The 13 Worst Game Design Crimes

Some game mechanics are divisive. There are those who would argue vehemently against regenerating health in shooters, while others would be entirely fine with it. It's a matter for debate. This is not a list about those mechanics. This is a list of design quirks that should be consigned to the scrapheap forever.PCGamer sees them time and time again, even in multi-million dollar games built by hundreds of developers, so PCGamer decided to get some of our biggest gripes together in one place. And on that day, in a storm of fire, fury and intense grumbling, PCGamer forged our list of gaming's greatest design crimes. Here it be.

[DoomeDx]

What a horrible list :/ They are not worse at all and are needed unless you want games to take 10 years until they are out of development..

I agree with #1 and #2 though.

[2pacalypsenow]

Games are too easy that should be one

Oh and online trophy's

[wonderfulmonkeyman]

The irony of your statement is that a lot of the "not too easy" games, outside of Dark Souls, don't sell as well as they should.

If we're being honest, there's a lot of gamers in the new generation that don't have the slightest clue how to handle the likes of games that fall under the old moniker "Nintendo Hard".

Ten bucks says most of them would give up on trying to pass the original Ninja Gaiden or Contra without cheats.XD

[WeAreLegion]

I'll never forget trying to exit out of Assassin's Creed for PC when it first came out. It took far too long to close that game.

[Perjoss]

Unpausable cutscenes.

Checkpoints just before a cutscene that cannot be skipped.

Games that do not make it clear when the last autosave happened when you are trying to quit out, obviously games that let you manually save are fine.

Also I think its about time that developers allowed us to fully remap a controller to our liking on a console game, not just choose from a few premade schemes. It even happens on some PC games but quite rare luckily.

[ShottyGibs]

I couldn't agree with you more

[scark92]

Stay away from the FF X HD Remaster in regards to unskippable cutscenes! :(

[wonderfulmonkeyman]

Too much focus on graphical assets and cutscenes and not enough on "side content" that extends the replay value of the game.

I don't care how big your budget is; if you're spending the majority of it on adding as many particle effects and realistic skin-stretches as you can to everything, and you're not making a movie, then you've got your priorities skewed.

Semi-related; if you're using too much of your budget on marketing hype, you'd better damn well have an amazing game underneath it all.
People are getting sick of over-hype and under-delivery in their games lately.

[GokuSolosAll]

I've got a huge list of problems in gaming but one feature which needs standardization is a type of "Fast Forward/Rewind/Chapter Select." Some may have a limited Chapter Select but it isn't enough. Also, "Mivie Mode" so qe can just watch certain games, like Dragon's Lair had. Heavy Rain would be perfect for it.

A controversial one is "Win Mode." Not Easy but completely unable to lose. Sometimes there's an annoying section due to puzzles or difficulty or whatever and you just want to get past it but still see it. The arguments against it include "That defeats the purpose of a game" and others like it. Thing is, it's optional so it doesn't concern you, and some of us aren't skilled or are lazy or played it already or just want to show our friend something.

Basically, gaming needs to be more controllable and accessible for our experience.

[iiorestesii]

Return of the hero and sideline the anti hero for a game or two would be nice. Thats why FF7 was so awesome. Your mission was politically idealized and you mainly fought wild animals and bandits.

[SaveFerris]

Rubber-banding in racing games and RNG loot frustrate me.

[wonderfulmonkeyman]

Add horrible scaling to player power vs enemy growth to the complaint about RNG loot, and you've nailed my issues with every Borderlands game past the first one.

First one did everything but the story and environments right.
The loot you could find off of enemies was appropriate; if they were using a rare gun, they DROPPED that rare gun, and when you used it, rather than taking two full clips to down bandits that used common white gears, you mowed through waves like the bad-ass the game claimed it wanted you to be.

BL2 changed that for the worse by making the majority of player shields useless against bandits using common white gears, and good guns were so few and far between that you practically never found an upgrade to your better gears unless you started grinding for very specific overpowered weapons that used a gimmick to deal more damage than they should.

Bandits also rarely if ever dropped what they were using if it was anything above white, and whenever they were using a gun, it was obvious that it was more powerful in their hands than when you yourself got to use it due to the ridiculous amount of health and shield scaling enemies got over players.

Both bad trends that have turned me off of the series, which is a shame because I truly wanted to love it...