As much as we all love it, the games industry is often accused of lacking innovation. That’s not strictly true - the Indie scene frequently comes up with some fantastic ideas - but there are plenty of gaming design tropes that continue to crop up, despite legions of gamers up and down the land throwing up their hands in exasperation whenever they rear their ugly head.
These are our 7 Deadly Game Design Sins.
7. Rubber Banding
The bane of many a racing game, Rubber-Banding has been a thorn in the sides of gamers since racing games began.
Here’s how it goes: You’ll zoom past all your opponents, build up a healthy lead, and then… bang! So much as clip a kerb, and you’ll find yourself in last place, overtaken by opponents who were half the track behind you just moments before. Developers and publishers have frequently cited rubber-banding as a way to ensure that racing games maintain their sense of excitement; but the truth is that it does very little except to really piss us off.
What’s worse than Rubber-Banding in single-player racers? Rubber-Banding in multiplayer matches. Half the fun of multiplayer games is the feeling of thrashing the other player. Losing a match to a terrible player, simply because the game decided that they should be given an unfair advantage, is one of the most anger-inducing experiences in gaming.
The worst culprit in gaming? Mario Kart. There’s nothing worse than being hit by a blue shell fired by a player a mile behind you, only to watch them race past a moment later.
6. Ridiculously unfair fighting game Bosses
If you’ve ever played a fighting game before, it’s quite likely that you’ll have thrown your controller at the wall, or shouted at the television after being thrashed for the umpteenth time by a ridiculous overpowered - and cheating - end-game boss. Whether it’s Ogre in Tekken 3, Mortal Kombat‘s Shao Khan, or pretty much any boss in Guilty Gear, these bastards are tough as nails and seemingly designed to induce pure, unadulterated rage.
It’s not just that they’re difficult. It’s that they fucking cheat. Infinite power meters, split-second reaction times, and un-blockable super attacks ensure that you never feel as though it’s a fair fight. Sure, up the difficulty at the end - but keep it fair. Defeating these utter bastards is often a matter of luck more than skill, and beating them doesn’t evoke satisfaction as much as it does simple, blessed relief and bring you one step closer to mental breakdown.
Our pick of the biggest bastard in the genre? Street Fighter IV‘s Seth, with ridiculously overpowered copies of other fighters’ moves. He uses Guile’s Sonic Booms, Dhalsim’s Yoga Teleport and Zangief’s spinning piledriver. If that’s not bad enough, for his Ultra Combo he sucks you into his fucking chest before spitting you out again. Defeating Seth all but pushed us to the edge of despair. We still have nightmares about him to this day - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, gaming-style.
Arrrrrrrrrgh!
5. Extra Lives
Back when gaming was largely confined to Arcades, the concept of Extra Lives made sense. Operators and developers relied on people pumping coin after coin into their cabinets - and the best way to do that was to give people limited attempts, and introduce artificial difficulty spikes, to ensure that players needed to feed more money into the machine.
These days though, Arcades are largely relegated to history, and most games are played in the home (or on mobile devices). So why hasn’t the industry moved on from such an archaic system?
The Mario games are the worst offender. Nearly every game in the series throws extra lives at you like candy, making the very concept of Lives redundant; and if you do run out of them, you can simply hit Continue and get a few more on the house. So why have them at all? Even the games that aren’t so generous with handing out extra attempts allow you to reload from your last save - the modern equivalent of a Continue.
It’s time we ditched Extra Lives and found more original ways to introduce a level of challenge into gaming.
4. Unskippable Cutscenes
Oh, how we loathe hitting a checkpoint, only to be forced to sit through a lengthy cut-scene.
Why? Because too often those scenes book-end boss fights. Lose the battle, and you re-spawn back at the checkpoint, only to have to watch the same scene all over again. Having this happen once is annoying enough, but when it happens 5 - or more - times in a row, we reach for the “off” switch on our console.
Elsewhere, some games insist on forcing you to sit through cutscenes that can last for upwards of half an hour - and often without the option to so much as pause the scene for a toilet break (or spend give minutes quietly weeping out of boredom as yet another massively dull and poorly-written exposition dump is played out on your screen). We’re sure the writers would love us to sit through their lengthy tale of magical artifacts, warring kingdoms and overwrought love triangles, but sometimes we just want to play the damn game.
Sure, we understand that sometimes they exist to mask lengthy loading times as your console streams in the data for the following sequence, but too often it feels as though they’re there simply for the sake of it..
The Metal Gear Solid series is particularly guilty of this, though at least Kojima finally listened and allowed you to skip the scenes in MGS 4: Guns of the Patriots.
