Adventure gamer's nightmare

[Lazy Z]

The standard stuff for me... Mazes, timed puzzles, untimely deaths, too much pixel hunting. Oh, and lame main characters, the "born loser" main character especially, it's more than overdone.

[ElectricMonk]

Oh, and lame main characters, the "born loser" main character especially, it's more than overdone.

I still prefer him to the faceless bland "main character" character who has no other traits than being the protagonist and who I therefore can't identify with. Seen that one far too many times, especially in amateur games, sadly.
(You know the type: short brown hair, one colour sweater, one colour trousers, often pops up in the Critic's Lounge threads)

[Ryukage]

--I hate puzzles which you can't solve if you happen to lack some innate talent.  The piano puzzle in Myst, for example: the solution is obvious (like most of Myst's puzzles), but utterly impossible to perform if you happen to be tone-deaf, like I am.

--I hate mazes, but for a different reason than everyone else: mazes are too easy in graphical games, and are consequently boring and pointless.  Mazes in text adventures are another matter, those are actually a challenge.

--Action sequences.  It's not a fricking arcade game, dammit!  If I wanted to do finger aerobics, I'd play Street Fighter 2!

--Total disregard for logic.  I don't require real-world logic, but any story, interactive or otherwise, must be consistently logical within the terms of the world presented therein.  This is more than just puzzle-logic; it means stroy and characterization logic as well.  My favorite fantasy worlds are those that do not conform to real-world logic, but have their own carefully planned laws of nature to which they consistently conform.  The fantasy worlds I most hate are those that pretend to conform to real-world logic, but are totally inconsistent even to their own rules.

--The objective reality of the story changing inexplicably as a result of player action or inaction.  Someone recently mentioned this in another thread, as a common problem with Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories: if you ignore the sound behind you, it turns out to be a fearsome tiger that eats you; while if you turn to investigate, it turns out to be a harmless bunny rabbit.  This is corollary to the logic issue above.  Note that I do consider it OK for reality to change if molding the plot is part of the game and all variations are clearly observable as results of player decisions and thus somewhat predictable, it's just not OK for things to change totally at random for no observable reason.

--Interaction modes reduced to the point where the game basically plays itself if you just keep clicking whenever the cursor lights up.

[DragonRose]

I can't stand it when you need to wait for something to randomly appear.  The whale in KQ4 is the one that I dispise the most.  I spent weeks- literally WEEKS- swimming back and forth across the ocean in that game, and I only saw the Whale ONCE! And then I was so excited I mashed all the arrow keys and crashed the game. Eeeeeevil.

[Dart]

And here goes the list:

- Timed puzzles
- Pixel hunting
- Lame jokes that the creator throws in
- Bugs that won't let you complete the game (especially if you're almost at the end of it)
- Items that cannot be retrieved after a certain event happens, and therefore making the completion of the game impossible
- Backgrounds which do not accurately show where the room's exits are
- Bad grammar
- Inappropriate language used repeatedly; I don't mind a cuss word here and there, but after a while it gets quite annoying.
- Games that focus more on the puzzles than the story
- Plots which are too complicated
- Lack of music... Meh, I don't know. I'm just one of those people that need some sort of background noise to heighten the mood of the game.

I think I'm done ranting for now...

[rtf]

MEH TURN!

-I hate it wen the puzzlez are 2 FRIKIN hARD!!!1!1!!
Like on SLIME QUEST!!!  WTF OMG!!  I got NO sleep @ all for like  2 WEKS!

-I HATE BACKGROUND MUSIC!!!!  AAAAAhhh!!!  EVerything sucks about backround music.  I"M TRYING TO PLAY A GAME HERE PEOPLE!!!1!!!!  This isn't a concert, it a game!  The worst music EVER was on Plurgburg-The Dark ages!  WAAAAYY TOOO SCARRY!!!
That brings me to my next one:

-Wen the name is too long and too hard to spell!!
 Examples::::::
        Plurgberg
       Aprentise
      Relity on the NORM!  What the hell is a NORM>?
    Perment DAYLIGHT!!  What?  Why not just call it "Forever sun!" or something better than that?


But the worst thing in the world is when the developer puts in UNHANDLES EVENTS!!!
 
  If I wanted a ton of help I would read a walkthrough!!  OMGOMGOMG!!


</sarcasm>

[Gregjazz]

Woah, you had me going there dude. I was getting major offended.

