Forward Thinking!

If game companies would start cutting off the fat and concentrating what's fun about their game/idea, then it'd result in a lot more quality games being produced.

The reason I'm bringing this up is because I've played about 11 hours of Mass Effect 2 and wow, they are taking forward thinking to a whole new level.

In Mass Effect 1 the things that bugged me about the game were:

Your inventory was always piling up and you'd have to manage hundreds of worthless items.

In Mass Effect 2 the inventory system is (for all intensive purposes) gone. You choose which guns you want to take as you exit your ship. Your armor is always the same but now you purchase upgrades to increase it's effects. And instead of finding thousands of items around the game and having to sift through to see which ones were actually useful, all you find now is money or the schematics to upgrade a weapon/armor or whatever.

The problem in ME1 also posed the issue that if you can find virtually any item in the game in any random place, it makes shopping for items entirely non-essential. In ME2, the shops are actually useful because they carry items you otherwise wouldn't stumble across.

Their method of unlocking or hacking any object was pressing a few buttons as they appeared on the screen.

This issue is a tricky one to dance around, but now the mini-games to hack/unlock things is a lot more entertaining. I still find Bioshock's minigame of hacking/unlocking a lot more fun (even though it doesn't make any sense), but at least having one that's both stimulating and not totally reliant on "press A, press Y, press X..." is an improvement. It makes the game more fun overall.

Sometimes a dialogue option wasn't an option at all.. two responses said the exact same thing.

Now if there's only one real response to a question, your character will just say it instead of it giving you this fake choice of options.


It's really interesting because a lot of games will just change what they did before, not to cut off the fat or make the gameplay easier to program and play, but rather to make it seem like it's "better", when in reality there's really no difference.

For example, here's a bad evolution from game to game:

Halo 2 to Halo 3 - The Brute Shot

Call me crazy, but I don't see what was wrong with the original Brute Shot in Halo 2. It was their most unique weapon and you could either try for direct hits, or try a more conservative method of bouncing it off walls and the floor and blowing the shots up next to somebody.

Then, in Halo 3, the shots don't bounce, they just blow up. It's nothing more than a faster-firing, less-damage-per-shot inducing rocket launcher. Why change it? Was there really a problem with the original? Not to mention the 2nd edition is a lot less fun to use, and it's a lot less unique. Might as well just call it the grenade launcher now.

Halo's evolution of weapons actually draws a ton of complaints from me, but we'll save those for another time.


Then comes the issue of problems that were obvious and only required one forward thinker (on the design level) to make a change. These are things that should have been fixed before the game ever got made. Things such as:

Assassin's Creed - Boring Combat System

I mean, really.. this game has the most fun parkour-style free running system I've ever played. But the combat is exactly the opposite. Once you get into a fight the game dramatically slows down (which is very ironic), and you're using 2 buttons, one to hold and one to press to counter whenever somebody attacks you. Using anything else was inefficient and would likely get you killed or pissed off.

Whose idea was it to use such boring controls to sword fight? It should be a given that if you're spinning around wielding a crazy blade that you should use an analog stick to make it more freely flowing. Either that or at least vary up a fight a little bit because I don't know of any other setting where a sword fight consists of people gathering around one guy, and then one at a time making these lame, predictable attempts at stabbing him. If they all rushed at the same time, the battle would be over and the main character would be dead. Logically, that's what would happen assuming they were all of similar skill.

So.. wow. I don't know what else to say, other than "Duh". Watch a movie that has a sword fight in it and base your battle on how they have their fights. They certainly don't stand around, wasting 4-5 seconds between each attack attempt, that much is for damn sure.

Halo 3: ODST - I can't see!! Oh wait, press X? Now I can kind of see.. AHH!! I can't see again, it's too bright!

Seriously, what is the point of making your game either so dark that you can't see the ground in front of you, or so bright that you can't see the tip of your weapon!? Any game that forces you to toggle your visuals without any good reason in order to clearly see what is around you is already missing the point.

Blinding somebody or in any way inhibiting them to play the game at all is a STUPID idea from the beginning. Even in Super Smash Bros Brawl, there are items that will turn out the lights or block the screen with this damn dog that crawls up in your face. What is the point of that?

If you're going with an idea that inhibits somebody from playing the game at all, you might as well have a feature in the game that turns the TV off and you can't play again until you turn it back on. Or one that turns your controller off and you wildly scramble to turn it back on so you can play again. That will be so fun, huh!? In the case of Super Smash Bros' Nintendog fiasco, that would be comparable to somebody walking in front of the TV when you're trying to play a chaotic game, and then when you ask them to move they walk up to you and lick your face. You'd kick their ass!

Mind you that ODST's example of not being able to see wasn't the worst I've ever seen, it still has no excuse because this feature was somehow invented and put into the game after the series had 10 years to mature it's ideas. Even in Halo 3 they had the most unpopular equipment in the game blind you if you were within 25 feet of where it went off. WHY!? Who honestly finds being blind fun in a video game? These are questions that need to be asked as soon as somebody proposes the idea. If it's a bad idea, don't even waste your time developing it and then refining it as development goes on. Just stop it at the source. It's not that hard.


So, at least it's nice to see developers starting to approach problems with a proactive mindset. If you're thinking about the game think of everything a player will experience and ask yourself if it's fun or not. If you ever think "it's not" then whatever you do, do NOT include it in the game. Save money and time and stop including bad ideas from the start! Don't wait for fans to complain about it!