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[Aptus]

PC versions of board games without online multiplayer.

Really, what is even the point? Board games are meant to be played with other people (generally at least, I guess there are single player board games out there) and if the only option for multiplayer is hot seat, why not just play the actual board game?
Notable offenders: Catan, Risk (popcap version).

[Darkmere]

Re: Plot

Actually, I'd like to say that a game can have a story SO AWFUL it wraps around to awesome, and if the gameplay is decent I'll still enjoy myself. For consideration, the abridged plot of Heroes of Might and Magic 5:

Spoiler: This Is Silly (click to show/hide)

The Queen: Alas, my husband is slain!
Evil Necromancer Guy NO ONE Likes: Oh, I can fix the whole death thing no problem. All you have to do is reverse my exile, lend me the armies or your kingdom to destroy the sworn enemies of necromancer-kind, help me rebuild the ancient places of power, and get me some shiny, super-powerful artifacts that will make me nigh-immortal!
The Queen: Sounds good.

(All of that then happens. The Queen is genuinely surprised when the king comes back as a ravening, soulless death knight who hates her for being dragged out of heaven. The kingdom hates her for starting pointless wars,  and begins a civil war, led by demons, for some reason. While the war goes on, the queen ditches the ENTIRE KINGDOM to go on a date with her new dark elf boyfriend. When she finally comes back and realizes how FUBAR everything is.... she gives away the crown and goes on honeymoon. The end!)

^^^ All of that is played straight. It's so bad, it's awesome in its own way.
I thing the truly unforgivable game plot sin is mediocrity.

[Neonivek]

Is it any wonder why Dark Messiah is considered to have a terrible plot and yet has the BEST Heroes Plot?

Ok... maybe just the best Heroes villain. I have never seen such a villain done so well.

Though honestly Darkmere my favorite "so bad it is hilarious" story is Diablo 3's storyline. Here is a quote: "This will fix everything"

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Now to explain everything wrong with the Diablo 3 plotline would take too long... Yet suffice it to say that in Diablo 3 it was revealed that there was actually a SUPER SOUL STONE... that can not only imprison Diablo but ALL the great evils at once AND it has a total lack of any side effects whatsoever.

Only NOW, after the holy war, after Diablo 1, and after Diablo 2 do they ever think of actually using it. Where was this thing two games ago?

MIND YOU... If there is one thing Blizzard cannot do right it is write a sequential storyline. Warcraft 3 was as bad as it got without being "bad".

[Darkmere]

Diablo 3's storyline.

I have a parody for that, too!

... Okay, I'm done. Seriously.

[Neonivek]

Diablo 3's storyline.

I have a parody for that, too!

... Okay, I'm done. Seriously.

Mehhhhh... The video is good but I think there could be more comprehensive parodies that actually go down deep with what made the Diablo 3 storyline so terrible.

For example by allowing the Skeleton King to speak they actually took one of their best sympathetic villains from the first game and made him a cackling villain who SOMEHOW had connections with demons and monsters before that was actually a thing.

I don't even know a proper parallel because he is meant to be someone who went mad under diablo's influence and loss of his son and his silence in fact aided this because he existed in a state of torturous undeath unable to move on from his existence due to power run fowl.

It is like all of a sudden a deep and multilayered villain who was somehow able to get across his pain was replaced by a Clown from Captain Planet.

and yet that is just the first chapter... The game is just a constant non-stop parade of TERRIBLE writing that is terrible on its own, but even worse with any sort of knowledge of the other diablo games.

[itisnotlogical]

Files/audiologs/emails/etc. that are required to progress and/or unlock things

It doesn't add any atmosphere or immersion for me, it just means a collectathon sidequest straight from the dark age of N64/PS1 era platforming. Scavenger hunts will never go out of style in games, it seems, but hiding a passcode for a door in an audiolog just to make you hunt around for it is the laziest "puzzle" design I've ever seen.

Radical changes in tone between sequels

I always liked the older Resident Evils. Something about goofy B-movie antics mixed in with some actual terror always appealed to me. I think the mix was finally perfected in RE 4, with Leon turning into an action hero and quipping one-liners while fighting off monsters that are actually pretty darn scary.

And then Capcom thought "Hey, Ashley isn't a frustrating and unfair hindrance to the player at all, better fix that for 5!".

And then Capcom thought "Hey, there's still residue from Resident Evil's better days stuck deep in the cracks of 5, let's make the next game just another safe, generic co-op third-person shooter, like what was in style way back when Army of Two came out!" And the rest is history.

[Neonivek]

Files/audiologs/emails/etc. that are required to progress and/or unlock things

In defense like MOST things... I'd consider it fine if the game is geared towards it and used because it genuinely improves the gameplay and not because it wanted to pad everything to death.

