Excessive and unnecessary details in a game's GUI/menu. On screen HUDs where something like a health bar is buried within a sprite 8 times larger just because they're sticking to the game's theme gets annoying. And I hate it when a game has an actual loading screen for the game's menu. Whether it's due to full motion video in the background, an excessive amount of animation in the GUI graphics, or whatever, if it takes longer to go to the options screen than it takes to adjust your in-game sound levels, then you need to rework your menu. It's been a while since I last played Chaos Theory, but one of the things that bugged me was that it took far longer than necessary to load the damn menu because they insisted on the moving backgrounds and making it look far fancier than it needed to be.
So are you guys against In-game advertising in sports games? where they show it in the arean to mimic TV?
Not if it makes my copy of the game cheaper for me to buy.
Exactly. Either use those in-game ads to lower the cost of the game for the consumer, or make fake ads like sports-game devs did oh so many years before. Some of the best examples are racing games - everything that would have an ad on it in real life has one, but the ad is for one of the companies involved with the game in the first place.
If we're going to include design decisions then I really have a gripe with non-optional side quests, like in Ultimate Spider-Man. Forcing me to do those stupid races in order to unlock more of the game drove me insane. Not to mention the Johnny Storm ones. I don't mind racing to a place. I do mind having to hit tiny 10 foot bubbles on my way there however.
Also I hate it when developers throw a mini-game at you that you've never played before and then put a timer on it and make it mandatory to complete the story. I don't mind mini-games, but for god sake don't throw it at me like a freaking IQ test in the middle of the narrative.
I haven't seen one instance of well-implemented HDR. I played HL2: Lost Coast, Lost Planet, and Gears of War. It's always more of an irritant than an enhancement. Blowing out the brights and blackening the darks just makes it look like you don't know how to white balance. It looks ugly and it needs to go away until someone figures out how to use it right.
Motion blur though. I like the motion blur in Shadow of the Colossus, Lost Planet, Gears of War, and Test Drive Unlimited.
Woo! DVD/BD have given us the technology to include high res, beautiful full motion video in our games!
.... and you're gonna watch it, Goddammit, and enjoy it,. Every single fucking time.
Cutscenes without some form of pause. Does the MGS series allow you to pause during cutscenes?
Also, I would really like to be able to rewind and fast forward through cutscenes.
Truth. I can't fucking stand the LOTR action games for this reason. Fun, but... did I have to watch 15 minutes of self-glorifying movie rips, from which the coolest moment will be the meld to polygons?
Maybe I haven't played enough "next-gen" games though, but I haven't really gotten this HDR burnout. In every game I've played with HDR, it's always been a marked visual and atmospheric improvement, and that even goes for Guild Wars (which doesn't use HDR anyway). I'm not sure where this "real is brown" thing comes from either.
As for actual technologies I hate seeing in games, I'm going with a controversial one:
High-resolution textures.
Don't kill me just yet - I'm a PC gamer above all, and this applies mostly to computer games. While I love pretty, super-high-detail textures in games I hate having to set aside gigs and gigs of space just for giant uncompressed art resources. I do a lot of my gaming on a laptop, and having to uninstall a bunch of 2- or 3-year-old games just to make room for the art folder of a single new game is annoying. Plus, a sizable chunk of those ever-increasing load times is taken up by textures loading into RAM (this is where it applies to consoles and PCs alike; not everyone's system has gigs of memory on hand).
I know, I know, get a bigger HD/more RAM or play on a desktop. But here's the thing - there are games out there that can build enormous, beautiful textures out of tiny amounts of data, procedurally. I can't think of the name of it, but there's an FPS (german, iirc) that clocks in at like 1 meg but has some of the best material textures I've ever seen.
Technologically, we're at a point where HD-space is nearing functionally infinite, and a lot of devs will complain that compressing these textures or simply using smaller ones will lessen the quality of their product. It's a valid concern, but we have ways of getting around that now. I'd just like to see some effort on the part of designers to make sure their game can be played by as many people as possible, and not just those players who can afford to stay cutting-edge.
Woo! DVD/BD have given us the technology to include high res, beautiful full motion video in our games!
