Video Games

[DrFaroohk]

So all the posts are about racism and anxiety and depression and mean people and rape and stuff...so on the lighter side, anyone got any pet peeves regarding video games they wanna share? I'm thinking mostly RPG's and the like, but I suppose anything goes. Here's a few of mine:

Magic: Mana, magic points, whatever you call it - screw that. They need to get rid of that. I played one game where your magic just came out of your stamina first, and then your life. I liked that better. When's the last time you saw Gandalf have to drink a mana potion?

Freedom: Oh, I can't go into the Mystic Valley because I'm not level 20. Why? Is there a door? No. Is there a gate? No. Not even a little fence. Maybe it's not a good idea for me to go into the Mystic Valley before I'm level 20, but that's my choice. Let me in!

Classes: Oh gee whiz, Dwarves CAN'T be wizards. NO! There's no such thing as a dward wizard. EVER! Getting hung up on realism now? There's no such thing as dwarves period you dumbass! Get over it. Surely there was ONE dwarf wizard in the history of the world? Well, maybe I'm him.

Leveling: I hate the whole "Get 50,000 experience points and then level up." I've played some games that were just gradual. You might have a skill level of 50 in throwing rocks, and every time you throw 5 rocks or so it goes up by 1.

Armor: Why the hell can't wizards wear armor? "Cuz it isn't fair!" Life isn't fair. "Cuz they can't do the complex little motions while wearing armor". Ok, you're wearing a fucking metal shirt, it's not a full body suit. And I've never seen any "complex little motions and gestures". I see a guy point at something and lightning comes out of his fingers. Are his hands bound by duct tape while he wears this armor?

Nerfing: Again with the "It's not fair!" So what if Wizards can kick the shit out of Soldiers? That's life. Leave it alone! "But everyone will be the strongest class!" No, they won't. Sure, a lot of people will, but some people actually enjoy ROLE PLAYING the game, not just being the best character so they can get the best drops.

Numbers: This one bugged me a lot in diablo, but I'm sure it happens in other games. A 50% chance to hit should mean I hit with every other swing. Not 1 hit, then 15 misses, then another hit. And if my sword does 10 damage, and I get a special upgrade that increases my damage by 5, it should do 15 damage, not 12, or 11.

Pre-Empting Quests: I HATE THIS ONE. It shouldn't matter whether or not I talked to Grand Wizard Altrus at his Magical Tower of Mystery. The magic rock he wants should be in the very place he says it was whether or not I talked to him. If, in the course of my adventures, I stumble across that location and get the magic rock, regardless of that fact that I've never met him, I should be able to pick up the damn rock, and when I bump into him and he says "Hey, can you go find my magic rock?" and I can say "Actually, I found it yesterday. Here it is." I just started playing this game where not only can you not preempt a quest, but the previous quest you get will actually require you to do the very thing you need to do in the next quest, but it doesn't count.

Yeah, I'm talking about World of Warcraft, and its fucking annoying. "Go get my magic rock. It's being guarded by the Great Fenris Wolf." Then you get there, slay the wolf, take the rock, go back to him, and then he's like "Now I must ask you another favor...go kill the Great Fenris Wolf!"

General Difficulty: Difficult, challenging games are fun! Inconvenient, pain in the ass games are not fun. There's a world of difference.

[Flyndaran]

Ever hear of Gurps?
It avoids all those setting specific nonsense and tries to be universal.
Magic is the least universal, but even there there are lots of rules to adjust as you like. The basic assumption is that magic comes off your fatigue a stamina in other words. Yes, the basic assumption is that wizards can use any armor they want and can carry. Otherwise you get your magery at a discount in this wonderful points based system. Sadly, there is no video game version.

As to video games, I just recently got banned from my WOW account through no fault of my own. I was hacked and had just gotten it back within a couple of days. But apparently, the hacker misused my account, and the ban just took a bit to get back to me.
Now I have to wait on their glacially slow help.

