Least favourite gaming conventions

johnny_ultimate

There are loads of annoying little conventions endless games seem to adapt. For example:

Boss rushes: a cheap way to add some challenge and longevity to games. May work well in some cases, but other times its just annoying fighting bosses you've defeated before, one after the other.

Timed levels: In classic games like Mario,this actually provided a true challenge. But sometimes it is just a massive irritation. How many times has a game demanded you get to a door quickly after pressing a switch? Annoying! Although it is far worse when the developers add a ticking clock sound effect!

Any others that spring to mind?

Royale with Cheese

Doing menial tasks to create in game currency to buy things that you need to progress. I know it's a problem in WoW etc. but I don't really play those type of games.

Racing games where you buy your own cars, end up doing the same race over and over again to make money to buy some stupidly expensive car.

RedXIV

Re-using Dungeons, that pisssed me off horribly in Zelda on the DS, going back to the same dungeon once i could handle, but after that it was a pain!

L31mr0d

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

Boss rushes: a cheap way to add some challenge and longevity to games. May work well in some cases, but other times its just annoying fighting bosses you've defeated before, one after the other.

god I can't stand that... the worst was Lost Planet: Extreme Condition where the last few levels are filled with level bosses from previous levels, but instead of fighting them one by one like previously you know are fighting them all at the same time.

savemejebus

Enemies respawning each time you enter a room regardless of how many times you've cleared it. In Ninja Gaiden this turned an excellent game into a boring slog.

kaimera

stupid spawn trigger points {I'm looking at you cod4}

JCDenton

Not necessarily a convention per se, but…

“Invisible Walls”.

I understand that game levels have to have limitations to how far you can see “behind the scenes”, etc. but come on; try to be a bit more clever about it!

Retr0gamer

Random battles have no place in videogames since Chrono Trigger.

Maximilian

Graphics. Takes all the imagination out of it.

Creamy Goodness

stupid loading screens and installs, ala GT5:Prologue and mgs4, i mean fair enough you've got to install a lot of stuff for mgs4 but do it once and get it over with, not at the start of every act .

check point save systems - just completely pointless.

stupid advertising, "In game X you can do EVERYTHING", can i hump a wheelie bin on the side of the street? no.

rizzla

Quicktime events. It really annoyed me in Resi 4.

Ross_Mahon

Collectables in the game, to make it last longer? Running around the whole of liberty city to find packages is not fun!

Shryke

Irritatingly placed mini-games.

Backtracking.

The irritating giant maze that you eventually wander through unscathed after a billion battles/encounters. You're completely out of steam and demotivated. You just want to turn the ****ing thing off but you're so close to the end you can feel it.

Crap story with obvious 'OMG!!!!! BITRAYLLL!!1!' from the mentor/captain/generic immovable object of a person.

How short games have become.

Every shooter just trying to be Halo.

The retard proof tutorial that takes a damn hour. There aren't that many buttons ffs...

Hype. Everything is hyped. Hype that makes permeable condoms sound like a fantastic idea.

Everything is made too easy. There is no difficulty. Or if there is it's not because of any kind of challenge. It's just the game being badly designed and lopsided.

K.O.Kiki

Seconded on 1hr unskippable tutorials, which could be done away with if they hired DECENT MANUAL WRITERS & ARTISTS. Oh how I long for the days of the SNES...

Also double-jumping: what's up with that? I can take air-jumping (multiple air jumps in any direction), hover-jumps, rocket boosters, but double-jumps?
No.

Also, generic space marines. oTL

Gunmonkey

Escort missions where the NPC has the intelligence of a 3-wheeled shopping trolley full of dyslexic penguins.

Un-skippable cinematics before a boss which repeat every time you die :mad:

pixelburp

It's not something I hate, but I laugh at it EVERY time it happens

So you're fighting through a level, barely surviving as you feverishly watch the ammo counter. 3 clips left. Two. One. Crap!
Yes! You get your way through the obligatory sniper / sewer level. Suddenly you come into a room that is stuffed with ammo. Ah, that can only mean one thing.

BOSS FIGHT.

DarkJager

pixelburp wrote: »

It's not something I hate, but I laugh at it EVERY time it happens

So you're fighting through a level, barely surviving as you feverishly watch the ammo counter. 3 clips left. Two. One. Crap!
Yes! You get your way through the obligatory sniper / sewer level. Suddenly you come into a room that is stuffed with ammo. Ah, that can only mean one thing.

BOSS FIGHT.