.... and you're gonna watch it, Goddammit, and enjoy it,. Every single fucking time.
Cutscenes without some form of pause. Does the MGS series allow you to pause during cutscenes?
Also, I would really like to be able to rewind and fast forward through cutscenes.
I caught so much shit from my girlfriend at the time circa MGS2.
Yeah, final battle, figured there'd be a 5 minute cutscene with a "congratulations" at the end.
I picked her up 45 minutes later. I can still feel the bruises.
That exact same thing happened to me....
Except, at the 30 minute mark, I turned off the Goddamn PS2 and went to pick up my girlfriend.
I returned to the game later, of course, and had to re-watch the 30 minutes, and see the rest of the last 15.
Fuck I was pissed that I had to get to such a juicy bit of plot (the Climax, no less) at the worst conceivable time. And had to ruin it for myself, only to rewatch most of it later just to end up beating the game shortly thereafter.
I love the MGS games, but I make it a point only to play them at night when I have no obligations or anything else that I have to do.
Pause-able cutscenes would be a Godsend for the MGS games and everything else.
Voice Acting. Seriously. I often find myself too embarrassed to play potentially good games just due to the bad VA.
Voice acting itself isn't unwelcome. Its just that its "expected" now, so every game has it. Really, it should only be there if its good (or so bad its good, like Dynasty Warriors). No voice acting is better than poorly done VA.
I am of a similar opinion, but I'd still be happier without any VA at all than deal with most of what's out there. I have yet to play a game with voice acting so good that removing it would significantly impact my experience. I've played a lot of games that would be made much more enjoyable without it.
The Bard's Tale.
Kingdom Hearts as well.
Pata on
Episode 5: Mecha-World, Mecha-nisim, Mecha-beasts
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
Now that I think about it, they did a good job with the HDR in Ep1. It was mostly rim-lighting, and the rest of it wasn't overdone. So yeah. Ep. 1 gets a thumbs-up from me regarding HDR.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
No no no, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the use of memory cards today. I'm talking about how the N64 used memory cards even though it was very capable of having battery backup in the carts themselves. It always bugged me. It's not like they made games Memory Pak-only to save space or something. If they did, how come most of the system's best games (Ocarina of Time, Banjo series) didn't need it? It was a totally useless add-on forcing people to buy a new peripheral just to save. It was ridiculous.
Rocketlex on
While you were asleep, your windows told me all your secrets.
(a) people need to stop ragging on HDR lighting. If you're ragging on it, then you don't know what it is. You're probably talking about bloom, which is not HDR lighting at all. HDR lighting just means that you can have unlimited exposure levels and 32bit floating point precision on blending. Light bloom was introduced by the same guy who brought HDR lighting to the forefront and in the same presentation, so people think it is HDR even though it was just something shown alongside it.
(b) I'm annoyed with overly shiny rock-faces. Like when people make cobblestone streets or brick walls that shine like polished plastic. It'd be solved easily with an 8-bit gloss map, but nobody ever bothers.
Voice Acting. Seriously. I often find myself too embarrassed to play potentially good games just due to the bad VA.
Voice acting itself isn't unwelcome. Its just that its "expected" now, so every game has it. Really, it should only be there if its good (or so bad its good, like Dynasty Warriors). No voice acting is better than poorly done VA.
I am of a similar opinion, but I'd still be happier without any VA at all than deal with most of what's out there. I have yet to play a game with voice acting so good that removing it would significantly impact my experience. I've played a lot of games that would be made much more enjoyable without it.
The Bard's Tale.
Tony Jay narrates and Cary Elwes (sp?) plays the Bard. Both are wonderful and made a good game into an even better game.
Absolutely agree with you. I really wish the Bard's Tale hadn't been overlooked by so many people. The game was quite fun, and you actually found yourself looking forward to cut scenes and talking to the random villagers, something that's a chore in most other games.
Voice Acting. Seriously. I often find myself too embarrassed to play potentially good games just due to the bad VA.
Voice acting itself isn't unwelcome. Its just that its "expected" now, so every game has it. Really, it should only be there if its good (or so bad its good, like Dynasty Warriors). No voice acting is better than poorly done VA.
