Things to avoid in (video) game design

[Lector87]

Farming materials to craft equipment.

If, in the course of your adventures, you gradually assemble the unique components of a unique weapon of ancient mystic power - great!

If, on the other hand, you have to farm bears' butts - and only 1 out of every 50 bears even DROPS a butt - you are wasting your life.

[Nadevoc]

Mechanics that need to be used to progress one section while being entirely irrelevant the rest of the game. At least without a lot of prep. So there are two ways to go about doing this. The good way and the bad way. Look at Mario Odyssey regularly has you possess different creatures to give you control of their new mechanics. But the game is designed in such a way that upon gaining the new mechanic you go through a quick tutorial on how to use it and then the puzzle is you using the mechanic in increasingly complex ways until it's done. This is opposed to games that show you a mechanic in the beginning of the game. And then it is nearly irrelevant for the entire game except one section midway through that requires you to do it correctly to pass. That's horrible.

Another form of this is a mini-game that's completely different from the rest of the game. I've seen way too many games where there's a race thrown in randomly, or the aforementioned random stealth level, or whatever. Particularly since the controls/mechanics are often not as tight as they should be since that's only a small fraction of the game.

Bugs

I really feel that 'bugs' doesn't fit here because they're not a design choice.

What about Luck as a character stat?

I think a Luck stat is incredibly difficult to design without being either useless or a god stat because it's going to impact basically every action and result. In my opinion, that means it shouldn't be included as a stat. I think it DOES work quite nicely as something like a feat (to use D&D terminology). So instead of "I'll drop strength by two and put that into luck", something like, "Instead of having the Well-Connected or Grizzled Veteran trait, my guy's just Lucky".

[Vitruviansquid]

The vast majority of these things to avoid can be summed up into one rule that may be general to the point of uselessness, but hell, let's put it out there:

Find the thing that is satisfying to do in your game, and don't muck around unnecessarily with things outside of it.

Most of the time a game significantly changes controls, like in water levels, quicktime events, driving sections, and such, they mucking around unnecessarily, and that's why we hate those parts of games.

[Olinser]

Another form of this is a mini-game that's completely different from the rest of the game. I've seen way too many games where there's a race thrown in randomly, or the aforementioned random stealth level, or whatever. Particularly since the controls/mechanics are often not as tight as they should be since that's only a small fraction of the game.




I really feel that 'bugs' doesn't fit here because they're not a design choice.





I think a Luck stat is incredibly difficult to design without being either useless or a god stat because it's going to impact basically every action and result. In my opinion, that means it shouldn't be included as a stat. I think it DOES work quite nicely as something like a feat (to use D&D terminology). So instead of "I'll drop strength by two and put that into luck", something like, "Instead of having the Well-Connected or Grizzled Veteran trait, my guy's just Lucky".

Forced stealth level are particularly stupid when they don't even have a NARRATIVE purpose in the game.

Things like Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. You suddenly get thrust into a stupid mandatory stealth section where you are trying to sneak past Agreus, and if he catches you, you die and have to start the section over.

When you manage to sneak past him? YOU IMMEDIATELY FIGHT HIM. So literally you spent 15 minutes sneaking past an enemy you were fully capable of killing in the first place. It's so stupid and pointless.

[Keltest]

Farming materials to craft equipment.

If, in the course of your adventures, you gradually assemble the unique components of a unique weapon of ancient mystic power - great!

If, on the other hand, you have to farm bears' butts - and only 1 out of every 50 bears even DROPS a butt - you are wasting your life.

I don't think this is necessarily a problem in and of itself. If youre killing bears anyway, whether for farming XP or just because they keep wandering into your path and picking fights, letting you do something useful with those otherwise incidental kills is a decent idea. Just don't make it the only way to progress gear or a quest or something.

[Knaight]

You're free to enjoy what you want to, but since at least the days of the NES there has been a consistent pattern in video games: the obligatory "water level(s)" are usually a giant pain in the butt. They often saddle you with mechanics you don't have to deal with anywhere else in the game, and for whatever reason they often have some of the least appealing music in the game.