Or even better, as Halo 3 did, force you through a level with sections full of enemies. You get to the last section, completely out of ammo and know you're only a bit away from a checkpoint when suddenly your confronted by another 15 + enemies.If anybody played that "flood" level, you'll know what i mean .

savemejebus

Actually, can "the flood" count as a least favourite gaming convention. cos they ruined 3 perfectly servicable FPS's

MOH

- Invisible walls
- Respawning enemies
- Unskippable cutscenes
- Putting the quicksave key beside the quickload key
- Rubbish camera angles
- Not being able to jump in an FPS - managed to get stuck in Mass Effect on the prologue level on a ledge that was about a centimetre below the surrounding terrain, ended up having to go back to my last save.

pixelburp

I know it has already been mentioned, but surely to God the winner has to be those god-damned Escort missions.

Errrrrrrrrrrrgh.

Stephen

^^^ That applies as equally to today's FPS games as it did to the X-Wing/TIE Fighter type games back in the day.

"protect the big useless and utterly defenceless ship against 400 incoming enemies. The other fighters in your squadron will be piloted by blind squirrels just to make this experience even more infuriating"

pixelburp

Stephen wrote: »

^^^ That applies as equally to today's FPS games as it did to the X-Wing/TIE Fighter type games back in the day.

"protect the big useless and utterly defenceless ship against 400 incoming enemies. The other fighters in your squadron will be piloted by blind squirrels just to make this experience even more infuriating"

It's funny, because by and large they are universally despised by gamers & yet they constantly turn up in titles, even hyped-up AAA ones like GTAIV or Assassins Creed.

Bubs101

Gunmonkey wrote: »

Un-skippable cinematics before a boss which repeat every time you die :mad:

+ ****ing one. Mass effect was a big offender in this category.

One thing I also despise is when, for the purpose of the storyline in the game, right after you finish and occasionally ball breakingly difficult mission, you get a cut scene showing you getting captured and losing all of your weapons or what not

Retr0gamer

pixelburp wrote: »

I know it has already been mentioned, but surely to God the winner has to be those god-damned Escort missions.

Errrrrrrrrrrrgh.

+1. I remember having to give up on Tie Fighter during a particularly nasty level were you had to escort the emperors defenseless shuttle and a frigate at the same time, each going in opposite directions. No matter where you concentrated your defence at the other escort vehicle would get shot to bits. Pain in the arse because the game was amazing up until then.

quad_red

Crap NPC A.I has to rank up there.

Maximilian

rizzla wrote: »

Quicktime events. It really annoyed me in Resi 4.

The ones in Jericho were the worst. Utter fail. What's worse if you re-mapped your keys away from WSAD to the Numeric keypad, the Quicktime events would recognize inputs from all the newly mapped keys...eh..except the left key.

Cue 20+ attempts over a few days at the same damn scene failing all the time. BUT I HIT LEFT!! I think that side of the keyboard no longer functions correctly. I'd check but it brings back those memories. I quit playing after that.

johnny_ultimate

pixelburp wrote: »

I know it has already been mentioned, but surely to God the winner has to be those god-damned Escort missions.

Yup evil, evil gameplay trick. I hate it when you see your escorts energy bar fading away, and the inevitable greater amount of enemies that show up as the mission progresses. I think Resi 4 handled it well though - still a bit annoying, but the sequence where you have to protect Ashley is pretty tense.

Maximilian wrote: »

The ones in Jericho were the worst. Utter fail. What's worse if you re-mapped your keys away from WSAD to the Numeric keypad, the Quicktime events would recognize inputs from all the newly mapped keys...eh..except the left key.

Cue 20+ attempts over a few days at the same damn scene failing all the time. BUT I HIT LEFT!! I think that side of the keyboard no longer functions correctly. I'd check but it brings back those memories. I quit playing after that.

The worst are the ones that have no connection to the game. Try the Bourne Conspiracy demo - dreadful QTE, completely breaks the immersion. Spiderman 3 was also awful for it, but God of War handled it well enough, even if it is still a very cheap mechanic.

L31mr0d

pixelburp wrote: »

It's not something I hate, but I laugh at it EVERY time it happens

So you're fighting through a level, barely surviving as you feverishly watch the ammo counter. 3 clips left. Two. One. Crap!
Yes! You get your way through the obligatory sniper / sewer level. Suddenly you come into a room that is stuffed with ammo. Ah, that can only mean one thing.

BOSS FIGHT.

lol, so true. I'll be playing a game with the missus beside me and i'll walk into a room full of weapons and go "Ah CRAP!!!" she'll look at me puzzled and go "I thought getting a load of weapons would be a good thing?"

Also, Maximilian, I know your pain. The first cutscene that you get to where you fall down some hole, I was at that for maybe an hour trying to figure out why I couldn't get it. What I had to do was instantly pause the game when a cutscene started and remap my keys to WASD to get past it... EPIC FAIL!!!

