First things first, I know I haven't updated in ages. I've been in Germany and I'm also on the job hunt!
In my down time I recently rented Alan Wake, a game I at least enjoyed the story to, but coupled with my rental of Dante's Inferno before my trip I think I've been served a very large dosing of game design decisions I think we need to start doing away with:
Collectibles
I'm not at all against the idea of collectibles in a game when a main theme of the game is exploration. I loved the bobble heads in Fallout 3, not to mention each one was hidden in a very interesting location that was fun to explore and revealed an interesting story. However, in a game where exploration is either not facilitated well by the level design, controls, pacing or story it really blocks the flow of the game.
Alan Wake really pushed this too far, there are 100 coffee cans to find, 25 signs to read, 106 manuscript pages to find, 25 can stacks to shoot over and 14 television shows to watch and 15 supply crates to find. WHY the hell is there so much shit in this game? I can let the manuscript pages slide as they are absolutely integral to the story and I always enjoyed when I found one as they tell a small story. However, all the rest leads to immensely stupid situations.
A game like Alan Wake that has such a strong story really just makes the player want to focus his or her energy on experiencing that. When Alan is in a hurry to get to a location, wouldn't it make sense that he just drives like a bat out of hell with his headlights searing the darkness to his next objective? Why yes it would, but I would love to read the story where Alan stops at every house along the way to see if they have one of the 100 coffee thermoses he's trying to collect.
This is just bullshit, tedious busy work and there's always that "Oh god maybe I missed one" thought that creeps into my head. It becomes frustrating when 9/10 times I wander off and find nothing, but damn that 10th time I found a fucking thermos ensuring I scour the entire game for this garbage. The kicker is, what do they do? As far as I can tell, not a damn thing. If you find them all you get an achievement but besides that... nothing! At least the Fallout 3 bobble heads gave your character permanent buffs.
I mean really, these things to not NEED to be in the game. I'd rather finish a game and be done with it instead of thinking "Oh I could go back and collect this or that." Really though, unless you LOVED a game, who the hell does this anyways? I have no desire to return to Alan Wake. I know the story, it's told and done. Why would I replay to collect pointless crap that gives me nothing? If you beat Assassin's Creed, do you really feel the burning urge to run around and collect flags for hours and hours? No, because it's not fun. It wasn't fun the first time and it won't be fun now, so lets just take things out of games that make them tedious and frustrating and just keep the shit that makes them fun
This is the kind of tripe hate and it is absolutely padding your game for length. A scene that would normally take 5 minutes can now take 10 or 15 as the player has to scour every edge and corner of the god damn map if they want to find all their shiny objects. If it's not padding the game then it's...
Pointless Achievements
God do I hate these. One has to ask themselves, if it weren't for achievements would Alan Wake have had the coffee thermoses? My bet is no, Remedy is much better than that. Did Assassin's Creed really need the hundreds and hundreds of flags all over the fucking place? NO It didn't, just focus on working the achievements into the game and not working your game into the achievement system.
Again, if these were all relevant and pertinent to the game then I like them. It is nice to get recognition of we beat a boss fight without taking damage or complete a section very quickly, but rewarding people for doing stupid shit like "travel 1,000,000 kilometers" or whatever it was in Tales of Vesperia is just so utterly axillary to the game it's a just idiotic to include. The kicker is unless you essentially tape your move stick down once you get the airship (furthering my theory that every JRPG must have an airship) for about 6 hours you probably aren't going to get this achievement. There is no reason you would ever need to normally move this far and on the flipside, it is not something to be commended as there is nothing impressive about it. Though, at least it didn't have...
Jumps in Games That Just Shouldn't Have Them
Again, another thing Alan Wake is guilty of. Face it, if your character's jump animation is just awkward and strange it is immensely cruel to put jumping situations into the game. I'll admit that Alan Wake was fairly good about this, safe for a few select parts but can we PLEASE stop doing this?
This also goes hand in hand with the "really hard jump" situation I find in games all the time. Now for me, Dante's Inferno had way, way too many of these. I fucking swear that every other jump was one of those jumps that you have to perfectly time your double jump while traveling at the right angle away from the surely stupidly positioned camera in a location you can't change. Again, if your game is a platformer than obviously jumping is a must. If you are sort of an exploration type game (metroid, castlevania, etc.) then hell yes, let's jump away because I KNOW the jump mechanics will be solid in these games.
