Games ruined by stupid crap?

[digitalwanderer]

Button mashing goes to the younger player 90% of the time. If the age gap is 10 years or more there's absolutely no chance for the geezer. We have to overcome it with wisdom and experience

With every passing year I become more grateful for cheat engine.

 

[homerdog]

With every passing year I become more grateful for cheat engine.

I was gonna say wisdom, experience, and also macros

 

[digitalwanderer]

I was gonna say wisdom, experience, and also macros

Can't believe I didn't think of macros for the button smashing. Never use them much so I didn't think of it, thanks for the tip!

 

[homerdog]

Can't believe I didn't think of macros for the button smashing. Never use them much so I didn't think of it, thanks for the tip!

Mastering macros is an elite PC gamer move. One of my characters in Diablo 3 had an ability that mega increased his defense but only if you press 3 every eight seconds. Which is ridiculous. Didn't feel bad about using a macro on that one at all.

In any kind of PvP stuff though I never use macros etc. that aren't built into the game.

 

[Nesh]

I hate it that every fighting game released is not the complete edition anymore. They are the starter pack.

 

[ZebMacahan]

QTEs. I used to just hate them for being annoying but now that I'm older and am having neuropathy issues they can be an absolute game breaker for me. Really grateful they're adding options to bypass QTEs and button smashing events to games lately. It turns them from unplayable to enjoyable for me.

Yeah, its not like mashing a button simulates the feeling of opening a giant stone door or whatever anyways.

 

[homerdog]

What about when games do that thing where the character slowly shimmies through a tight gap or under a log or something. I know sometimes it's to hide loads but sometimes it's not and that bothers me.

 

[hughJ]

Since someone mentioned QTE and shimmying, I'll take it a few steps further:

Games that reduce complex actions down to a single button push that's context-sensitive while temporarily disrupting control of the character with an uncancelable animation sequence. That includes stealth takedowns, snap-to cover mechanics, traversal animations (climbing/grappling/mantling/crawling/shimmying), QTE, Doom glory kills, L4D-style boss attacks, etc. The fact that these situations often have to resort to obnoxious onscreen prompts to explain to the player why the character is no longer responding to the same control scheme they were a second ago is an obvious red flag, imo. I'd mostly attribute this trend to console controllers being inadequate to handle the variety and complexity of verbs/actions the game design is wanting to have. What all of this tends to lead to is having the most intense, interesting, and involving moments actually have the least amount of player agency and input (ie. gameplay). You're likely to have less control over your character when climbing a precarious cliff, hiding behind a rock in a gun fight, or grappling with an enemy than you do when sifting through your inventory deciding which rat hide to sell to a vendor first.

 

[ZebMacahan]

Since someone mentioned QTE and shimmying, I'll take it a few steps further:

Games that reduce complex actions down to a single button push that's context-sensitive while temporarily disrupting control of the character with an uncancelable animation sequence. That includes stealth takedowns, snap-to cover mechanics, traversal animations (climbing/grappling/mantling/crawling/shimmying), QTE, Doom glory kills, L4D-style boss attacks, etc. The fact that these situations often have to resort to obnoxious onscreen prompts to explain to the player why the character is no longer responding to the same control scheme they were a second ago is an obvious red flag, imo. I'd mostly attribute this trend to console controllers being inadequate to handle the variety and complexity of verbs/actions the game design is wanting to have. What all of this tends to lead to is having the most intense, interesting, and involving moments actually have the least amount of player agency and input (ie. gameplay). You're likely to have less control over your character when climbing a precarious cliff, hiding behind a rock in a gun fight, or grappling with an enemy than you do when sifting through your inventory deciding which rat hide to sell to a vendor first.

I personaly dont mind glory kills in doom, I think they look cool and gives a breahter, but for someone who mainly play pc where you have more control I can understand why they are anoying. Otherwise I generally agree, at least when stealth kills, puting down an enemy corps, looting etc take too much time so you´re spotted or take damage. In doom glory kills seem to pause the game as far as I can tell.

"..which rat hide to sell to a vendor first" Yup, 50% of the playtime of most games nowadays.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I'd mostly attribute this trend to console controllers being inadequate to handle the variety and complexity of verbs/actions the game design is wanting to have.

1) Controllers can readily have 40 discrete binary inputs (combination shift and face buttons)
2) KB would require you memorise rarely-used actions scattered over the keyboard, and to navigate to them in a timely fashion
3) It's a huge ask to have devs write a versatile interface and animation system and to expect most gamers to be able to control that

Can you point to any examples where it's done right and the complex interactions you want are expressed on KBM?

