Guide to bad game design

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59 comments, last by DaveTroyer 11 years, 5 months ago
So what it looks to me, to make a bad game, you either have to make it boring, or annoying.
I think here is a good starting list to make it boring, but I didn't read much of annying mechanics.

In games, "just because FUCK YOU!" elements are annoying i believe, for example:
In diablo 3 in inferno difficulty, when you didn't kill an elite mob in less than 20 minutes, the mob is "aggroed" or whatever and you have to die (they help you with that, you lose all of your health in 10 seconds). After that, you have to wait 5 minutes or so until the elite mob has regenerated all it's health.
Why? Because SCREW YOU, that's why.


Or the other side of this one, as FFXII did: you can only obtain the super powered weapon later in the game if you DIDN'T open certain chests (that were not marked or identified in any way) earlier in the game.

Haha, great "FUCK YOU" to the gamer.


Something completely different:
This doesn't make a game bad, but it certanly hides it's potential. For example: make many different attack types in an rpg game (fire, physical, magic...) but make them virtually equal in all regards, it just doesn't matter if you do fire or lightning damage.
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Setting fire to these damn cows one entry at a time!
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Make difficulty levels that only affect enemies, weapons and ammo. All jumping and stealth still requires near-perfect timing, whatever the difficulty is.
Lauris Kaplinski

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My biggest gripe in game design came from God of War (yes, the original).
Give players an entire game to master using several fun and diverse weapons, then at the final climactic boss battle: take them all away and make them use something new and horrible with no practice or warning.

Hazard Pay :: FPS/RTS in SharpDX (gathering dust, retained for... historical purposes)
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Just look at all of Acclaim's games.

Every single aspect of them was HORRIBLE.

Horrible, uneven graphics.
Horrible motion captured animations.
Horrible sound. It was always all over the place, and either too low, or blowing out your speakers.
Horrible collision detection.
Horrible AI.
The save systems were so clunky they looked like they were pasted out of the tutorial section of their platform SDKs.

The took bad ideas, spent all the budget on a license, and then rushed a clunky, half baked, idea out in 6 months.


I could say the same things about any game from Capstone Software/Intracorp Entertainment...

  • Always have the camera in an awkward position where the FOV is 30 to 50% obscured. Oh. And also make that camera unadjustable.
  • Also, I love mission-oriented games that don't log what the mission is, who gave you the mission and where that person was (it's not much of an issue now, but it was before).
  • Make (single player) off-line games that require you to be online.
  • If at first you think the player will succeed, then move the platform 3 pixels to the right, have a two wandering enemies, and show only half the platform so the player will jump right into the death trap on the other side.

Beginner in Game Development?  Read here. And read here.

 


  • Unadjustable controllers
  • Force V-Sync
  • Force Mouse Accelration
  • Must watch long credits after final boss to continue playing. Else you must kill final boss again.

(Perhaps some aren't really design related, nevertheless it's plain stupid)

If you don't understand the stuff written here, please sharpen your C++ skills.

Have a game that allows the Classic Konami code. Then when the player loses a life, BSOD the game.

Beginner in Game Development?  Read here. And read here.

 


  • 2D game? JPG artifacts. Bitches love JPG artifacts.
  • Always make the final boss (with no particular weak points) a matter of shooting him until he keels over, then a quicktime event. Repeat. On harder difficulties, take this, but make it three times longer per level.
  • The control scheme of the last three games in your series being recieved incredibly well? Oh, easy enough to make THAT better! Just switch two major buttons around, and make sure what used to be the action button now stabs the nearest person in the face!
  • Or perhaps those last three games have had a winning formula? No one likes formulas, so you should stop that. To mix things up a little, change the way the story's told completely, and add a half-baked genre mash-up! That should show them.

Bonus round!

  • If making a movie/TV game, make all cutscenes low quality, 4:3 rips from the parts of the movie that either make no sense, or are huge explosions.
Always make the final boss (with no particular weak points) a matter of shooting him until he keels over, then a quicktime event. Repeat. On harder difficulties, take this, but make it three times longer per level.

Yeah, attrition. Relying on quantity of resources rather than intelligence, or quality of challenge.

That reminds me of the opposite, actually, and that makes me think of the original Syphon Filter. You go through all these levels and all these bosses, you're getting head-shots, you're sniping, you're blasting through enemies, you're... generally trying to figure out where to go next... and eventually you get to the final boss. If I recall correctly, all it took to kill him was a gas grenade. It's the last thing you'd think to throw at him, but if you did, it ended really, really quickly.

And that is neither attrition, nor a really acceptable challenge. It was just anti-climactic.
I got a couple:
Make infinite waves of enemies that keep on coming, spawning from random places, until you complete your objective.
Make one of those annoying platform games where you jump from one platform to another, and then make that one platform that the player always misses by a centimeter.
Have a currency system, to reveal that you can buy absolutely nothing useful at all.
Have SUPER easy characters that lead up to a boss that is almost impossible.
Have a boss.
Make a tutorial that takes up half of the game and then fails to explain some of the most important parts.
Make Duke Nukem.
Make a racing game where you have the same track over and over with a couple of new turns.
Give the player a super hard objective to find out you unlocked 2 coins.
Make a Game Named Ratchet and Clank.
Make it where the player has to find a key. You search ten minutes for a key when you could've blown the door open.
Have annoying cutscenes that you can't skip yet have nothing important in them.
Make a game where you have to play in the same place every other freakin' level.
Make it like disc 5 on GTA: SA. No one likes it.
Have a boss where he isn't even hard, just where hundreds of enemies decide to come out right then and shoot at you. All of a sudden, when the boss is dead, they stop and go away.
Plenty more where that came from ;)
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