sword
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HATE: Games that try to imply you, the player, are actually a bad person for scripted actions you have no choice over, particularly when they suggest that the 'correct' thing to do is to turn it off and stop playing. How about I save some money and don't start playing in the first place you pretentious hacks?
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BlackMageJawa posted...

HATE: Games that try to imply you, the player, are actually a bad person for scripted actions you have no choice over, particularly when they suggest that the 'correct' thing to do is to turn it off and stop playing. How about I save some money and don't start playing in the first place you pretentious hacks?

example?
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Solioxrz362 posted...

Don't forget MGS2 with the sword

You mean the best part of the game?
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Weakupedia posted...

Dragon Quest 8 on PS2 had a super obscure feature where pressing the left control stick registered as an X input (confirm).

For a game where you're doing a lot of running around talking to people and opening doors/chests outside of battle, I actually used this a lot. You could play the game with your left hand while doing something else with your right (browsing the internet because DQ8 while great, is very slow). I haven't seen any other game do this.

Bravely Default and Bravely Second have a similar thing - pressing right on the d-pad is A and pressing left is B. It's pretty great.

One thing I like a lot that I don't see very much is timed presses to increase attack or defense like in the Mario RPGs. Has there been a "serious" RPG that uses them?
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foolm0r0n posted...

Solioxrz362 posted...

Don't forget MGS2 with the sword

You mean the best part of the game?

I've never played through it all myself, so I wouldn't know! It does fit what he's talking about though.

Tbh Rising was pretty fuckin sweet so I'm sure the sword fight is awesome in MGS2
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Dragon Quest 8 on PS2 had a super obscure feature where pressing the left control stick registered as an X input (confirm).

Legend of Mana had this too, such that you could play most of the game one-handed if you needed to. It was awesome.
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Solioxrz362 posted...

BlackMageJawa posted...

HATE: Games that try to imply you, the player, are actually a bad person for scripted actions you have no choice over, particularly when they suggest that the 'correct' thing to do is to turn it off and stop playing. How about I save some money and don't start playing in the first place you pretentious hacks?

example?

Not sure how big of a deal it is since I haven't played, but Spec Ops The Line comes to mind immediately.
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Shonen_Bat posted...

Solioxrz362 posted...

BlackMageJawa posted...

HATE: Games that try to imply you, the player, are actually a bad person for scripted actions you have no choice over, particularly when they suggest that the 'correct' thing to do is to turn it off and stop playing. How about I save some money and don't start playing in the first place you pretentious hacks?

example?

Not sure how big of a deal it is since I haven't played, but Spec Ops The Line comes to mind immediately.

ehh I think that game doesn't try to say that you, the player, are a bad person.
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Love: Power Trips (Prototype 2)

Sometimes I want to feel like the underdog taking on a big, challenging world, but sometimes I want to just punch a helicopter out of the air. Give the player a ton of powers and a ton of strength and durability, to the point where it almost feels like you're playing on god mode. Not something every game should have, but when it works it's so much fun.

Hate: Procedural Generation (No Man's Sky)

When did this become such a mainstay in gaming? Was it Minecraft? I blame Minecraft. It's lazy game design presented as a feature. I'd much rather have a limited game world that's thoughtfully crafted than an infinite game world created by a random number generator. Now when I hear a game's maps are "procedurally generated" I just immediately know that the environments will be forgettable and repetitive.
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Solioxrz362 posted...

Shonen_Bat posted...

Solioxrz362 posted...

BlackMageJawa posted...

HATE: Games that try to imply you, the player, are actually a bad person for scripted actions you have no choice over, particularly when they suggest that the 'correct' thing to do is to turn it off and stop playing. How about I save some money and don't start playing in the first place you pretentious hacks?

example?

Not sure how big of a deal it is since I haven't played, but Spec Ops The Line comes to mind immediately.

ehh I think that game doesn't try to say that you, the player, are a bad person.

I think viewing the game that way is kind of missing the point

Spec Ops the Line in particular is a game that does try to make you feel like a bad person, but is not implying that you are. It's a pretty distinct difference. It manipulates your emotions in a way no other war game has really attempted to, specifically emphasizing the horror of war and the danger of blindly following orders.

tldr: it's not a bad thing for a game to have an emotional impact
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spot on johnny
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Spec Ops is the one game that I think pulled that off well. Mainly for the reasons in that spoiler box- it doesn't so much say you're a bad person, as invite you to think about the actual consequences of the sort of things you might unthinkingly do in other FPSs that present them as unironically heroic. It's not killing fake people that makes you a bad person, it's thinking that doing it in CoD makes you a badass that makes you a bad person.

