Hated Design Decisions

[Grim.Reaper]

My other pet peeve, although others probably like......overly complex character generation in RPG games.....so many options without clear understandings....often get stuck at creation and never fully enjoy the game:(

[Bletchley_Geek]

• Check points - That has killed so many games for me... I understand there may be technical limitations (e.g. in Red Faction Guerrilla for instance, I can see it is hard to track where every little piece of debris went) but often it just a ploy to make games harder or becomes a point of friction between my hobby and real life...
• Shopping Trolley Design - Nowadays game developers have lots of channels to receive feedback through... which is a good thing. What is not a good thing is that many developers, in order to avoid whinging, when not outright trolling, try to be everything to everyone. Which either results in a half baked game, since your feature set is too broad to be developed with your resources, or in a bland, tutifrutti product where you will still have parts of your audience picking up the fruity bits they don't like, prompting reactions like "rock melon? in my ice cream? THIS IS F*CKING RIDICULOUS! Let me do a full 360 degrees vomit spread on the forums to make sure EVERYONE knows how displeased I am". The world would be a very sad place if all the music made in the United States boiled down to musical clones of whatever was at the top of the Top 40 last week, right? Same thing with games.
• Art & UI Design Done Once... And Never Again - Art and UI work is expensive to make. But if art gets in the way of mechanics and UX, then the Art needs to go and the UI needs to be redesigned. Fixing arbitrary limits on the resolutions people can play with, not handling properly DPI scaling issues, etc. are going to hit your bottom line on the medium and long term more than the $$$ or other resources spent up front on developing a functional, pleasant and ergonomic experience. More specifically about war games with simulation components: they are by definition WIP... a developer cannot expect the art and UI to remain static as game mechanics and gameplay evolves and the expectations of your players do too as technology gets more sophisticated.
  

[Nefaro]

Crafting.  Hate it.  It's never fun. At best it's innocuous.  Usually it's a chore.

+1

It's everywhere, now.   ::)

[mirth]

I do like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, though.

[Bison]

I do like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, though.

[mirth]

Gus is my soul mate.

[Bison]

I just liked the cassette tap awesome mix label.  That's a classic 80's trend that will never see a revival.

[RyanE]

Its called a playlist now...I think.

[mirth]

A good mixed tape was an art form.

[mikeck]

Turn limits is HUGE. I can't stand being forced to conquer the universe in a certain time or else

no manual. Maybe not a design decision but damn...I think games like HOI IV should actually have a manual. It's not always convenient to pull up YouTube videos every time I want to know what an icon means or what a button does

[Bison]

A good mixed tape was an art form.

Damned straight!

[Sir Slash]

Save points would be highest on my list along with un-beatable Boss-Battles. Pet Peeve would be poorly written English and overly bad language just for shock effect. Pine Coladas I love, the rain not so much.

[FarAway Sooner]

Turn limits were a good idea that turned into an iron-clad convention.  For the original Panzer General, they introduced a fascinating puzzle-like dimension to the campaign and promoted replay value.  After playing five or ten PG clones, I simply find this restraint artificial and tiresome.

The design decision I HATE MOST was the decision, in so many RTS, to make it impossible to issue orders or even survey what's going on, in Pause mode.  Did more to turn me off most games in that genre than anything else.  I like to figure out what's going on and plan my moves when I play a strategy game.  If I want to frantically mash buttons, I'll play a Diablo clone!

[jomni]

What about dongles?

[panzerde]

Crafting.  Hate it.  It's never fun. At best it's innocuous.  Usually it's a chore.

+1

It's everywhere, now.   ::)

Worse than that, it's increasingly becoming the entire point in many games. I still haven't bought Fallout 4 because of it. I think it's what developers are doing now instead of actually investing in writing a plot. "Hey, people like Minecraft, let's make Minecraft but with the graphics assets from our last RPG, and call it a new game!"


Screw. That.


Ditto on save points/check points, time/turn limits, stupid escort missions, and particularly forced MP.


My current pet-peeve is the grinding lack of originality that game publishers/designers are mired in right now, but that's not really in the spirit of the thread. I'll just say that there's not much point in having a million game choices if nearly all of them suck, because they're just derivative crap.