Sometimes a game can get the cutscenes right though, like God of War, but Spiderman 3 really was awful. For the final boss I literally had to take out a pen and paper and write down the button combination after numerous failed attempts to hit the button the split second it flashed on the screen.

humanji

To be honest, I'd forgive Spiderman 3 for those moments, because of the hilarious animations when you hit the wrong button. Kept me laughing through my anger.

silvine

Games that try to makes things harder by either spreading out the checkpoints or taking them away altogether.It's just annoying replaying ten or fifteen minutes of gameplay just to attempt a tricky jump, get past a souped up enemey or make a tricky manoeuvre.

I'm looking at you GTA, Halo and Rainbow 6.

L31mr0d

character models: game developers that think it is ok to create 4 types of baddies and just reuse them over and over again throughout the game

Also games that use the tactic of instead of making the baddies get progressively more difficult they just simple make you fight more and more of them

wooden doors that have ronseals 5 year explosive proof varnish on them. If my bullets can knock chunks off concrete pillars I should be able to drop a grenade beside a flimsy door and blow it off its hindges rather than having to scout around dead bodies and peoples desks looking for that red/yellow/green/blue key/keycard

Retr0gamer

Boss fights in FPS games. Unless you are Retro Studios doing a Metroid Prime game they just don't work so don't bother. Also they never fit into the usual settings of the games they are usually shoe horned into.

Rascaduanok

Well! You folk seem to have mentioned most of the ones I dislike. I’ll add what people generally refer to as ‘Fed–Ex Quests’! A seeming staple of RPGs, you have to fetch and carry all sorts of mundane and trivial crap for lazy–arsed sods (who can’t do anything for themselves) in order to advance the plot, or fulfil some side mission.

AlmightyCushion

You're part of a massive group of elite marines who are armed to the teeth with massive weapons. All of a sudden something happens down that dark corridor and one of the marines turns to you and says "You go check that out and we'll wait here and secure the entrance".

They never fúcking come, they always stay behind. Fúckin' pussies.

uberpixie

L31mr0d wrote: »

wooden doors that have ronseals 5 year explosive proof varnish on them. If my bullets can knock chunks off concrete pillars I should be able to drop a grenade beside a flimsy door and blow it off its hindges rather than having to scout around dead bodies and peoples desks looking for that red/yellow/green/blue key/keycard

Funnily enough, Crusader:no remorse, a game well over 10 years old, would allow you to blow open any door with a grenade launcher, bar extremely heavy blast doors, granted it set off an alarm, but it did cut down on looking for poxy key cards at times.

That game also had destructible glass amongst other things AND remote control spider bombs, you could set people on fire and shoot civillians.

Things many more modern games released afterwards lacked....:rolleyes:
Hell it even had dacent cut scenes that didn't drag on for half an hour and a dacent enough trashy sci/fi story going.

What really annoys me in games, PC games in particular: sloppy,over complicated controls.
You should not have to dislocate the fingers on one hand to climb over a box. Resi 4 got it right, a context sensitive button. Granted very simple, but bloody effective.

Hop over fence:green button
Knock ladder over while zombie climbing up: green button.
Open door:green button.
Kick door open, hitting zombie on the otherside in the face:double tap green button....



Hidden and Dangerous games. Worst set of controls ever, hard to climb a ladder. hard to pick up weapons etc.
Operation flashpoint,while a good game was a pain in the ring as well. Controls could have been much simplier.
Why do developers insist on making basic in game actions hard to do?

Hopping a wall, picking up things off the ground, climbing etc should all be instinctive.

TBH, Assassins creed, while a horribly repetitive game, the controls were spot on. Easy to climb, easy to ride a horse, easy to stab people in the face etc...

Which reminds me...
How come most games that feature horse riding in them(oblivion and two worlds i am looking at you), do such a terrible bad job of it?
Assassins creed got it right, Zelda got it right.
Trying to turn your horse shouldn't feel slower than try to turn a river barge! (Two worlds)
And really how come most games won't let you have a spear on horse back, hell oblivion wouldn't let you attack from the saddle, you had to get off your horse!

If you are on horse back you should be able to trample people, run them through with a big FOAD Spear. You can always counter act the advantages of horses by doing what assassins creed did: in group combat, some sneaky gurad would come up behind you and hamstring the horse knocking you off if you stopped moving and were surrounded.

Why bother including horses in a game if you just won't do it right?

humanji

Speaking of horses, I can't stand the way in MMO's that you have to be level 40 upwards to ride a horse. Why can't you just ride a horse from the start and with practice you get better and unlock skills (ie being able to attack from the horse, or jump, or ride faster)?

humanji

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

You're part of a massive group of elite marines who are armed to the teeth with massive weapons. All of a sudden something happens down that dark corridor and one of the marines turns to you and says "You go check that out and we'll wait here and secure the entrance".

They never fúcking come, they always stay behind. Fúckin' pussies.

It's called "Hazing the new guy".