[powerboy]

I am currently play Smackdown vs Raw 2010. I am playing the Road To WrestleMania challenge as Shawn Michaels. One of the things that I must do is to jump off the cage onto Kane. Now that is one thing that I must do to pass the round so to speak. But every time I go to climb the cage, Kane will jump to his feed and bring me off the cage.

I hate, when I have to do something to just to get to the next match or round. It really takes the fun out it for me.

[Fryk]

I'm with you on all those, Doc. Your post should be a manifesto.

I would like to add ENDLESS GODDAMN FETCH QUESTS to the list. Seriously, can EVERY problem in an RPG universe be solved by killing x amount of y animal, so you can bring someone back materials from them. And what the hell are animals doing with these materials and weapons, anyway. How are they carrying them? THEY DON'T HAVE OPPOSABLE THUMBS!!!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go kill some wolves, so I can bring back 30 pieces of cereal and some coffee. Gonna be a long morning.

[DrFaroohk]

Yeah the fetching quests get old. They're running out of ways to be creative with it. "Kill 10 boars and bring me back their tusks so we can fashion spears out of them. Kill 10 goblins patrolling around the bridge so we can get to the other side of the river. Kill 10 wolves and drain their blood so we can make potions out of it....."

Anyone ever played Mount & Blade? That game had like 5 quests that just rotated. Take a letter from Lord A to Lord B. Collect a debt from Lord B and give it to Lord A. Go hunt down a criminal for Lord C. Collect taxes for Lord D...take a letter from Lord B to Lord A.................."

And they have money too! What do they need money for? Where did they get it? Most of them are just wandering around in the same little circle.

One more I forgot to add: If I fight an evil baron who has a +5 Longsword, I should get to keep his fucking longsword when I kill him. It's right there on the ground. It's not broken. It's probably not even dull. It's probably magical and never gets dull. Let me take the damn thing!

Some day I'm going to save up a hundred thousand dollars, go to school and learn to be a computer programmer and make this game myself.

[Rapscallion]

The bit that bugs me is where you defeat the end boss, and he has a far more powerful weapon in a chest for you to loot. Why's the boss not using it?

Fedex quests (take this here) are fairly boring, but they get you around the place. The ones I loathe are the 'protect' missions, as the person to protect is usually willing to walk into the gaping maws of chewingness.

Rapscallion

[DrFaroohk]

Guild Wars had quests like that. The guy I'd be escorting would just randomly stop, and I wouldn't notice until he was like five hundred feet back. Then the Charr would close in on him...

Or how about when some guy gives you a quest, and he says "Go North of here and do this..." When what he really means is go fifty miles east, then go five feet to the North.

[Cat]

Why the hell is there a train in the new Zelda?????????

[protege]

Oh...the things I could say about KOTOR...

Some things in that game just piss me off. Mainly, because certain characters just *love* setting off mines. Seems that Carth and Bastila think nothing of running through various mines, setting *you* up to take damage, as they attempt to attack various enemies

[MaggieTheCat]

Did anyone here ever play Final Fantasy 11? If WoW bugs you, FF11 would probably make you want to jump off a cliff. I still loved it. But it did make me want to jump off a cliff sometimes.

[DesignFox]

I hate Phantom Hourglass where you have to keep going back through that goddamn maze. I got all the way to the end, to the last boss, and I forget what I did, but with the stupid timer and continue points...I lost progress. I just said fuck it. I did everything else in the game. XD I do not want to do the same puzzle and same dungeon 500,000,000 times. Thank you very much.

What drives me nuts in Diablo is when the monsters start getting immune to attacks. How the hell is my Druid, who is not designed as a melee character, supposed to kill something that is immune to both fire and cold, when his only elemental spells are fire and cold??? What about my friend the sorceress who can only use elemental spells, and all the enemies are immune to every single element? When you play nightmare and hell mode it is a requirement to play multiplayer...there really isn't any way around it. Other than that, I loooooove Diablo II!

[lordlundar]

Did anyone here ever play Final Fantasy 11? If WoW bugs you, FF11 would probably make you want to jump off a cliff. I still loved it. But it did make me want to jump off a cliff sometimes.

Ohhh, now you've done it. You got me started on FFXI. If I were you, I'd run.

