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[Sonlirain]

No animals allowed.

Strange how the isles in Just Cause 1-2 and the cities in all GTA games have NO animals what so ever only plain old humans and birds.

Never finished content that appears to be in the game

I'm looking at Two Worlds 2 now.
It's pretty fun game both single and multiplayed BUT...
The (by far) largest continent in the game is mostly inaccesible.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The blue areas are reserved for multiplayer the red areas are accesible in SP and the rest... instantly teleports you away

You can travel along the shoreline in your boat and find out that most of it is walled off by a steep cliff but there are numerous signs that the continent was "in progress" like a temple or complete village (without NPCs) with a road leading inland... and blocked by a steep cliff.
Hell there are even some mobs you can only find there in single player like wolves and bears.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

No animals allowed.

Strange how the isles in Just Cause 1-2 and the cities in all GTA games have NO animals what so ever only plain old humans and birds.

The main reason for that is usually cost versus gain. Trying to populated a massive world like JC2 with animals that look and act intelligently is both costly to produce and costly on processing due to things such as pathing and rendering. When you compare that cost to what gameplay or immersive gain you'll get for including the animals it's generally not all that worth it.

There's also a particularly strange demographic of people who believe that violence against virtual animals is completely amoral and unforgivable while completely ignoring depictions of violence against humans. They happen to be a very vocale demographic.
There have been many people/companies who have received very real death threats for this. An example would be the threats sent when players posted up videos, screenshots and stories of "torturing" "Norms" from the "Creatures" series of video games in various online communities.

[nenjin]

There's also diminishing returns on putting that much non-essential stuff in game. What's more important to immersion, dogs and cats or trash floating in the wind and street signs?

[Mephisto]

There's also the fact that people are just fine with blasting away other people, but they'll flip their shit as soon as you give anyone the option of shooting a cute fuzzy.

I'm surprised Far Cry 3 got away with it.

Super late ninja? I managed to not realize until hours later that Catastrophic lolcats said basically the same thing.

[Krevsin]

There's also the fact that people are just fine with blasting away other people, but they'll flip their shit as soon as you give anyone the option of shooting a cute fuzzy.

I'm surprised Far Cry 3 got away with it.

That's because the cute fuzzy was trying to murder you and devour your flesh.

[WealthyRadish]

Solution: all ground squirrels and puppies are now carnivorous.

[Sonlirain]

No animals allowed.

Strange how the isles in Just Cause 1-2 and the cities in all GTA games have NO animals what so ever only plain old humans and birds.

The main reason for that is usually cost versus gain. Trying to populated a massive world like JC2 with animals that look and act intelligently is both costly to produce and costly on processing due to things such as pathing and rendering. When you compare that cost to what gameplay or immersive gain you'll get for including the animals it's generally not all that worth it.

There's also a particularly strange demographic of people who believe that violence against virtual animals is completely amoral and unforgivable while completely ignoring depictions of violence against humans. They happen to be a very vocale demographic.
There have been many people/companies who have received very real death threats for this. An example would be the threats sent when players posted up videos, screenshots and stories of "torturing" "Norms" from the "Creatures" series of video games in various online communities.

Thing is... animals don't have to be inteligent or need special pathing in games like Just Cause. I doubt anyone is intyerested in sloth migrations but having a tiger randomly walking around a jungle would be nice.
Hell i'd probably buy a "animals DLC" for JC2 if it was reasonably priced.

Also Carmageddon didn't have any problems with animals being availble for slaughter in all 3 games (counting PC only because i can't really tell if there were animals in the console versions) even the generally considered bad DR2000.

As for the animal rights activists... well teh developer might just say that they added the animals for "immersion" and the game gives no reason for violence towards them.

[Niveras]

Even if you tried, you'd still end up lacking. Like in an MMO where there's dozens of wild animals in a relatively tiny space because everything is so compressed, there's really hardly any wilderness at all for a realistic or simulated portrayal of wilderness animals. I guess you could try to do so anyway, but I feel that even if you succeeded, the thread would be down one Sonlirain: No animals allowed." post but up one "Niarilnos: Dense animal populations" post.

[itisnotlogical]

Releasing a box set before the series is done

This always, always gets me, be it books, movies or games. The design of the box looks nothing like the sequels that come after and I hate mismatched cases. That's partly why I never buy James Bond movies, because none of the damn cases look alike.

