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[Neonivek]

Regarding early access defenders, it's important to note that there are exceptions to the rule and they are shining. Prison Architect, KSP and Space Engineers come to mind. Hell, KSP is even leaving EA soon. While I'm not defending the process as a whole, there are examples to show that it can work.

It isn't about people defending that Early Access exists or that it isn't a viable way to make a game.

It is people defending a game BECAUSE it is early access even when the criticisms are about either the direction the game is going or about the quality of the early access itself.

[Glloyd]

Ah true. "But its Alpha guys" isn't a great excuse.

[Darkmere]

Eh, I've seen so many early access games fail I just assume the EA label is an auto-fail condition at this point. Hit 1.0 and I'll consider it a game to be interested in. Until that it's just a set of ideas. I know there are exceptions but they are few.

Anyway, I posted to call out

Lack of Balance in Higher Difficulties

I'm specifically referring to RPG-esque skill-based mechanics here. Some games get it right, like Mass Effect where playing on Insanity might require different tactics or a higher skill threshold to use certain abilities (bionic charge is a good example).

However I've played too many games where it's bluntly obvious the developers just made everything kinda work for the piss-easy normal difficulty and completely ignored some things higher up. Pet classes whose pets die in seconds. The worst I've seen recently is one of Maya's "game changer" skills from Borderlands 2. Cloudkill is supposed to be an area damage over time ability, but at the level cap it does less than 10% the damage of a single submachine gun bullet. It's painfully obvious no one even tried it out at that level, and there's another 4 or 5 skills in the same tree that perform just as badly.

The worst part is when skills are obviously useless and the developers cover it up by obfuscating the numbers. "Rank 1 damage" = "this doesn't scale with anything, and is useless."

Blatantly Impossible AI Stunts

So I'm sniping at a guy from behind cover. One headshot kills him, but his buddy immediately tosses a grenade that flies in a perfect arc several dozen yards to land precisely at my feet. Bonus points for any wingless wild animal that has a leap attack which will home in on you the same way, to the point of changing direction midair. Double bonus if it's a person and they can leap three or more stories to get to me. Mega Bonus Combo if they don't actually have to see me to accomplish any of these tasks.

Double RNG Across the Sky

So, I want a rare drop from an enemy that rarely spawns. That's about all I got. At least give me the satisfaction of killing the guy every game, ffs.

[Neonivek]

The worst I've seen recently is one of Maya's "game changer" skills from Borderlands 2.

Until the Pre-sequel all the skills in the series that didn't affect your guns scaled TERRIBLY! Maya's Cloudkill isn't the worst one that would be Helios.

Ohh and here is one related to Boarderlands

Important Character Defining Skills not working on Bosses

So you have a character and the ONLY thing they do is poison enemies. That is their character defining trait and you chose to play them. It works well against enemies and then you get to the boss and...

It doesn't work... The boss is immune to poison.

Boarderlands 2 is the WORST I've seen. Maya's ONE gimmick is that she freezes enemies in place for a period of time... She can't do that against all the game's bosses. Sure it "hurts" them but the damage is miniscule.

I can understand certain abilities NEEDING to be different against bosses... But would it be so bad to give bosses, for example, different versions of those status effects? So the "Death spell" character doesn't find their entire reason for being to be negated?

[Glloyd]

So I'm sniping at a guy from behind cover. One headshot kills him, but his buddy immediately tosses a grenade that flies in a perfect arc several dozen yards to land precisely at my feet. Bonus points for any wingless wild animal that has a leap attack which will home in on you the same way, to the point of changing direction midair. Double bonus if it's a person and they can leap three or more stories to get to me. Mega Bonus Combo if they don't actually have to see me to accomplish any of these tasks.

Fucking cloakers from Payday 2. Once they've honed into you, they will jump impossibly large distances to get you. Even if they land near you, they'll still take you down and you get the joy of watching them hit the ground with their nightstick a few metres away from you.

