This thread requires too much thought.

True, but if you want to play a game where the recoil makes your (in-game) body react and where ammo for the gun is just as scarce and expensive... well, you might as well do it in real life

The good-guy thief in RPGs. Just once, can't an RPG have a criminal party member who acts like a criminal?

Haha, yeah, that was pretty much the crux of that storyarc

I also hate how gamers are often forced to use their imagination in order to pretend something is occurring but not visible to the player because of a game's limitation to render it.

What exactly do I mean by that? Here are examples:

1) Going up to a button and "using" it but not being able to see your hand actually press the button. Instead, the button magically activates on its own as if you were using the powers of your mind to do it. This also applies to using objects like doors and pushing boxes. So far the only FPS game that actually shows you pressing the button with your hand was Prey. That was a nice touch (pardon the pun) on their part and I hope more games would go the extra mile and do this as well.

2) Putting your back to a wall and then looking down, only to discover that you have no feet and your nothing more than a pair of floating disembodied arms holding a gun. I've always thought that this was rather jarring to witness and broke the suspension of disbelief when spotted. Thankfully some games out today are addressing this and allowing the player to see his feet when looking down now (Halo 2 comes to mind)

Another gripe I'm having with a lot of games now of days is the removal of death animations in favor of having the physics engine create a "dynamic" death using rag doll effects. To me, while I understand way developers would do this (making 15 million death animations for the different types of deaths based of hit location must have been a pain to create) but the rag doll deaths tend to look very fake and unnatural to me. The old fashion way looked more convincing to me than watching a person transform into a rag doll and just flop and slide across the ground like a bag of sand.

In the future, animation will be combined with ragdolls to create more realistic and varied everythings. Death animations will have more movement to them. Running will be based on environment, not strict identical animations.

I'd even like to see it go so far as to press up against a wall some if you get near it. Your player automatically ducks under a slightly lower pipe. When ducking behind sandbags, you pull your head down as not to show the top of it, etc.

Kirby, that stuff is already very possible. LEC is using Endorphin in their new Star Wars and Indy games to do stuff just like that.

Well that's the first time I've heard anyone say rag doll effects make it look unrealistic...

Key hunts. Seriously, think of some puzzles that I have to solve to progress. Don't make me scour dungeons looking for a single key.

Some games, Twilight Princess for instance, do it right in that the keys are generally where you are going in the dungeon, and you have to solve some puzzle to get to them. But the games that have key hunts for the sake of key hunts can go away.

But none have been released, yet. That's why I said "In the future." I recall one game that had ragdolled animated deaths, but I can't remember what it was. A WW2 game, I'm pretty sure.

When was the last time you saw a dead body slide down a ramp as if he was on a slip-and-slide?

I think limb/joint values would be awesome. Tension, reflex, etc. Limbs would rip off if a certain level of force was applied, etc. Snap? Go limp? Etc.

More than that, when was the last time you saw a dead body period?

FEAR is a godsend when it comes to legs. You can see your legs and arms when you do stuff, like run, walk, punch, kick, climb ladders, slide, whatever. I... Can't remember if it shows you hitting switches, though. <_>

By this I don't mean "Hurf durf i am shooting at you from 50 yards away and i am not hitting you omg hax" I mean "Hey, i am shooting an entire clip at you from 3 feet away, why aren't you dying?"

I always hated CS because you could shoot someone in the head with several of the weapons and they did not die.

If you can shoot a full clip of anything at the enemy from 3 feet away without killing them... then you really need to learn to shoot =p

When computer intelligence is as smart as us, it will be able to compete with us without 'cheating'.

Gears of War and Graw2 do this. And those are just the ones I actually play. Graw2 animates players planting bombs, hacking laptops, and all sorts of stuff. I don't think it actually contains any switches. Or doors, for that matter. Gears has switches, though there are some cases where the animation fails to line up with the switch. You kick doors open in Gears, and yes, there is an awesome animation to go along with it.


You mean, like, a cover system? You need to play more games before you rant about them. Just because the 'latest and greatest' halo doesn't have a cover system doesn't mean that there aren't games that are actually good out. Gears has an awesome cover system, though it suffers from some 'magic button' issues. Graw2's cover system is arguably more realistic, but unfortunately does not exist in multiplayer.

Doesn't Gears have a cover system?
Oh, and Enter the Matrix had you ducking automatically too.

The simple reason Gears has all those animations is because it's presented from a 3rd person perspective. The gripe is with first person shooters not showing arms and hands pressing buttons and / or not having legs...

Yeah true.
How weird would it be to have a third person perspective yet no arms and legs?

Vegas has an excellent cover system, and unlike GRAW2, it's not limited to just SP.

Operation: Winback on the N64 had a fun cover system. The game had it's flaws, but it was pretty good fun overall.

Gears' cover system is also in MP. The game would be totally unplayable without it. GrawII manages to stay playable because you can still duck, so even though you don't 'stick' to cover, you can stay down behind something. Gears' multiplayer cover system still has it's issues though. There are times when an enemy is behind cover, and you can see the enemy, and you can shoot the enemy, but you can't hurt them. This only happens when the cover is between you and them, and if you're above them you can usually hurt them, but still. Gears tends to be a lot more arcady, like all of Epic's offerings, than a tactical shooter really should be. Nothing destroys a brilliant maneuver better than one laggy douche with a shotgun.

