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[Puck]

Just watch any of the Angry Video Game Nerd videos to see examples of games that have really bad design.

Sometimes he is just trying to be funny, sometimes he is just ... i dont know... muscular impaired?

Landing in "Top Gun" on the NES is NOT hard. And the game was more than alright by then.
Just a little example.

Recent games given me the thought:
Unskippable movie sequences can be bad design. Or dialogues you dont want to listen to because youre that much faster reading the subtitles. So you click the dialogue away, but lo behold, the last line you skipped also made the game skip 30 secs of important video. Problem is... before you can reload the savegame before that part you skipped, so you dont miss it, you have to endure ANOTHER 30 minutes of dialogue before you regain control. Dialogue youre goin to experience anyway AFTER THEY LET YOU FRIGGIN RELOAD THAT LAST SAVE.

I'm looking at you, dragon age, and your friggin harrowing.

[3]

Unskippable movie sequences can be bad design. Or dialogues you dont want to listen to because youre that much faster reading the subtitles. So you click the dialogue away, but lo behold, the last line you skipped also made the game skip 30 secs of important video. Problem is... before you can reload the savegame before that part you skipped, so you dont miss it, you have to endure ANOTHER 30 minutes of dialogue before you regain control. Dialogue youre goin to experience anyway AFTER THEY LET YOU FRIGGIN RELOAD THAT LAST SAVE.

This reminds me of games that use an autosave system, but only autosave when you enter/leave certain rooms... which may or may not be important ones.

[Neonivek]

The worst of the WORST in terms of unskippable cutscenes would probably be Assasines Creed. (well of games I remember)

If you lost a mission (which often wasn't that hard to do.) you could end up sitting through the same five+ minute cutscene over and over again.

As for Videogame Nerd... once again I like that this topic is going in the dirrection of games that are good but that have horrible parts in them... rather then just plain bad games.
-Also there is a guy, who is basically an immitator, who is MUCH worse then the Videogame nerd in terms of exagerating the difficulty of a game... This guy, who annoys me to no end, plays Aladin for the SNES and SUCKS AT IT! I doubt he played through the game because he doesn't seem to notice that the Genie stage is pretty much the most difficult in the game. He also doesn't know how to use the parachute. Now I am not criticising his ability to play so much that he unfairly criticises the game's difficulty when the game isn't that hard.

[Puck]

Oh hell, yeah, assassins creed is bad. And that unskippable thing is just the tip of the iceberg. How did they manage to wreck a heap of perfectly good ideas that thoroughly is beyond me... They literally had to put effort in to make a game full of so much cool stuff THAT bad.

Must have been the suits. Or the young trendy designer team had too much coke. (Seriously, watch the "making of" that game. Those guys look like they crawled right out of an apple ad.)

[Sergius]

You don't need to grind all that much to complete the main quest. Like I said, some guy did it in under an hour using a merchant bug and some really clever alchemy. You do have to move around a lot though. Personally, I find Morrowind quite enjoyable, mostly because of the spirit of exploration throughout. You get little rewards (or not-so-little, depending on exact places) for performing acts of ingenuity and getting into places the designers likely didn't want you to be able to visit. For this reason, my sign of choice was the Tower. With it and some basic alchemy knowledge it's possible to get into all sorts of too-high-to-reach and locked places.

I got to the end of Morrowind and accidentally fell on Lord Dagoth, who stumbled into the lava and died. Was he going to be a hard fight?

Punching out gods is also lots of fun.

[kuro_suna]

You don't need to grind all that much to complete the main quest. Like I said, some guy did it in under an hour using a merchant bug and some really clever alchemy. You do have to move around a lot though. Personally, I find Morrowind quite enjoyable, mostly because of the spirit of exploration throughout. You get little rewards (or not-so-little, depending on exact places) for performing acts of ingenuity and getting into places the designers likely didn't want you to be able to visit. For this reason, my sign of choice was the Tower. With it and some basic alchemy knowledge it's possible to get into all sorts of too-high-to-reach and locked places.

I got to the end of Morrowind and accidentally fell on Lord Dagoth, who stumbled into the lava and died. Was he going to be a hard fight?

Punching out gods is also lots of fun.

Every time I got to him he fell in the lava all by himself. Though unless you use the magic mcguffins on the big heart thing he won't actually die, just run around aimlessly at the bottom of the lava pit forever.

Similarly when challenged to a epic duel in the arena for control of the mages guild I accidentally entered the arena in to the stands rather than the pit. At this point I enter and imminently he yells for me to die and starts spazzing out in the arena pit unable to path to the stands where I casually chucked a pile shurikens at him until he stopped moving.

[mithra]

One issue that I've seen in several games is that the developers haven't actually played the game for any length of time, so they design in things that become hugely annoying over time.

