Great games, unwelcome legacies

5uspect wrote: »

Here's a more controversial one. Boss battles. So many recent otherwise solid games have had piss poor boss battles for the sole reason that games apparently need boss battles. Deus Ex:HR, Arkham Asylum immediately spring to mind.

I don't mind certain boss battles. They can be good when done well and the break up the repetition of beating up the same goons over and over again. I didn't mind the idea of the boss battles in Batman AA, they were just unimaginative. However I hate them in games that don't need them. The boss at the end of the uncharted games is a prime example of a game that would have done well without it.

Reekwind wrote: »

Try Bioshock Infinite. They're also horrendously overused in most RPGs - I'm convinced that a leading cause of death for adventurers is their need to stop and document every last development in scattered journals, all so that later parties (ie you) can stumble across them and put their ramblings to use in opening some chest/door/portal.

I agree completely. In Bioshock infinite they are particularly irritating, since thanks to the poor controls, every now and then you accidentally hit the button that replays the last audiolog. The logs just feel like a cheap way to add immersion, I don't think they work at all.

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Call of Duty 4 and online leveling: I'm not sure if CoD4 was the first FPS to have an 'RPG' type system for online, but it certainly perfected and popularised the idea: adding a vast metagame to make all those online hours feel a little bit more focused. Alas, now it has become almost standard, and rare is the game that allows you to drop in for a quick match without being bombarded by a persistent leveling system, perks and unlocks. It's almost as if casual play is punished!

Battlefield 2 had it 1st in the sense you unlocked weapons, which I like in fairness. It rewards you for playing and I like guns.

Character development in racing games. Just let me drive the cars I want, on the tracks I feckin paid for


I think it was Codemasters 'Race Driver' that introduced this. Before Race Driver, we had the TOCA touring car series where you picked a team and an event and tried to do as well as you could.

Then the TOCA brand was retired and replaced with 'Race Driver' where you had to pretend to be a young race driver building a career and reputation with other characters like your manager and rival drivers.

In the first game it wasn't too intrusive (I usually skipped the cut scenes) but lately it's gotten ridiculous. Entire classes and events are locked out until your driver gets enough career points to unlock them. Bullsh1t. Don't force me to grind through modes that I don't have any interest in just to unlock the features that I bought the game for.

Dirt 3 is rubbish because of this. I want to do a rally season but I can't because the game is structured around the career of the driver and I couldn't be arsed doing all the rallycross games and skid pans and stunt 'gymkhana' rubbish to get enough points to unlock tracks and cars for normal rally events.

Whoever thought of spawn triggers - where enemies keep spawning infinitely until you run past an invisible point.

I remember a particularly bad on in the Original Black Ops - just before frank woods gets blown up with a grenade, that base had a long section before you passed the spawn trigger, I was fit to put the controller through the screen doing it.

Mickeroo wrote: »

Dark Souls fleshes out it's universe by an "info bomb text dump" too but it puts it in the item descriptions instead. I guess it gets away with it by having a more interesting back story.

It does well though by showing them during loading screens as well. Means you continuously get exposed to tidbits that encourage you to dig a little deeper yourself.

gugleguy wrote: »

The case with Shenmue is a prime example of the game creator putting all their eggs in one basket. Shenmue 2 cost 600 million to make. Sega has'nt made a successor of the Dreamcast. In any case if Rhyo haszuki were a real person I would'nt have that much sympathy for him. Actually, he ended up being used in a motorcycle racing game alongside sonic the hedgehog as a racing opponent that Sega later brought out, so he got his just deserts anyway.

The Shenmue games cost a hell of a lot less than $600m to make. They were budgeted as a series and it was $70m for the lot. It's still far outside what it could have done on the DC but $600m in utterly insane, no movie or game has ever even cost half that.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Whatever game popularised codex for telling it's backstory. I'm going to name check Mass Effect here but it was probably something before that. I enjoyed Mass Effect but my god the codex were a load of old arse. All that nonsense was not needed. The world wasn't that complex that they couldn't tell the important stuff in game. The universe wasn't that interesting, it just being a sci-fi reskin of the fantasy genre mono myth. I'm seeing it in lots of games now and it's not welcome in any of them. If you need to flesh out your universe with a info bomb text dump encyclopedia then you are just a **** writer.

I noticed this today when playing Assassin's Creed 4. The amount of encyclopedic crap in the game is utterly unbearable. It goes on with walls of text for every minor character who pops in and out of the game and it's just completely unnecessary. On the one hand it seems like it's a lot of work putting in all this effort for something practically nobody cares about, on the other, it seems very lazy to just dump all this text onto the disc instead of trying to convey stuff about the character through dialogue or interactions.

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Sometimes there's a game that does something fresh and innovative, and earns both critical and player acclaim as a result. It adds something new to an existing formula, or hits on a new one entirely, and feels like a breath of fresh air. However, a few years later, that very same innovation becomes a cliche or trope as other games copy and abuse what was once an excellent idea

Maybe I'm just being cynical but I do sort of notice that the video game industry tends towards this stuff. Someone will have a good new idea that works well and 5 others will point at it and instead of saying "that was a nice original idea that livened up that game, I wonder what ideas we could come up with?" they say "that was a nice original idea that livened up that game, let's just do that again". The community aren't much better though, people tend to say "you guys made a great game, give me more of it in the form of a sequel" instead of "you guys made a great game, what else can you come up with?".

RopeDrink wrote: »

Games like RE4,5,6 tend to get unjustly panned for over-use of QTE.

I don't think anyone was criticising RE4 for abusing QTEs, just pointing out that it really helped to popularise them amongst lesser games.

janefisher wrote: »

Assassins Creed black flag has alot of pointless collectables that could easily have not been put in the game

+1. Not sure where it started but Ubi have made a horrible habit of just littering their overworld maps with crap that does nothing but gets in the way. Whether it's feathers or flags or "memory shards" or "almanac pages" or whatever, it's just annoying and takes more away than it contributes.

C14N wrote: »

Also, I'd like to bring up COD4 again. It was a good game, but unfortunately it's overwhelming success seemed to kind of doom us to several years of almost every big game copying stuff from COD4. Everyone needed regenerating health, every game needed multiplayer, generic "modern" shooters with red dot scopes were suddenly being made by the bucketload and even Activision just had to go and re-make the game over and over again while taking zero chances with the series.

Every game before that was a WW2 shooter, its just the way of the industry to copy what makes money. Remember all the Extreme sports games on the back of tony hawk? or all the music games after guitar hero? you can go all the way back to when everything was either a side scrolling shooter or platformer as well.