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[Graknorke]

Ever since I learned how to shoot the treatment of shotguns in video games has bothered me.

What about them?

[itisnotlogical]

Inescapable "stop playing and listen" moments

I want to play Half-Life 2 again, I really do, but I just don't want to go through all the parts where you have to stop and listen for several minutes before you can progress. It's amazing the first time around when you don't know what's going to happen, but it pretty much kills the replayability for me.

Games that you need to know how to play before you even start (DF excepted of course)

This is what turns me off to MOBAs and fighting games. Fighting games assume that you already know all the combos and moves for at least one character, or else there's no way you're going to win. And from what I see, the only people who play MOBAs are already top-level players that work day and night at the damn things.

[Mech#4]

Egh, that "needing to know how to play before you begin" is a bit of a problem with competitive games. All the people who are good did go through all the noob calling, of course, but that doesn't make it any more appealing. It's like sports with both sides calling each other names.

Street Fighter IV is quite an impressive game. The level of timing required to pull off things like combos or links is down to frames and, while the precision is very nice, it makes it really difficult for a beginner. The challenges don't help much either because it starts off with something like jump punch to low punch, then moves onto queuing charged moves without telling the user how to cancel moves into each other.

The next Street Fighter game really needs a detailed tutorial, like Skullgirls, but covering all the fan used abbreviations, cancelling, slow down to help with link timing (or at least an indicator), basic combos for characters and so on and so forth.

[scrdest]

Have you noticed that planets in sci-fi fulfill the same basic purpose as towns in fantasy? Really, if you compress some sci-fi from the scale of galaxies to the size of a fantasy kingdom, you don't lose a large amount. Basicall, bad sci-fi writers cannot comprehend scale and make all species 2-dimensional and all planets consist of a single concept to keep things simple for them.

Well, bad sci-fi and bad fantasy are more or less interchangeable if you swap some fantasy-sounding terms for futurey ones. And since particularly older sci-fi was almost required to have copious amount of space travel, making space a 2D plane dotted with uniform, single-biome planets was pretty much data compression.

[NobodyPro]

Ever since I learned how to shoot the treatment of shotguns in video games has bothered me.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShortRangeShotgun

You mean this sort of thing?

Yeah, that. Halo and CoDD being the worst offenders.

[alexandertnt]

Totally agree with the whole "needing to know how to play before you begin" thing with competitive games. Some people really dont take kindly to being a noob, which is fustrating when you dont exactly have a choice int he matter.

I think some games have isolated new players to varying degrees because of this.



I think DF is a (Single Player) exception to this, as half the fun is in losing the game. Some of my favourite moments were when I was still learning how to play, and unexpected mechanics would cause everything to come off the rails.

[Darkmere]

If DF were head-to-head competitve, it would be the exact same douchebaggery as anywhere else. The fact is people in a competitive environment have a large vested interest in keeping new players from every competing, so they will.

And that's fine with me, I have no use for competitive machismo crap, so as long as it stays on that other part of the internet, everyone's good.

[WealthyRadish]

People in a game's actual competitive scene are obviously the first to be bummed out when that scene dies due to a lack of, well, new players. People insulting other people on the internet is just the internet bringing out the inner jerk.

There are actually many games where a person's enjoyment of a match can be pretty much ruined by randomly getting bad teammates. In the case of MOBAs in particular, they may end up getting locked in a 40 minute match that's completely unfun just from one player being less than useless, which is pretty horrible in a 5 vs 5 match. It's not really the competitive nature of the game, but it really depends on how well a player can do independently of their teammates that indicates how angry they're liable to get. Not saying it's an acceptable reaction, but it's a pretty universal phenomenon in heavily team based games.

[scrdest]

If DF were head-to-head competitve, it would be the exact same douchebaggery as anywhere else. The fact is people in a competitive environment have a large vested interest in keeping new players from every competing, so they will.

And that's fine with me, I have no use for competitive machismo crap, so as long as it stays on that other part of the internet, everyone's good.

I suppose that the problem is, competitive games attract people who are competitive, who I would say are douchebags to a fault, but that might be a bit of over-generalization.

[Niveras]

Games that you need to know how to play before you even start (DF excepted of course)

This is what turns me off to MOBAs and fighting games. Fighting games assume that you already know all the combos and moves for at least one character, or else there's no way you're going to win. And from what I see, the only people who play MOBAs are already top-level players that work day and night at the damn things.

I'm on the fence about this. What game in the existence of games doesn't have a learning curve? If anything, this sort of attitude on the part of developers is why we get atrociously dumb unskippable tutorials in every game. Even very highly acclaimed games (Deus Ex, Bioshock, Tomb Raider; well, TR may not be "acclaimed") fall victim to this inanity. If your game falls under a common genre (action, FPS, RPG, etc) then the controls are probably going to be intuitive - in terms of an action game, mash buttons until you recognize what each button does. But, I can understand [this game] could very well that this is the first time an individual has ever played a video game (or a game in this genre), so what to do in those cases? Recommend playing a separate, short tutorial that doesn't break immersion by implying a professional mercenary doesn't know how to vault obstacles or stay under cover. Or a short reference card/manual, but we all know people don't read manuals.