One example that come to mind is the SNES game PTO II (that's Pacific Theater of Operations).  The way to find enemy ships is to search.  Each search costs one point of the several action points you get.  Often (nearly every time) multiple searches are needed.  But you must go through a series of button pushes for each search.  IOW, you can't say "Search 3 times", instead you have to go through the entire search sequence three times.  So you spend an inordinate amount of time pushing buttons since you search nearly every turn.

[Muz]

Bad game design? MMORPGs.

Whose idea is it where you have to spend more hours doing boring stuff to get better at a game than anyone else? I don't mind showing that you did the most work or planning or replaying the same game. That's all cool.

But when you deliberately do something completely mindless and boring, and call that playing the game, yeah, that sucks. I'm trying to play a game to have fun. I shouldn't have to bore myself for 10 hours to have fun for one hour.

[Puck]

That, however, is not really bad game design. Actually, the "threadmill" exists on purpose, and is actually some sort of selling point for some games. I read some interesting stuff on it, but it's been a while, and for the life of me I couldnt get you the links, sorry.

Maybe people dont even enjoy it, but still it's there for more than just grubbing subscription money. It IS somewhat funny, tho, that most games that sell you the grind are actually MMOs.

If you want MMOish gameplay without the grind/threadmill, there are games out there. Early Guild Wars comes to mind (I say early because I dont know the current game). It even had a lot more depth when it comes to tactics and strategy than most MMOs, even tho it uses the well known and proven party principles (healer, tank, DD/CC combos and such).

tl;dr: a lot of customers are in it for the grind, and it's neither good nor bad game design per se. Most MMOs actually sell because of the grind.

[chaoticag]

I've been playing Darksiders lately. Great game, but the controls are a little unresponsive, and the pistol seems useless most of the time.

[Muz]

That, however, is not really bad game design. Actually, the "threadmill" exists on purpose, and is actually some sort of selling point for some games. I read some interesting stuff on it, but it's been a while, and for the life of me I couldnt get you the links, sorry.

Maybe people dont even enjoy it, but still it's there for more than just grubbing subscription money. It IS somewhat funny, tho, that most games that sell you the grind are actually MMOs.

If you want MMOish gameplay without the grind/threadmill, there are games out there. Early Guild Wars comes to mind (I say early because I dont know the current game). It even had a lot more depth when it comes to tactics and strategy than most MMOs, even tho it uses the well known and proven party principles (healer, tank, DD/CC combos and such).

tl;dr: a lot of customers are in it for the grind, and it's neither good nor bad game design per se. Most MMOs actually sell because of the grind.

Paying = no effort is a good option. I mean you have kids who would click ads 2000 times to pay for a game, why not make them farm gold to get stronger in a game, while the people who have no time to grind can just pay. That's decent design and a good business model.

With grinding, they're into it because they can win just by playing longer. You know, more effort = win, that's what it should be. But actually doing something completely boring for the sake of winning.. there's something wrong there. I'd rather the design be "waste 20 hours/day doing something fun" to get stronger.

Some MMOs do this better than others.

[JoshuaFH]

I'm pretty much in agreement with Muz, which is why I don't play MMO's any more.

[Asehujiko]

What do you get when you take
the basic concept of abandoned space stations on fire of dead space
the "one button does everything but always the wrong thing" control scheme from gears of war
the rushed out the door to meet a deadline quality of sadly too many games to count
the plot revisionisticism undoing all that was good about the previous game of red alert 3
the constant protagonist near death experience of call of duty
the ammo scarcity of resident evil on hard mode
and dlc that is already in the game but you need to pay for anyway?

Spoiler: the answerM (click to show/hide)

ass effect 2

Then there's also the MASSIVE spoilers in the installer with things like <important character>_death_renegade.mov

Yay for day 0 piracy giving the me the opportunity to cancel pre-orders before i'm ripped off. In a semi related note, company of heroes complete is on sale at steam for 10.49 euros if anybody suddenly has any cash to spare...

[Neonivek]

I have to disagree with you on Ammo Scarcity on Hard mode (Except for the a few of the Resident Evil games) in that it is fully intentional being a "Survival game".

On Hard mode you don't have the option to simply kill everything anymore.

I always found it odd that in Resident evil 2 (and 1) you actually had enough ammo to kill every creature in the game and then some.

[Asehujiko]

Well, if i'm playing an rpg, as opposed to a survival horror game, i shouldn't exhaust the ammo supply of 4 out of 5 of my weapons before i reach the first boss when i play carefully with 90%+ accuracy and leave a decent amount of shooting to my teammates. I hit with every single one of my pistol and sniper bullets, wasted about 10 shotgun pellets total and killed at least two enemies with each of my grenades. Besides that, i found the original RE's version of ammo management also quite annoying. Having to be sensible with your supplies is ok, having to play through it once already and calculate how many bullets you are going to use on everything in advance is needless irritation. And my main point was that mass effect 2 isn't even remotely as good as it's predecessor, thanks to ripping off the bad parts of all popular games they could think of.