Design Mistakes Made, Twinkies Denied

how about difficulty "levels" that only multiply the damage done to you by enemies? thats hella lame

you could for instance make it so you have different objectives for every difficulty level

i.e.: In Thief1 at normal you could go through a mission by killing every guard you encountered, but at expert you had to go in without killing anyone and not be seen by anyone, which made the game play completely differently

Hey, this is great, a thread where we can say negative things without worrying about a load of other shackers instinctively jumping on you for not loving each and every thing in the world, even the things that suck.

We need more of this on the shack!

Unfortunately I've run out of stuff to complain about for now, except to complain about people who complain about people complaining.

Unavoidable boot movies that you can't just "ESC" out of unless you physically edit files in the program folder....I'm looking at you Battlefield 1942 and many other games. Its a game, not a movie theater with 10000 intro clips.

I'm surprised he mention didn't Eve Online having no brightness or gamma control at all. I tried the free trial and couldn't do anything with it, it's just too dark and fiddling with the full screen D3D profile doesn't change it. They don't don't even have a reg entry or .ini/.cfg setting you can change. 3 years after release and they still don't have one, it boggles the mind.

The list was valid until fallout showed up. VOID.

Oh.. also games that dont support the obvious resolution of 1280x1024

Hahah, this post's title is gold.

One I particularly pet peeve of mine is that when you select "inverse mouse" (you know, to invert it vertically - moving the mouse up looks down, and vice-versa) and it actually inverts the mouse on the whole game. So you have to use the game interface (menus) with your mouse totally inverted.

It's as if the game developers think users have to invert the mouse direction because they have a mouse malfunction, not that they just want to PLAY with the inverted mouse because they were too used to flight simulators when they started playing FPSs.

I've seen two games doing that to this date, although I don't remember very well which were them. I think one of them was OFP (it was later fixed though).

1) Inability to change refresh rate along with resolution in-game. 65Hz HURTS! lol the humanity

2) Lack of widescreen support (16:10 is especially unloved)

3) Inability to reassign certain (arbitrary) keys. I should be able to move backward with the ESC key if I'm so inclined. I'm of the mindset that the gamer should be allowed to assign any key to any in game action. In fact I think it's downright criminal from a design perspective to deny the user this basic right.

4) Separate main menus vs. in-game menus. This is particularly bad with console ports (Splinter Cell anyone?) where you have to back out twice just to get to the menu screen where you can quit the game. In the worst cases, the "main" menus are in a completely different screen resolution causing the monitor to audibly "pop" as it switches modes.

5) Intro movies that won't scale to your in-game resolution. As mentioned above, it's quite nasty going from 640x480@65Hz to 1280x800@85Hz just from transitioning to a nvidia logo movie to the game's menu.

6) Inability to delete/clear out default control schemes. The first thing I do when playing a game is to go in and completely remove any trace of the default control scheme so I can begin to cleanly set up my own without any fear of conflicts, confusion etc. You'd be surprised how difficult a task this is with most games.

7) Checkpoint saves and general lackadaisical save systems. In short, please let us save where we want, when we want. If you give us the ability to quicksave with a hotkey, please have the courtesy to include a hotkey for quickload as well - and vice-versa. Don't tie confirmation dialogues with quicksave/load keys.

8) Always ask if we want a damn shortcut placed on the desktop. Some of us don't like to clutter/bog down the desktop with that crap.

9) Never require a re-boot after an install/uninstall.

10) Please have the last install disc be the play disc. Don't make us put disc one back in, even if the aforementioned is true, just to finish the install. Better yet, give us a DVD option.

11) PC gamers like color manuals too. We really do. Honestly! ...and Jewel cases!

12) Please provide audio level control over dialogue separately from other sfx.

13) Arrow key support for menu navigation is really handy, fast and intuitive. Just saying.

14) Mouse cursor movement not scaling properly with higher resolutions.

...and I'm spent.