Multiplayer-only games with major connection issues

Nine of ten attempts to join a Quake Live game end in utter failure for me. This is on top of the fact that barely anybody plays Quake Live in the first place, but I doubt anybody's actually playing vanilla Quake 3 anymore.

Ragdoll physics

I can't think of any recent game (other than maybe Resident Evil titles) that had canned death animations. Sure, canned death animations can look a bit cheesy, but poorly-done ragdolls look even worse. I think Halo 2 got it right, having a few canned animations that revert to ragdoll when the animation's done.

[Leonon]

The airboat is by far the shittiest part of HL2. Everything else in the game is much, MUCH better. Just some friendly encouragement, I played it through for the first time a couple months ago and once I got past the part the game was great.

What?  I remember buying the game on steam last Christmas, and thinking that this was a rather average game until I got to that point.  I distinctly remember running around in the boat gunning stuff down and thinking to myself "I change my mind.   This game IS awesome." Now the car, on the other hand...

I actually used the boat part as a pet peeve in this thread, but a summary of it was, nothing plot-wise happens, most of the time you don't have a gun, and the terrain is pretty unforgiving with the fiddly controls.

How dare you speak unkindly of the KickBoat. KickBoat is the best boat ever.

[Neonivek]

There's also a particularly strange demographic of people who believe that violence against virtual animals is completely amoral and unforgivable while completely ignoring depictions of violence against humans. They happen to be a very vocale demographic.

There is a certain aspect to it that is less "PETA".

For example I watched an episode of Case Closed (detective anime) where a dog was kidnapped and when I thought it was put into an incinerator I just went "No... what the heck!?!"

It is a show that does nothing but murder people every episode and yet the little dog inside an incinerator was what almost pushed me over the edge (luckly less then a minute later they confirmed the dog wasn't incinerated)

It is just the aspect of killing poor defenseless animals.

[Squill]

Ragdoll physics

I can't think of any recent game (other than maybe Resident Evil titles) that had canned death animations. Sure, canned death animations can look a bit cheesy, but poorly-done ragdolls look even worse. I think Halo 2 got it right, having a few canned animations that revert to ragdoll when the animation's done.

I prefer ragdoll to canned animations. It just bugs me when I'm in a game and, well, say there's a dead body on top of a truck. In a game with fixed death animations, if you drove the truck off the body will often stay floating. I just find it utterly stupid when stuff like that happens.

[Knight of Fools]

It's becoming more common to meld animations with rag doll animations. I can't remember what it's called, but a character can basically animate "softly", with the animations being affected by stuff around them. So they can flail around and smack their arm on a piece of scenery, without having the clipping issues that pure death animations have.

The big problem is that it requires more time to implement and eats up more CPU/GPU cycles when it is finished. It does look better than either one alone, though.


For an example, Lugaru 2 (I think it's called Overgrowth) has some YouTube videos of their implementation of blended death/falling animations. I can't seem to find it, but it was kind of cool. You could jump through the air and smack your head on a tree limb and fall, then your character will curl into a ball and your character will dynamically roll along the ground.

[Mrnocamera]

Overgrowth has a skeletal structure in every model, and instead of health it's how long you can get hit in your legs before falling over and getting kicked in the head.

Why can't more games have skeletal structures in their characters?  Instead of it just being "Aim for the head to damage it more!" It would be "Kick it's knees in and then snap it's neck with a well-placed punch and twist!"

So I guess the peeve is in pretty much every game.   And that peeve is Unrealistic damage.

[scrdest]

Overgrowth has a skeletal structure in every model, and instead of health it's how long you can get hit in your legs before falling over and getting kicked in the head.

Why can't more games have skeletal structures in their characters?  Instead of it just being "Aim for the head to damage it more!" It would be "Kick it's knees in and then snap it's neck with a well-placed punch and twist!"

So I guess the peeve is in pretty much every game.   And that peeve is Unrealistic damage.

I don't really mind unrealistic damage that much, but I HAAAAATE when you don't feel you deal it. This is probably the reason I cannot make myself to like laser weapons, be it in RTSs or shooters - when you kill someone, it feels like you shot their soul to death and the body committed suicide out of loneliness.

But kinetic weapons can do this badly as well, with guns that have too little recoil and/or badly done sounds (when it sounds like the gun itself is 100% silent but you wear a bag of crisps on your foot and you crush them when you are shooting) and too little momentum for bladed and blunt weapons (IMMA SMACK YOU WITH THIS PAINTED CARDBOARD!).