WHAT IS THE BIGGEST DESIGN FLAW IN GAMES?

Just as we were speaking of design flaws part three of a wonderful series turned up on RPS.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/do-dont/
One is even relevant to another topic in this very forum (the unbeatable battle one)
"DON'T: give me a fight I can't win. I've faced the boss for fifteen minutes, I've painstakingly shot out its legs, arms, wings and eight of its eyes, and now I'm going for the final blast! His stupid, stupid face. BLAMMO! Cutscene! The monster is alive and disappearing down a hole… waitwhat? No! Absolutely and emphatically no. All of the no in a big pile all at once. If you're going to make me go through some tedious extended fight, let me bloody well win it. If your story relies on this baddy mysteriously surviving having his energy bar completely emptied, his body hideously destroyed, then perhaps your story is a big stinking piece of old underwear."

As is obvious and I'm sure has been stated by now, there is no single objective "biggest game design flaw", a fact I think is worth reiterating.

"DON'T: give me a fight I can't win. I've faced the boss for fifteen minutes, I've painstakingly shot out its legs, arms, wings and eight of its eyes, and now I'm going for the final blast! His stupid, stupid face. BLAMMO! Cutscene! The monster is alive and disappearing down a hole… waitwhat? No! Absolutely and emphatically no. All of the no in a big pile all at once. If you're going to make me go through some tedious extended fight, let me bloody well win it. If your story relies on this baddy mysteriously surviving having his energy bar completely emptied, his body hideously destroyed, then perhaps your story is a big stinking piece of old underwear.

This. Dead Rising (especially the original) is such an egregious example of this. I have a problem with games where humanoid characters can be shot in the face ONCE and live, but in Dead Rising you have to shoot the first boss in the face dozens of times and somehow after all of that he STILL survives. The second time you fight him, this happens again. WTF.

author=prexus
Fights like that can work amazingly in a fantasy RPG though.

This is pretty much the exact opposite of the above scenario. The problem with what is described is the complete lack of satisfaction on the part of the player. At least in your version, you've made it feel more like a challenge than like running into a brick wall. A+ work

I like games that start out easy, quickly get harder, and then suddenly get insanely hard. Having tiered difficulty levels is a sign of poor game design if you can't do a difficulty curve right. However, since most of us are making hobby games, we can be as insanely hard as we want without marketing or managers whining about hitting a wider market.

But then you get insane games like TouHou, but as long as it's fun it is alright.


@Sail
I love oldschool and retro games that bring back the difficulty, the look, the good feel and the sound. But what I like about neo retro the most is that they leave behind all the clunky menus, slow text, confusing gameplay, and everything that was wrong with classical gaming.

So I agree with you except that I haven't played a neo retro game like that yet. There's no reason why I should ever have to play a game where my attacks do nothing because an enemy used to be there or having a menu that's slow and hard to navigate.

author=Sailerius
Using "retro" or "oldschool" as an excuse for terrible gameplay mechanics and awful story.

Totally agree with this one.

Also, Making tons of touch encounters on a narrow map with escape resulting in immediately re-fighting them.

Completely forgot about that game. But when a, and I quote,

"Normal setting being significantly more difficult than even the Japanese version's Hard setting"

type of situation happens, then you have a problem.

And I have played this game (Streets of Rage 3), and it is brutal even on the EASY setting, let alone its NORMAL setting. Streets of Rage 2 wasn't this hard!

why even have an easy mode if you won't let the player beat the game on it?

the point of easy mode is to make sure that even the babbys and casuals will still see all of the game you spent so much time on (and if you're commercial will not complain about wasting thier money on a game they couldn't beat)

author=Fallen-Griever

why even have an easy mode if you won't let the player beat the game on it?

To help the player get good enough to beat the normal mode..?

So the player must go through the game on the easy setting, not be able to finish, then go back and play through another difficulty setting just to beat it?
That's retarded.

More games need a room at the end of the giant confusing final dungeon (only accessible via another dungeon and traveling in a monster littered area of the world filled with poison swamps, random damaging earthquakes, and having to traverse damaging ocean) where you are outnumbered three to one with some of the most dangerous enemies in the game divided by a forcefield where your side of the room gets filled with lava after one turn