[General Discussion] Overused Gaming Conventions

One thing that's always bothered me about FPS games is, generally speaking, a lot of weapons, as cool as they may seem, are rather worthless. For instance, you may start out with a pistol, but once you get that machine gun, you'll never, ever go back to the pistol, unless you just happened to have run out of bullets on that machine gun.

Some games have been forcing you to use said pistol via not giving you enough ammo. In HALO 2 I found myself using the covenant weapons more simply because the human weapons didn't hold much ammo, and finding ammo for them was ridiculous at times. Same thing with Call of Duty 2. I find myself using the Nazi weapons simply because I know like half the Wermacht is going to be using that weapon, so I have a constant supply (there are exceptions though sometimes, cause in COD2 you generally have a lot of friendlies, who, um, get killed, so you can take their ammo. Just make sure the Nazi's kill them, cause friendly fire isn't tolerated if you do it to them, not vice versa).


Another pet peeve of mine is in RPG's, where they give you spells like slow, poison, stun. Again, they may look cool as heck, but 99% of the time you will not be using it, because they either won't work (bosses in particular seem immune to it, but a funny example is in most Final Fantasy games, where the majority of mobs are immune/resistant to quake/poison, so in like the first FF, it's a waste of money to even buy those spells), the battle won't last long enough, or you'll want to spend that mana on casting a damage spell as opposed to one of those spells. There are exceptions, but most of the time that's how it works.

Strangely enough, when those spells are used on your characters, they almost always work, and are always detrimental (such as a boss casting slow on your entire party, followed by a poison which knocks off 10% of your health per turn).

And yes, I know, that's in the RPG cliche list, but I always hated that. Why are you going to waste time putting a spell into the game, when at the end, your characters are only going to be using 1-3 spells max anyway?

Jam it back in, in the dark.