Yeah, I meant Hammerwatch. And I totally agree with the easter egg thing. I`ve never seen that before, but maybe there are some other games out there which have this "collector penalty" too. I think they put the planks into the game to "spice" it up a bit, but too many spices can ruin a meal as much as too less spices can!

P.S.: Wow, thanks to the community, my english gets better every day!!! :-)

To me it depends on whether the game tries to be a sim game or not, as well as on how well it is hidden.

If rubber-banding is hidden reasonably well in an arcade game I don't really mind it, as in Grid Autosport.
If the rubber-banding is very obvious, as in the first Grid game, it does have a negative effect on my immersion and thus my gaming experience.

When it comes to sim games though, there's should not be any rubber-banding at all.
Rubber-banding exists to force challenge unto the gamer, but people who play sim racing games tend to seek out challenge by themselves and value realistic AI driving.

Here's one that is common in WRPGs: DIsallowing resting in town.

If the game will let me rest in a dangerous place (like a dungeon), why can't I rest in arbitrary spots of town? From a gameplay standpoint, this makes no sense and makes things tedious when it comes time to rest between adventures. It's like the game wants you to start an adventure and rest there instead of doing the logical thing and resting in between.

Some particularly bad examples are Baldur's Gate 2 (a lot of the game takes place inside a giant city), Arena (if you arrive at a new town during the night, the game won't let you rest until day and there's no one to ask where the nearest place the game does let you rest first), and Daggerfall (for daring to select the rest option, even before it would otherwise be fully confirmed (the game hasn't yet prompted you for how long you want to rest), the game treats you as having committed a crime).

In this case, it is a game prioritizing realism over playability/fun, which I consider to be bad game design.

Edit: Also, in Daggerfall, the arrest warrant comes before I have even specified how long I want to sleep; I don't even get a chance to cancel (as I would in a place where this asinine rule doesn't apply).

this. It just smacks of being precious and extremely cheap. You can still have a great 'retro' game feel with some actual work into graphics and art.

Haven't played it, but then I wouldn't have because it is pixelated retro. :)

Keep in mind that games like this are designed for a specific audience of people that are looking for that and I'm just not part of that audience, so when I see them I find that feature to be too common because for me it is undesireable. I do get it though, it's an artistic style - just not one I'm fond of. In a market bursting at the seams with titles we all have a list of features and function that we're looking for in games and not looking for to narrow down our focus to find titles of interest. I don't really want to look past that for the gameplay or the story or whatever other things might be appealing in a game because I have hundreds of games already. A game that wants my money has to impress me in all the categories that matter to me for me to get interested and for new releases that means using modern graphics and supporting my 2560x1600 display at the pixel level. If only 20 games came out in a year and 10 of them were pixelated then I might look into them more because my options were limited but for now they're not. :)

I could swear that you can rest in Athkatla if you keep trying until a guard doesn't show up to stop you.

That might be true, but it is still annoying. Just let me rest where it is safe without having to hunt for a specific spot!

(Incidentally, this issue is more annoying in some games that implement this anti-feature than in others; Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the worst cases because so much of the game takes place inn a giant city, and there's no way to leave the city without loading another area and having time pass. Also, resting is necessary to recover your magic, unlike some other games like Ultima 6.)

Another anti-feature in that game: If two party members are farther than a certain distance apart, the game doesn't let you trade items between them. It may be realistic, but it's annoying, especially since the game has bad pathfinding and the game forces you to rely on pathfinding for movement.

I hate it, regardless of sim or arcadey racer. The first game where I noticed it was NFS Underground. In the previous NFS games you could lap the AI drivers in longer races if you were good (and they would lap you, if you drove like shit). In NFS:U some opponent that crashed into traffic right before my eyes would be right on my tail only a few seconds later (while I go at top speed all the time). That just makes me want to puke...

Resting in the city isn't always safe, if you have low rep. Guards of various sorts may spawn and come after you. Iirc, there is an inn or a safe resting house in every section of the city.

As for the lack of trading over distances: beyond scouting with a thief, how often are your party members far enough apart that they can't trade? I don't recall this being an issue, except maybe with the scout.

Lets get to the mother of all inadequacies here : bad tutorials. I absolutely despise the dumb tutorials of recent games that teach you nothing of the game's mechanics or ruleset but still keeps you handholing for hours. IS IT SO HARD TO MAKE A TUTORIAL LEVEL, TEACH ALL THE MECHANICS AND JUST LET YOU GO??? NOPE, EXPERIENCE OUR SHINEMATIC TUTORIAL!
-Seen it with Borderlands, the PreSequel
-with MGS5
-with Splinter Cell : Blacklist
-too many others. All I want is one like in Thief Gold. Is that too much to ask?

In the low reputation case, resting can be handled like resting in the wilderness or a dungeon. Also, I tend not to get a low reputation when I play the game, because I don't like doing immoral things while playing such games. (If I want to get extra money, I would rather exploit gem underflow than steal.)

It actually isn't unusual for characters to be too far apart to trade, in my experience. This could happen in the aftermath of a battle. Or, it could happen that the pathfinding (which the game forces you to rely on) is misbehaving. Or (and this is the most common case), I am looting treasure from the enemies and the character I'm using is out of inventory space and too far from the rest of the party, so yes, it does happen.

Okay this is a response from a roguelikes perspective, defending procedural generation and permadeath, in this case. And yeah I realize nobody's suggested to address roguelikes particularly, but I'm going to!

Procedural generation can actually be pretty good. I think it's "time and place", though. In roguelikes, the importance in the change is to mix it up. It's not to say "Hey look, we made locations even neater with procedural generation!" It's that your brain won't recognize this 2nd and 3rd and 300th layout, so the predictability isn't there. You can't just look at the same doorway and say "Ah, right, behind this door are the 2 skeletons that I always lure out into this hallway," every time you replay. There's anticipation of genuinely not knowing what to expect. I wouldn't say it's better than hand made at all, not even close. It's just that it fits the context of how you get replayability from roguelikes.

Permadeath in roguelikes is actually related to procedural generation. I would absolutely lose my mind if I was playing something linear and cinematic like Final Fantasy 7, and had to restart the game the first time my party died. But the story of a roguelike is whatever happens to your character within their personal random creation, so dying is just the exclamation point at the end of that story. You're not really expected to win.

And besides, you just play differently when you realize that you're DONE if you lose a fight. It triggers some primal survival instinct that just isn't present when you have nothing to lose. Suddenly you're more meticulous about your actions, and more savvy about the things you take with you into battle. It's kind of an awesome feeling, like your IQ has gone up a few points.

Anyway, those types of games are not everyone's cup of tea, but I wouldn't call those features universally broken or misguided.


Just to contribute my 2 cents about features I hate, what is up with unskippable cutscenes? What I find REALLY irritating is when a cutscene is unskippable the first time, but watching it once sort of "unlocks" the ability to skip it.

This reminds me of something I (re-)encountered recently: the Crypt puzzle in The 7th Guest. It's not cut off by a cutscene, but rather an incredibly long puzzle - the Maze - not to mention the sliding block puzzle the preceded the maze! Even if you know how to get through the maze (god help you if you don't realize the map is available and try to map the place yourself), the weight of the previous two puzzle is right behind you. It feel like you have to solve the Crypt puzzle right now or All Will Be Wasted.