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Video Game Design Trends that You Love and that You Hate

Plague Doctor

Plague Doctor

Member
Hey Gang

What are some designs in Video Games, modern or past, that you really liked or despised.

Mainly focusing on art be it character design or level or art direction but you can bring up gameplay if it hits yah.

Edit: Bonus Round: Add photos to help illustrate your points.
 
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I fucking HATE devs obsession with roguelike and this is my biggest reason why I lost interest in most indie games.

People say indie are more creative but all I see shoving roguelike or Souls-like to every genre.
 
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Okay I am going on a rant here:

Videogames are NOT MOVIES.

I am not playing a camera directed by Cameron I am the fucking CHARACTER.

The character is most likely not a shitty 1970s analogue camera. The character does not see the world in a de-saturated piss filter.
 
I love everything Bloodborne does. The cluttered look of a vatican meets london like metropolis where shit hit the fan

The abomination juxtaposed works of art

The subtle palletes of color that keeps the player focussed on the action.

The environmental storytelling in every corner.

The music and sound design.

All flawless.


352782283.jpg
 
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I'll go negative now.

Fucking hate purple as a main color and the flourescent multicolor everything. I would happily return to the army corridor shooter browns and greys over this rainbow vomit art direction.

Then there is the MCU tier writing for character dialouge. If everyone is sarcastic and quippy, get out of here with that. "Winking at the camera" and fourth wall breaking with no rhyme or reason bullshit. I'll take inept but earnest writing over this shit any day.

I will not buy a game if the protagonist sounds like a knock off Joss Whedon wrote that shit. Don't care if the rest of the game is GOTY caliber. No, I can't ignore it.
 
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I like QTE in cutscenes. When you are beating on a bad guy in a cutscene and you mash the X button, it's very cathartic.

You have to be also able to fail them, like in Bayonetta or W101.

I'm also ok if there's an option to skip them in the menu if you don't like them.
 
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Love:
  • Enviromental storytelling like journals, recordings, and the state of the location.
  • Small sandbox over open worlds.
  • Problem solving instead of puzzle solving.
Hate:
  • Unskippable and unpausable cutscenes.
  • Quicktime events.
  • Slow forced walking sections.
  • X-Ray vision in games not named Batman.
 
I dislike Battle Passes.

They are designed to keep you addicted to playing a game not because you're having fun, but because you are trying to unlock something.
 
Hate: excessive realism in graphics. It's a game. If I need "detective vision" to tell items and interactive elements from the background, you're doing game design wrong.

Hate: losing stuff when you die and lose it forever if you don't get it back before dying again. For the love of God, enough with this shit already. It's not even incentivizing me to "git gud" when you know perfectly well your game is cheap and I have to be even cheaper to survive.

Love: limited, clearly-defined goals. Not every game needs to be a sandbox. I have enough chores in real life. Give me three things to do, and say clearly what the goal is. That is a game. Rules, and a goal.
 
Hate single mode multiplayer games. Having a single mode allows the player to focus on the flavor of fun the FPS provides but there are many of us who remember a time when multiplayer games have multiple modes to choose from and also a single player campaign, a game book, and other shit that made everyone like those games.

Now the games are super targeted at one single group of game hoppers.

The biggest issue for me is that I really don't think the same amount of work is going into these single mode games that went into a more fully fleshed out product.

I don't think the reason these games are made is because there is a small group demanding them but rather they have figured out how the give us the very lowest amount of work possible while retaining most of their players, even if that means the product has a very small amount of content. Because most people will still buy with a piddly amount of content, that means those of us who would prefer more content don't really have as many games to buy.
 
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Plague Doctor said:
Fucking hate purple as a main color and the flourescent multicolor everything. I would happily return to the army corridor shooter browns and greys over this rainbow vomit art direction.
Click to expand...

Ahhhh, I came to post this after watching new Fable game play footage. This kind of vibe is an instant red flag for me.
 
the 'humanization' of what are fundamentally video game cartoon characters, like lara croft & kratos, is basically like doing so with bugs bunny & daffy duck...
 
Recently i find recycled encounter design to be so terrible, like most of those crpgs? yeah they suck at that.
I also find unskippable cutscenes to be one of the worst things in games, those are really infuriating, fortunately not many games have this.
Extreme hand holding is also terrible.
I'm also starting to dislike character that talk to themselves just to spoonfeed the player hints, although its not so bad in moderation.
I dont like the console UI/HUD design for character table.
Too much text or too much story is offputting me recently.
Open world meme
Too much leveling up where it doesnt belong.


I can squeeze my thoughts and i will probably get 100 more lol

What i love? i love intricate and thoughtout level design, good handcrafted encounter design and content in general, good side quests, i like games that are bold and forces you to think a little bit instead of directly spoonfeeding you the clues.
Games that have some depth in gameplay and is not scared to challenge the player (reasonably ofcourse)

I dont know if those are all trends though.