I am of a similar opinion, but I'd still be happier without any VA at all than deal with most of what's out there. I have yet to play a game with voice acting so good that removing it would significantly impact my experience. I've played a lot of games that would be made much more enjoyable without it.
The Bard's Tale.
Kingdom Hearts as well.
Perhaps this is where the difference lies. I can't speak for Bard's Tale, but I found that MGS, KH, and System Shock 2 all had pretty awful voice acting. For KH in particular it is a big reason I have never finished it - it completely ruins the delivery of the game for me.
(b) I'm annoyed with overly shiny rock-faces. Like when people make cobblestone streets or brick walls that shine like polished plastic. It'd be solved easily with an 8-bit gloss map, but nobody ever bothers.
Agreed. It seemed like every game that came out for the Xbox felt required to bump-map everything. As a result every surface in the game was made of plastic, including the character's head. Not cool, devs.
It's gotten a lot better quantity-wise lately, but the quality is still lacking a lot of times, like the cobblestones you mentioned. Hell, take a look at Oblivion on max settings. Waxy, polished stone as far as the eye can see.
(a) people need to stop ragging on HDR lighting. If you're ragging on it, then you don't know what it is. You're probably talking about bloom, which is not HDR lighting at all. HDR lighting just means that you can have unlimited exposure levels and 32bit floating point precision on blending. Light bloom was introduced by the same guy who brought HDR lighting to the forefront and in the same presentation, so people think it is HDR even though it was just something shown alongside it.
I can't agree completely with those specific games you listed, I mean, sure there are bad examples but the principle is a sound idea. I am gonna have to call you out on that one. When it's really bright sunshine and you're outside, you cannot visually see all the detail through window into an unlit room. It just looks "black" inside. And if you're in a (relatively) dark(er) room, when you look out that window, the sunshine is a little blinding. You don't blame your eyes for not "white balancing" enough, do you, that would be silly. Also, I'm sure there's at least one TV show or movie that you personally really like that has artificially boosted the colors or lighting levels for artistic effect. Why is it not valid in other cases?
I never said it couldn't be done right or that it's a bad idea. I'm totally aware that it replicates what generally happens in real life when the eye adjusts during the transition from bright locations to dark, and vice versa. What I'm saying is that it's fucking annoying. And yeah, a bunch of my favorite movies have crazy digital effects and filters thrown on them for artistic effect, but they don't do it in the shitty way that most games with HDR do it.
If a movie or tv show has black blacks next to completely blown out whites, that means an amateur was in charge of lighting. It looks shitty and cheap, and devs need to realize that it looks just as amateurish in their games.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited March 2007
I cant believe you guys forgot lense flare. My character is not wearing a clear plastic visor, dammit.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
(a) people need to stop ragging on HDR lighting. If you're ragging on it, then you don't know what it is. You're probably talking about bloom, which is not HDR lighting at all. HDR lighting just means that you can have unlimited exposure levels and 32bit floating point precision on blending. Light bloom was introduced by the same guy who brought HDR lighting to the forefront and in the same presentation, so people think it is HDR even though it was just something shown alongside it.
I can't agree completely with those specific games you listed, I mean, sure there are bad examples but the principle is a sound idea. I am gonna have to call you out on that one. When it's really bright sunshine and you're outside, you cannot visually see all the detail through window into an unlit room. It just looks "black" inside. And if you're in a (relatively) dark(er) room, when you look out that window, the sunshine is a little blinding. You don't blame your eyes for not "white balancing" enough, do you, that would be silly. Also, I'm sure there's at least one TV show or movie that you personally really like that has artificially boosted the colors or lighting levels for artistic effect. Why is it not valid in other cases?
I never said it couldn't be done right or that it's a bad idea. I'm totally aware that it replicates what generally happens in real life when the eye adjusts during the transition from bright locations to dark, and vice versa. What I'm saying is that it's fucking annoying. And yeah, a bunch of my favorite movies have crazy digital effects and filters thrown on them for artistic effect, but they don't do it in the shitty way that most games with HDR do it.