I noticed your use of language (WFT, OMG, !!!1!1!!, etc) was just a bit abnormal, too.

[Drugster (Yufster)]

Timed Puzzles
Full Throttle made use of these, but they weren't annoying. The ones that annoy me are the ones where you have to jump at precisely the right moment, and then run at precisely the right moment, and then do some other bunch of stuff  at exactly the right moment, and if you screw up once you go right back to the start. Timed Puzzles can heighten the player experience; they can also majorly piss you off.

Pixel Hunting Puzzles
No excuses for this one.

Dropping you into the gameplay without any sort of introduction
In Full Throttle you're given an excellent intro sequence to introduce you to the characters and the world. Or in Grim, you could ask Eva questions about the world that Manny lives in. Same in MI2 or DOTT or The Dig; you're given the story and you get a feeling of the atmosphere. It sets you up for the rest of the game.

However, QfG4 dropped the player right in there, right at the start. No introduction or anything. You wake up, you don't know anything about your character and you don't care. You don't know what's going on. Bah.

Doing things just to make the game longer
Like non-skip speech.

Huge, massive gameplay worlds
Where you can wander around aimlessly and have no idea what the hell you're supposed to do. You have no idea even where to start. Worse is when you have to walk through 50 screens to get from one end of the town to another.

One song, looped, endlessly
When a huge massive gameplay world is orchestrated with the same, long, usually celtic-style song.

[AGA]

However, QfG4 dropped the player right in there, right at the start. No introduction or anything. You wake up, you don't know anything about your character and you don't care. You don't know what's going on. Bah.

Rubbish. If you played Quest for Glory III, you'd know perfectly well why the Hero appeared in that cave. And as for not caring about your character, QfG was designed to be played through with the same character, so by that point (assuming you played the previous 3 games), you do.

[TerranRich]

Arcade sequences.

If they are required to finish a game, then I get extremely pissed off. They made Ms. Astro Chicken optional in SQ4, as kind of an added on bonus. At the moment I can't think of any games where they are required, but I remember at least one occasion where I was required to complete an arcade game. They have no place in adventure games and should die.

[InCreator]

- Lame jokes that the creator throws in

What?! Die, Dart! Or go have a First-Person Shooter. Adventure games are not for you. Sorry.

I can't stand it when you need to wait for something to randomly appear.

Indeed! I waited for WEEKS in Sierra's oldie "Gold Rush!". The letter from brother just DIDN'T appear!

Oh yes, and stupid dilemma that appears in 4 games out of 5. I decided to illustrate this:


Non-violent solutions? My ass.

[rtf]

Really this time:

I hate when there are timed puzzles, dying, and math-maze things, but there is but one thing that I hate:

  When there isn't a status line that tells the player what he is looking at.

You literally have to stay up late guessing what you are using a certain unnamed inventory item on.  I can;t stand it.
That's probably the only thing wrong with Pluerghburg(OK, there was dying, but it was good dying.)  

Lame jokes that the creator throws in.

Are you kidding?  I love that!

[fovmester]

I'm sorry if I upset anybody by bringing up more serious points about what some people put in their games.

Not at all, but the use of "serious" issues for me depends very much on the overall mood of the game.
For example, I thought some of the stuff, especially the racism issues, in "Frank the Farmhand" was a bit strong for my tastes. Fitting for a serious dark game, certainly, but a bit out of place in this one.
Especially

Spoiler

Ben being the constant victim of racist hatred, even going so far as to have his life threatened, didn't mesh well with the main character playing the cruel indigestion joke on him.

[close]

Oh, boy! I figured this would be happening! But not like this, though.

The reason why I put racist-stuff in my game was NOT because I'm a racist and love to make fun of black people! On the contrary!

I put the abuse of Ben into the game just because I wanted show gamers how badly black people and other minorities are treated! ElectricMonk, did you notice how much I make fun of the KKK and all the other racists who do these things to Ben? That's quite a big part of the game actually! And I personally think it's one of the funniest parts.

The points I wanted to make with the story around Ben was that the people who're in the KKK and other racists are mostly uneducated goons and rednecks!

And besides that I wanted to put a black person in some embarrassing situations (I'm referring to the toilet-incident for you who's played the game) to show that this DOESN'T neccessary mean that it's racism! I mean how many games doesn't involve treating a white person badly to get what you want? Humour must be equal! And that's my second point.

Thirdly, I don't think you should be afraid of humour, but instead use it as a tool to get important issues told! It doesn't have to be a "serious dark" game to be carrying some important stuff, it could even be better to deliver these issues with jokes.

