Worst Gameplay Mechanics

I like the health regen in Halo, because that is how that game specifically works. But the overflow of regenerating health bars in modern gaming has no excuse. At this point it is just lazy.
 
Not that I think it's a bad mechanic, but this talk of health regen in shooters reminds me of revives. I think it started in gears of war(correct me if im wrong), but people can deplete their health bar and still be brought back by teammates. The goofiness culminates in Battlefield Bad Company where medics have amazing powers over life and death, reviving people who have been down near instantaneously. To this point and also the prior complaint about 1-hit melee, the medics defibrillator is also a melee weapon which is faster than the games default 1-hit melee option. To make things even sillier, the area of effect on the two effects is large enough that once in a blue moon you kill someone AND revive someone at the exact same time.
 
Not that I think it's a bad mechanic, but this talk of health regen in shooters reminds me of revives. I think it started in gears of war(correct me if im wrong), but people can deplete their health bar and still be brought back by teammates. The goofiness culminates in Battlefield Bad Company where medics have amazing powers over life and death, reviving people who have been down near instantaneously. To this point and also the prior complaint about 1-hit melee, the medics defibrillator is also a melee weapon which is faster than the games default 1-hit melee option. To make things even sillier, the area of effect on the two effects is large that once in a blue moon you kill someone AND revive someone at the exact same time.

Left 4 Dead has that "Ive been dead for 10 minutes, but you can come revive my body by shocking the shit out of it." Gears of war I think did that to tho, i dont remember, didnt like GoW.

When ninja gaiden 2 came out, I was at first pleased with the regen health bar thingy. But ur absolutly right, it just becomes laziness at some point.

HRD
 
I like to cripple people with harassing shots and force them to react under panic. You cant do that with bad health regen systems. All they have to do is avoid for a very small amount of time and undo all your work. I preferred know my enemy was injured and forcing them to make a move or charging in for the finish. Halo 1 was the greatest health system ever and it's sad we don't see it return. The fusion of both regen and health was good because you could recover, but only so much.
Well I kind of like that they have to duck away for a little bit. Since I'm not a sniper, everything I say will be from the standpoint of anti-sniper (the bane of my particular existence) but if you clip a sniper in a system without health regen he'll just keep trying to sight you and take you out, he has no incentive to do otherwise. If you clip a sniper with health regen he'll usually try to duck away and heal up which gives you a nice opportunity to work your way around him. If he manages to hit you and not kill you, you can play the same game again, provided you find a spot out of his sight (good luck with that but still) On the other hand you can't wear a sniper off his perch by attrition. So it's a mixed blessing.

Not that I think it's a bad mechanic, but this talk of health regen in shooters reminds me of revives. I think it started in gears of war(correct me if im wrong)
I know that they were in return to castle wolfenstein.

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And that predates gears by a while. If they appeared before that I have no idea. I always played as a medic, he came with a Thompson or P-40 (so he was no slouch in the killing department) and he could heal himself, teammates and do revives. (I think 5 on one go and more could be attained from a player playing a lieutenant) I still have fond memories of waltzing up a flight of stairs, knifing a guy in the back, killing three guys guarding an artillery cannon then turning around in time to res the guy who went up the stairs without me. (When you shot some one in the head in that game if they still had their helmet on it could stop a head shot but then the helmet would pop off, made for some memorable scenes because when you popped them in the head twice in a row it kind of made them look surprised)
 
no if you clip a sniper with no health gen they're forced to either take a risk and pop up to kill you first or run. The risk is much higher. With health regen they can take damage without much remorse and just duck to cool off then pop up again. Health regen is a valid system that needs careful execution. Halo and COD do a shit job. Though i do laugh at the wackiness of revives in GoW and BF:BC2
 
The strength of the Halo sniper is relative though. It is definitely the most powerful weapon in the game, but if a sniper is really giving you problems there are usually enough counters to take him down. Popping him with just one bullet and forcing him to retreat behind an obvious wall just sets them up to die from an obnoxiously powerful grenade that they won't be able to dodge. Regen in that situation wouldn't help regardless if they were camping a health power-up.

And what would health damage even DO in CoD? Make you die from one less bullet than the ONE it already takes to off you? Let grenades kill you from 500 feet away rather than 100?