But by far the biggest offender in gaming is the RPG genre. Many RPGs place lengthy cutscenes ahead of major boss battles, forcing you to watch them over and over again. Our pick of the worst culprit? Final Fantasy X. There’s a particularly lengthy unskippable cutscene just prior to the difficult battle against Yunalesca. Despite the frustration this caused upon the game’s original release, Square Enix still didn’t include the option to skip the cutscene in this year’s HD remaster.
Why, Square, why?
3. Unskippable Tutorials
Look, we’ve been playing games for a while now. We know that we need to move the left analogue stick to move around. We know that pulling the right trigger will fire our gun. We’ve been doing it in countless games over the years.
So why, developers, do you repeatedly insist on railroading us through unskippable tutorials at the beginning of your games?
Call of Duty does this frequently, to much frustration. Look, if someone picks up a Call of Duty title, it’s pretty fucking likely that they’re familiar with the series, or at least the genre. So they don’t need to be forced to traipse through yet another firing range, while an obnoxious voiceover or on-screen prompts instruct them to move down a corridor, or click to crouch and crawl through a tunnel.
Sure, by all means add a tutorial as an additional option accessed via the menu. That’s fine. Or perhaps ask players at the beginning of the game whether they’re familiar with the controls.
But don’t force veteran gamers to sit through an extended hand-holding sequence while you patronize them by acting as though they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.
2. Quick Time Events
Ah, quick-time events. Originally making their debut in 1983’s Dragon’s Lair, by the late 90s the mechanic had all but been forgotten.
And then Shen Mue was released.
Fuck you, Yu Suzuki.
Ostensibly an attempt by developers to make players feel bad-ass as their character pulls off awesome moves, or an attempt to add interactivity to otherwise passive scenes, Quick Time Events all boil down to the same thing - hitting a button in response to an on-screen prompt in a glorified rendition of Simon Says.
That doesn’t make us feel bad-ass. It just makes us bored. Forcing us to hit a button just to continue watching a scripted scene play out isn’t fun; it’s simply a cheap ploy to trick us into thinking we’re directing the action.
Unfortunately, despite practically every man and his dog absolutely hating them, Quick Time Events are now ubiquitous, shoved into seemingly every game that gets released. Dragon’s Lair might have started it, but no-one in the industry seems willing to end it.
The worst culprit? As tempting as it is to single out Heavy Rain, we’re going to go with Asura’s Wrath - a game that is effectively one giant QTE from beginning to end.
1. Multiplayer modes bolted on to Single-Player games for the sake of it
With the rise of second-hand gaming, many players look to sell off their games after completion in order to fund their next purchase.
Whatever your thoughts on that, it’s a viable tactic which ensures that people can continue to play the games they love. And let’s face it, gaming’s not exactly a cheap past-time.
The publishers’ response? To attempt to stop you from doing that by shoehorning in multiplayer modes to games that don’t warrant them (as well as increasing amounts of pointless DLC, but that’s a whole other issue). The hope is that you’ll hold on to the game as long as possible. The result? A legion of games which are released with mediocre multiplayer tacked on, which most people try once and then forget about, leaving the game’s online community dead within a month or less.
Sure, sometimes this practice works - GTA Online may have had a rocky start, but it’s since developed into an enjoyable experience in its own right.
Too often though, these multiplayer modes feel shoehorned in, there simply to tick a box. Tomb Raider is a taut survival story of a young girl’s journey from innocence to hardened adventurer. So why does it need a multiplayer Deathmatch mode? Far Cry 3 is an expansive open-world FPS about a single guy trying to save his friends in a hostile environment. So why add in co-op multiplayer?
Worst of all, though, Spec Ops: The Line is an excellent examination of the psychological effects and horrors of war, which is only cheapened by the inclusion of its multiplayer modes; asking players to run around and have fun killing each other completely dilutes the message that the developers were intending to convey in the single-player campaign - something which Yager Development has gone on record as saying that they regret.
Publishers, please. Stop it.
Just because you can add multiplayer to a game, doesn’t mean that you should - and too often, the resources diverted into redundant online modes harms the development of the single-player campaign.
What other gaming sins do you think need to bite the dust? Have we missed out anything that particularly gets on your nerves? Let us know.
Dale Morgan
Latest posts by Dale Morgan (see all)
- No Man’s Sky Developer Settles Lawsuit With Sky TV - June 20, 2024
- E3 2016: Microsoft Unveils New Xbox, Project Scorpio, For Holiday 2017 Release - June 13, 2024
- Injustice 2 Announced, First Trailer Inside - June 8, 2024
