Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

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Bal
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Bal » Mon Mar 03, 2014 3:15 pm

Brentai wrote:Revengeance has some pretty nasty examples too, like the way you sometimes have to try the same prompted sequence multiple times in a row to make a boss finally die, or the way the parry input is suddenly completely different.


The parry input is always exactly the same. I've never fucked up the input to kill bosses, but the initial input is always identical, and the follow up input is always very simple, unless it's a zandatsu, but those aren't QTE anyway.

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sei
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby sei » Tue Mar 11, 2014 3:18 am

Chapter 6 of Bravely Default. Jesus Christ, I was ready to put the game, but forced myself to power through it so as not to have another Xenosyndrome (dangling-late-game abandonment caused by ennui, named after Xenosaga) situation.

Only to be confronted by Chapter 7.

God damn it, SE.
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Bongo Bill
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Bongo Bill » Tue Mar 11, 2014 11:40 am

Chapters 7 and 8 are actually good, though. They only look like they are repeating the mistake of chapter 6, which should have just been merged into chapter 5.
...but is it art?

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Rico
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Rico » Fri May 16, 2014 11:15 pm

Getting around to playing FFT PSP and man is it full of these. No soft-reset/quit if you know you screwed up a battle; unskippable cutscenes, both old and new....

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IGNORE ME
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby IGNORE ME » Sat May 17, 2014 12:03 am

I can't remember if it was FFT but I remember one of the games I was on had skippable cutscenes up until the release version, where it was suddenly disabled.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Sat May 24, 2014 8:28 pm

You can copy your Miis from your Wii to your 3DS.

But only after you've already created your default Mii.

And you can't switch your default to a different Mii.

I've gotta say, I think a big part of the problems Nintendo's been having are the result of actively inconveniencing their existing customer base.

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sei
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby sei » Sun May 25, 2014 5:00 pm

Is it possible to make your default mii import the appearance of another existing mii? I'm assuming not.
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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Mon May 26, 2014 2:49 pm

If by "import" you mean "manually change every individual detail", then yes, it is entirely possible.

If you mean anything sane or user-friendly, then no. LOL Nintendo.



EDIT TO ADD: Also, the ports it uses are apparently completely fucking undocumented. I wound up just assigning a static IP to the sucker and leaving all the ports open on it.

I registered for Club Nintendo and, when asked what my initial impressions of the device were, I wrote something pretty long-winded that ended with "I am not sure who the target audience for this device is. It appears to be children who have never used the Internet or bought a previous Nintendo system before, but who know how to assign a static IP and open ports on a firewall, and who have really been looking forward to the sequel to A Link to the Past. Do you get a lot of those?"

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Bongo Bill
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Bongo Bill » Wed May 28, 2014 8:32 am

I'm curious what you were trying to accomplish that made that necessary.
...but is it art?

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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Wed May 28, 2014 1:01 pm

Accessing friend codes and the eshop. Nothing that should be remotely obscure or complicated.

General network connectivity worked fine out of the box, and I could open the browser and do all the usual port 80 stuff. But friend codes and the eshop timed out.

Nintendo's documentation on this says "Just open every port from 1 to 65535." Which is bullshit; there is no way they're using all 65535 of them.

I saw some forum posts listing 28910, 29900, 29901, and 29920, so I opened all of those in the firewall. That didn't do it, so that's when I assigned a static IP and opened every port on it.

I am confident there is a much better and simpler way of doing this. And Nintendo, being Nintendo, won't tell us what the fuck it is.

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby IGNORE ME » Wed May 28, 2014 4:42 pm

Last time I told Nintendo's target audience to open up every port I got a visit from the FBI.

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Kayma
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Kayma » Wed May 28, 2014 9:38 pm

Open every port from 1 to 65535? When did Nintendo become Microsoft?

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Classic
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Classic » Fri May 30, 2014 4:42 pm

No.
Fuck you.
FUCK YOU.

:leavingforever:

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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Sun Oct 19, 2014 10:46 pm

You know what's disappointing? A perfectly promising minigame with shit-stupid AI.

Red Dead Redemption's Liar's Dice game is, potentially, pretty neat. Except that, no matter what saloon you play it in, you're stuck with the same two opponent AI's. One of them constantly makes implausible bluffs; the other constantly calls plausible ones. So if you've got a basic grasp of probability, you're always going to win. After ten or so tedious-ass rounds of simple educated guesses.

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beatbandito
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby beatbandito » Fri Dec 12, 2014 6:56 pm

Origin has an option to completely disable the client in games, and a full page of options to turn off individual notifications.

None of these options stop achievement notifications.
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Sharkey
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Sharkey » Tue Jun 02, 2015 8:18 pm

"Use the mouse and the W, A, S, and D keys to move."

Okay, I realize there's a vanishingly small chance that this could be the very first time someone has played a videogame in their entire lives. That's great. We should accommodate those people and do everything we can to bring them into the fold. However, if that is the case, then baby's first videogame should definitely not be motherfucking Mechwarrior. That's like teaching a kid to ride a bike by putting them on one of those ridiculously tall clown unicycle things and shoving them into traffic. Yes, we should have tutorials, but I think there's a certain level of familiarity that can be assumed when we start, especially with games that are going to expect you to move your fingers like a fucking tapdancing centipede.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby IGNORE ME » Tue Jun 02, 2015 10:08 pm

I thought that about Demon's Souls at first, but when I found out how weirdly Souls games are mapped I became glad that it didn't assume anything would be obvious. Well, about the controls anyway.

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Thad
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Thad » Tue Jun 02, 2015 10:16 pm

Yeah, it would have been welcome 'round about, say, Doom 3, which I believe was the first game I played that had WASD controls and I couldn't figure out why the arrow keys didn't work, but...that's over a decade ago now. If you're playing a PC game this year, you do not expect it to use the controls of Doom 1 and 2.

(I recently watched a Community where Abed has a sarcastic line about how you move using WASD, like every video game since the dawn of time. I wonder if it was a case where that was a line for a tech-savvy character written by a less-tech-savvy writer, or if it was deliberate trolling of the tech-savvy members of the audience.)

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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jun 02, 2015 11:17 pm

I still use the controls of Doom 1 & 2, because I'm clumsy and find it way easier to avoid key mispresses by using the arrows and surrounding keys.

If Enter, RShift, RCtrl, Del, End, PgDwn, Num7, Num4, Num1 and Num0 aren't enough supplementary keys (sometimes expanding to the numpad as a whole and occasionally using Backspace or \)... you're probably playing a game with too many fiddly bits.
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Re: Unforgivable Sins of Game Design

Postby Sharkey » Thu Jun 11, 2015 2:59 pm

Okay, so DA: Inquisition has a button to "ping" for loot. It's something you do pretty much constantly throughout the game, often in comparative silence. Unfortunately, it's the exact same noise as the tracker sounds from Aliens. I don't know if it was a placeholder someone just forgot to replace or what, but it's distracting as fuck that every time it spots a sack full of silver coins or whatever all I can think is "They're in the vents!"

Stock sound effects are necessary sometimes, I get that, but some of them are just too damn recognizable to be used in anything but parody.
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