On the topic of bad gameplay mechanics: unnecessary backtracking. I recently re-played Ocarina of Time, and they should rename it "Link Runs Across a Field" for the amount of ungodly backtracking it has. Amazing dungeons, great exploration, horrible timesink. Seriously, it isn't necessary for me to talk to 20 different people to get a mask to get a key to open a door 30 miles away.

Similarly, when RPGs have you in a town and nothing happens until you talk to everyone, or visit certain screens enough times, or other stupid things it makes me so mad that my eyes cross and blood comes out of my ears. After 5 minutes of wandering around it makes me want to run to GameFAQs just to read "wait 10 minutes for something to happen." I guess other gamers don't have shit to do, but it pisses me off.
 
On the topic of bad gameplay mechanics: unnecessary backtracking. I recently re-played Ocarina of Time, and they should rename it "Link Runs Across a Field" for the amount of ungodly backtracking it has. Amazing dungeons, great exploration, horrible timesink. Seriously, it isn't necessary for me to talk to 20 different people to get a mask to get a key to open a door 30 miles away.

Similarly, when RPGs have you in a town and nothing happens until you talk to everyone, or visit certain screens enough times, or other stupid things it makes me so mad that my eyes cross and blood comes out of my ears. After 5 minutes of wandering around it makes me want to run to GameFAQs just to read "wait 10 minutes for something to happen." I guess other gamers don't have shit to do, but it pisses me off.

OMG! This times 10!

Lord knows I love the Metriod Prime series but fuck I hate back tracking throught the same jungle fighting the same indigenous life/space pirates just because I got a grappling hook SHE SHOULDN'T HAVE FUCKING LOST IN THE CRASH IN THE FIRST PLACE 100 miles away from where I need it...

And the RPG thing urks me, too. Specially when you really have to wait "10 minutes" or the story won't move on. While we're at it; unskippable cut scenes. Fuck them.

Stealth sections in Shooters, RPG's, etc... If I want to play MGS/Splinter Cell/Assassin's Creed, I wouldn't play Gears of War/Yakuza 4/Marumasa.
 
imo the worst is patches

the most fun I had with mw2 was the jav glitch when it was patched the fun was gone
 
Also, the way Nintendo constantly re-releases things. No matter how many Metroid games they make that have different story lines, Samus still loses all of her shit in the beginning of every game. The only one that changes if slightly is Mario, and that is only thanks to superb level design. It does irk me though that Nintendo diehards jump on other genres for making tons of sequels that only change slightly when that formula is literally what their entire library consists of.
 
Lord knows I love the Metriod Prime series but fuck I hate back tracking throught the same jungle fighting the same indigenous life/space pirates just because I got a grappling hook SHE SHOULDN'T HAVE FUCKING LOST IN THE CRASH IN THE FIRST PLACE 100 miles away from where I need it...
So you'd have linear Metroid?
 
Even moreso, the bonuses you get for leveling skills appear only at levels 25, 50, 75, and 100. Which means to get a true bonus from skills such as Mercantile you have to grind the ever loving piss out of them. So if I go to town on Mercantile only to turn around and, expecting Black Bears, I find whatever the fuck that alligator-faced asshole is running amok. King K-Rool mother fucker. Spits on me and I have a heart attack, or punches my horse in the face and kills it. And I paid serious gold for that horse. And those guys ARE EVERYWHERE.
Lol amazing. Anyway I wasn't really saying it was a good mechanic and I agree that Morrowind is much better, I was just giving advice to make the best of it.Honestly it never game me too much trouble but I guess I never really focused on noncombat skills before combat ones. Maxed out marksmen + sneak will fuck anything up lol.
Obviously I meant from a balance perspective.
 
Lol amazing. Anyway I wasn't really saying it was a good mechanic and I agree that Morrowind is much better, I was just giving advice to make the best of it.Honestly it never game me too much trouble but I guess I never really focused on noncombat skills before combat ones. Maxed out marksmen + sneak will fuck anything up lol.

I was just relating my first playthrough, where I tried to play like a moron in order to have fun. I had no idea how the level system affected the world, and so I got my ass beaten by daedric monstrosities that spawned willy-nilly.