I'll be honest, I'm now struggling to remember any particularly bad examples, because it mostly crops up in indie games- the sort of thing where they think a game can't just be fun, it has to be 'deep'. Like Braid not just being a cool platform game with time puzzles, it's a metaphor for obsession, and to prove it they make 100%ing it ridiculously impractical. I can see the point they're going for, but they set the puzzle, and it bugs me that they're implying the player has something wrong with them if they want to complete something they bought.
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Hate: Nioh's reused assets. Possibly also linked to Dragon Age 2, if I'm not mistaken. I've never played it so I wouldn't know, but I've heard it reuses assets a ton.

In Nioh, if you ever try to do all of the side missions, you'll notice that you have to fight a ton of the bosses a 2nd time (and for a few bosses, you'll have to fight them more than 3 times). The environments are reused too. Some side mission layouts are seen 3 or 4 times, and the main mission maps are reused for side missions as well. It's horrible and lazy game design. If you want that many side missions, consider making new bosses or new levels for those missions instead of putting the player through something they've already seen.
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Hate: Games that add a "new" or an exclamation point or something in the menu to show that you haven't looked at it yet (like Kingdom Hearts and the Setsuna games)

hey while we're on the subject

Love: Emotional Manipulation (Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line)

I was a gamer before Bioshock, but Bioshock is really what changed the way I viewed games because it's the first game to ever make me feel actual guilt for an action I made in the game (specifically, the first time I harvested a little sister which, through incredible atmosphere and sound design, made me feel so awful that I couldn't bring myself to do it for the rest of the game, despite the fact that doing so directly benefits you in the game). It wasn't something I thought games were capable of prior to that moment, and it creeps back up once in a great while, always leaving a long-lasting impact when it does.
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Hate: Force lose battles
Pointless. What's the point of a battle that's impossible to win? Just make a cutscene

Hate: When you wreck a boss and after the battle he's fine and destroys you anyway
Why did I even fight that battle? I accomplished nothing

Hate: Fake choices
"Will you do it?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"

Ok fine why did you even give me the option to say no >_>
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colliding posted...

Love: Games that add a "new" or an exclamation point or something in the menu to show that you haven't looked at it yet (like Kingdom Hearts and the Setsuna games)

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MZero11 posted...

Hate: Force lose battles
Pointless. What's the point of a battle that's impossible to win? Just make a cutscene

Hate: When you wreck a boss and after the battle he's fine and destroys you anyway
Why did I even fight that battle? I accomplished nothing

Hate: Fake choices
"Will you do it?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"
"No."
"Come on please?"

Ok fine why did you even give me the option to say no >_>

these are all good examples of things that are simply extraneous. However, I will argue that force lose battles can be used to good effect sometimes. They plant the image in your head that a certain enemy is way too powerful for you to beat, so when you do beat them later on, it's super awesome and you feel like you've really become stronger. It's more effective than a cutscene because in a force lose battle you actively take part in failing and you know that all of your best strategies simply aren't good enough.

They're totally awful sometimes but definitely usable.
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Love: boss fights where you are supposed to loose... but if for some reason you managed to win you get a prize and the cutscene changes a bit to show your prowess
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Love: Pretty much everything Solio hated

Hate: A fair amount of stuff Solio loved
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Life is Strange is an example that shits on the player directly, much moreso than Spec Ops

But that's a big LOVE: Narratives that are actually opinionated and can be disagreed with
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Hate: Achievements/Trophies that require you to be in the top xth percentile of an online leaderboard. Found in Killzone 2 and Elder Scrolls Online: Tamriel Unlimited

As a trophy hunter, this shit is stupid. Fuck this shit. I don't have the time or the will to try and beat people who probably do have the time to sit in front of their TV all day and play the same game.
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Oh man I am suddenly very very glad I never decided to try out Life is Strange.
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Hate: Doors that can't actually be opened and aren't just part of the backdrop. Example is Wolfenstein: The New Order.