[Darkmere]

Boarderlands 2 is the WORST I've seen. Maya's ONE gimmick is that she freezes enemies in place for a period of time... She can't do that against all the game's bosses. Sure it "hurts" them but the damage is miniscule.

I can understand certain abilities NEEDING to be different against bosses... But would it be so bad to give bosses, for example, different versions of those status effects? So the "Death spell" character doesn't find their entire reason for being to be negated?

Yeah, they could have at least given the boss a timered debuff or something that activates all your while-phaselocked abilities, but I've grown to accept that all Borderlands games gleefully piss on single player folks. You're only supposed to play Maya in a group as the healer, period.

That's why I leveled up Axton first - the jack of all trades and all that.

[Shadowlord]

Blatantly Impossible AI Stunts

So I'm sniping at a guy from behind cover. One headshot kills him, but his buddy immediately tosses a grenade that flies in a perfect arc several dozen yards to land precisely at my feet. Bonus points for any wingless wild animal that has a leap attack which will home in on you the same way, to the point of changing direction midair. Double bonus if it's a person and they can leap three or more stories to get to me. Mega Bonus Combo if they don't actually have to see me to accomplish any of these tasks.

There are also games which have blatantly impossible player stunts. For instance, if someone shoots arrows at you with their bow in Ultima Online, and you try to dodge them by running, the arrows will literally curve in mid-flight and even chase you. Other later MMOs do the same thing as well. (I'm actually curious how Elder Scrolls Online does it, since you can dodge all the things in Bethesda's singleplayer games...)

[Neonivek]

Grand Wizard Martial Artist

Ok this always BUGS me and it is a growing trend. So you have wizards who harness untold magical energies through long periods of study and contemplative thought...

Hey... normal spell casting is boring... Lets instead have them cast spells by shadow boxing and waving their staffs around!

This will always bug me in systems where magic is a intellectual force.

It is honestly the reason I never got the latest Dragon Age... because Wizards look stupid.

[Shadowlord]

I'm remembering how much fun Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was, and now I just feel bad for you, Neonivek, that you can't enjoy games where magic has, like, animations.

[NullForceOmega]

I dunno, Neo's got kind of a point, instead of all the handwaving and general screwing around it might be nice to have more Belgarath style mages.  Just staring the damn thing down with arms crossed and speak a single word then, 'poof' no more baddie, much more intimidating really.

[i2amroy]

Personally I've always thought the monk-wizard thing kinda made sense in though-controlled magic systems. I mean who is going to probably be better at controlling their thoughts in a given way, the old dude with the disorganized messy workshop or the guy who spends his days meditating on the top of mountains? Even if you waved it away as a "different kind of thought" it always seemed like people who had trained in controlling their thoughts would be able to grasp it much easier then the average joe.

That said for other types of magic I can totally see where you are coming from. Like little motions are ok (pointing your staff, "throwing" fireballs, etc.) but not crazy kung-fu madness.

My pet peeve:
Interface Screws.
They are pretty worthless, and are just annoying. Any player who's worth their salt in a racing game is going to have the tracks basically memorized, and the minimap isn't usually screwed up, so gunk on the screen isn't doing much. Similarly the common "invert controls" thing just takes a moment to adjust, and even randomly scrambling controls usually doesn't cause more then a moments hassle.

Now if someone wanted to do interface screws in something that was occulus rift/motion controlled I could totally see that, since it's a physical thing. Having the confuse effect making you have to physically change the way you point your wiimote or whatever would be interesting since it could cultivate that feeling of your body not actually working right, but with button controlled games? Please no.

[Neonivek]

I'm remembering how much fun Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning was, and now I just feel bad for you, Neonivek, that you can't enjoy games where magic has, like, animations.

We aren't talking about a wizard conjuring a fireball and then throwing the Fireball like he would a baseball.

