Examples Of Baffling Game Design?

[arvfab]

I don't know if these count as game design, or more on the technical design side:

- online-only in single player games
- unskippable cut-scenes
- no possibility to pause cut-scenes

No possibility to easily pause the game in most Souls games. I usually play the games offline, yet if the door rings it's either "You Died" or I have to pick up my package from a neighbor/post office.

Limited save items in some games. In the Resident Evil games, which are pretty short and linear and the ink to save is not scarce, it's not much of a problem. But I actually skipped playing Omikron: The Nomad's Soul back then because of this. And while in RE the quantity is not a problem, the fact it occupies an item slot is it.

Talking about RE:
The merchant in RE4 and RE8 shouldn't exist. In a survival-horror game it takes away the survival AND the horror.
I feel the same with MGS4, although there it was somehow justified by the setting and it's also another genre.

The open-world in Elden Ring. I feel it made the game unnecessarily bloated and it made the genre lose it's soul (no pun intended). Same as BotW.

Deathloop. Promising premise having to "loop" to discover a way out. Too bad the actual game is very linear in what has to be done.

Fallout, all of it, all of them.

 

[anonpuffs]

I'll put Genshin up there for something baffling, although this is less game design and more UI/UX design.
There is no standard to what button does what in different menus. Sometimes you need the left stick to scroll text, sometimes it's the right stick. Sometimes you need to use the direction pad to tab into menus, sometimes the thumbsticks, sometimes it's L3/R3, sometimes it's the shoulder buttons or triggers. It's maddening, and it's because each new system has its own dev team because of how their dev process is set up and there is no consistency.

 

[Zzero]

They can keep explaining.

It’s a shit design choice which adds nothing to a game.

Did you ask most people? Ask them if they would have preferred BOTW with or without it.

One of the three or four highest rated games of all time? Yes, I did talk to a lot of people about it. And yes, most people did like the weapon degragation and use a large variety of weapons because of it, like the developers intended.

 

[Vertigo]

Zelda’s weapon durability is a garbage attempt at a loot system.

(Should’ve just ripped off Nioh)

Fuse wasn’t a remedy. It’s just the ability to craft and combine perks to reroll drops into a new weapon. Still shit. It’s half assed.

I’m okay with it tho. It justifies caring about drops at all in the game. I just would’ve preferred an armor system similar to Elden Ring and a weapon system similar to Nioh’s. It needs something to keep that gameplay loop intact. Then again I think Elden Ring is the better Zelda game anyway.

At the end the day what’s most disappointing about new Zelda is that there’s no real dungeons and the shrines do not fill that void. In fact… they’re kinda lame… makes the game feel more like super monkey ball than Zelda to me most of the time…