If a movie or tv show has black blacks next to completely blown out whites, that means an amateur was in charge of lighting. It looks shitty and cheap, and devs need to realize that it looks just as amateurish in their games.
Yeah... hate to break it to you, but that's not HDR. That's automatic exposure control. Sure, it wouldn't be possible without the underlying HDR technology, but it in and of itself is not HDR.
HDR merely is the ability to have a rendering piepeline with no limitations on light value. Color values are never clamped and are represented with high-precision floating point numbers. It allows for a high degree of accuracy in lighting and blending calculations. When all the rendering is completed in HDR, the image is then mapped to some sort of low range color space.
If you don't like the way some game does that final conversion, then that's more like disliking a texture. But saying you don't like HDR is like saying you don't like texture mapping. It's an underlying technology, not some special effect.
No no no, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the use of memory cards today. I'm talking about how the N64 used memory cards even though it was very capable of having battery backup in the carts themselves. It always bugged me. It's not like they made games Memory Pak-only to save space or something. If they did, how come most of the system's best games (Ocarina of Time, Banjo series) didn't need it? It was a totally useless add-on forcing people to buy a new peripheral just to save. It was ridiculous.
It was given as an option to 3rd party devs. It cost more money to have save built in to the cart, so they could earn 10$ more per cart (the 3rd party) by keeping it to mem card saves.
The catch though, was that Nintendo didn't even write a basic memory card manager into the N64. Every game that wanted to use the memory cards had to write their own memory card manager from scratch.
FyreWulff on
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Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
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Not if it makes my copy of the game cheaper for me to buy.
Also I hate it when developers throw a mini-game at you that you've never played before and then put a timer on it and make it mandatory to complete the story. I don't mind mini-games, but for god sake don't throw it at me like a freaking IQ test in the middle of the narrative.
Woo! DVD/BD have given us the technology to include high res, beautiful full motion video in our games!
.... and you're gonna watch it, Goddammit, and enjoy it,. Every single fucking time.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Cutscenes without some form of pause. Does the MGS series allow you to pause during cutscenes?
Also, I would really like to be able to rewind and fast forward through cutscenes.
I caught so much shit from my girlfriend at the time circa MGS2.
Yeah, final battle, figured there'd be a 5 minute cutscene with a "congratulations" at the end.
I picked her up 45 minutes later. I can still feel the bruises.
Motion blur though. I like the motion blur in Shadow of the Colossus, Lost Planet, Gears of War, and Test Drive Unlimited.
Did you play MGS1?
No, the first time I played MGS1 was on the 'cube. I never saw it coming.
Truth. I can't fucking stand the LOTR action games for this reason. Fun, but... did I have to watch 15 minutes of self-glorifying movie rips, from which the coolest moment will be the meld to polygons?
Maybe I haven't played enough "next-gen" games though, but I haven't really gotten this HDR burnout. In every game I've played with HDR, it's always been a marked visual and atmospheric improvement, and that even goes for Guild Wars (which doesn't use HDR anyway). I'm not sure where this "real is brown" thing comes from either.
High-resolution textures.
Don't kill me just yet - I'm a PC gamer above all, and this applies mostly to computer games. While I love pretty, super-high-detail textures in games I hate having to set aside gigs and gigs of space just for giant uncompressed art resources. I do a lot of my gaming on a laptop, and having to uninstall a bunch of 2- or 3-year-old games just to make room for the art folder of a single new game is annoying. Plus, a sizable chunk of those ever-increasing load times is taken up by textures loading into RAM (this is where it applies to consoles and PCs alike; not everyone's system has gigs of memory on hand).
I know, I know, get a bigger HD/more RAM or play on a desktop. But here's the thing - there are games out there that can build enormous, beautiful textures out of tiny amounts of data, procedurally. I can't think of the name of it, but there's an FPS (german, iirc) that clocks in at like 1 meg but has some of the best material textures I've ever seen.
Technologically, we're at a point where HD-space is nearing functionally infinite, and a lot of devs will complain that compressing these textures or simply using smaller ones will lessen the quality of their product. It's a valid concern, but we have ways of getting around that now. I'd just like to see some effort on the part of designers to make sure their game can be played by as many people as possible, and not just those players who can afford to stay cutting-edge.