On the other hand there is something to be said for a bit of variety in a game, and level specific mechanics often work well for this - water levels are often poorly implemented, but that general concept is solid. I think the design lesson here is not to work on a secondary set of mechanics when you don't have the resources to do it right.

Back to the general topic of things to avoid in video games, I'd like to add platforming in first-person games. If I can't even see my character's feet, then gauging where I need to be positioned to make the jump is a pain in the butt. Save platforming for games with a third-person perspective.

I've seen this work only a couple of times, although those few exceptions generally worked. Mostly this is the Metroid Prime series, which notably doesn't use the standard shooter controls.

[tensai_oni]

Bugs:

Does that really count? Nobody puts bugs in their video game by design - at least, I hope nobody does!

A lot of things in this thread I can theoretically give designers a pass on, because while they are often done badly, they can also be done well. For example if you hate escort quests, play Ico and high chances are you'll change your mind at least in this one instance. But some things are just inexcusable:

Inability to turn on subtitles.

Unskippable cutscenes as it was mentioned.

For PC games - controls that make it nigh impossible to play without a gamepad. Extra fail points if the game only works with an X Box one and not a third party product.

For games with save/check points: placing them too scarcely so you can lose half an hour or more game time if you die or have to quit the game before reaching a save point. I love Nier Automata, but Nier Automata did this at the very start of the game. Please don't do that.

Obligatory puzzles that require a specific, non mainstream skillset to solve. An example being a music puzzle in Undertale - Toby Fox is musically talented so it was a piece of cake for him, but he also (I assume) foolishly thought it'd be just as easy for everyone else. In reality, a lot of players had to either guess or find a solution online.

"Heads I win, Tails you Lose"
If you can't write a story for winning the 'unwinnable' boss battle, don't make it a boss battle. Xenogears had a pretty bad example where a late game 'battle' that was supposed to be unwinnable was winnable, you got a piece of loot, but nothing changed afterwards and they had no problem with making other auto-loss cutscenes.

And lastly this. Few things annoy me more in a game's plot than winning an encounter only for a cutscene to play and show that no, I actually lost.

[BeerMug Paladin]

For me, forced multiplayer, online interactivity or social passes. If I wanted to be exposed to people, I wouldn't be playing a game.

I like my single player games and I don't much care for social networking aspects. This includes things which require check-ins or online play in order to acquire unique unlocks within the game. The ds/3ds has a lot of these kinds of things, but they also show up on other platforms.

I'm fine with a separate multiplayer mode I'd never touch, but I don't want to ever have messages from other players pop up on my screen in single player.

I really feel that 'bugs' doesn't fit here because they're not a design choice.

When easily noticeable bugs are included in a finished product, they're a design choice. No fairies came down from on high and made those bugs just miraculously appear out of the aether on launch day. Someone knew about (or ought to have known) the obvious bug and decided to release it in that state. That is a choice.

[Fri]

For PC games - controls that make it nigh impossible to play without a gamepad. Extra fail points if the game only works with an X Box one and not a third party product..

I think it's fair if some games meant to be played or can be played better with game pad. It's a gaming pc accessories. After all, some games are meant to be played with flight controller for example. You can play it Microsoft Flight Simulator with keyboard, but it's meant to be played with flight controller, and the experience of playing it with keyboard is a different and arguably inferior one. Some games in consoles also need specific accessories, e.g light gun. You can play Time Crisis in Playstation with your controller, but it's a wholly inferior experience compared to using light gun.

[Nadevoc]

When easily noticeable bugs are included in a finished product, they're a design choice. No fairies came down from on high and made those bugs just miraculously appear out of the aether on launch day. Someone knew about (or ought to have known) the obvious bug and decided to release it in that state. That is a choice.

No, they're never a design choice. They're a failure of the software engineers, the QA, and the project managers.

Saying they're a design choice is like if a cook knows an ingredient is expired, makes the dish anyways, and then you blame the guy who wrote the recipe.

[Starwulf]

Farming for loot, or experience.