Again back to Dante's Inferno, I died in pitfalls in that game about 95% of the time. So much so that a screen came up "You can adjust the difficulty in the options menu, would you like to?" NO! Go fuck yourself game. Is putting the game on easy suddenly going to alter the geometry of the map so that the ledges are closer together? Of course not, go to hell. At the very least the game LET you change the difficulty because I hate
Not Being Able to Change the Difficulty
Now, not many old games had this at all and it's a pretty modern idea in gaming. However, it's one that I think makes a lot of sense. Especially with the trend of games seeming to become easier and easier, "hard" is almost like the new "medium". The problem is, when you get a difficult game and assume you can handle it on hard and then an hour in when things really kick off the game decides it's going to stomp your ass to the moon because your on hard. Should the player really need to start a new game on "medium" and lose their progress because of something they really couldn't have ever known? They didn't know how hard "hard" is and had no way of knowing. Though on a related topic I also dislike...
Locked Difficulties
Don't do this bullshit. Alan Wake was a huge offender in this regard. Not only because it locked Nightmare difficulty until you beat the game on medium or hard, but because it also only dropped certain manuscript pages in Nightmare difficulty. The manuscript pages provided a lot of back story and motivation into the characters, which in my opinion makes having some of them as hidden collectibles a very strange choice. But come on, locking out back story because I'm not playing on the hardest mode which is ALSO locked from me? Get over yourself, game.
Padding games out
Maybe you had your funding cut, maybe the publisher wants the game to be longer. Whatever the reason, padding a game out just leads to tedious situations.
No, actually, I do not want to fight every boss monster in the game in some ridiculously contrived "gauntlet" at the end of the game. Nor do I want to play through all the levels again but in reverse. Nor do I really relish yet ANOTHER "suddenly the room collapses and this door is blocked, go walk for 40 minutes the long way around." A game should be as long as it needs to be, and not longer.
Stuff That Isn't Your Fault
An alternative title to this could just be "Other Bullshit" but I felt that was less descriptive. I mean parts in games where you just yell at the screen "Oh, come on!" I think I'll just list a bunch of stuff here.
Enemies that can stunlock you to death or near death. This is just classic cheesy "make the game hard" garbage. If an enemy can combo me to death you may as well just do away with the health meter so we can stop pretending I have more than one hit.
Shit that happens that you can't react to. like an enemy just spawning behind you and then one shotting you, thanks game.
Characters that just don't seem to DO what you tell them to. When I say switch weapon, do it NOW; don't take all damn day. Likewise when playing an RTS, when I damn well tell you to use an ability you USE it.
Having little enemy/environment variation. This is important enough to probably warrant it's own section, but really it's a very simple concept. People get bored doing the same thing again and again and seeing the same thing again and again. If you mix this up your game becomes much more interesting and gives more breathing room for extended combat sections.
Finally...
Bad Endings
Now, I don't really know why this is such a problem with a lot of games. I realize you all want to keep the bling bling sequel opportunities open and we of course HAVE to make room for the piles of inevitably shitty DLC to come out, but does all this really mean the game we all purchase needs to have such a terrible ending?
I want things to feel concluded, or at the very least concluded for the time being. A good metaphor would be to close a door, but open a window. We want the door (ie, the main story) to be finished but leave a hook (ie, opening the window) for the story to continue should sales be good enough. Movies and novels do this all the time when sequel potential is there so I don't know why we gamers get the hardcore shaft on things. Sometimes it doesn't even seem like we make it into the house that even HAS the door or the window.
Let's look at say.... Unreal 2. At the end of the game your main space ship blows up and every character on it but yourself dies in a horrible laser beam. Your stuck on the planet and then the game ends, see ya.
What the fuck is this? NOTHING is concluded, NOTHING is even finished. It's not even a cliffhanger, it's just kind of... a dead end. It's like the game just goes "Well that's all for you, we're done here - see ya!"
This kind of abrupt ending is not entirely common in games, but we don't need all the cliffhangers and ambiguous bullshit endings that happen all the time. Perhaps I'm just a prude, but I don't like endings where I need to "assume" things via sheer guesswork. If the main character dies just tell me so, don't make it so he might be dead or might not be because we don't know if we can afford a sequel. And hell, you know what?
Don't Retcon
I'm looking at YOU Starcraft 2!
