So I was on another forum lurking, when I spotted a Smash character thread. This is perfectly normal.

When my eyes actually laid on some of the suggestions and the reasoning, that's when it came to a curveball.

In no particular order, they were suggesting Baby Groot, Dumbo, Baloo, Hello Kitty, Beast Boy, a yellow living tictac, and Spongebob freakin' Squarepants.

This too, while completely loopy is par for the course, I must admit. But the reasoning, that's where it goes a bit pear shaped.

For those of you not clicking to that thread, I don't know if this person sees themselves as a marketing executive or some mad bat from advertising, but the reason they want all those characters is for some mad idea of audience reach, because what a competitive fighting game needs is toddlers at the controller.


So now that the tone has clearly been set, surely some of you have laid witness to illogical or otherwise daft suggestions for a game.

PC Gamer had an article about that last year. Lemme find it...

https://www.pcgamer.com/the-strangest-patch-notes-in-pc-gaming/

There are some changes that I have actually seen implemented in remakes.

The worst one, IMO, is taking a game that has invisible random battles that only trigger when you walk, and replacing them with visible (though sometimes still random) enemies that move in real-time, turning the game into an action game at times.

Ultima 4's NES port took a game where you had visible enemies that only move when you do, and replaced it with random invisible encounters that can even occur while standing still.

I once saw a request for a bug-fixing DLC. As in, a paid DLC that would only fix bugs introduced by the other patches/DLC.

The developer was really quick to dismiss the suggestion.

That's fine and all, but not quite the spirit of the thread. This is more a thread for when your friend says, "Ey, you know what would make Diablo really good? Katanas! And they have a chance to split even Diablo in half!", when Diablo being the game that it is, would not be very compatible with such an idea.

Speaking of Diablo, turn-based Diablo could have been interesting to see. Probably not fun to play (Diablo was initially turn-based during development, but they found real-time to be more fun).

Other changes:
Planescape: Torment would've been better as an adventure game, IMO.
Simon the Sorcerer 3D could've been demastered to be in 2D.

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Not exactly the same, but along these lines, I recall during the development of Pillars of Eternity (keep in mind it's an isometric game with 3d sprites on a 2d background), someone was adamant they needed ragdoll physics. Went on and on about how there was no excuse for not having it.

This suggestion.

I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I'd love to see Fallout: New Vegas done in the Fallout 2 engine. It seems really designed around that rather than an open world.

The - now sadly defunct - Pinkerton Games forums were a goldmine for those. During production for Moebius - Empire Rising, they were very open to backer feedback. They took advice from some of the most autistic point&clickers conceivable and tried to accomodate them as best as they could.

And quite a few of those design choices that were added at the behest of screeching backers ended up getting lambasted in professional reviews when the game was released. It was tragic.

I distinctly remember one of those demands being: Don't let the character pick up an intem right away! That makes no sense! ONLY let the character pick up the item once he realises that he's going to need that item to solve a puzzle! Once implemented, this of course meant that you'd have to do lots and lots of backtracking - you can probably guess that this kind of forced backtracking only to pick up objects that stuck out like a sore thumb right from the start really wasn't any fun at all. It hurt the game. Players thought they made it like that to artificially stretch the play time. But they didn't. They included it because they wanted to accomodate some of their more vocal backers.

Breaks my heart to think about it...

That reminds me of a thread that was on this very forum, of someone wanting to have the whole package in their games, including the copy protection.

That's some crazy stuff but entirely believable. Some gamers are so weird and anal about "realism" and other things, they'd destroy a game to make it fit their ideas better. Normally I rant about huge companies listening to infinitely small numbers of voices online, but in a backer situation I guess you kind of have to, at least to some extent. Shame.

C&C represent.

Tiberian Sun patch 2.02

"World Domination Tour map settings don't get changed with "Surprise Me"."

Red Alert 2 patch 1.002

"You now have the option of turning off Asian and/or Non-Asian chat."

Red Alert 2 patch 1.004

"Dreadnoughts can now break bridges with missiles."
"The edges of the Radar Screen are now visible."
"The Desolator will no longer continue to shoot the ground over and over and keep building up radiation."

Zero Hour patch 1.03

"Colonel Burton – fixed the bug where he could destroy aircraft by knife-attack."

Red Alert 3 beta 2 patch 1.3:

"Imperial Warrior is now immune to Bark-Stun while banzai charging."
"Balloon Bombs are immune to Magnetic Satellite. Apparently they're made out of ceramics or wood or something."

I find the ragdolling in Breath of the Wild to be a bit silly at times. To have the same in a 2D game, would be just absurd.