If to beat the game, I have to go through the same repetitive task after I've already accomplished it, I will hate you and your game. I should note, there is a difference here between having a gauntlet that you have to complete the full way through in one go or you have to start over at the beginning. That can be done well if the challenge of the gauntlet feels fair and varried. Hell, that's basically the entirety of the Dark Souls games.

But if I have to beat some boss for 15 times to get a specific magic weapon. Or I get sent on a mission to collect 25 bear anuses. I will drop your game immediately.

This is a pet-peeve, not a bad game design(and there is a significant difference). There is an entire genre of games that rely on this, and have an incredibly large following(Talking about aRPG's, ie: Diablo, Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, Sacred, etc). I know I myself would be pretty upset if that entire genre of games just disappeared, lol.

Now, you could qualify that statement with saying that it doesn't belong in jRPG's, or hell, any game at all that doesn't specifically revolve around that gameplay mechanic, and I'll fully agree with you. I remember the first time I came across it in a video game that it had no business being in: Dragon Warrior(or Dragon Quest in japan). Trying to do anything once you unlocked the bottom half of the map pretty much required you to grind, and grind, and grind, and then grind some more, and it was freaking awful. Especially trying to get the legendary adventurer's armor from that Knight creature in the deserted town. I had to spend dozens of hours trying to find metal slimes just so I was strong enough to beat that monster to get the armor. Hated every minute of it.

[Knaight]

No, they're never a design choice. They're a failure of the software engineers, the QA, and the project managers.

Some bugs fit this description. Others are very much a deliberate decision to release something minimally polished and hope people don't care, at least long enough to make sales. That's a design choice.

[Nadevoc]

Some bugs fit this description. Others are very much a deliberate decision to release something minimally polished and hope people don't care, at least long enough to make sales. That's a design choice.

That's why I included project managers. They're the ones that say "this is not working as designed, but we don't care".

If it's working as designed, it's not a bug. Thus, a bug literally cannot be a design decision by definition.

[Cespenar]

Eh, I actually have the black sheep opinion in which I love all the surprise gameplay changes like water levels, stealth sections, escort missions, hacking minigames, etc. They often spice up an otherwise stretched and tired game mechanic, so even if they're clunky, I often end up preferring them to just another straight level.

But I heartily second and condone every other complaint about any game essentials: cutscenes, save points, controls, camera angles etc. just shouldn't be creating trouble for players in this age and time.

To name something even more specific, though, I hate the cheesy excuses in RPGs that doesn't let you utilize your full party size. You go to all this trouble in collecting the zaniest/coolest/most badass characters in the universe and even befriending the lot, and then 80% of them sit on the ship/base sipping tea while the 3-4 of you go fight stuff. Adding a mechanic in which you make a second/third team that ends up in helping you in small ways should take just about one choice screen and a couple of paragraphs of writing, but 90% of the games still don't go to that trouble.

[Knaight]

If it's working as designed, it's not a bug. Thus, a bug literally cannot be a design decision by definition.

Except that bugs are routinely defined by the observer (in this case player), where design comes from the designers. The designers can put a bug (as defined by the player) in as a side effect of intentional design decisions and then choose to leave it there, and while the designers probably wouldn't define it as a bug that doesn't make that an incorrect assessment on the player side, let alone a useless term for warning other players.

[Nadevoc]

Except that bugs are routinely defined by the observer (in this case player), where design comes from the designers. The designers can put a bug (as defined by the player) in as a side effect of intentional design decisions and then choose to leave it there, and while the designers probably wouldn't define it as a bug that doesn't make that an incorrect assessment on the player side, let alone a useless term for warning other players.

So... something that's not in any way whatsoever a bug somehow qualifies as a bug in your mind? That makes literally no sense to me.

That said, it seems no progress is being made in this discussion, so I'm dropping it and moving on.

[Knaight]

So... something that's not in any way whatsoever a bug somehow qualifies as a bug in your mind? That makes literally no sense to me.

That said, it seems no progress is being made in this discussion, so I'm dropping it and moving on.

