Least Favourite Part of Your All-Time Favourite Game(s)?

ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

I recently replayed one of my all-time favourite games, Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father. It still holds up, even if Gabriel himself is a sexist pig.

But there's a puzzle near the end where you have to collect 10 stone slabs and place them in sequential order in 12 different rooms (2 are already locked in place to give you an idea of where to start). It's tedious in the first place, but every time, I swear I somehow get the order backwards and have to re-collect all of them and do it again. I hate doing the puzzle just for the tedium of it.

In Gabriel Knight 2, there's a puzzle near the end involving closing doors in a maze. There's no right or wrong answer, but there is an order to it that's most efficient. It takes me forever to get out of that maze.

Much as I love Final Fantasy IV and VI, I hate the level grinding part of it that's almost necessary to survive the later part of the game.

How about you? What's your least favourite part of some of your favourite games?
 
Tress

Tress

One of my favorite games of all time is Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen (aka the one on SNES back in the day). I love that game so much, and I've played and replayed it dozens of times. It's a complex strategy RPG with innovative (for the time) battle modes and a large cast of interesting characters. Having said that, the start of the game is sooooo fucking slow. The first few maps are a slog, and all of the complexity that makes the game shine doesn't start until you're a few levels in.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Psychonauts 2 - Why do cosmetic badges take up a slot? I should not have to choose between having a purple TK ball and having two bonus perks.

Planescape: Torment - there are so many cases where spell and item descriptions don't line up with what happens. Also, in adapting pen & paper spells to computer, some of the spell durations just don't make any sense. Some buffs last practically forever, and others don't last long enough to be worth it. There are conversations where you can cast Friends before speaking to an NPC, and have it expire before you get through the charisma check in the dialogue.

Saints Row the Third - Saints Row 2 fans are horrible.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Emyprion - the net code is SO BAD. Multiplayer is so often a lagfest. This is particularly bad because the game has no PvE endgame, so basically playing online with/against other players is the de facto endgame.

This game needs multiplayer SO bad and it will never be supported (Long Dark, Subnautica, etc)!

And of course, too many of my favorites to count - this game peaked in early access and thus never got finished and probably never will be, at least not when anybody else is playing it (Empyrion, Valheim, Space Engineers, Satisfactory, Darktide, My Summer Car, Subverse, Medieval Dynasty, etc)
 
Bubble181

Bubble181

Does "the company behind it" count for all my old Blizzard favorites?
Slightly more seriously - for Diablo 2, the end game. I'm a solo player, and sure, you start off on /players 8, but by the time you're somewhere kneedeep in Hell that's impossible to keep up. Much of the end game ended up balanced around the most boring type of grind/botting imaginable (Pindleruns etc), actually completing a useful rune word for your class in a solo playthrough was next to impossible (I solo'd a Necro to level 99 back when I had ridiculous amounts of free time and never got what is considered "good" end game gear),...

I know my POV on this is almost diametrically opposite Gas's, but the multiplayer screwing over the solo experience, in so many otherwise great games. Get those balance patches out of here.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Bubble181 said:
Get those balance patches out of here.
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IMO if a game doesn't feature PvP, "balance" should never be a reason behind a patch or code change. It's bad design to say "every class has to be as good at everything as every other class." But I know whiny gamer bois gonna whine.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

Half-Life: The Xen levels. It got to the point where I'd end playthroughs right before I entered the portal to Xen.

Hitman: World of Assassination trilogy: I don't like the Berlin nightclub level because the music in the club annoys me. This is apparently a minority opinion among the fanbase, with the Berlin level being a fan favorite.

Subnautica: The lava zones are annoying. Having to dodge so many hostile enemies while navigating a very inhospitable environment can get old quick. Special mention goes to the warpers, who can teleport you out of your vehicle and one-shot you to death.

Mass Effect 1: Driving around planets on the Mako. Unlike many other people, I actually consider the Mako itself to be fine. The problem is driving around craggy, boring landscapes looking for a scant handful of interesting things while tumbling down cliffs half the time.

Mass Effect 2: Planet scanning. Plus the Firewalker.

Mass Effect 3: System scanning.

Fallout 3: The Operation: Anchorage DLC has some awesome loot near the end, but playing the DLC itself is a slog, to the point where I'll often just turn on god mode and sprint through it.

Fallout New Vegas: Listening to Ulysses chuntering at you throughout the Lonesome Road DLC. Just shut the hell up dude, I'm here to kill deathclaws.

