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[SeriousConcentrate]

I would file that more under 'underpowered status effects' myself. In South Park: The Stick of Truth a DoT character build is WAY better than anything else because of how fast you can annihilate enemies with a few stacks of Bleed. Regardless, that's pretty much a universal problem in RPGs; debuffs are never really worth it because either they don't do anything or most enemies are so resistant that you have to waste several turns just trying to get it to stick.

[pikachu17]

Damage Over Time Gimmick Characters

Your defining character trait is that you kill everything twice as slow.  And such characters always end up underpowered.

It can depend. In Pokemon you can badly poison your enemies, then focus on staying alive, which can work quite well.
In some games you can ambush a character, poison them, and then hide until they are dead.
Damage over time can sometimes damage faster than healing can heal it, or even stop healing all together, in some games.

[Telgin]

It's mostly a problem with resistances, yes.  In general, most games with these mechanics let you kill a monster in a hit or two, making it pointless to use on them.  Then you hit a boss where it's helpful, but they're almost (or are outright) immune to it.

It works a little better in team based games, such as MMOs, where a player can specialize in it.  I'm reminded of Everquest, where some classes were built around the entire concept of DoT spells and could out DPS most anyone else at the expense of being weak and dying in a couple of hits.  Hmm, maybe Everquest's combat isn't the best example of balance... you needed those DoTs because monsters were outrageously tough specifically so you would need friends to kill things.

[Niveras]

It might have less to do with damage over time being "weak" than enemies being not strong enough for DoTs vs. DD to balance out over time. Then it simply becomes a matter of flavour.

[EnigmaticHat]

In Xcom 2 DoT's schtick is that the effects double as debuffs.  Poison reduces stats, fire is effectively a silence, acid doesn't do anything but has the highest damage and acid attacks shred almost anything's entire armor.  That being said in Xcom most fights are 1-2 turns and if you fire a grenade (the most common source of DoT) at something you're probably going to kill it in one turn before it can scurry back into cover.

Most games with DoT fail to meaningfully distinguish it from standard damage.  Especially since once they're done ticking, most DoT effects add up to about a standard attack anyway.  DoT can be interesting when applied to player characters, since it makes the player choose between continuing to fight or removing the damaging effect.  The most obvious way for players to use it on enemies would be to apply the debuff and then run away/otherwise start stalling, which is not something that most developers would want to encourage.

[Sergius]

Ok, this is something that recently I've found that it peeves me somewhat. A bunch of games have this research tree or list, you assign specialists and build machines so they can unlock stuff for you. Inevitably, you research everything, and all you can do is really just take down all that furniture and reassign people to shoe shining or whatever.

I think this could be averted if there was some use for researching after learning all the tech, like temporary productivity boosts or something so that suddenly a third of your population doesn't end up unemployed with fancy paperweights that used to be state of the art super microscopes.

[Rolan7]

Kinda curious about what game you mean.  I haven't been playing much new stuff, but I have been playing UFO:Afterlight.  The UFO series sooorta has that, except that like XCOM (new and old), when you finish the tech tree you're pretty much done.

If it's a Civ-like thing, SMAC and apparently old Civs gave bonus victory points for "Future tech"/"Transcendent thought".  So at least there was something, sorta.

My favorite solution was in Master of Orion 2, though.  It had repeatable generic technologies for each field, which actually gave significant benefits through miniaturization.  It was pretty much always *unnecessary*, but it allowed the player to have fun by sticking a dozen death-star-lasers (stellar converters) into a hull.  This was also intuitive, since miniaturization was a noticeable mechanic in the rest of the game.  As you advance in physics you get fancy new gravity guns, but your lasers get really efficient.  Why should end-game technologies be any different?

[milo christiansen]

The CIV games (I have played 3, 4, and 5) all had infinite research of some kind, but in general it is pretty rare.

[Tawa]

This isn't really specific to games, and it's not necessarily endemic to games, but it seems to occur in them more often than in any other form of media.

It bothers me when a game has a running theme that's expounded upon repeatedly and forms the work's central message, but because of the premises of the game or context of the theme, it's absurd to apply this outside of the game.

The thing that immediately jumps to mind is Pokémon. Every one of those games has a heavy-handed moral of sorts about the nature of cooperation between humans and Pokémon, but this is near impossible to use in any other context because there's nothing that fills the same role as Pokémon in real life.

A lot of the Ace Attorney games fall into this trap, too. Except for perhaps the speeches the judge gives at the end of Trials and Tribulations and Apollo Justice, the takeaway of the game tends to be relatively pointless because of either how wildly unrealistic the games' court system is or how vague the theme is.

Undertale's genocide route hits this too, IMO. It's a great game and all, but did the bad ending seriously have to be [an allegory for 100% completionists?] Let alone in a game where a subplot exists about [how one of the characters is literally dummied out and can be found only by screwing around with the game files.]

[Egan_BW]

Hehe. What is fiction for, if not showing us absurd scenarios that could never happen in real life? Morals and allegories are silly anyway, may as well make them utterly irrelevant too.

[Rolan7]

That...
And I like the exploration of a theme, if it is at all consistent.  In other words, I like to hear a message which at least makes sense in an imaginary context.  That's good fiction.

If that context is at all close to reality, well, that's a concrete bonus.

[Egan_BW]

Reality can get stuffed; I'll enjoy something whether it's like reality at all or not. :V
In fact, the farther from reality, the better.

[Rolan7]

While I specifically seek out fiction which offers insights on reality...

Yes.  I also love abstract games like Furi or N(++) or so many others, which have ~nothing to say~, they're simply experiences.

Or games like Cave Story which, perhaps by chance, straddle the line of gameplay and storytelling.
_{Keikaku aguu}

(Nothing to say except the need tO RAIL AGAINST CHALLENGE, aka the sum of human existence.)

[Egan_BW]

"Excellence isn't an art, it's pure habit. We are what we repeatedly do."
Yeah, nothing to say alright.

I mean, bit specific, but I have had Reality-Experiences of repeatedly trying to sword fight someone who's better than me.

[Tawa]

IMO, if you're going to be thematic and drive an idea into a viewer's head, the theme needs to actually have real-world implications of some sort. Just having a theme isn't enough; it needs to mean something outside of its own context. It doesn't need to be some elaborate allegory or philosophical manifesto or something, either. Offering some hackneyed moral is better than a theme being inapplicable in the real world.

And I'm not talking about games where a theme is just implied vaguely and you have to interpret it for yourself; I mean ones where the theme plays a central role, such as a speech or conversation where it's addressed (oftentimes toward the end, just before or after a climax.) Usually, if you're forced to interpret the theme on your own, the theme is less specific and more widely applicable, and oftentimes works of this sort tend to be less aimed at being meaningful, anyway.

I'm not saying that a game can't be good if it doesn't have a meaningful, applicable theme, either--hell, I love every example I just mentioned. But it just comes across as pointless to me if a work goes to great lengths to express a theme that means nothing outside of a fictional world. If we're going to accept games as art, I see having meaningful, applicable themes as a crucial step. We need to move beyond praising video games for having themes and start praising them for having meaningful ones.

A theme should be something that sticks with you, that you can apply to the real world, that might cause you to think about something in a way you didn't before. A theme you can't apply outside of its original context does nothing.