What's a good example of what not to do when designing a game?

DON'T YOU DARE JUST RANT ABOUT BAD GAMES IN THIS THREAD. WHEN SAYING A GAME IS BAD, SAY WHY YOU THINK SO IN A CALM, PROFESSIONAL MANNER.

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could give me some examples of particularly broken games? Let me go into detail of what I mean by "broken":

Systemic Breaks: When the intentional design of the game makes the game unfair in some way, whether it be making the game unintentionally easy, or unintentionally frustrating. Example: In a trading game, you could sell all your cargo, and then inflate the price. You could then buy it back, and sell it again, once again inflating the price. This is a systemic break because it makes the game easy by giving the player an easy exploit for money.

Technical Breaks: This is when the game just breaks. You know, when the map disappears from below you, when you die for no reason, that kind of stuff.

I would very much appreciate it. Games that are fair but still bad due to plain poor design are appreciated as well.

edited 2nd Sep '14 7:03:04 PM by Apocalypt1cAssass1n

I don't think Technical Breaks are particularly interesting in this context. Yeah, there's a bug in the game, don't screw up next time. There's not much to learn from it. Although I guess integer overflow is a fairly consistent problem, when a number becomes too high so it wraps around to negative. Designers should always keep in mind that players might inflate their numbers more than expected.

edited 2nd Sep '14 7:47:51 PM by Clarste

I was always amused by Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, particularly its infinite-speed reverse glitch that would let you drive off the map into a sky-colored void if you held the key down long enough. Probably the most unintentionally hilarious of many how-did-they-not-catch-that moments in a hideously broken game.

Action 52 too, all fifty-two of them. They play fair, or try to anyway, but the physics and programming are often so broken as to make each and every one of them a chore to sit through. There are a few games (I want to say Star Evil at the least) that would eventually start to do things like spawn the player right in front of a screen-width impassible wall until they either ran out of lives or turned the game off, and the sound driver is so badly programmed that in the third level of Lollipop it breaks entirely and starts playing garbage data.

Limbo of the Lost is the best example I can think of for the systemic breaks example. It's not very buggy, but the leaps of faith you have to make to solve even the simplest puzzles are frankly ridiculous at times. Put simply, it's worse at its least obtuse than King's Quest is at its most. (You need to acquire a Soul Jar full of a green substance, but the jar's keeper won't let you have it. The solution: Fill another jar with water, put saffron in the water to make it green, then switch the two.)

edited 2nd Sep '14 7:46:55 PM by Midna

Systemic breaks can sometimes lead into Good Bad Bugs. They don't crash the game (usually) and they often don't hinder playability (except in hilarious ways at times) but yes it can remove the challenge of certain encounters or long term progression.

There's no excuse for technical breaks. Rarely if ever are those worth keeping.

The one instance I can think of a fault in the balance and overall design of a game affecting it's quality would be in Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. The issue in particular was with the incredibly fast speed, the rapid construction rates, and the relatively cheap costs of units.

You see, the resource harvesters in the original version of the game brought in $2400 credits on a full load, which is enough to purchase 2-3 of any of the low-tier units, or one building and a bit of extra on the side. The game strongly encouraged to have 2 or more harvesters running at once, so this meant your actual cashflow was somewhere around 7,200 within 10 mins, maybe less. That's more than the cost of anything that exists in the game, Superweapon structures included. The high-tier units like the Mammoth Tanks and Avatar mechs cost around $2000+, meaning you'd be popping one out every harvester load. And since those units so clearly outclassed anything else available in your arsenal, it meant that the core strategy would be to build a horde of those suckers, equip them with railguns, and charge the enemy base and their horde of high-tier units until one of you dies first. Sure, the massive tank battles were fun to watch, but the problem was that the tanks were such effective units that the usage of anything else, such as the infantry or aircraft were clearly secondary in effectiveness, and that trying to counter a pure-tank player with weapons other than tanks rarely worked.

And given how quickly everything was paced in this game, that meant within the first 5-8 minutes you'd have a mid-tier base with probably 15-20 tanks ready to roll, and by 15 minutes you'd be maxed out and have a Superweapon ready to launch. Oh, and those with strong enough economies could afford to do a nasty little tactic called base-crawling: it involved using powerplants and other structures which provided a build radius to make a chain of structures towards the enemy base, and whenever the enemy tried to interrupt it you'd immediately plop down a ton of Tier 3 defensive turrets to fight them off. Repeat until you reach the enemy base and sealed them behind your wall of powerplants and guns.

Overall, this meant that the meta-game didn't evolve much and revolved entirely around build orders and tanks. After a few months EALA caught on and tried to balance it give the other units and tactics more appeal, eventually culminating in the changes seen in the Kane's Wrath expansion, but by then the community had either moved on or had hated the amount of changes being made, resulting in the expansion being a mediocre release and competitive sites like Game Replays.org not caring much about it.