Or a lag-free host with a shotgun.

That's because you prefer them to go gay for each other.

I don't mean like a cover system. I mean a dynamic animation integration with the environment so that your player can fit between tighter places and walk along ledges without looking like they're standing on thin air.

Moving towards non-interactive media, I hate it when TV shows/movies have commercials/previews that either:

A) Give away plot critical points, or the ending. You see someone dying, or the current episode ends with the fate of a character uncertain, but they show them in the clip of the next episode, etc. <--- hate this so much.

B) Are all "Next episode... SOMEONE WILL DIE!!!" and you know that it won't be a major character because they always do things like this and they will never kill off a major character. This is starting to happen less (Lost comes to mind), but other than Sliders I can't think of a single show that has really not been afraid to kill off characters. (Hell, Sliders killed off 3/4 of the original cast, and then a good deal of transitory cast until the last set of actors.)


And in video games: Unrealistic world boundaries. If we posses the ability to superjump over tall buildings, then don't make an invisible wall over a small fence my grandmother could roll her wheelchair over. Don't just say "Oh uh.... you can't go here yet." Diablo II, Act 2 did it pretty well. You couldn't advance into the Palace until you did so and so because Guards stopped you, and you needed special permission from the prince guy, or whatever.

The new uh... Jungley game for PS3 has tons of animations for characters reacting to bullets and what cover they are behind. I can't remember the name of it, but you should check it out. It's *the* game that would make me buy a PS3 if it dropped in price.

EDIT: The game is Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

That is irritating. Oblivion has the invisible walls that just say "You cannot go this way, turn back." What's even worse is that they didn't even match the borders of the map.
Thankfully they can be removed quite easily.

On Happyduds note, I have to say how much I hated the Shrek 2 commercial for giving away the greatest joke in there, and that is the Puss in Boots thing.
They suck.

Hosts don't lag, duh. The host only gets an advantage if everyone else lags, and then with the way people dart back and forth now, throw in some lag, and even the host has a ***** of a time hitting them.

Prison Break comes to mind. In the second season the vast majority of the characters were killed off. It's hard to define what a "main" character is with that show, but in my opinion if someone was in every single episode until their character's death they were a main character.


Tony Hawk's Project 8 was really bad for this. You could easily wallride and grind your way to the top of whatever large wall or fence separates you from an area that needs to be unlocked, it was really unrealistic to simply not let you fall into the new area. It's especially annoying because the commercials for the game touted the fact that the game was one continuous city with no loading, and even had a commercial with Tony Hawk (the actual man, not a video game representation) skating into an invisible wall and looking perplexed.

The healer person needs you to help gather some things including some sort of plant. Or any other go out and bring me these items or do these things before I help you sort of thing.

Unless you see the character go splat after falling down a cliff do not assume they are dead, thing.

Vehicles easlisly explode unless you are the main character then your vehilce might even be able to drive through lava!

Now that you have fought god/now that you have made it past all these traps to get to the treasure ... quick the place is going to explode and cave in!

When there is a countdown for some bomb or something. It take 5 minutes of film from the time it shows the digital display with one minute left untill the bomb is diffused or explodes. And then there is the "I don't know which wire to cut I'm color blind!..."

Games based off movies rushed out before they are completely debugged so they can keep up with the movie hype and where SO much of the movie story is taken out that unless you have seen the movie the game makes NO SENSE.

Thanks for all your replies so far, guys! Please, keep them coming!

However, please also try to stick with cliches and conventions in the actual content of the story or game -- some of you are bringing up examples of stuff that's just bad marketing, for example. Invisible walls, for instance, are a good example of a BAD gameplay convention, whereas "movies made into games" is more just a bad marketing trend. Don't get me wrong -- all this stuff will probably be useful for my personal project, but I definately need story and game CLICHES and CONVENTIONS the most.

The bad guy always wants to control or destroy the world.
Why?
Control would be impossible to maintain, destruction is suicide.

I hate when there are agents of evil.

"Soon everything will be dark and evil and wonderful hahahahaha!"

Who the HELL wants that? Clear distinguishing features of good and evil are kind of part of gaming, but it would be refreshing if the line were blurred.

I agree so hard. Like in Warcraft 3, where Kel'Thuzad the necromancer says something along the lines of "Soon, this world will be a paradise of eternal darkness!". That's a terrible cliche; so melodramatic and well ... cliche.

When I was thinking about this, I thought of a lot of things I don't like about games, and tried to think of games that had those things in them. I thought "What games have you doing errands the whole time, then it turns out you were doing the wrong thing? What games have a character who is shadowy, neither evil nor good, who suddenly sides with the protaganist at the last moment and saves the day? What games have bad guys who die, but then it turns out they weren't dead after all? What games have the character being supposedly some kind of elite, awesome person not being able to perfrom certain actions, like jumping? What games try to be 'realistic', but still allow the character to carry several huge machines guns, mutliple handguns, swords, potions, keys, various items and large ammounts of ammo?"

Then I realized, the Metal Gear Solid series contains nearly every lame video game cliche there is, but it still manages to be awesome. So, pretty much take Metal Gear Solid, and pick out the all things in out, and compare them with other games that don't do them quite so well.