I think it's a definition difference between us. Among the definitions of "bug" I'm used to are some that fit (the player and reviewer side identifying obviously unintended behaviors, e.g. programs crashing completely), some that don't fit but at least roughly apply (the design side regarding behaviors that exist within a program that weren't put there intentionally), and some that are totally inapplicable (insects, arachnids, and similar). Things that aren't in any way a bug by one definition can still be a bug by other definitions.

[Wookieetank]

Back to the general topic of things to avoid in video games, I'd like to add platforming in first-person games. If I can't even see my character's feet, then gauging where I need to be positioned to make the jump is a pain in the butt. Save platforming for games with a third-person perspective.

While I generally agree with this sentiment, Detiny (1&2) and Dying Light have proven to be fine exceptions to this rule. Granted both of those games have things in place to make the platforming more forgiving, double jump in destiny, grappling hooks in Dying Light.

[DigoDragon]

"Jump puzzles"--I really dislike them and consider it bad game design when you're forced into them to advance. I rather get an optional alternative path and fight something than go through the jump puzzle.

Bad random encounters.. More common in RPGs... Comes in different formats, e. g. fights not worth waiting because they are neither challenging nor rewarding. What's the point of those? Or the FF Tactics problem... Encounters you can't predict, can't avoid and take way too long. A normal encounter takes a minute or two, but those take five to ten and you need to reload to get away!

I agree, and there have been games which addressed this! Earthbound had a mechanic I really liked--if your level was above a certain point past the enemy' level, the game automatically skips combat and declares you the winner.

Wild Arms 3 had a game mechanic where just before you enter a random battle, an exclamation mark appears above your head. You can then press a specific button and skip the fight if you wanted to, or just keep walking and the fight starts. Skipping random battles cost points off an encounter meter, but the meter can be refilled by finding gems in the dungeon you are in (usually there's enough to skip most battles). The bonus of this game mechanic is that the higher your level, the less it costs to skip random battles. The cost can reach zero too. This is very useful if you wanted to go back to an old dungeon to retrieve a treasure you forgot, but don't want to have to fight every darn random battle on the way there.

Speaking of random encounters:
FF1 had this ice cave where there was death or stone cause enemies that were worth almost nothing for XP/gold so there was challenges that weren't worth it that can kill you randomly.

Really just frustrating as can be.

I know exactly which dungeon that is and it's the second most frustrating dungeon in the game for me. And later on in that game you do find more enemies that are hard as bricks to fight and yet only give you the "1 exp 1 gp" reward. That's just insulting.

[Lector87]

I don't think this is necessarily a problem in and of itself. If youre killing bears anyway, whether for farming XP or just because they keep wandering into your path and picking fights, letting you do something useful with those otherwise incidental kills is a decent idea. Just don't make it the only way to progress gear or a quest or something.

Totally agree - the key word here is "incidental". If killing a ton of enemies of a certain type can be enjoyably worked into the normal course of the game, crafting some fine weapon from their mountain of corpses can be a nice bonus.

If, on the other hand, you are farming them - going back to the same place to kill the same mobs over and over in hopes of a rare drop - then I have a problem with the game design.

Come to think of it, I wonder if I just object to "farming", period. I think games should more or less flow from beginning to end. If you get bogged down in the middle performing the same repetitive task for hours, I can't see the appeal. But this might be a taste thing? Some people might like a "farming" mechanic, for gold, XP, upgrade materials, etc.?

Anyone here ever "farm" for something in a way they actually enjoyed?

[Keltest]

Totally agree - the key word here is "incidental". If killing a ton of enemies of a certain type can be enjoyably worked into the normal course of the game, crafting some fine weapon from their mountain of corpses can be a nice bonus.

If, on the other hand, you are farming them - going back to the same place to kill the same mobs over and over in hopes of a rare drop - then I have a problem with the game design.

Come to think of it, I wonder if I just object to "farming", period. I think games should more or less flow from beginning to end. If you get bogged down in the middle performing the same repetitive task for hours, I can't see the appeal. But this might be a taste thing? Some people might like a "farming" mechanic, for gold, XP, upgrade materials, etc.?