There are exceptions. Games that follow a genre on the surface, but add new mechanics and considerations (or just do the same but look/control different; for example, The Witcher). MOBAs are a bit unique in this respect because it is still a very new genre (compared to everything else, at least) and there is a huge meta game aspect to it. It's not just about controlling what the game offers, but what actions to take to win, and on top of this most MOBAs, being cooperative/competitive, are extremely hostile to poor players on the same team, because its the whole team that loses.

[alexandertnt]

I think the problem is more commonly seen with team-based games, where you drop into a public server and everyone accuses you of being a noob because your costing the team points or whatever.

I also think its worse in games that provide rewards for team victory, as some people can see new players as "costing them" something.

Or atleast I see it more in these games because I dont play in any competitive circles.

-

I think you are thinking too far in the opposite extreme. It isnt solved with unskippable tutorials. These are the games whose learning curve starts off far too high, where you have to read the manual, ask for advice, and spend the first part of the game losing over-and-over until you can start to actually make progress.


Thinking back a while ago to the conversation on "feeling strong" in video games, I realise that some games are supposed to allow you to feel powerful/strong and thus "special" where you may not be able to do this in real life, i.e. an immersion in a fantasy. This is fine, except it seems to be so common in games that being "strong" is not special anymore, its the expected norm. For me, its no longer interesting on its own.

I would really be interested in a game that did the opposite to this. A game where your character was more flimsy (you dont necessarily have to be "weak", just "not-strong"), where the combat would be dangerous and where it may even be better to avoid it if possible or even, heaven forbid, actually run away from a dangerous situation. A slowish paced combat where the focus is on trying to avoid being hit entirely (rather than just taking it on the chin and regenerating/applying bandages straight afterwards). It would have to have relatively smart AI which can work together, and the goals of the game would not consist of mowing down 10's of whatever. Bonus points if the enemies themselves arent that strong and relied on cautious, smart actions. I suppose it would have a survival-ish feel to it. In the sense of trying not to get killed, not in the sense of collecting scrap in some post-apocalyptic wasteland.


Now for an actual peeve: Romanticised Vikings

With their horned helmets and other assorted fictitious cliché's. I really dont like Noble savage characters, and in video games they are basically Noble Savage: the Culture.

Those try-again-over-and-over ultra-hard games

I do not enjoy dying over and over again. Generally, a game should present a reasonable challenge, but not so much as that I have to restart the level over and over and over. It becomes old, infuriating and I will just go off and play something else instead if it gets to that point.

[LoSboccacc]

Alexandertnt: try batman arkham x series.

Yes you are stronger than anyone, but very vulnerable at the same time.

Cannot really explain it but looks like the best human hero impression in a videogame ever.

[alexandertnt]

I will have a look into it, thanks.

[Mech#4]

The Gothic series is kind of like that as well. Well... Gothic 3 more so then 1 or 2 (which are more instant kill you until your high level enough to instant kill it back), they focus more on parrying and attacking when an opponent is open then wailing on them constantly. I will admit it's a bit thin in that regard, let's see...


Mount and Blade kind of, "Sir, you are being hunted" is survival where you have to elude a hunting AI long enough to find things, Dark Souls, S.T.A.L.K.E.R isn't melee attack but with mods or even playing the base game on a high difficulty there'll be times when retreat and strategy comes into a firefight.

kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, though made by a now defunct company with the original goal of being an MMO, has melee that is focused around dodging, blocking and hitting enemies when they're open. Learning when and where a monster is weak is a bigger part of winning combat without using lots of health potions then it originally seems. The quests are the usual "Go kill whatever" "Go collect whatever" but the game looks really nice and the game worlds pretty big.

[scrdest]

The Gothic series is kind of like that as well. Well... Gothic 3 more so then 1 or 2 (which are more instant kill you until your high level enough to instant kill it back), they focus more on parrying and attacking when an opponent is open then wailing on them constantly. I will admit it's a bit thin in that regard, let's see...


Mount and Blade kind of, "Sir, you are being hunted" is survival where you have to elude a hunting AI long enough to find things, Dark Souls, S.T.A.L.K.E.R isn't melee attack but with mods or even playing the base game on a high difficulty there'll be times when retreat and strategy comes into a firefight.

kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, though made by a now defunct company with the original goal of being an MMO, has melee that is focused around dodging, blocking and hitting enemies when they're open. Learning when and where a monster is weak is a bigger part of winning combat without using lots of health potions then it originally seems. The quests are the usual "Go kill whatever" "Go collect whatever" but the game looks really nice and the game worlds pretty big.

Yeah, M&B is surprisingly like that, except that you can't die per se - you get knocked out and taken prisoner, meaning you lose a good chunk of your money and army, but in time you escape and you just lost some time.

But that aside, it's very heavy on parries and the only difference between the player and the troops is the skills and equipment (well, and numbers) both sides currently use, and there is no way of healing except for the slow regen on the world map.