Polaris said:
Love:
  • Enviromental storytelling like journals, recordings, and the state of the location.
  • Small sandbox over open worlds.
  • Problem solving instead of puzzle solving.
Hate:
  • Unskippable and unpausable cutscenes.
  • Quicktime events.
  • Slow forced walking sections.
  • X-Ray vision in games not named Batman.
Click to expand...
Yeah what this guy says also ☝️
 
Plague Doctor said:
I love everything Bloodborne does. The cluttered look of a vatican meets london like metropolis where shit hit the fan
The abomination juxtaposed works of art...
The music and sound design.
All flawless.
Click to expand...
Bloodborne could be much darker and much more atmospheric with a better score.
Akira Yamaoka + Bloodborne would be better than Bloodborne with its limited soundtrack.
 
NeoIkaruGAF said:
Hate: excessive realism in graphics. It's a game. If I need "detective vision" to tell items and interactive elements from the background, you're doing game design wrong.
Click to expand...
This is an issue with HD games in general.
Prior to PS3 there were very few games with detective vision and yellow paint on relevant areas.
 
Mozzarella said:
Recently i find recycled encounter design to be so terrible, like most of those crpgs? yeah they suck at that.
Click to expand...
Good one. I hate From Software using earlier bosses as mobs in the late game. And the recycling in Elden Ring made lots of enemies much less special and memorable, and just plain annoying.

It makes sense in games like Breath of the Wild. The Lionel can be a miniboss of a kind, but it's also a species roaming the world and there's various forms of it. But there's a reason we never had a Ninja Turtles game where, I dunno, you fight Bebop and Rocksteady as bosses in stage 1 and 2, and then meet them as mobs, with a different color, in later stages.


awwr999999 said:
This is an issue with HD games in general.
Prior to PS3 there were very few games with detective vision and yellow paint on relevant areas.
Click to expand...
Games with prerendered backgrounds had lots of detail even in SD, but they still managed to make interactive stuff stand out. Sometimes an item would clearly be made out of polygons amid 2D stuff, sometimes it would just shine. And this didn't require detective vision, nor did it break immersion.
It's not a problem due to HD. With the right artstyle, you can have HD and still clearly tell what is interactive and what isn't. But when you make everything as realistic as possible, of course if everything doesn't blend in, it breaks immersion.
Even so, there's still a lot of ways to not need detective vision. Resident Evil 2 remake is absolutely realistic, yet it doesn't have this problem. But somehow, Assassin's Creed and The Witcher 3 do. And in the modern Tomb Raider games, figuring out which ledges you can grab and which you can't requires trial and error, or yellow paint. This isn't good game design.
 
What i like :

environmental storytelling , i enjoy looking at a room and understanding what happened there
non linear level design

what i dont like :

inserting your political views in the game
forced slow walking scenes
gameplay sections with non main character like god of war and spider man
non skippable cutscenes
no save anytime feature
 
Cyberpunkd said:
Isn't this just a hidden loading screen? Same with moving all the objects to squeeze through with always the same animation?
Click to expand...
I'll take a cutscene or just straight up a loading screen over the pretense of gameplay that's no different than a quicktime event.
 
Few things are worse than a limited inventory capacity.

But stamina absolutely needs to fuck off, stop wasting my time to inflate your game lenght in the most boring way ever conceived, waiting and doing nothing is not a game mechanic, its straight up a fun killer. Games have you play as supersoldiers or literal demi-gods and i am supposed to believe they cant sprint for more than 5 seconds, utter nonsense, devs need to fuck off with this.
 
Love:
- Environmental storytelling
- Quality over Quantity. Few ideas well implemented.
- Puzzles integrated with the story / environment. Not the classic random minigame that makes no sense in that place.

Hate:
- Filler content to increase duration
- Forced stealth sections
- Clues when you've been stuck for five minutes
 
I actually miss when we had more cutscenes, or rather I dislike the trend of slow unskippable sections in modern games that are primarily there for storytelling
Instead of a decently directed and paced 5 minutes cutsene we get 25 minutes of uinskippable walking and talking which isn't just boring as fuck but also ruins the replay value.

Sony games are the worst at this, it's one of the main reason I've started caring less and less about their games. This design philosophy is how you end up picking up fruit in God of War, getting 25 Aquarium flashbacks in TLOU2 and basically having no real gameplay for like the first 2 hours of Uncharted 4.
 
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samoilaaa said:
what i dont like :
non skippable cutscenes
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This is only a problem because we've never seen a game with great cutscenes.
For whatever reason cutscenes are drawn-out, boring and generally the worst part of any game.
It's entirely possible to make punchy, unskippable/unpausable/uncapturable cutscenes that move at a fast enough clip to be considered universally interesting.
The key is having the story told through cutscenes move too fast as opposed to the standard cutscene which is far too slow.
Cutscene dialog needs to be distilled down to powerful things that people will remember.
Guy Ritchie's got a great example of a massive story told in under 5min through a sequence of smaller cutscenes.
Breaking that down into smaller chunks and adding some hard-hitting dialog would make for unskippable cutscenes that people look forward to rewatching.
 