That exact same thing happened to me....
Except, at the 30 minute mark, I turned off the Goddamn PS2 and went to pick up my girlfriend.
I returned to the game later, of course, and had to re-watch the 30 minutes, and see the rest of the last 15.
Fuck I was pissed that I had to get to such a juicy bit of plot (the Climax, no less) at the worst conceivable time. And had to ruin it for myself, only to rewatch most of it later just to end up beating the game shortly thereafter.
I love the MGS games, but I make it a point only to play them at night when I have no obligations or anything else that I have to do.
Pause-able cutscenes would be a Godsend for the MGS games and everything else.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
.kkrieger
96kb
That's the fucking truth. I don't have much of a life, but when life rears its ugly head, I like to be able to pause a game to participate.
Is that the one that procedurally generates textures and such?
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
aye, pretty freaking incredible to think that it would only take up like 7/8% of a floppy disc,
Kingdom Hearts as well.
Now that I think about it, they did a good job with the HDR in Ep1. It was mostly rim-lighting, and the rest of it wasn't overdone. So yeah. Ep. 1 gets a thumbs-up from me regarding HDR.
Episode 2 isn't out yet.
So, it's probably bedtime.
So how did you get a chance to play Episode 2?
:B
No no no, don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the use of memory cards today. I'm talking about how the N64 used memory cards even though it was very capable of having battery backup in the carts themselves. It always bugged me. It's not like they made games Memory Pak-only to save space or something. If they did, how come most of the system's best games (Ocarina of Time, Banjo series) didn't need it? It was a totally useless add-on forcing people to buy a new peripheral just to save. It was ridiculous.
(b) I'm annoyed with overly shiny rock-faces. Like when people make cobblestone streets or brick walls that shine like polished plastic. It'd be solved easily with an 8-bit gloss map, but nobody ever bothers.
Absolutely agree with you. I really wish the Bard's Tale hadn't been overlooked by so many people. The game was quite fun, and you actually found yourself looking forward to cut scenes and talking to the random villagers, something that's a chore in most other games.
Perhaps this is where the difference lies. I can't speak for Bard's Tale, but I found that MGS, KH, and System Shock 2 all had pretty awful voice acting. For KH in particular it is a big reason I have never finished it - it completely ruins the delivery of the game for me.
It's gotten a lot better quantity-wise lately, but the quality is still lacking a lot of times, like the cobblestones you mentioned. Hell, take a look at Oblivion on max settings. Waxy, polished stone as far as the eye can see.
What the shit?
I know what HDR is, thanks.
I never said it couldn't be done right or that it's a bad idea. I'm totally aware that it replicates what generally happens in real life when the eye adjusts during the transition from bright locations to dark, and vice versa. What I'm saying is that it's fucking annoying. And yeah, a bunch of my favorite movies have crazy digital effects and filters thrown on them for artistic effect, but they don't do it in the shitty way that most games with HDR do it.
If a movie or tv show has black blacks next to completely blown out whites, that means an amateur was in charge of lighting. It looks shitty and cheap, and devs need to realize that it looks just as amateurish in their games.
Yeah... hate to break it to you, but that's not HDR. That's automatic exposure control. Sure, it wouldn't be possible without the underlying HDR technology, but it in and of itself is not HDR.
HDR merely is the ability to have a rendering piepeline with no limitations on light value. Color values are never clamped and are represented with high-precision floating point numbers. It allows for a high degree of accuracy in lighting and blending calculations. When all the rendering is completed in HDR, the image is then mapped to some sort of low range color space.
If you don't like the way some game does that final conversion, then that's more like disliking a texture. But saying you don't like HDR is like saying you don't like texture mapping. It's an underlying technology, not some special effect.
It was given as an option to 3rd party devs. It cost more money to have save built in to the cart, so they could earn 10$ more per cart (the 3rd party) by keeping it to mem card saves.
The catch though, was that Nintendo didn't even write a basic memory card manager into the N64. Every game that wanted to use the memory cards had to write their own memory card manager from scratch.
I thought System Shock 2's voice acting was actually quite good. The voice logs you would find would give me chills.