Oh joy, FFXI, the inevitable clusterfuck of bad ideas combined. (For the track record, I played and left when it was released on the PS2 with the HDD, so LOONG before they came out with any of the friendly changes)

Let's start off with the character creation. Farook, you talk about class problems? this game has it in spades. Want to play a mithra black mage? Good luck finding a team, because only the tau make good spellcasters, anyone else starts off in varying degrees of bad and the margin gets steadily wider.

Server selection. Originally, it was randomized, though you could get to play on the same server with your friends if you got a friend code. The catch? You had to buy one from a vendor in the game for a fairly steep price. As well, it only granted access to said server, not a character transfer, so if you developed your character at all, well, tough shit. Yes I know they changed it, but they still did not implement character transfers so you were still screwed unless you were a new player.

The Linkshell - Whee! we can form a clan! but every member has to have a particular item in their inventory. But what if your inventory is maxed out with stuff you need? It is the ONLY MMO I know of that REQUIRES a sacrifice of an item slot (always a valued commodity) to be a member of a clan/guild/group.

The level scale - Level 1-5 Whee! I can kick the ass of any monster I see! Level 6-10 Okay I have to be careful now, but I can still fight relatively equal stuff. Level 11-20 I need a group to fight this stuff, but if I'm careful, I can navigate around it. 21+ What the hell! I need a full party just to SURVIVE?!

Combat. Ahh yes, the game where an equal level trash mob can wipe out a full party with a single attack! And you have to fight 6 impossible ranked enemies within 10 seconds of each other to get anywhere NEAR decent EXP. Hope you have a really awesome team in an area where the enemies are relatively easy and frequent or you're screwed. Then there's the combo system, where to have the power attacks, you need perfect timing to pull off properly. Have a bit of lag? whoops! missed your power attack, and you're dead in the next attack. And I at the time had a connection that would randomly cut out for shits and giggles. Worst part about it is that these attacks are mandatory for fighting trash mobs no less.

Experience points. Oh good lord. They took stupid to a whole new level with this one. Admittadly, the 10% loss on death wasn't new, but here's the thing. A player in other games could solo and get the experience back. It would take a while and was a lot faster with groups, but provided you played it safe, you could get it back with little fuss. Now with FFXI, to get the cap of XP gain (2000XP/kill) you need to defeat a minimum of 6 top difficulty enemies within 10 seconds of each other, and had to keep this going. One slip up, and you start from scratch. Now remember how I said that a trash mob can cause a wipe with a single unavoidable attack? Guess what? Wipe happened and you just lost 50,000 XP. There went your entire day's progress. Oh? you just leveled up and got a new attack which you need? Sorry, gone now. Gotta spend another 1-2 days getting it back. Died and your party beat the enemy? yeah, you get jack shit, and have to navigate the minefield of enemies just to get back to your party, because they aren't stopping for you. And you get to start back from the XP scale again.

Travel. Early level on foot, and enemies have different tracking systems. (I actually like that system but I was able to use it to my advantage) Unless you knew EXACTLY what you were fighting (or more often avoiding) you were pretty much screwed. Then comes level 20. YAY! Chocobo! I just need to do this quest to be able to ride them. SWEET! <minimum 7 hours later> (Yes, real world time, and no, I am not exaggerating in the slightest) Yay! I FINALLY finished the quest and I got a License. Wait, license? where's my Chocobo? I have to RENT them? The license only permits me to RENT one? Well how long to I get to keep it for? A one way trip. Great. How much? What do you mean you don't know? It depends on how many people rented it before? How about I kill you and take over your business, as it seems to be a pretty profitable business? Then comes the airship. I can ride an airship! awesome! Wait, what's the ticket price? WHAT THE HELL?! That much for a pass? Or I can go fight a pack of monsters in a heavily farmed area for the off chance of getting one of 3 keys to do it after I have completed a LONG group of quest consisting of no less than ten boss enemies. I'll go by boat! I assume there's no price on that? Good. But I'll get attacked by a dangerous enemy that is known for wiping anyone out unless they stay below deck. Of course. So much for safe travel.