Anyone here ever "farm" for something in a way they actually enjoyed?

I played a lot of Diablo and Everquest, so... yes?

[Kato]

I agree, and there have been games which addressed this! Earthbound had a mechanic I really liked--if your level was above a certain point past the enemy' level, the game automatically skips combat and declares you the winner.

Huh, I didn't know that. (yeah, I really should play it, yadda yadda) neat.
I know a few games allow enemies to run if you are too powerful but then you'll still need to start the encounter and wait for them to get away.
But something like that, comparing levels or some other threat assessment, cannot be that hard. I don't even want your five gold and ten XP, just stay away from me, please

I don't want to resurrect the bug debate but regarding farming.. Yes, as people have pointed out : there are genres around it. I can't say I enjoy it usually but there seem to be fans. I guess again, the problem arises when it pops up in games that are normally not about that.

[Wookieetank]

Totally agree - the key word here is "incidental". If killing a ton of enemies of a certain type can be enjoyably worked into the normal course of the game, crafting some fine weapon from their mountain of corpses can be a nice bonus.

If, on the other hand, you are farming them - going back to the same place to kill the same mobs over and over in hopes of a rare drop - then I have a problem with the game design.

Come to think of it, I wonder if I just object to "farming", period. I think games should more or less flow from beginning to end. If you get bogged down in the middle performing the same repetitive task for hours, I can't see the appeal. But this might be a taste thing? Some people might like a "farming" mechanic, for gold, XP, upgrade materials, etc.?

Anyone here ever "farm" for something in a way they actually enjoyed?

Yup, in lotsa games. Although I find farming to be a lot more fun when there's some sort of challenge involved (Diablo 3's greater rifts, RPGs with elite enemies that you can sign up to fight (FFXII, FFXV, etc), or if its to experiment with character/party builds (FFIII, FFV, DQ9, etc.). Farming just for items though is less fun than me, and terribly frustrating when the item just. won't. drop.

I agree that games should just flow from start to finish, but if there's farming as part of side game/post game material, its not an issue for me.

[Driderman]

Anyone here ever "farm" for something in a way they actually enjoyed?

Probably only back in vanilla WoW because I was young and dumb, and it was fun to monopolize the auction house crafting materials markets on the weekends.

[Knaight]

Anyone here ever "farm" for something in a way they actually enjoyed?

Sure. I've picked plenty of fights in Baten Kaitos and Mount and Blade just for the sake of beating on things because the combat systems are fun. Sometimes this involved beating on the same enemy groups (or types of groups) for a while.

[Velaryon]

One more, specific to strategy/tactics RPG games (do they even still make those?) is character perma-death for non-story reasons. I get that these games are supposed to be more difficult and challenging than turn-based games, but it irks the $#!& out of me that if I lose a character to a lucky critical hit, they're gone for good.

Many of these games have items or magic to revive characters, but I often find that when you lose a character in these circumstances and then try to bring them back, they just get killed again and you spiral into an endless cycle of pissing away items and magic to keep one character from being lost permanently after this battle, when if you were allowed to just revive them after battle like a normal RPG, you could end the fight quickly despite the loss of one character.

It would be like if D&D resurrection magic only worked while you were in the same battle, and once the encounter ended you could never raise them.

--

RE: the bug debate that I inadvertantly touched off, my opinion is the same as BeerMug Paladin's. Bugs are not intentional, but when they're so obvious that it's impossible the developer was unaware of them, or they're so numerous that the game is basically unplayable and the game is released anyway, then as far as I'm concerned it becomes a choice. Whose choice it was (developers, engineers, marketing team, executives, etc.) is not relevant.

While I generally agree with this sentiment, Detiny (1&2) and Dying Light have proven to be fine exceptions to this rule. Granted both of those games have things in place to make the platforming more forgiving, double jump in destiny, grappling hooks in Dying Light.

Destiny's jump mechanics are extremely forgiving, but there are still a few places where it's a big pain in the butt. And most of the time it's more "falling down an enormous distance and then activating your double jump at the right time so you don't die of falling damage" rather than actual platforming anyway.