 

[Davros]

Can you point to any examples where it's done right and the complex interactions you want are expressed on KBM?

Dcs world you cant map this game to a gamepad there is just too many controls

1) Controllers can readily have 40 discrete binary inputs (combination shift and face buttons) - as opposed to the several hundred on KBM (ps: if they are a combination they cant by definition be discrete inputs can they )
2) KB would require you memorise rarely-used actions scattered over the keyboard, and to navigate to them in a timely fashion - why is left trigger and A button superior to CTRL-A ?
3) It's a huge ask to have devs write a versatile interface and animation system and to expect most gamers to be able to control that - Nonsense

 

[Shifty Geezer]

What's Dcs world? Is that an example of a game with QTE type combat without QTE type input?

 

[Cyan]

Games that could be played local co-op but only have online co-op. It's not the same to play online co-op with strangers than with friends/family. Even with real life friends online, playing online requires you to wait when they go to dinner, or you receive a call, etc. A very different experience

 

[Davros]

What's Dcs world?

It's a flight simulator

 

[homerdog]

I dont so mind checkpoints as long as the game creates checkpoints at regular intervals even better if the game also allows manual saves
the game Singularity (great underrated game imho) only allows a single checkpoint and no manual saves so if you wish to replay a level your only options is to replay the entire game again
one thing I did is at the start of every level is alt tab out copy the checkpoint file and copy it in a numbered folder along with a description that way I can reply any level I want by just replacing the checkpoint file with
the one I want
eg:
View attachment 12276

You can use the Windows task scheduler to take VSS snapshots. Both of my drives get shadowcopied once a day. Maybe you could use that to make shadowcopies of a specific folder like every 30 minutes. This would be useful in a game like Dragon's Dogma 2 which has no mechanism for multiple save files and intentionally saves the game when you fuck up major things.

 

[Davros]

Thats an idea, I would have to research it because I have no idea how shadow copies work. Although I wouldnt be any good for Singularity as I'm trying to create a checkpoint for the start of every level and I cant guess how long completing a level will take. level

 

[homerdog]

Thats an idea, I would have to research it because I have no idea how shadow copies work. Although I wouldnt be any good for Singularity as I'm trying to create a checkpoint for the start of every level and I cant guess how long completing a level will take. level

It's dead simple to use in Windows Server. You do it in the disk manager. In Windows 11 it's clunky and you have to use the task scheduler but it does work. But I don't know if you can tell it to only take snapshots of specific folders.

 

[Davros]

Not sure I want to create a copy of an entire drive every time I want to backup a 2kb file

 

[homerdog]

Not sure I want to create a copy of an entire drive every time I want to backup a 2kb file

Yea I guess it only works on a partition level. Since it only stores differences the size of the copies is tiny unless you change a bunch of stuff. I set the VSS cache to 1% on each of my drives, so only 10GB on the 1TB and 20GB on the 2TB.

 

[Boss]

Dcs world you cant map this game to a gamepad there is just too many controls

1) Controllers can readily have 40 discrete binary inputs (combination shift and face buttons) - as opposed to the several hundred on KBM (ps: if they are a combination they cant by definition be discrete inputs can they )
2) KB would require you memorise rarely-used actions scattered over the keyboard, and to navigate to them in a timely fashion - why is left trigger and A button superior to CTRL-A ?

I'm just going to come out and say it. Keyboard and mouse is garbage for playing games barring rts, fps, point and click adventure games. You used Dcs as an example and I don't play that but play flight simulator. It's significantly better to buy flight control panels, throttle quadrants, rudder pedals, flight yokes/sticks to play the game than to use a keyboard and mouse. It's also much easier to memorize the controls. Using a KB mouse combo for flight sim is also inferior to flying on a controller. Using the kb+mouse to control bank angle, pitch, and yaw is terrible. Horrible actually. As someone who has been playing flight sims since 98, I can attest from experience that it's terrible.

Personally, I don't know where this keyboard and mouse elitism stems from as its a pretty terrible way to play games barring fps, point and click, and rts. In fact, a strong argument can be made that point and click is better or touch enabled devices. Here are just some genres that are superior on controller: racing games, sports games, arcade flight games, third person shooters, platformers, open world games, etc. When I game on PC, I use a a controller for everything except rts and fps and sometimes, I even use a controller for fps games.

Finally most peopled do not want to memorize hundreds of button combos to play a game. 40 is already pushing it. When you have that many, it's no longer a game, it's a simulator and those make up a small minority of the market.