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[Mech#4]

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.

Yeah, I understand. This theme of no really evil characters annoys me somewhat, making it rather predictable, or lessening the impact of something

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Like Muradin surviving.

.

There are some aspects they've done I like though. The changes to Hillsbrad in World of Warcraft with the farms there becoming an enclosed camp for Forsaken science was a neat change. They have a monster there made up of three farmers you defeated before Cataclysm. *Laughs despite it being rather mean*

@Neonivek new post: It would've been funny if you could socket the soul stones into weapons. Creating a vastly powerful item that eventually kills you, or gives you a bad ending, but that's too complex for Diablo's gameplay.

[Aptus]

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

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.

Ahh, I see, in the light of this I am in agreement with you on the soulstone smashing issue. I had missed that point about the soulstones and had just assumed the thing with the forge was basically a 'throw the ring into the fires of mount doom'-scenario.

[Mesa]

Reboots
A sequel is one thing. A prequel is... Well, if done right, it can be good. But completely changing the game world, dropping all of the continuity, and effectively taking a dump on all of our connection to the characters? Please, god, no.

Ubisoft with the Might and Magic universe in general. (so Heroes of Might and Magic as well)
Alright, Heroes V was half-decent, BUT FOR GOD'S SAKE YOU MADE IT TERRIBLE!

Sure, there are many games that combine sci-fi and fantasy, so they aren't truly new.
But ANY game like that is miles ahead of ANY generic fantasy universe THAT IS UBISOFT'S MIGHT AND MAGIC!

And Might and Magic X is just stupid concept and I doubt it will work.
Mostly because this isn't Might and Magic anymore.

[JackOSpades]

F***ing Escort Missions: the purpose of an Escort/Bodyguard/Security is to DETOUR the enemy from attacking via a show of force NOT gun down the enemy when they do attack. if the enemy knows your there and has enough firepower or determination that they are willing to attack in spite of your presence THEN YOU'VE ALREADY #%$&% FAILED.

and honestly I have to wonder why they still exist I know it's not just me that absolutely despises them. lately I've been watching a lot of random lets plays and the Highest praise that has ever been given to any such mission was "thankfully it's not that bad"

[itisnotlogical]

-snip-

Most games just don't get escort missions right. If you haven't, play Resident Evil 4. Capcom got it so right on so many levels, Ashley is never an unfair hindrance. It's mostly just due to a handful of things, too:

- You can order her to stay somewhere and she'll stay there no matter what. She won't wander off, she won't randomly decide to start following you again.
- She ducks if you aim in her general direction.
- She isn't present for 99% of boss fights. Maybe one El Gigante fight.
- Most enemies are looking to kidnap her, not outright kill her.
- You can heal her and increase her maximum health.

It helps that most enemies are melee-based, too.

I found Perfect Dark's escort missions fun in a masochistic ultra-difficult sort of way, but that's probably just me. I found it neat that you can actually shield your charge with your own body in that game, and it'll work most of the time too.

[Werdna]

On the "story so stupid, its funny" topic, my friends and I had a blast playing Lost Planet 2 in coop.  The story is 100% in the incomprehensible "launch all zigs" school of gaming and yet its a fairly original shooter with some epic fights and changes of scenery.  We had a great time with it.

[flame99]

On the "story so stupid, its funny" topic, my friends and I had a blast playing Lost Planet 2 in coop.  The story is 100% in the incomprehensible "launch all zigs" school of gaming and yet its a fairly original shooter with some epic fights and changes of scenery.  We had a great time with it.

You know, I never actually played the second Lost Planet, though I did play and like the first. Is the gameplay similar?

[Werdna]

On the "story so stupid, its funny" topic, my friends and I had a blast playing Lost Planet 2 in coop.  The story is 100% in the incomprehensible "launch all zigs" school of gaming and yet its a fairly original shooter with some epic fights and changes of scenery.  We had a great time with it.

You know, I never actually played the second Lost Planet, though I did play and like the first. Is the gameplay similar?

Wish I could help you, but we never played the first.  Its hard finding 4 player coop's, and Lost Planet 2 was cheap at the time so we grabbed it.  Not sure I'd recommend Lost Planet 2 as singleplayer, coop was definitely what made it memorable.  Throughout many combats we were playing through tears of laughter, as we made wisecracks about the cut scene before it.  What I remember is a ton of utterly ridiculous yet really fun weapons, a unique movement system (lots of movement via a batman-like cable-gun), and lots of glowing goo that we raced each other to collect.  And lots of absolutely enormous bosses and over the top fights (like a 20min gunfight where you had to fight your way down two parallel speeding trains with a Godzilla-sized bug eating the last car of the train one at a time).

[EnigmaticHat]

Leveling up mechanics in everythng for the hell of it

Leveling mechanics are terrible for game balance on top of that.  In multiplayer they either make matches unfair (if leveling up carries between games/conflicts) or make matches predictable from the early stages (if leveling is temporary in each match) because when one side gets the level advantage they're almost certainly going to win.