ArcticKomodo: CoD is the MvC of shooters. It's a game full of broken, stupid things that all kind of work together to make it a broken, stupid mess that somehow is fun. But then you realize that it is fun because literally anything you do can kill another player. Someone mentioned in the FPS thread that truly competitive FPSs died after Quake, and I think he's right. That doesn't make CoD and Halo and Battlefield bad, it just makes them games full of nonsense that shouldn't be taken as seriously as they are.
 
Someone mentioned in the FPS thread that truly competitive FPSs died after Quake, and I think he's right. That doesn't make CoD and Halo and Battlefield bad, it just makes them games full of nonsense that shouldn't be taken as seriously as they are.

If that was the "why do so many like the fps" thread, I never poked my head into that thread because it looked like it was gonna be full of anger and stupid. That said I have to agree with that person. My memories of quake 2 were all good ones and I can't think of any one particular weapon that reigned supreme in that game. Quad damage was cheap shit and weapon balance wasn't perfect but for the most part a man with a machine gun could kill a guy with a rocket launcher so long as he knew the rules to each weapon match-up. Yeah bunny hopping was a little retarded, and before the Vwep patch it was essentially roulette whatever weapon your opponent was going to have, but by the end that game was pretty great, and I can't cay that unreal tournament took us in a better direction.

Unreal tournament is the first modern shooter. It lacks health regeneration and "realistic" damage/weapons but if you've got the nonsense on your side you can cough in that game and kill 10 people.
 
Horrible Gameplay mechanics i've seen are from Super Street Fighter 4 The Hitbox is horrible. I like Alpha alot better. The Hitbox on Black Ops is extremely bad. (shooting someone in the hip apparently is a headshot...) But you know they should take the time to perfect the BASICS instead of focusing on the advanced things. all they do is rush the basics and expect it to be okay.

And also the broken bound physics from Tekken 6... which was a horrible mistake... Tekken 5 was alot better.
 
How is that balanced? The game rewards who ever has the better connection when flailing your blade. That's why I play hardcore instead of core in cod.
The game is going to reward whoever has the better connection in any situation that is based on reaction time, which is pretty much anything in COD, so that's irrelevant. I'm talking about balance as in a weapon with a severely limited range doing more damage than an otherwise far better weapon. Its just reaction time when two people stumble on to each other while turning a corner. When bullets take you down so fast what would be the point of a knife that doesn't kill you in one hit?

The scoring system in L4D2 vs mode is a really shitty mechanic. When one team limps out with no kits and 1 hp each and the other team makes it out without getting touched its a tie and they better team gets a pathetic 25 point lead in a game where the score is done in thousands.
 
The scoring system in L4D2 vs mode is a really shitty mechanic. When one team limps out with no kits and 1 hp each and the other team makes it out without getting touched its a tie and they better team gets a pathetic 25 point lead in a game where the score is done in thousands.

Man oh man do I agree with this. Granted, for a full year I didn't lose a single match in L4D because most players are terrible (I wish this wasn't true, but I actually went a whole year without losing. It contributed vastly to my decision to stop playing the game). L4D is a great game with some glaring flaws such as incredible level design mixed with awful level design (did they playtest Dark Carnival at all? Swamp Fever?) stupid scoring system, and the random nature of the superzombie spawn options against unstoppable superhuman survivors.
 
So you'd have linear Metroid?

I'd put the grappling hook 50 miles away, not 100 miles... :/

Like seriously. I get to a point in the ice level that needs the plasma gun so I have to travel through the sky temple, the jungle lake, the mountains AND the the Space Pirate Base just to retrieve the plasma gun? Mind you the teleporter got me to skip the under water caverns and the ancient ruins. Like I love that it's a long game, just not the fact it's artificially elongated by back tracking.
 
Man oh man do I agree with this. Granted, for a full year I didn't lose a single match in L4D because most players are terrible (I wish this wasn't true, but I actually went a whole year without losing. It contributed vastly to my decision to stop playing the game). L4D is a great game with some glaring flaws such as incredible level design mixed with awful level design (did they playtest Dark Carnival at all? Swamp Fever?) stupid scoring system, and the random nature of the superzombie spawn options against unstoppable superhuman survivors.
The problem is that Valve doesn't put enough post release work into the game. They release it really fucking wonky and incomplete then half ass the post release support.
 
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