We love video games, and games have advanced to an incredible degree. On a sheer technical level, games are better than ever. Open world games, new mechanics and ideas, all of them combine to make some great, immersive experiences.
But that doesn’t mean they’re perfect. While reviewing our Game of the Year contenders, certain problems popped out at us over and over and over again, moments that are incredibly frustrating because they’re so simple to solve and so obvious to anybody playing the game you wonder what’s going on.
So, here are five problems we found, and a few suggestions on how to fix them.
#5) Forced Tutorials
We get that you need to go over with us how the controls work, and a tutorial level is a nice thing to do. It lets even experienced gamers get a feel for the engine. But for the love of God, do we really have to go through an entire mission where the entire goal is to get us used to something that we probably won’t use?
The worst offender this year was “Batman: Arkham City”. Didn’t have practice using the glide function? Enjoy slamming into walls during one level. Haven’t used a lot of Takedowns? That’s OK, here’s a boss fight where you have to use five different ones to get on with the story! To be fair, “Arkham City” isn’t nearly as frustrating as the games of yesteryear; you don’t have to commit five minutes of twists and turns to muscle memory. Still, hasn’t the art form gotten beyond this?
#4) Unnecessary Mechanics
Here’s a question for you: how many times have you been introduced to a mechanic in a game, had to learn how to use it, and then never bothered with it again or only used it when the game absolutely forced you to?
A lot, right? This is painfully common, even today. A great example is the by-now absolutely bog-standard bullet time mechanic. Lots of games have this even when it’s absolutely unnecessary to actually finish the game. Yes, it’s cool, and it can even be useful, but most of the time, it’s optional at best and an active annoyance at worst.
#3) Mechanic Overdose
If you ever want to flash back to the painful, unresponsive controls of the ’90s, it’s easy: fire up “Saints Row the Third”, jump in a helicopter, and try to fly with any sort of real precision. There’s the sludgy response and difficult physics we tried to forget from the PSone era!
Flight mechanics in general are a mess outside of flight simulators: it’s an abject lesson in what happens when you try to transfer joystick controls to gamepads. But more often than not these days, developers bite off more than they can chew. Part of the problem with “Saints Row the Third” is that the graphics engine goes crazy. Maybe you just shouldn’t have had the helicopters, guys?
#2) Many Ways To Solve a Problem: Only One That Works
This is probably the single most frustrating problem; you want to try to solve a problem a certain way, and the game forbids you.
“Deus Ex: Human Revolution” generally stood out as an aversion to this, with the sole exception of the boss fights. To be fair, there are clever, and satisfying, ways to beat each boss, and the final boss is actually well-designed, but it’s a sharp contrast to the freedom of the rest of the game, where you can sneak past enemies, confront them somewhat head-on, or just mercilessly screw with them and drive them insane (the most time-consuming but by far the most satisfying).
The biggest frustration here is realizing you’re more creative than the people who designed the game, and they decided instead of being creative themselves to just turn you down flat. Thanks, guys.
#1) Mechanic Balance
We’re going to single out “Deus Ex” again, but not because it got it wrong, because it got it right. Most old-school gamers complain about cover-based shooting with auto-heal because it takes the suspense out of a game: hide until healed, then pop up and shoot.
“Deus Ex” worked because you couldn’t just hide until you recovered: enemies would hunt you down and all it took was a few bullets to end you for good. Screw up and you were likely a bloody smear; your health didn’t recover quickly enough to survive a stand-off with a lot of opponents.
“Serious Sam 3” went exactly the opposite direction, with no healing and just medpacks…but that was a game that the designers played through repeatedly and knew exactly where to place the health to make it challenging without making you want to kill the design team.
But it says something that this was really all it took for these games to stand out in this respect. Way too often we play shooters where injury is cheap, or you pray for medpacks that never come, because that’s old-school, dur hur hur. “Hard Reset” is a superb example of old-school fetishism taken too far; playing that game stopped being fun once you realized you had to essentially have a perfect run to have any hope of completing it.
How about you? What problems do you see that need to be fixed in modern games?