HATE:

- Dark Souls and everything inspired by it.
- DOTA and any bullshit following it's veins.
- MMORPG in general.
- Battle royale in general.
- Minecraft, Fortnite and it's derivatives.
- Dancing games like DDR, Pump it Up, etc.
 
Love:
-Games that reward exploration even if it's just some cool vista. They know what you'll try.

Hate:
-way too many missables that matter in the end, specially on long games
-half of the story is on journals or shit like that (or even the entire story). This should only serve to make the world fresh, to add lore and some other small things
-Roguelikes galore
-card system (I still love Baten Kaitos tho)
-Limited inventory
-Games with too many stats that don't really look like make a difference at all (+5 atk on rainy days, fuck that)
-These Gacha free shit and other free games that are now corrupting even the console space.
 
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When I played RDR2, I had spent the first 10-15 hours doing some missions, but mostly discovering the map.

Which I think is great about open worlds, but it eventually led to some mission bugs later in the game. For instance, I had collected an old postal card (or picture?) in a cottage somewhere in the wilds.

Many hours later though there was a side quest to go and find that item specifically, but since I had collected it already, I couldn't complete the mission anymore.

I dislike such errors or logical flaws in many games the most.

Another game design I love AND somewhat dislike at the same time is the scripts.

I absolutely love the Hitman games ever since, for example, just played WoA some days ago again. And I know that their particular game design needs scripts being triggered.

But I just can't help myself but to sometimes think how dull it is that the NPCs follow their route on a continuous loop.

That's something for instance I hope AI could be a benefit in future Hitman games or any game actually.
 
More HATE:

- Intercoms/radio chatter. Because even when a side character can't be with you, they still need to shoehorn dialog and pay voice actors more.

- Points of no return. Oh, you wanted to explore the whole map? Too bad, you went the wrong way and now it's inaccessible. Here, have a cut-scene that shows you the road back being destroyed or something.
 
Vampire Survivors and its' ilk being referred to as bullet hell and the game design itself which is just psychologically manipulation distilled to its' purest form.
 
Here's one.

Turning off Spiders in a game that is marketed as horror, dark, gritty, etc.

Like... mother fucker, you see how they are marketing this game and are in it for the horror but that's your line?

What the fuck?

Miss me with the "options are good" platitude bullshit. When the game is explicitly marketed as horror or dark, that's your line? "Oh, I am totes cool with the hardcore gore. But please turn off the spiders"

What the fuck happened in your life to hold those two preferences simultaneously. Edit: You know what. I don't want to know what happened.
 
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I hate that L3 & R3 in every controller.
I have asked for more buttons at least to replace those two, but then we have to pay hundreds for them!!

I hate that PRO controllers removed the possibility of having more buttons as standard to evolve gameplay.

I hate stamina when running in a big open world and having to wait to refill! It's annoying! The worst case of it was Brest of the Wild. If your game is huge, let me run endlessly and tirelessly!
 
nkarafo said:
- Points of no return. Oh, you wanted to explore the whole map? Too bad, you went the wrong way and now it's inaccessible. Here, have a cut-scene that shows you the road back being destroyed or something.
Click to expand...
Shadow of the Erdtree pulling this was some BULLSHIT
 
Enjoy
  • Boomer Shooters and violent retro 90s 3d art being a thing
    • Enough of them regularly feature more interesting level design than what AAA shooters devolved into being either scripted linear hallways in 360/PS3 era or aimless open-worlds since the PS4/Xbone era.
    • I like the speed, love the over the top gibbs, being able to strafe around slower projectiles, pickups or executions > regenerative health, etc.
    • Any innovation that can be done on top of the foundation of letting me rip and tear is appreciated, but I will take Trepang2 or Turbo Overkill (gif below) over CoD or Battlefield any day.
BzIvvErglTG5Db1F.gif

  • Vampire-Survivor likes have enough variety still
    • I thought I'd be getting bored of this blueprint for a game, but enough stuff like Deep Rock Galactic Survivor and Ball X Pit have kept it fresh for me over the last year.
    • Playing demos for Wanderburg (gif below) with Howl's Moving Castle fortresses and Vampire Crawlers shows me it still has some legs before it gets too saturated and stale
d0NjR6qNfn4jTnHX.gif

Schadenfreude
  • Seeing Live-Service continously failing more often, as the audience is getting saturated, innovation is rare, and more projects fail.
  • Developers that trash the audience getting mocked, laid off or running away to Bluesky. Make a good game, and respect the people giving you revenue.
  • DEI-ish Art Styles with colored hair, ugly people or pandering to disabilities/identity traits fail, while asian games with AAA waifus succeed
    • I don't even need gooner-tier design, but it succeeding will influence devs to at least design modest but attractive characters instead of the sugarfoot Horizon nonsense.
 
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