Fallout 4: The Dima's Memories part of the Far Harbor DLC. Who the hell thought that first-person platformer puzzle solving would be a good idea in a Fallout game?

TES4: Oblivion: Closing Oblivion Gates got really boring after doing it a dozen times.

TES5: Skyrim: The climb up to the Greybeards.

XCOM/XCOM2: "OH COME UP THAT WAS A 97% SHOT WHADDYA MEAN I MISSED IT GODDAMMIT THIS GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!!!!"

Huh... I have a lot of favorite games.
 
Frank

Frank

I do not like real time with pause combat, in fact, I hate it. It's a chaotic clusterfuck that is never any fun to control, especially in the older Infinity Engine games. Newer CRPGs finally moving back into the turn-based combat mode is very gratifying to me.
 
bhamv3

bhamv3

I have more favorite games!

Stellaris: The late-game lag as the galaxy gets developed and the population increases to the point where the game is struggling to keep track of everything.

Dwarf Fortress: The late-game lag as your fortress gets developed and the population increases to the point where the game is struggling to keep track of everything.

Every Civilization game: The late-game lag as... y'know what, you guys get it.

Championship Manager/Football Manager games: There is a tendency in these games for opposing goalkeepers to inexplicably become supermen at times. This leads to a disproportionate amount of games where you pepper your opponent's goal with shots, but their keeper will save them all, while your opponent will manage to score with just a few shots on target. This has resulted in an unfortunately common sight of stuff like "You (22 shots on target / 1 goal) vs Opponent (2 shots on target / 2 goals)", ha ha you lose. Of course, the conspiracy theory to explain this is that the game is deliberately fudging things and making you lose, but apparently people have looked into the game's code, and what's actually happening is that the opposing AI is smarter than players give it credit for. The AI is capable of "cracking" your tactics if you use them too often (basically simulating opposing managers watching your tactics and coming up with counters) so that the only shots your opponent allows your team to take will all be low-percentage, low-quality shots that goalkeepers can easily save. Contrariwise, the AI can set up its tactics to produce high-quality, high-percentage chances when it's attacking against you. Since most players will generally find a formation or tactic they like and just stick with it, or at most rotate between 2-3 tactics, sooner or later the AI will "crack" the player's tactic, leading to the above phenomenon happening. So it's not unfair... but it's still annoying.

Assassin's Creed games: Every part where you're not doing Assassin's Creed stuff, such as the parts outside of the Animus in AC1 to 4, the glyph puzzles, the first-person platforming puzzles in Revelations, etc. The only exception is Black Flag, in which the Assassin's Creed stuff gets in the way of the really fun part, wandering around a video game developer's office being a pirate.

Sleeping Dogs: I wasn't a fan of how the later parts of the game played out. Firstly, the climactic battles mostly involved guns, but for the vast majority of the game you've been practicing your hand-to-hand fighting skills, so now you're suddenly thrown into a bunch of gunfights with minimal preparation. Secondly, the climactic battle introduced QTEs for some reason, when they've been absent for the rest of the game.

GTA5: Michael's Epsilon questline. The part where you have to run around the desert for like half an hour is the worst, but there are a bunch of other missions in that questline that feel utterly pointless, such as the one where you just fly a plane across Los Santos, that's it. What makes it worse is that this is one of the most lucrative questlines in the game, especially early on, so you really do want to do it for the reward... it's just that actually playing this questline sucks ass.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
the game has no PvE endgame, so basically playing online with/against other players is the de facto endgame.
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Every Mixed Single-/Multi-player Game Ever: "Oh you've gotten through all the single-player content (if any) and want more? Too bad! The rest of the game is IMPOSSIBLE to complete solo and will be forever gated off from you unless you get and maintain a group of at least 3 other friends/people/randos/whatever and coordinate your schedules so you can develop as a team to conquer the remaining content/levels/PvP content/whatever in order to get the rewards that are EXCLUSIVELY available ONLY in that team content." (Destiny, PUBG, Overwatch, WoW, CoD, etc).

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
PatrThom said:
Every Mixed Single-/Multi-player Game Ever: "Oh you've gotten through all the single-player content (if any) and want more? Too bad! The rest of the game is IMPOSSIBLE to complete solo and will be forever gated off from you unless you get and maintain a group of at least 3 other friends/people/randos/whatever and coordinate your schedules so you can develop as a team to conquer the remaining content/levels/PvP content/whatever in order to get the rewards that are EXCLUSIVELY available ONLY in that team content." (Destiny, PUBG, Overwatch, WoW, CoD, etc).