I hate it when you're playing some sort of brawler, and you hit an enemy and the enemy seems to react to the hit by recoiling, but what is really happening is they're using an uninterruptible counterattack animation. It's bait-and-switch by making it seem like the game is rewarding you by giving you positive feedback, but then it pulls the rug out from under your feeling of power. Dead Island and Prototype are big offenders here.

What makes this so bad is that it subverts an undeniably good design choice: giving the player positive feedback as they play. These tiny "microrewards" are very subtle, but they make a huge impact on games' enjoyability. Things like the flashing crosshairs in Mass Effect 3 when a shot hits an enemy, or enemies getting staggered when you hit them.

edited 3rd Sep '14 9:04:34 AM by shigmiya64

One really infuriating thing I've seen in games is giving the player the illusion of choice but balancing things to force them into a very particular play style. Some of the worst offenders I've seen are Flash tower defense games where damage types and enemy types are arranged so that you have to build some of every single kind of tower (no versatility whatsoever) and the costs of towers and upgrades follow an extremely steep curve (meaning you pretty much have to build and upgrade in a very specific order). Good gameplay gives you at least some freedom in how to complete your goals.

edited 3rd Sep '14 11:08:22 AM by Meklar

I'm thinking that this thread doesn't stand on its own legs without running into the complaints rule. If you want to make a topic about game design and bring up flawed systems so that you can talk about improving them, that's one thing. But this isn't that. However it's intended, it has shown every sign of becoming a "bring up all the stuff you don't like about game design" topic.

This has been discussed, and we're provisionally reopening it. If it devolves to simply listing things you don't like, it will be relocked as a bitching thread.

Carry on.

Probably the best example of Guide Dang It! would be Final Fantasy 12. You can get the Infinity +1 Sword, but only if you don't open five other treasure chests first.

1. No warning that the innocuous action you are taking is bad

2. No connection at all between the forbidden action and the result

3. No possible way in-game to figure any of this out

4. No way you wouldn't open those chests without prior out of game warning

Its probably the height of "puzzle designed to sell the strategy guide", except for that it postdates strategy guides being a thing you couldn't just find on the internet.

I think Lost Forever, in any game that takes more than a few hours to complete, is a bad design choice in general. Buy sneaky Lost Forever like that is just mean.

When I saw Dead Island: Riptide on the shelves last year I was badly rocked by the content, by the trailers having missed the controversy first time round, by the new Australian R rating and how there is now rape in games as a warning on the cover.

Now that might sound like I'm having a whinge, I'm not. Soon after that I saw a course on making video games and I thought, why not try my hand on something that I think would appeal, that would interest others, something a little different and not have to involve all the yuck stuff we were seeing in games? So I took up the course and began playing around with the idea of a type of Police Quest style game that adhered to law enforcement rigidly, mixed with a little L.A. Noire in talking to suspects, talking down suspects so you don't have to shoot them, investigations into whether use of force was justified if you kill someone, a cast of characters you begin with, unlock throughout, customize, they each have their own story and dialogue, different scenes play out depending on who you're with, missions play out a certain way depending on who you play as, it was all very technical and involved.

Point is my tutor was most impressed with the narrative, with the level of thought that went into the story and design, choice of music, but thought that maybe it was too technical and advanced for a college project. They were after something more simple, competent, something a good Game Mod developer would be able to do easy would earn top marks, it doesn't have to have the Shown Their Work of Mass Effect or level of advancement of Metal Gear. Given they cited TV Tropes as a reference point I wrote a trope page for my game and if it went ahead I may have ran it up, it was easily the size of one for a Resident Evil title.

That may sound like I'm bragging, point is the tutor thought it might be too advanced, too technical, and trying to actually make the game I think they were right. As I explained it when I dropped out I think it was a case of I had a story that needed a game rather than a game that needed a story. I was too much thinking of the design aspect, the talking aspect, and not nearly had the skill to make something physical and pull it off. If you're looking at examples of what not to do then from attempting the course you do not have the skills to have this great concept or kick ass narrative or story as well as the computer skills to pull it off. To do that takes many talented writers, artists, designers, programmers, ect. Look at building the frame first, getting the skills for what you want to achieve, before hanging the creative fruits of your labor in it.

Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters. It had a customizable armour system, where wearing a full set would give you special effects, such as the fire based set would give you fiery footprints and your wrench attacks would set enemies on fire.

Now, this didn't work, because all the armour sets you found were in order, and scaled linearly, so any piece of the fire armour would be inferior to its poison counterpart, and the poison parts would be inferior to the electric parts later on, and so forth. So they basically wasted time and money making something that people would see for perhaps 10% of the game.