The Economy. Gee! here's an Idea! Let's make an economy that is 90% player controlled! We can trust players not to fuck it up, right? <2 months later> Good Lord, the economy is crap! The farmers and bots have total control of it and people are leaving because they can't progress because they can't get any necessary equipment because of them! what do we do? I know, let's ban a small portion of the farmers as a message. Whoop! that failed. Now regular players are resorting to bots just to compete. Do we use our proprietary code to lock down the game to stop the bots? Naw! we'll just ban more of them in a few months time.

PvP. Does it even exist? Oh yeah, it's a stupid sporting event that you need to do a quest to obtain a license to play (what is with this game and licenses anyway) and then you get to PAY an obscene amount for the privilege of being declared a waste of space. JOY!

Equipment. OH MY GOD! That item has a plus 1 on it! I's OOOBER!!! Yeah, it only means you're doing an additional point of damage, but when you're only doing 15-20 on a trash enemy that has 5000 HP, you need that +1 or you're useless.

Balance. BUAHAHAHAHAHAH! Yeah, this just plain does not exist. Any gaps that are minor at low level just get worse as time goes on and is insane at the level cap (I think it's 100 at this stage) There is no such thing as balance, let alone any effort to fix it.

Other players. Oh my god! you're playing a non-optimized race/class combo without the best gear that costs several million currency at level 5 just to obtain? And you don't have any stat boosting items that just to buy one costs a weeks worth of currency earning? And you don't know that facing a particular direction on a particular day gives you a bonus +1 to a particular attack? Get lost! you're useless!

I would just like to say at no point am I lying or exaggerating in what I have said. I have encountered every single thing here and all of it grated on me. The final blow was them saying that the credit card used was invalid (which it wasn't) but they never bothered to inform me until after they billed me for a month and blocked the account when the time expired. One year later they contacted me asking me to come back, saying that they will restore my character (which they claim is irrecoverable after 90 days of account inactivity) and that they made some changes to the game. If my response to remove me from the mailing list went to a live person, the reply I would have sent would never have got past the censor filter. In fact, it would probably have overloaded the filter, causing it to bug out.

See? I told you getting me started on it was a bad idea.

[Cat]

I hate Phantom Hourglass where you have to keep going back through that goddamn maze. I got all the way to the end, to the last boss, and I forget what I did, but with the stupid timer and continue points...I lost progress. I just said fuck it. I did everything else in the game. XD I do not want to do the same puzzle and same dungeon 500,000,000 times. Thank you very much.

YES!!!!!! It remains the only Zelda game I will not replay. And Majora's Mask...the water dungeon.....I got so frustrated at it I threw thegame in my closest and did not touch a single game for a year. ( I've since beaten it)

Sorry.....I'm a Zelda freak, so most of my rants are about that series

[Greenday]

Oh...the things I could say about KOTOR...

Some things in that game just piss me off. Mainly, because certain characters just *love* setting off mines. Seems that Carth and Bastila think nothing of running through various mines, setting *you* up to take damage, as they attempt to attack various enemies

Ah, I hate that crap. It's like, hm, I'll press the button to ignore them so I can take the mines. BOOM! Damnit...

[MaggieTheCat]

For what it's worth, FF11 did at least have unique quests. You wouldn't be complaining about fetch quests or any of the other boring quests with that game.

And not everyone required you to be a taru if you were a black mage, or a galka if you were a warrior, etc. I played a pretty off-center race/class combo (elvaan white mage) and I remember very few instances if people turning me away because I wasn't a taru. But I have heard of it happening.

Bottom line, the game was HARD. It was not like WoW where you can go and solo 10 mobs in 5 minutes while watching TV and talking to your SO on the phone. It required you to think and not act like a jerk to the people you were playing with, because you needed to act like a team to survive (not saying anyone here is a jerk while playing MMOs, but there are jerks out there, we've all encountered them.) It generally weeded out some of the idiots before you hit level 20 (although, of course, there were still idiots even at the level cap.) I really enjoyed it, even with all its flaws. I'm looking forward to 14, hopefully it will be more balanced than 11 was.