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[penguinofhonor]

Events where victory and defeat are identical except in name.

This area is being controlled by enemies! If you beat them, then they leave and everything returns to normal. But watch out - if you don't take them down within the time limit, then they leave and everything returns to normal. Scary!

The game I'm currently noticing this in is Guild Wars 2. I think it comes from single player games where losing an event just gave you a Game Over screen. It's silly, though, like someone thought "Well, we can't make the player restart a level in an MMO... so instead of designing an alternate downside that fits in our game, we'll just take the downside out entirely."

I mean, a lot of the time you'll get better loot for winning, but I don't think the only difference between these slavers taking over this town or being chased off should be whether I get 3 or 5 silver for helping.

[nenjin]

There seems to be a growing belief that "Fail states are bad m'kay."

I think making interesting fail states is hard. In real life there's only one hard fail state, and that's death. The rest of life is made up of consequences for actions. That's hard to live up to in game design.

But I feel like a lot of games are exceptionally lazy in this regard because it takes so much work to make failing interesting and meaningful. Either they do hard fail states, or they do what you say and only give you the illusion of failure. What I really hate about the "fail states are bad" mentality is that they refuse to acknowledge fail states as motivators. Failure gives context to your actions because some results are demonstrably good and some demonstrably bad. Games that are afraid of aggravating the player with fail states often fail to capture my attention for very long. To me it's kind of a regression of gaming in some ways, like trying to make a game as inoffensive and consumable as baby food. For people that are only interested in playing a handful of minutes at a time, a game where they can't really fail is fine. For anyone that wants to get into their game for an extended period of time, I feel like it just hurts the overall illusion and eventually begins to make you question the definition of "fun." Which is usually not a thought you want your game to inspire.

[Mesa]

T-this thread...
Is DEAD?

WHAT F*CKING HERESY IS THIS?

Short story long, "Operation B.U.M.P. underway. Initializing primary bumping protocols."

But, to stay on topic,

"Modding allergy"
It's kinda biased for me to say that, but I absolutely love game modifications, and I just hate when the big-budget titles just don't allow me to alter them (didn't play, but *cough*Battlefield 3*cough*). Bonus points if the game in question is filled to the brim with horrible DLCs.

[LoSboccacc]

It is the opposite for me: a game has great idea or potential, but so poor execution or so little content it becomes interesting only when getting mods

And then you get in mod hell where you love a mod but for just one feature that ruins it completely etc.

[Mephisto]

This isn't so much a pet peeve as it is something that I randomly thought about today.

Console designers that just don't get it

The most readily apparent company that fits this is Nintendo. Just about every generation has them doing something badly and then rushing to fix it.

Let's do a quick recap. This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Release N64. Realize discs are the way of the future. Release 64DD, which promptly fails. The only company I can think of that's done worse than this is Sega. The Genesis had two separate add-ons like that.

Release Gamecube, which uses miniDVDs. Realize that, for some reason, people want to watch DVDs. License hardware to Panasonic, which releases the Japan-only Q.

Release 3DS, a handheld whose target audience includes children.  But children shouldn't use 3D because reasons. Said 3D technology can give adults headaches. Release 2DS, which is ugly, is larger than the 3DS when in transportation mode (and thus probably doesn't fit in a child's pocket), and is only marginally cheaper than the 3DS.

[Mesa]

Console game designers that just don't get it

FTFY.
(I have a bias against consoles, sorry.)

[majikero]

2DS has the advantage of having no hinges for children to snap off. A common problem for the DS.

[Krevsin]

Console game designers that just don't get it

FTFY.
(I have a bias against consoles, sorry.)

You should get that looked at.

[itisnotlogical]

Games that assume you've never played a game before and would jam the controller in your eye without their help. I can get with it if they're explaining how the game works or there's a lot of keys that do a lot of things, but even the most casual gamer can probably guess that the left analog stick or WASD controls movement in 99% of games.

[flame99]

WASD is somewhat understandable, because some (Very) casual gamers haven't played a game in which that controls movement. Left analog stick is considerably less understandable. The WiiMotion Plus guiding you how to PLUG IT IN is just baffling.

[WealthyRadish]

I miss tutorials. 10 minute tutorial vs first hour and a half of your game being pointless? Why?

[MadMalkavian]

I miss tutorials. 10 minute tutorial vs first hour and a half of your game being pointless? Why?

I for one dislike not being able to skip the tutorial after having done it once already. I also dislike having to use mods just to skip the tutorial. Furthermore I dislike tutorials that treat me like I've never played a video game before.

[alexandertnt]

I love tweaking game that I play, so modding is massively important to me. It is dissapointing when games are released that have been specifically designed to restrict modding.

I miss tutorials. 10 minute tutorial vs first hour and a half of your game being pointless? Why?

But learning things on your own is fun...



Mouse movement smoothing

It makes the controls feel strange and floaty.

[Lightningfalcon]

I miss tutorials. 10 minute tutorial vs first hour and a half of your game being pointless? Why?

I for one dislike not being able to skip the tutorial after having done it once already. I also dislike having to use mods just to skip the tutorial. Furthermore I dislike tutorials that treat me like I've never played a video game before.

The solution is to have the tutorial be a separate menu option not in the default campaign.  Like Mount and Blade, which I've been playing a lot of.  When you go to the main menu tutorial is a completely separate option.  When you press it it takes you to one of the in game training fields, modified so that you walk around asking for help.  There is a melee instructor, who teaches you how to block and fight, an archery instructor who teaches you archery, and a horseback instructor who teaches you to ride and fight on horses.  In the game itself the only mandatory thing is fighting a single guy at the very start, and you can then choose to do a starting quest.  After that when you go to the main map it has a pop up saying "This is the main map! Blah blah blah" but that's it.  When playing the rest of the game there are training fields you can go to, where you can not only practice various skills, but doing so gives exp to your party, which is great for early game when you have recruits and very little trainer skill.

Also, Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon handled the tutorial rather well, from what I've seen. 

[Parsely]

The biggest immersion breaker for me is the lack of any visual representation of the results of the damage I'm supposedly dealing, which seems to be a big problem these days. The health bar going down just isn't enough for me. Either have the health bar be large enough or flashy enough that I can tell when I'm laying down some hurt a lot of hurt or no hurt or make the guy's freaking head blow up, or armour fly off, or sparks shoot up while he stomps towards me, or his body flash or something. Being able to know when I'm hitting and how I'm hitting at a flance is always good. One game that did this fantastically while doing everything else wrong was Binary Domain. Awesome visuals. You always knew exactly how many shots it would take to get the robot's arm to fall off, or his leg to buckle.

On the flip side, some games have too much visual representation of hostile status or damage dealt, such as most non-arcade first-person shooters.