You know what really grinds my gears? people from the 19th century. GET WITH THE PROGRAM PEOPLE.

I hate it when there are derived statistics with mouseovers about what that statistic does for you, but does not contain information about what went into the creating that value.

Attack power for instance. How about you do a little math there for me so i'll know 300 of it comes from my Strength and 200 of it comes from my weapon, ala: 500 = (200 weapon damage + (2x150 strength)

or something like that.

Shit save systems. Prime offender, even though there is a workaround, is crashing during a game of Hitman Blood Money. It only saves at the end of a mission, in-game saves are temporary. Fucking abysmal. The straight from console, too far apart check points in Fire Warrior were a joke too, though no one played that.

How about any time a game adjusts itself based on the player's performance? I hate the idea that the game will just get harder if I play well. I want a variety of challenges, and if I'm a badass I want to crush the easy ones, although I also appreciate the hard stuff.

This also relates to stat-based adjusting like in oblivion. I certainly know why they did it, and I might even agree it was best for them, but in the end I fear it just makes the game more shallow than it should have been.

And where are my big badass monsters and bosses? Take the weapons in FF7, or the dragons in Baldur's Gate 2. I love huge bosses like in Painkiller or Serious Sam, but I also like extra enemies that are far tougher than any story-related boss. This is another thing I wish oblivion did.

Widescreen support and also WTF is up with Doom 3 engine games that NEVER let you play in your native resolution, pisses me off to no end.

Yes, even the Prey demo refused to let me play it in anything higher than 1024x768. At least it adjusted to widescreen, even though in an unwanted res.

1.) Bad Camera
2.) Over-cluttered UI
3.) Tutorials that teach you stupid crap like "here's how you walk"
4.) Not being able to cancel cinematics
5.) Black or Killzone style rigid save systems.

Any unfortunately common design faux pas that really grind your gears?

Almost anything in UI related to the Battlefield Series

Previous twinkie articles arranged for handy clicking:

http://www.gamasutra.com/features/designers_notebook/19980313.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/designers_notebook/20000331/index.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020208/adams_01.htm
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20030523/adams_01.shtml
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20040611/adams_01.shtml
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20050603/adams_01.shtml

How about using vaguely current examples?

And communicating reservoirs? Is that really that important to worry about, honestly?

One thing that annoys me is when a game has a few dozen actions that each need a separate keybind. You don't have to have an interface like that to have a deep game.

I'm not sure it's so much the resulting style of gameplay that annoys me... it's more just the overhead of getting set up before I start to play. And of course the default layout almost always sucks. I want to get going with a brand new game but first I have to put up with several minutes of paging through keybinding dialog screens, learning what controls there are and trying to figure out where I can wedge the offhand grenade key or the sprint key (how about... no, I'm already using that key for the flashlight... hmm, no, not that key, that has to be for zoom so that I can press it easily during a fight... or maybe I could swap it with the reload key...).

Gah! I guess I make it harder on myself than necessary because I like to bind each weapon to its own key, but I've been training myself away from that recently (for singleplayer games) and there are still some games that just eat up the keyboard.

Then if I have to put the game down for a while because of work or a trip or something, I can't just jump right back in when I want to give it another whirl later; I have to go re-learn the keys. (And probably find the CD too, since most companies never release a no-CD patch even when their game is years old, but that's already been covered.)

Yeah these are really just minor delays in the overall scheme of things, but after a few decades playing games the small irritations accumulate. :)


In slightly related griping, the games that are the worst offenders in controls-proliferation often have the crappiest tutorials. In fact many games have bad tutorials. I realize that devs/pubs think that this is one of the most easily sacrificed aspects of a game when time and resources are tight; people can always go read the manual. But reading the manual is just yet another delay keeping me out of my lovely new game, not to mention that it will inevitably spoilerize some aspect of the game.

Some games do manage to have nice tutorials and even additional "teaching moments" spread throughout the game. Much love to the people who make that happen.

