*Game Designers*, please explain this?

[Kzin]

I´m playing the last mission in GTAIV and no matter how hard I try I can´t imagine some of the design decisions in this game.

Almost everything about this game is amazing: the world, the grafics, cutscenes, the radio and tvshows, the incredible attention to details etc. I have spent more than 30 hours playing this game wich is probably more then I´ve spent on any other game this generation-

But the controls and camera are simply awful. When playing I am constantly struggling to get around the camera and controls, 100% of the time. I seriously cant think of any other game which have worse control and camera. Thats so strange considering everything else in the game is amazing.

And there´s the lack of checkpoints. I just played the last mission for the second time.

Spoiler

First there´s a real long car chase (in which you have to use a big car wich is very unresponsive), and this is just to get to the mission. When you arive there are drawn out firefights (in which I got hit alot because of the awful controls and camera. After all this a guy youre chasing jumps into a boat and drives away, and you´re supposed to chase him down the coastline on a motorcycle. The first time I played it I had just started the motorcycle before i got a message "he got away - mission over". So the second time i ran as fast as I could, I knew beforehand what I was supposed to do, but I had just started the motorcycle and then the same thing again. "He got away - mission over".

So having played for quite some time, then faling on a thing like that, I cant image ANYONE thinking it will be FUN to play all that again just to figure out how to deal with that last part.

They´ve added mid mission checkpoints in lost of the damned, but i cant understand why they didnt have it from the beginning.

They added the restart sms, but that doesnt help anything. You probably want to get a new body armour before the mission and you dont realy want to lose the ammo you´ve spent on your first try. And most of the time you still have to drive quite a bit to get to the actual mission.

I loved dead space. Amazing. Great everything, loved the controls. And they had done alot of things to avoid frustration, good amount of checkpoints.

Thats why the last boss feels so out of place.

Spoiler

Why would anyone think its a good idea to have 1 minute long unskipable cutscene before the bossfight, and a 1 minute long death animation when you fail. And you have to watch both of these everytime you try again.

How come decisions like these get made? I cant be the only one who find these things extremly frustrating, can I?

 

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

How come decisions like these get made? I cant be the only one who find these things extremly frustrating, can I?

It's how lazy devs make six hours of content into twenty hours of playtime. It doesn't help them in the long run, because it means that players don't see the work they put into the game if the player bails early, and they are less likely to buy another games from the devs or in the series, or with checkpoints in the future.

 

[obonicus]

Well, Rockstar (at least Rockstar North) seems to be very set in their ways. I've mentioned this before, but Houser spoke as a point of pride, during one of the many fluff interviews before GTA4 released, that he doesn't look at other games, instead drawing his inspiration from films.

I attribute that explain why they don't, say, allow you just to have dual-stick controls, like Mercenaries or Saint's Row, forcing you to half-press the trigger to be able to freely aim (or are reluctant to show you a reticle at all, really). Or why they still essentially ignore analog controls, and force you to mash a button to run. It worked in the past, people loved their games, no reason to change.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Do films have jaggies in 'em? :|

 

[vanquish]

One thing I dislike about GTA4 (although it controls much, much better than previous GTAs)
Is the looking/movement controls, in that your movement is mapped to the left stick and looking to the right. This is unlike other TPS (and FPS) like Gears/Uncharted where the left stick has the strafing controls and the right stick has the looking and 'steering' controls.

This means I always try and use both sticks while playing GTA4, resulting in the camera constantly shifting as it keeps trying to return to its default position when I look around, very disorienting. The driving controls are the same as well.

And I swear that there are instances when I'm shooting out of cover, where my gun doesn't fire when I pulled the trigger.

 

[kyetech]

Do films have jaggies in 'em? :|

No, but they dont have very good AS filtering on the textures n