There's a bunch of doors just laying around on the walls. Some are openable, some can only be opened from the other side, some are locked to imply that you have to find another way behind it but there is a room behind it, and some are just there for decoration. So... why are the decoration ones there? They serve no purpose and just waste my time having to get close to see if they're actually a door or just a part of the wall. Dumb.
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Ha Solio, you must really hate Silent Hill then lol.
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so I'm playing ys 8

it has the ability to let you customize the camera and lock on settings. like, you can choose to lock on only to enemies on screen, or also enemies off screen. you can separately adjust whether you want the lock on to prioritize nearby enemies or enemies in the center of the screen.

whoa
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Hate: Job or weapon 'system' that makes everyone the same very early in the game.
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Leafeon13N posted...

Whatever game it was that inexplicably made you close the ds to solve a puzzle.

Another Code: Two Memories/Trace Memory? Great use of the DS.

Hate: Games where completing it on higher difficulties does not unlock the rewards/achievements for completing them on the lower difficulties.
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Spec Ops: the Line White phosphorus onward
Braid Getting the eight stars
Undertale Genocide
LISA the Painful

I see how these would upset gamers, but also I think these moments skillfully make their points while positioning you as a bad guy due to obsession.
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Hate: spinning joysticks rapidly. Do games even do this anymore?
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Cybat posted...

Weakupedia posted...

Dragon Quest 8 on PS2 had a super obscure feature where pressing the left control stick registered as an X input (confirm).

For a game where you're doing a lot of running around talking to people and opening doors/chests outside of battle, I actually used this a lot. You could play the game with your left hand while doing something else with your right (browsing the internet because DQ8 while great, is very slow). I haven't seen any other game do this.

Bravely Default and Bravely Second have a similar thing - pressing right on the d-pad is A and pressing left is B. It's pretty great.

Are there any more? LoM was mentioned too
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HaRRicH posted...

Hate: spinning joysticks rapidly. Do games even do this anymore?

Pretty much hasn't been a thing since the first Mario Party having this caused people started tearing up their palms.
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HaRRicH posted...

Hate: spinning joysticks rapidly. Do games even do this anymore?

Oh god.

Adding to this. Hate: Button mashing.
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Love: God Mode Activated (almost every Metroid ever, Half-Life 2, etc.)

You know that moment in Metroid where you get the space jump and screw attack almost back to back, and every area that gave you trouble before is suddenly a breeze as you're wreaking havoc upon the world and one-hit killing everybody. Half-Life 2 might be my all-time favorite example of this with the powered-up gravity gun. So damn good.

And now that I typed all this out, I see Johnbobb already touched on it! But hey, those are some more examples of how to do it right.

Love: Collectibles that mean something (Donkey Kong Country 2)

DKC 2 and 3 are great examples of this, having these fun bonus room challenges where beating them nets you bonus coins, and collecting enough of those lets you play the Lost World. Now whenever I play a game and the collectibles don't net me anything meaningful, I can't help but be disappointed.

But you can definitely have too many collectibles, and locking the game's best content behind that can be a chore. So the newer DKC games still nail this perfectly, where only the Kong letters are needed to unlock the cool stuff and, since there are a ridiculous number of puzzle pieces, those only unlock artwork and music. Still great bonuses, but not as meaningful as new levels and therefore made more optional.
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Hate: Really low drop rates, unskippable/unpausable cutscenes, no subtitles
Love: 1v1 competition with players (if I know what I'm doing), intuitive but deep customization, weird funny character interactions
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I love it when games seem to have taken the time and paid enough attention to every possible outcome and have new dialogue or reactions after stuff happens

Undertale does this well but I was invested in the Mass Effect characters so much that when ME3 did this I greatly enjoyed it.

I also like it when games take the time to clearly establish relationships between your allies rather than just with you. And not just the odd scene but really throughout the team. Hence why ME3 really jives with me, though that's just an example and I'm not exactly the most seasoned RPG player.

Just great attention to detail in general really. I love to play a game and discover new things whenever I replay it. Not big things necessarily, just little quirks you didn't see before. My two favourite games do this really well.
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Snake5555555555 posted...

Ha Solio, you must really hate Silent Hill then lol.

It'd probably be annoying. But I don't hate Wolfenstein! In fact it's pretty fun, that door thing is just a small gripe.
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