Also I've seen some AMAZING wizard animations that didn't involve martial arts at all... My favorite was speed drawing (in that setting Wizards cast spells by drawing complex runes in the air).

But when I saw a Wizard start slinging his staff around and shooting iceballs out of it I was just "This is ridiculous!"... Even if I were to accept that this is some sort of magical martial arts, there MUST be a better way of using magic. Even sling staffs aren't used in that manner.

At least Gun Kata had some semblance of being viable and HECK it could be if you were a cyborg or something...

I guess the big problem is that "Martial art spells" in those videogames are melee attacks... used to shoot single balls. They are NOT ranged attacks used to shoot ranged spells. It looks cool but is completely ridiculous. It is the equivalent of an archer pulling the string on his bow to knock enemies around in melee.

[alexandertnt]

I can't really see wizards as the intelligent type. In a land with catapults, medicines, crossbows, drawbridges, and other clever things invented by genuinely intelligent people, why do you need what is effectively a crude mimicry of an intelligence? There are evidently plenty of actually-smart people around. I mean, legends has it that Archimedes set ships on fire with the power of the sun, not by chanting some made-up smart-person words, or by taking a smart-person book from a smart-person library and reading it smartly, by using mirrors and focusing light. Now that would be true intelligence.

I could, in some situations, consider it almost insulting. The implication being that if it's something intelligent, you can't understand it, so if we have some bearded person do something you can't understand, then they must be intelligent.

Ugh, I suppose I'm just not a fan of the whole concept of magic. It cannot by definition be understood, therefore it's just not that interesting to me

Statistics as the be-all and end-all to games

Some people seem to think that removing statistics in a game makes it dumber somehow.

If you remove, say, a stealth statistic (dice roll if you are spotted) and replace it with an interactive stealth mechanic (avoid gazes/cameras, cover in shadows etc), some people seem to act as if there was only a loss, as if the new stealth system doesn't count as a game mechanic.

Nevermind that that new hypothetical system is far more intricate than the old one, and allows for more interesting and dynamic scenario's, and has many more statictics involved anyway (they are just hidden from you), it's no longer a dice roll so obviously doesn't exist anymore.

[Niveras]

Ugh, I suppose I'm just not a fan of the whole concept of magic. It cannot by definition be understood, therefore it's just not that interesting to me

While I agree with the sentiment, I think it's more a failure of the media than the concept of magic itself; that is, it is always portrayed as anathema and mysterious, because most writers are lazy (to be fair, most people are lazy, ergo). And when they're not, writers (and their audience) are generally more interested in the story and characters than necessarily the mechanics of how the world works - particularly since, when you do try for a highly explained system, there will inevitably be quirks and problems and 'what if's?' and then you have fan boys sneering when they outsmart you over something you wrote as a throwaway.

[As an side, I wonder if there potentially exists a new class of fiction: science fantasy, where the mechanisms are explored in depth even as a story is told around it, just as the old hard science fiction was as much about the promises of new technology and exploring what it could mean as much as character arcs.]

That said, magic is also often portrayed as an innate gift or a rare/difficult skill, which appears more palatable to me. That doesn't necessarily make the character "intelligent" either, but rather is a consequence of how even our own (as viewers/readers) concept of "intelligence" is often variable and vaguely defined. A person might seem intelligent when they instantly give you a profound answer to a simple question (and you had no other indication they'd ever even considered the problem), but is it really intelligence if they actually spent a hundred hours agonizing over that same simple question?

I don't really know where I was going with all that. I should probably not hit post here.

[Mech#4]

I tend to get the feeling in fantasy that magic is often like early science. People know about it and make use of it but they don't fully understand everything about how things work or why this does that. Works more for a setting like "Dungeons and Dragons" where magic spells have specific components and words to perform correctly unlike in, say, Skyrim where magic is portrayed more as a manifestation of someone willing a specific effect into existence (at least that's the feeling I got after reading the book Water Breathing).