--Patrick
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Ok, MMOs are one thing, but did you really expect to have a single player experience in Overwatch?
 
General Specific

General Specific

I'm just going to list specific tropes that I dislike rather than full games or I might be listing things out like @bhamv3 ;)

Forced Multiplayer - I'm looking at you, Mass Effect 3. I loved that series until the end of 3 when you HAD to play the multiplayer in order to get the best ending in the SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN. The endings were already pretty shitty, but that just made it worse. I think I got one of the DLCs and have never even looked at the series since.

Unskippable Tutorial Levels - Yes, that's right, almost every game ever. Can we please dispense with this? Some sort of system that detects if you have a save file already and offers to let you skip the "How to play" bit of the game and go straight to the fun stuff. Especially games where you likely have sunk entire months into one play through *cough cough*SKYRIM*cough*

Collectibles that have no effect on the game - Assassin's Creed 2 was the main standout of this for me. Those stupid feathers. I found them all and got the cape and it did exactly nothing. All it did was drag out the play time. I have never cared about collecting all the greeblies since unless there was a specific game enhancement for doing so.
 
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figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
General Specific said:
Unskippable Tutrial Levels - Yes, that's right, almost every game ever. Can we please dispense with this? Some sort of system that detects if you have a save file already and offers to let you skip the "How to play" bit of the game and go straight to the fun stuff. Especially games where you likely have sunk entire months into one play through *cough cough*SKYRIM*cough*
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Forced tutorial levels suck, especially when they're bad. This reminded me of one of my pet peeves:

Games that tell you how to do something once, in a pop-up window, during the tutorial level, and then never mention how to do it again, anywhere. I don't have specific examples, but I've had multiple games do this. "To perform an engarbling wheeble, press LB + Y" and you're told this without any idea of what the move is, or why you'd want to do it. I've played games where there's no way to look up the control scheme in game. Just today Mass Effect told me how to heal while I was at full health. By the time I needed to heal I'd forgotten. I could not find a way to look up what button to press, so I just hit buttons until I did. I'm still not sure how to heal my team mates.

Most game UI/UX is some level of bad, with some being outright terrible. It's been a while since I played a game I thought has consistently good UI. Bad user interface / user experience is so common, it's something I passed over mentioning about my favorite games.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past - It feels kinda unfair picking on a game this old for bad UX, but it's criminal how underused the shoulder buttons are in most SNES games. The LttP randomizer lets you swap between items with L&R, which is a huge improvement, but it still feels lacking.

Planescape: Torment - The way inventory management works is just horrible. This is true of any of the Infinity Engine games (e.g. Baldur's Gate), but it's especially bad in PS:T. There are no gem bags or bags of holding in PS:T, (though it's absolutely ridiculous that you need a gem bag at all in Baldur's Gate). 20 bronze rings take up a character's entire inventory. It's a stupid system that doesn't make sense in terms of either realism or game balance.

Saints Row the Third - Holy crap the "cellphone" interface is generally terrible. Some optional side missions are tucked away deep in menus, with critical info requiring you to dig back through the menu if you need to refresh your memory mid-mission. Calling homies for help will fail sometimes, and the game gives little or no feedback as to why.

Borderlands 2 - Why do the menus take up such a small portion of the screen? Why is all the info being crammed into like the center third of the screen? This is way beyond avoiding overscan on TVs, and a whole lot of games do this. I've got a huge inventory of items with tons of stats to display, the menu should sprawl a little!
 
IronBrig4

IronBrig4

bhamv3 said:
TES5: Skyrim: The climb up to the Greybeards.

XCOM/XCOM2: "OH COME UP THAT WAS A 97% SHOT WHADDYA MEAN I MISSED IT GODDAMMIT THIS GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!!!!"
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The first time you climb up to the Greybeards is a treat. It's just you and the elements, and it feels so immersive. It wears then after a while.

XCOM 2 made me rage sometimes. But there were some instances where most of my team was low on health and out of both grenades and medpacks. That's when something like a sectopod would come in from out of nowhere. At that moment, one of my squaddies with a repeater would execute that monstrosity with one shot. Suddenly the game became awesome again.

Here's mine.

Sims 4: You invite friends over to party and all they do is make a beeline for the family computer. That's just rude.

Mass Effect 3: I seriously spent 20 minutes doing pull-ups for no reward. Not even a badge.
 
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