In singleplayer games levels can wreck the difficulty curve.  Often in the long term of these games will see the player becoming too powerful and never meeting any resistance, or becoming too weak and having their progress utterly stopped until they grind.

My main problem with leveling is that the ideal case is almost always to have the players at the same level in multiplayer, or slightly below the NPC's level in singleplayer.  So why not just get rid of the level mechanic and add abilities through other mechanics, the way that say Legend of Zelda does it?  Well, the reason is that leveling is the easiest way to make players stick with your game.  Not because it makes the game more fun, mind you, but because it makes the game more addictive.  It lends the player an immediate sense of accomplishment to see "level up" pop up every half hour, even if the only gameplay effect is to keep the game the same while increasing the damage numbers at best, or disbalance the game at worst.

[Neonivek]

It honestly makes me wonder why City of heroes is the ONLY RPG in existence that ever got the idea of a leveling down or level up mechanic.

Mind you if you level down you are still powerful and if you level up you are still weak... Yet that system really worked.

Other games only level you up in PVP, but that is it.

Ohh city of heroes, I am so sad it was gone. It was that game I always intended to go back to and now I won't get the chance.

[Marchosias]

Timing dependent puzzles, fuck that shit; I always end up stuck on the parts where you have to free-run up a shaft away from a spiked death elevator or hit all the meteors before they hit your ship or run ahead of the spinning lasers, die-ing hundreds of times before I abandon the game out of shear hate because they sit in the only path to game progress.

Annoying npcs that you cannot kill or send to die, I loathe npcs; escort mission targets, chatty npc party members, menial quest givers, snob vendors.

[Niveras]

It honestly makes me wonder why City of heroes is the ONLY RPG in existence that ever got the idea of a leveling down or level up mechanic.

Mind you if you level down you are still powerful and if you level up you are still weak... Yet that system really worked.

Other games only level you up in PVP, but that is it.

Ohh city of heroes, I am so sad it was gone. It was that game I always intended to go back to and now I won't get the chance.

EQ2 had a level down system in PvE, though I don't recall the exact mechanics. I'm pretty sure you basically just got scaled down to the person in your group whom you choose to "mentor". You keep all the other abilities you'd have at your normal level and you probably kept some bonuses from gear. The trainee also gains bonus experience too, I believe.

Although the mechanic is nice for old players to group with their lower level friends, the problem is that PvE is kind of rote. Your older friend probably already went through all the content before, so even if he wants to help you he's still kind of put off by having to do the stuff he's done before. That actually kind of leads into a peeve of my own:

[MMO] Unvaried PvE content:

It's strange, in just a few short years MMOs have gone from having a breath of "content" available to requiring that everyone take the same path. EQ1 had tons of content - although I grant that it was all pretty much the same, and with how they tuned experience, old content was always less efficient to level in so no one went there. But it was there if you want a change, even if the only change was killing giants instead of dragons or sarnaks instead of undead or something. This got better with the next generation of MMO where they actually tried to tell a story, even if the exact mechanics boiled down to kill things or fetch things or whatever, and beyond that most people just skipped it. But there was variety, in enemies and zones, so you didn't have level up through the same thing if you didn't want to. However, as WoW aged, they focused that down - everyone had to, more or less, go through all the same content. There was some differences between the factions but even this overlapped in some cases. I guess it saves money, but why not give players more choice, especially in the leveling game? Don't require that players play through everything to level up that next character.

[itisnotlogical]

Excessive loading periods

Not long loading times; those I can handle. What bugs me is when the game stops every five seconds for it to load the next five seconds of gameplay. This bothers me a lot in Morrowind, when you're fighting or travelling along the edge of an area and end up taking unnecessary hits due to loading breaks. It's painful just to watch Danny and Ross play Space Quest 5 (or was it 4? Can't remember) on Steam Train.

Early CD games that won't work in anything except an actual computer from the era

[hector13]

That's not really gaming though, is it? I mean it's a software problem for the most part... Championship Manager 00/01 had issues with this, but it could be fixed with some Microsoft program exception thing. The game says you don't have enough memory - enough being I think 64mb - despite the fact that it's 10 years after the game was released and you have 2gbs of RAM.

Long loading times are annoying though. As far as I'm aware, it's just for all the fluff to make the world look nice, which I certainly don't need. Some games do suggest you install extra content from the disc onto the hard-drive to compensate, though. MLB 12 The Show, for example. The only issue is that, at least in my example, that extra content is pretty heavy at 10gbs!

[Darkmere]

Actually, loading was what killed my interest in Fable. I was gifted the "collection" (1 and 3) on Steam by a friend, so I finished 3 and then loaded up 1.

Then I took a few steps and loaded up 1 again. Then again. Then again. Then again. Then again.

They did nothing at all to make the game sane in the PC port, so there's a loading screen every 10 minutes. I quit a few hours in, couldn't take it anymore. Finding out they never bothered bringing 2 to PC didn't help.