RTS games that don't let you change your bindings (War 3 on release, grrr).

Not being able to change graphics options while in the game.

Popup message boxes that block out what I see in the screen.

Taking control away from me while I'm playing.

Save system in Prince Of Persia: Warrior Within (XBOX) and other games that organize your save games based on the timestamp on your XBOX.

Most of my save games are dated Nov 15, 2001 : 12:00am.

If you put the game down for a few days and return to it, it's very hard to figure out where you left off.

What pisses me off more than anything and its been like that in very recent popular games...

UNABLE TO SAVE YOUR GAMES WITH A UNQUIE NAME!!!!

How or better yet, WHY was any game ever setup where your save game doesn't allow you to enter in your own text for the same file?

1. Awful Save Systems: XIII, where saving was broken. If you tried to overwrite an entry it brought you back to the orginal save checkpoint.

2. Confusing config menus - for us non expert hardware guys trying to tweak the settings is difficult. They should have a small question mark next to all the slide bars telling you which way to go and what to check off for better graphics or better performance.

3. Camera controls - 3rd person mmorpgs. Sometimes its impossible to fully control your guy . Examples include Silkroad and Wish.

Pet peeves:
No save anywhere (sometime you just have to stop what you are doing)
Bad key binding (BF2)
No built-in cheats (sometimes you just like to mess around)
Non-skipable intro level (B&W)
AI that zerg rushes in early game, then just kind of gives up/sucks mid to late game
Bad server browser/game matching (BF2, DS for not letting you have more control over who you play on wifi)
Five minutes of intro movies that I have to press escape 10 times to get through
Games that don’t autosave at each new level
Multiplayer games where you have to make an account via a website and fill out you personal information. (excluding pay for play MMORPGS)
Having to have the CD/DVD in to play
2+ CDs with no DVD option, or ‘special collectors edition’ only DVD option which costs 10 bucks more
Inconsistent gameplay objects/actions (In hitman you are suppose to be able to push people over railing, but a few rails don’t work that way)

I always though the different water levels in Quake were because of the whole, you know, alternate dimension thing. There were lava portals on the ceiling. You entered episode IV by jumping into a pool of water and falling out of the bottom into an open room.

There's some legitimate complaints there but that's a pretty stupid gripe.

Hmmm I always thought they would prefer bananas over twinkies?

Anyways, I look forward to these little features. But it makes me wonder if any of sinks into the mindsets of most game designers today? It would help a lot if they did.

When an endgame completely tosses out all of the teaching that has been done over the course of the game. God Of War did this and it was a huge huge mistake, made all the more depressing because everything else in the game was so perfect.

When a game does the opposite, when it takes the skills learned and then pushes you to use them all at the end, that is much more satisfying. Metroid Prime is a perfect example of this.

I like how he mentions "Ignorance of the Law of Communicating Reservoirs"

Anybody who has played Dark Forces 2 : Jedi Knight will know how badly the game abused this. The most blatant example was in the multiplayer map, Canyon Oasis.

This is partially me being used to decent autosave practices, but I just fired up Tribes: Vengeance recently ... to find out it only autosaves at the beginning of the level.

Well, the Arena level has 4 increasingly hard stages, the end of each would have been a brilliant checkpoint - but no, I died on stage 4 and realized I haven't quicksaved since .... the beginning.

Each mission has multiple objectives (locate the loot, disable the turrets, realign the matrix flux, take out the prime target sort of thing) which again would have lent themselves to checkpoints very well - to miss that little usability detail seems almost criminal.

Needless to say, I have learned to save a lot.

As a counterpoint I present Jak & Daxter - you do not need to save in that game, ever. Every single objective, no matter how small, that you accomplish is saved right away, and when you're done playing, you just turn off the console (I still save because I'm paranoid, but I don't really have to). And that was in the very first J&D, some time ago. It just makes the gameplay smooth.