Yet then again the games I can think of that could get away with it are puzzles, adventures, and high-end games and not platformers.

I certainly would not want to get halted in Psychonauts and have someone go "Hey, remember that memory you got earlier? What was it?"

[Aptus]

I actually put down Diablo 3 in disgust in act... uhh... whichever one was the barbarian one. I just couldn't stand the cartoon villains of alignment evil stupid that they had turned the evils into. Holographic images taunting you the entire way "muahahah you may have beaten my demon henchman the last seven times, but you will have no chance against my eight one! /evillaugh." I mean... seriously?

Not to mention the good guys... and the whole story making no sense at all...

Diablo 3 was such an incredible step down from 2 in just about every way possible. Diablo 2 was a game I could, and have, picked up ten years after the release and had just as much fun with but I couldn't even make it through one playthrough of Diablo 3.

In my mind I have my version of what the story should have been. In D2, the prime evils are dead with a capital D, their souls were captured in the stones and bloody destroyed at the hellforge, and so are all the lesser evils except for Belial and Azmodan. With the shattering of the worldstone the barrier between hell and the mortal world is torn and shit starts to go down. With all their competition gone, Belial and Azmodan take on the mantle of the new Prime Evils and lead the invasion. The heroes who killed Bhaal die when the worldstone shatters and it is time for new ones to take up the job of defeating the last lords of hell. There, instant Diablo 3 base story that as far as I can tell do not fuck over existing lore as much as the official one.

[Neonivek]

In D2, the prime evils are dead with a capital D, their souls were captured in the stones and bloody destroyed at the hellforge, and so are all the lesser evils except for Belial and Azmodan

Ok you have to understand this about Diablo 2... Diablo 2 was the Diablo 3 of Diablo 1. It took the story of that game and put it into a crazy machine. Diablo 3 is a game that had been through the crazy stupid machine essentially twice. So just remember that when we finally get to see StarCraft 3.

There is NO reason why the Prime Evils should have been killed through the destruction of the souls stones, that would make no sense. It was actually one of the dumbest plot twists in the second that ONLY made sense if you didn't read the manual.

In fact I believe the original implications was that the prime evils were outright immortal.

[Mech#4]

Re: Plot

Actually, I'd like to say that a game can have a story SO AWFUL it wraps around to awesome, and if the gameplay is decent I'll still enjoy myself. For consideration, the abridged plot of Heroes of Might and Magic 5:

Spoiler: This Is Silly (click to show/hide)

The Queen: Alas, my husband is slain!
Evil Necromancer Guy NO ONE Likes: Oh, I can fix the whole death thing no problem. All you have to do is reverse my exile, lend me the armies or your kingdom to destroy the sworn enemies of necromancer-kind, help me rebuild the ancient places of power, and get me some shiny, super-powerful artifacts that will make me nigh-immortal!
The Queen: Sounds good.

(All of that then happens. The Queen is genuinely surprised when the king comes back as a ravening, soulless death knight who hates her for being dragged out of heaven. The kingdom hates her for starting pointless wars,  and begins a civil war, led by demons, for some reason. While the war goes on, the queen ditches the ENTIRE KINGDOM to go on a date with her new dark elf boyfriend. When she finally comes back and realizes how FUBAR everything is.... she gives away the crown and goes on honeymoon. The end!)

^^^ All of that is played straight. It's so bad, it's awesome in its own way.
I thing the truly unforgivable game plot sin is mediocrity.

I liked the story for HOMM5 simply because it was so stupidly cheesy. It had me laughing at several points because the characters acted in ways I didn't expect them to.

I was going to put some quotes up but... a clip does a much better job of explaining:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2a6E4QiFScQ

I wanted to find another of just before the final battle but no luck.


Blizzard on the other hand. They write good plots and interesting characters for the most part, but I get rather annoyed at their tendency to make villains sympathetic. Arthas wasn't really evil, he regretted all the things he did under Gul'dan's control, the Hivemind was forced to do what it did by it's creators. It's why I really like Markal in the clip above, he was a heartless bastard to the end, and Snidley Whiplash evil.

@Aptus: Or, the only way to defeat the new prime evils is to bring back Diablo by finding a suitable host strong enough to contain him, thus causing the whole thing to repeat itself.

[Kaje]

The biggest peeve I have is the current trend of trying to simplify games for the Call of Doody generation of gamers.

XCOM, Sim City, Civilization - all classic games that have been dumbed down and over-simplified because developers think that the 'Pew Pew Crowd' can't sit still for long enough to appreciate a deep strategy/simulation experience.

Hell, even Football Manager - a game series I work on (for free, in a research capacity) - now has a quick play mode with unlockable power-ups!

