This is FTL. It's a rougelike, but it's fairly easy until the boss, who is ridiculously hard so the checkpoint js the start if the game.

Good game, but the boss ruined it for me. I'm dealing with that in dragons dogma now. I have a million Mike path and I think one way is right and the is wrong. But I could be mistaken. And the quest is on a timer (I think,; pawns keep saying quests can be on a timer) so I'm hoping my way is right. But if jt isn't right, thrn that just sucks.

Still, a good game. But only 1 save slot.

Not counting Diablo, weapons that fall apart after five minutes!

Game Design Rule #1

Never put the SAVE button and the LOAD button right next to each other.

Yeah, that gets me all the time, too. Usually I have to check on Youtube or something to watch the cut-scene in its entirety.

Continuing with the cutscene theme:

"Here's an unskippable cinematic for you to watch just before you fight an extremely difficult boss. Oh, you died? Well, you have to watch the whole thing over again, and watch a loading screen, before you get another try."

Taking control away from the player when something interesting is happening that could have just been handled as part of normal gameplay; e.g., watching the hero kill the bad guy or whatever.

General overuse of cutscenes. I seem to recall that cutscenes originally began as a sort of reward to the player for beating a whole level. Now you get them because you walked a few steps or killed some low-level grunts. Imagine Super Mario Bros. forcing you to watch a cutscene after you squash that first goomba, or got your first fire flower?

I'm not familiar with DD, but now that I think of it, maybe you could make a backup of the autosave and overwrite it later, if needed?

I did that with FTL when I got tired of wasting time trying to unlock the "ship that can only be unlocked by doing this random event in this sector you're only going to find if you have a crewmen of X race and only if you have done this other event earlier". It's a much less stressful game if you can count on a bit of insurance. :P

So-called "procedurally generated" games that are basically the same things over and over, plus or minus a few cosmetic changes. (I'm looking at you, No Man's Sky.)

Focusing on 3D instead of gameplay and story like a 9-year-old retard.

Leaving room for DLC.

Leaving room for microtransactions in both free-to-play and, revoltingly, pay-to-access games.

It's exactly the opposite for me. I want movement on the arrows and jump (ideally) on the spacebar for the left thumb or (bad but tolerable) on the right control for the right thumb. When I try to use the fingers on one hand for moving AND jumping, I die.

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The worst thing ever is wasting my time, typically by requiring a pointless waiting period before I can retry something that's meant to be retried. E.g. La-Mulana: no checkpoint before bosses (it could've been an ephemeral checkpoint: lose a boss battle and you can retry, decline to retry and go load a legit save elsewhere instead). Titan Souls: same, but the game is all bosses. My precious Teslagrad has checkpoints everywhere and lightning-fast restarts after death... but there's a huge room with several trick jumps that's impossible to die in.

Another thing: no good endings. Be selling me a game, you implicitly claim that the game is worth playing, as in, you made it so that people would pay their time/money for the privilege to spend even more of their time/money on effecting changes in an imaginary world. If those changes are invariably for the worse, I shouldn't have played the game in the first place, which means I was scammed out of time/money.

A program I use a lot at work has F11 mapped to "pull up an account" and F10 mapped to "Log out."
You're right. It sucks!

Edit: this was supposed to be a reply to Univetsalwolf. :p

So any story that doesn't have a happy ending is a scam? You're not one for freedom of artistic expression, are you?

No way to develop this point without spoilers, but quite a bunch of the most awesome endings in games i've played have been horribly "bad" endings. Even when there were multiple possibilities. For me, it's a mere narrative factor (not all my favorite novels/movies have happy ends).

Also... maybe avoid bullfrog's "Flood" :-/

___
Edit: oh well, in the case of multiple endings, it doesn't spoil much to say it. The "bad endings", in Masquerade Redemption and in Bloodlines, are way better than the good ones, in my eyes. For instance.



HOWEVER, when it comes to genuinely bad (lame) endings, here's one cardinal sin :

Cliffhanger endings that set up a sequel.

Because you are SOOO sure that you'll get to make a sequel, right ?

I was going to start a new thread for this, but it fits quite well here.

Redundant game mechanics / features
I'm currently playing Divinity Original Sin and your equipment has durability, standard RPG mechanic. But it's pointless. I have a character with a skill (not actually sure if it's crafting or blacksmithing he uses, he has both) and a repair hammer who can infinitely repair all my equipment. No cost, no downside, no risk or reward. It's just an annoying task to perform every now and again.
I even seem to be able to do it mid combat (though it might cost AP in that case, I've done it twice and once seemed to while the other time didn't).
Ok, without that skill and a repair hammer you'd have to travel to a shop and spend gold, but it's highly unlikely you won't train that skill on one of your four characters and find or buy a hammer...

At least in a roguelike you trade off the time it takes to perform an action (and the food required to sustain you) against the action, or in Diablo repairing things is only possible at shops (I think? Been a long time since I played it)

So if at the end of the day all item durability does is give me an annoying task to do every now and again then it shouldn't exist (or should be changed)

I'm sure with a bit of time I could think of other similar things (actually stealth and stealing in many games are good examples as they are almost always worse than the other available options)

So any medicine that doesn't actually cure the disease is a scam? You're not one for academic freedom, are you?

Any interactive story that advertizes itself as goal-oriented but doesn't have a happy ending option, doesn't disclose it and isn't free is a scam. Like medicine, media products are basically immune to market forces with respect to taste. For market forces to work, consumers have to be able to make an informed choice -- but the industry actively discourages informed choices.

So for example, Tyranny is a game where you play a powerful bad guy (or gal). That's the draw; that's why I bought it and that's what I expect to get (also purple special effects). If it turns out I have to join the good guys or get killed, I'd consider it a scam. (Before gators and Trump, there was a great series of threads on /tg/ about a party who were forced to do exactly that but outwitted the GM. I applauded the GM for being a good sport about it.) Dorf Fortress is a game whose slogan is "Losing is fun!" - excellent! The infinite dungeon mode in ToME has a warning: There's no victory, you will die, the goal is to advance as far as you can - also excellent! I'm also guaranteed to lose in Tetris, no matter how well I play (it's math). But I'm making an informed choice. I can play Tetris, or I can go cycling with friends, or I can volunteer at a methadone distribution center and get my skull bashed in by Christianists. Informed choices are great. "Haha fuck you we got your money" isn't.

Here's an even better example. There's a tabletop game where you fuck around with pips and then get told "what you actually have been doing is holocausting the Jews, lololololol". Yes, seriously. Idiots love to spring it at people at gaming fairs, and idiot victims then write thinkpieces (the jury's still out on the "think" part) about how everyone is a latent Nazi or something. And of course they got it all backwards (presumably because they think with their asses.) The core assumption of tabletop gaming is that it's something you do with friends or friendly opponents for fun, thus an invitation to the game carries an implicit "I think you'll have fun". It's the creep whose idea of fun is the fucking Holocaust who's the monster.