I actually tried to wear the full fire armour set in the new game+ once. Died in one hit in the next shootout.

edited 9th Oct '14 5:44:49 AM by ekimmak

<————— my face when

the pause button is also the skip cutscenes button

One of my pet peeves is that in a game that has you looting items and maintaining an inventory, having too much of one thing is very distracting. In Bioshock it's the useless empty hypos, in Red Steel 2 it's pistol ammo, and in Bioshock Infinite it's ammo in general altogether!

Where's the reward in looting when supplies are given to you like candy?

Thinking it was ok to use button combinations to scroll through characters in status, items, equipment screens.

edited 9th Oct '14 9:28:22 AM by Memers

Misapplication of camera controls.

The classic example here is Drake of the 99 Dragons, where the camera and the targeting cursor are the same control (right analog), meaning that you can't aim without moving the camera, making it impossible to aim at all with any degree of accuracy.

Item distribution.

Have a limit, but don't make it "1" for Item Drops outside of Key Items.

Quest 64 has a partial issue with this. Any Item Drop you can only get one of from a Monster. The Japanese version makes it 3, and there's no limit in the Game Boy remake(but there's only 20 item slots). There's 150 in the N64 versions, though. Which are ironically unfillable overall besides cheat codes.

I generally find any gimmick or etc that makes the game not very fun or frustrating for the sake of the plot or 'because that's how the character feels' to be a bad design choice. There are better ways to convey that your character is frustrated, confused, or depressed instead of making the player directly feel the same about the game they're playing.

I mean, I don't want a game to constantly make me feel happy and etc, but making me want to punch my TV Screen in for the sake of the plot? Not a good idea.

I think the most common flaws I find in games generally fall under the category of repetition. The most obvious example is grind, but this can manifest itself in many other ways. For example, there's a reason rhythm gamers (myself included) tend to hate note charts with "jackhammers" where you have to hit the same button repeatedly.

As a rule of thumb, if you're trying to implement measures to prevent botting in your game, you're treating the symptom and ignoring the cause. RuneScape was a prime example of this, at least when I tried it out many, many years ago. Take mining in RuneScape. When I first tried the game (10+ years ago), mining was just a matter of repeated clicking until you get ore. Then repeat 20+ more times to get enough ore for it to actually be useful, which could take half an hour. It was like watching paint dry.

A long time later, I heard they had added various game mechanics to make the game less monotonous, so I gave the game a second chance. The "improvement" was the addition of random events that would give you rewards for responding to them and punish you for ignoring them. It was clearly designed to make botting less feasible. But it also meant you had to pay closer attention to the game when there was nothing even remotely interesting happening 99% of the time, which made it even more annoying. This is a prime example of trying to solve the wrong problem entirely, and it's something I've seen many, MANY online games attempt to do. These days, if I see a CAPTCHA for any purpose other than spam prevention, I'll usually quit because it's a sign I'll dislike the game for being too grindy.

For an example of a good solution to this problem, look at Kingdom of Loathing. Bots are allowed. Not just tolerated, but permitted. Botters gain no advantage over non-botters because there are daily limits on everything, so botting only lets you spend less real-life time per day to accomplish the same results.

Also, I've noticed a subtler variant of the repetition issue: Repetitive menus. It's not a very noticeable effect, but I've found that my frustration with a particularly hard level bears little correlation with the difficulty of the actual level, and very strong correlation with how much time I have to spend in menus before I can give it another go. For an example of this flaw, take BIT.TRIP RUNNER's bonus rounds. If you're aiming for a PERFECT!! on level and miss something in its bonus round, before you can retry the level, you have to fail the bonus round (if you haven't already), skip through the results screen, start the next level, pause, exit back to the menu, and select the level you just played. Unlike the regular level portions, there's no restart option when you pause during a bonus round. This, in my opinion, is the game's sole major flaw. It's an excellent game, but the UI makes it unnecessarily frustrating to aim for a PERFECT!!

I didn't even realize this until I read about how Terry Cavanagh said he consciously designed Super Hexagon to avoid these flaws, even at a detail level. Little things like how after dying, you can jump right back in literally a second later, and the music will start at a random point to ensure you're not listening to the same 10 seconds over and over, when you try the "hardestestest" difficulty for the first time and inevitably die in <10 seconds multiple times in a row. And he was spot-on. I don't know how many hundreds of failures I had in Super Hexagon, yet at no point did I feel frustrated. And I must've failed Veni Vidi Vici in VVVVVV (also by Cavanagh) over a hundred times in a row, also with no frustration. Even I Wanna Be the Guy was made significantly less frustrating and more fun by the way you can hit 'R' and immediately get back into the game after dying. This wasn't a matter of extreme patience; I've gotten frustrated at plenty of other games on numerous occasions.

edited 10th Oct '14 3:06:34 AM by PoochyEXE