[:plant:] "If _I_ were a game designer"

Pet peeves about a genre or a particular game? Which larger or smaller design details would you do differently were you given the chance, and how?

For instance, I have a problem with reloading in FPS. Most games have lenghty and detailed reload animations and it makes sense that a machinegun with belt ammunition would take a long time to reload, but what I don't like are the little inconsistencies about it. Some games opt for making you stuck for the duration of the reload, before you can do anything else like switch to another weapon. Some games let you interrupt the reload animation to switch to another weapon, but once you pull out the previous weapon, you have to start the reload animation all over again.

It's particularly annoying when you have a weapon with ammo in the clip, and pressing reload immediately reduces the ammo count to zero, yet the ammo count doesn't fill up until the very end of the reload animation, even if you clearly see the fresh clip is already in the gun. Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 did this, there is an infuriating little pause between sliding the clip into the gun, and the ammo count blinking to life. It's lead me to switching to another weapon right as I thought the pistol was reloaded, only to switch back to the pistol after my shotgun runs out and there's a Tank still rushing at me, and discover the pistol starts the reload animation all over again.


What I'd do, is make the reload out of not one long animation, but several shorter ones, each one differently interruptable depending on the situation.

For instance, emptying the clip out of the gun would leave the gun without a clip until the next animation slides a fresh clip.
If you switch to another gun, or got hit, or otherwise interrupted before sliding a new clip, the gun would not magically have an (empty) clip inside when you pull it out again.
The next animation would slide the clip in, and if you interrupted that, the fresh clip would still be there, part way or all the way, depending where you got.

If I didn't shoot all the bullets before reloading, there would be one more bullet in the chamber, it would still show in the ammo count, no matter when you interrupt any of the animations, and you wouldn't need to pull the slider back to complete the sequence, the ammo count would blink to full as soon as you finished sliding the clip in properly. Until that click it would show "1".
If I had shot the last bullet, then naturally pulling the slider would be another animation, after which the ammo count would be full again.


It's a minor detail, but it's caused me many deaths in games like Call of Duty 4 and Left 4 Dead. With more and more attention being paid to details and realism, it makes no sense for a soldier to toss away a half empty clip, start putting in a fresh one, get knocked back by an explosion and notice another empty clip has suddenly appeared on his gun, forcing him to toss it away as well and arduously slide a new one in. And then wait two more seconds before being able to fire the bullets.



The first Mafia game went further, making you lose any ammo in a clip when you reloaded a gun with ammo left in it. I would love to see something like that done in something like ArmA or STALKER, where you could also handle inventory, with half empty clips, refilling old ones etc, but it's obviously not necessary in most contemporary shooters.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Personally I wouldn't mind the main character dying at the end of a game if it's done well enough. Most people have a knee-jerk reaction about protagonist death, and I kinda get it if you only think about spending all that time playing the game, only to be "rewarded" at the end with death anyway. But developers do this all the time with other games. How many escort missions have had you protect some person, guy or a girl, only to have them die in a cutscene just later anyway? I think those kinds of deaths are far bigger dick moves than the protagonist dying. I get more upset about NPC plot deaths then protagonist ones.

But it really depends on how you do it. There's been really stupid protagonist deaths in movies as well, and understandably it's those that games look to when trying to justify never killing off a protagonist. You want a franchise after all, and don't want to anger your players.

But again, that's just me. If your character achieves something, has something worth dying for, even eventually does, that would be just as satisfying as some bs happy ending. MGS4 certainly would have benefitted without the copout.


And Black did not have you lose your entire clip.

How ya doing, buddy?

I originally thought Soap also dies at the end of CoD4, which made the ending even more poignant and powerful than it already was after such an amazing finale.

Spoiler:

Resurrecting practically the entire cast for a sequel and killing them off again cheapened the whole thing so much.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.