Haven't played Dying Light so I can't comment there.

Even in these instances though, I'm firmly of the opinion that giving players an option to switch to 3rd person view (even if it's buried in a menu somewhere) would improve the experience if there's going to be platforming.

[Lector87]

How do we feel about gimmick bosses?

Not bosses that are just a cut scene, or bosses that you are doomed to fail against, but bosses that you defeat by means other than mano-a-mano combat.

The first thing that springs to mind is a boss in Demon's Souls called Dragon God. There's huge buildup to him, he appears in the opening cinematic and in a special scene in the tutorial, he's absolutely huge and terrifying - and you end up not really fighting him! Instead, you sneak around his stage trying to avoid his eye (because his attack can insta-kill you), until you make your way to magical ballistae that take him down and render him helpless until you can finish him off.

Now, given the testosterone-fueled git-gud attitude of a lot of the Souls base, many players were disappointed that they didn't get a true test of strength and skill against such an awesome-looking boss. But perhaps it's actually appropriate, given the setting? This ancient, gigantic thing is *just too big* for you and your pathetic weapons. You HAVE to resort to executing him using tools left to you by unknown architects.

A fitting anti-climax, appropriate to an alien, melancholy, Lovecraftian setting? Or simply a bad design decision?

[Talion]

Expansions that throw the game's sense of power scaling completely out of wack. This is especially bad when the content is available, even unavoidable, to new players and not just veterans. I'll provide two quick examples:

In the Elder Scrolls Morrowind, the Tribunal expansion includes sewer dwelling goblins, who can easily of a threat to even a high level character than the final boss of the main game (a 4,000+ year old mad-man who has tied his powers and consciousness to the heart of Tamriel's creator god and plans to spread his divine influence through disease and dreams until everything else is either dead or part of his shared lovecraftian hive-mind). This also added Assassins who would target the player in their sleep, and depending on build could be more than a match for a player while giving the stronger/luckier ones an overly reliable source of income and good gear.

By contrast, the first expansion of the original Guild Wars game, Factions, expects a character to reach the game's maximum level (and gives them access to max level armor) within just a few hours of following the story (as opposed to the game's original 'days' or even weeks depending on how you went about it), and afterwords spends the remaining 70%+ of the campaign fighting mobs of creatures that are as strong/stronger than the ones found in the end areas of the original game, (IE numerically stronger than the players and often in much larger groups than the player's party). This is regardless of if you move over a finished character from the first campaign (who may be in need of the new abilities available to keep up) or if its your first time playing either game. All in the same world, within 2-3 years of each other and within fairly short sailing distance.

[GloatingSwine]

Depends on the gimmick.

Dragon God is a bad gimmick boss because the gimmick is super poorly communicated and what cover will and won't prevent him seeing you is less than wholly clear. (Especially on the bottom row). (Not as bad as Bed of Chaos though).

Maiden Astraea is a great gimmick boss because everything about it is well communicated and there are multiple ways of solving it other than the obvious "fight Garl first" way.

That said, most of Demons Souls' bosses have at least some kind of gimmick, Leechmonger heals, Old Hero is blind, the bird on the Adjudicator's head is the real boss, Dirty Colossus inflicts a status you can burn off with the fires in his room, but many of them are too easy for the gimmick to become relevant because Demons Souls is mostly easy bosses after hard levels. (Giant Depraved Ones and Horrible Swamp Lady are harder to deal with than any of the Valley of Defilement bosses)

[Driderman]

One thing I personally don't like is trade-off perks. Currently playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance and it actually has a very nifty system where most of your attributes, combat skills and non-combat skills all have separate perks you can pick when you level the skill up. Unfortunately, most of them are of the "get a bonus to this and an equal malus to something else" so instead of being improvements it's specialisation at the cost of versatility, and the rewards you get for levelling up will in most cases also reduce your skills or attributes. I don't mind some trade-off perks, but there's so many of them I actually have unchosen perks simply because I don't want to turn myself into a one-trick pony.