It makes me furious and sad in equal measure. Don't get me wrong, I LIKE certain Pew Pew games. I'm a big fan of the Battlefield series, and I like some other FPS based games...but I also LOVE a great strategy/simulation game where I have to sit and think.

Thank feck for Paradox, at least they have the balls to continue making deep strategy/simulations.

[Aptus]

In D2, the prime evils are dead with a capital D, their souls were captured in the stones and bloody destroyed at the hellforge, and so are all the lesser evils except for Belial and Azmodan

Diablo 2 was the Diablo 3 of Diablo 1.

I... would not go that far. Maybe the whole, destroying the soulstones kills whatever is inside if done at the magical macguffin forge in hell is stupid, but they should have stuck to it. Diablo 3 was just not consistent with Diablo 2.

Now the question is, if this macguffin-forge existed and worked, why didn't the hero of the first game do it to Diablo instead of jamming the stone into himself? Maybe he simply didn't know it existed. If I remember correctly it was Tyrael (?) that told you about the possibility in D2.

Now I agree that D2 lost a lot of nuance compared to D1, but all in all, the story was internally consistent. Something which D3 fails at big-time while adding an unhealthy overdose of Evil-Stupid villains and Lawful-Stupid good guys.

[Neonivek]

The problem Mech is that Blizzard tends to make their villains sympathetic because they don't want you to play purely evil characters.

So yeah Arthas can't be PURE evil because you have to play him later. The Zerg cannot be evil because you play them. No one can be evil in their games if you play them.

However that may be why the King in Diablo 1 worked so well as a tragic villain, because they never intended you to play him. Thus he actually comes off as tragic and essentially grieving parent who was pushed over the edge until Diablo 3 where he became cartoonishly evil.

XCOM

I am going to give this a pass. It does feel rushed, it does feel incomplete, and the story is stupid in the end... But it doesn't really deserve to share the same seat at the table as Sim City. Since it actually does feel like it is trying.

It does though seem like it is making a compromise between mainstream gaming and classic gaming at the same time though.

Thank feck for Paradox, at least they have the balls to continue making deep strategy/simulations

They also make some of the most terrible games on the planet that try to rip off the player constantly (Hey Knights of Pen and Paper! Nice to see you not really fulfill the entire point of your game and be basically a facebook game in disguise)

In fact their DLC in general tends to be rather devilish.

Paradox doesn't really get a free pass in my mind. Not that they don't put out genuinely good games.

I... would not go that far

Ok you are right. Diablo 2's story to Diablo 1 really does undeservingly retcon quite a few things and is kind of silly and stupid in a few areas but does hold up. Diablo 3 is what happens when you make Saints Row 4 the official sequel of Grand Theft Auto 3 in terms of story.

and Lawful-Stupid good guys

No... they were just plain stupid... and I mean REALLY stupid.

I can't blame them Blizzard put them on the tracks so hard I am surprised a train wasn't one of the playable classes.

[alexandertnt]

Leveling up mechanics in everythng for the hell of it

It seems every game now needs a leveling up mechanic. FPS's, for example, sometimes even have levelable weapons (what?). They often end up feeling awkwardly hacked in.

I always thought after so many years of the leveling up mechanic in use that it would have either grown obsolete or substantially more intricate as computing power and game budgets increase. I was not really expecting (and certainly not hoping) that the same tired mechanic would pop up absolutely everywhere suddenly. Makes me feel like gaming has become stagnated.

[Neonivek]

Now the question is, if this macguffin-forge existed and worked, why didn't the hero of the first game do it to Diablo instead of jamming the stone into himself? Maybe he simply didn't know it existed. If I remember correctly it was Tyrael (?) that told you about the possibility in D2.

Sorry had to answer it.

You see in the first game the only way to stop the Three great evils was to seal them away in soul stones after they were betrayed by the other prime evils during the holy war (the war between heaven and hell).

The reason why the main characters would never have thought of destroying the soul stones in the first game was because the soul stones existence was a way to contain them and destroying it would have just freed them.

The plot twist that the second brought was

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

It was all a trick and a plot by Diablo, Baal, and Maphesto to get at the world stone by taking on physical form in the human realm with the soul stones of their own design, or something along those lines. THAT was why you smash the soul stones in the second game, because the twist was that the soul stone aspect was pointless. Also the fact that holding TWO OF THE SOULSTONES AT ONCE has absolutely no pull or influence on you is also dumb

Not to mention they retcon the entire reason why the Wanderer put the soul stone into his head in the first place, it was originally because it was the only way to contain the power of the soul stone long enough.

Which for someone like myself who actually read the entire diablo manual, which had a LOT of backstory, was a very convoluted plot twist with a lot of holes and required quite a bit of retcons just to pull off.