And THAT'S what I was trying to do in Frank the Farmhand!

[InCreator]

Stop it! Stop it! stop it!!!
Damn, why do people get so serious at AGS boards? Just say "black" and effin' world war three starts!
Guys, seriously, get some sleep. In every damn thread!
Like, we're adventuregamey people. And makers of them. Healthy sense of humor is something that shoulda have been coming "with the packet" when we did born. Or does playing adventure games and generating plots for them really messed up brains so badly that every letter, move and word may mean HUGE conspiracy against whole planet and we now have to Gestapo every word and even letter in every game, post and so?
This ends up with accusing people not using black outlines on their pics in Critics Lounge. Or too much yellow colors. Or some other idiotism like that. Paranoia is an illness!

[MrColossal]

it seems you're the one freaking out Increator, it's not like anyone screamed and cried in outrage over the game, he said it very plainly, the game wasn't really to his tastes. Nothing wrong with that.

A game can be the most tastefull and well made thing in the world involving the rape and murder of a woman and if someone doesn't like that subject and they don't like the game it has nothing to do with paranoia or being uptight, it's just not for them.

What I hate in adventure games are jokes referencing how wacky it is to be in an adventure game. Discworld 2 did it and eh... AGS games do it and eh... Also, I dislike when people use the Monkey Island template and don't use all the verbs. If you're just going to be using look at walk to pick up and use then there's no need for all those other verbs.

[InCreator]

it seems you're the one freaking out Increator, it's not like anyone screamed and cried in outrage over the game, he said it very plainly, the game wasn't really to his tastes. Nothing wrong with that.

um, maybe really. It wasn't really this spectacular case in my mind. But still, sometimes posting in this forum feels like walking on a minefield.

[ElectricMonk]

fovmester:

I don't think you're a racist. Please don't ever think that. With all the stuff going on in the game, how could any person with even half a brain think that?
I "got" what you were trying to do with the game, and most of the time you did it really well. And MrColossal, I'm not saying the game was not for me. I liked it a lot. It's just that one joke didn't sit right with me for some reason. I just felt sorry for ol' Ben, that's all. The game has been mighty cruel to him.

[fovmester]

It most certainly has!  

And I wasn't insulted or anything. I just wanted to clarify what I was thinking when writing the story for Frank the Farmhand, that's all.

[Kinoko]

Hmm, it's true that there are a lot of things that can be wrong in an adventure game. However, I totally agree with... whoever said it... that the rest of the game being great will completely make up for any slightly slow or annoying bits.

Still, the things I hate in general are...

- Mazes without the game giving you some sort of guide. Kyrandia I found okay, it was challenging without being really tiresome (at least the first time you played it, because you had that feeling of "ooh, what's gonna be in THIS room" and it did have plenty of interesting rooms in the caverns).

- Boring games. That sounds pretty obvious but really, I hate an adventure game without some sense of adventure. There are a lot of text adventures out there in particular that are like this. they start you somewhere and give you puzzles, but there's little or no plot and not much motivation for playing the game.

- Action sequences without a skip option. I don't mind them in a game, they can be fun (Astro Chicken was GREAT!) but you need to be able to skip them if you don't feel like playing them. I remember hating them in LSL3.

- Huge worlds with heaps of rooms and no map screen. It's very annoying going through 20 rooms to perform one action, then going all the way back.

- Completely illogical puzzles.

- Not being told what you're looking at in a Lucasarts styled game. I don't mind pixel hunting (like in the cave in Zak McKracken) as long as the game will reveal to me when the mouse is over an object.

- Not being told or given hints as to what something is called in a text-based adventure game. I remember being stuck for AGES in QFG 2 because I didn't know those things you use to get a fire going were called "bellows". Argh! There may have been a way to find that out in the game but it certainly escaped me when I first played it.

- Timed puzzles that just come out of the blue. You're happily playing a game and BOOM! All of a sudden you have 10 seconds you disarm a bomb that you didn't even know was there. If they ARE going to do that, the game has to have the option of going directly back to the spot before the timing starts.

- Games that are TOO scary. I just hate scary stuff, I want to be able to play a game and have fun without having trouble sleeping the next night. This is a personal thing with me though. I know a lot of others love horror games. 5 Days a Stranger was about all I could take of that sort of thing. That was okay because it was such a fun game to play and the graphics weren't too detailed.