What games have you enjoyed for the "wrong" reasons?
So, I just finished playing Sleeping Dogs. It's a kung fu action game with a heavy emphasis on the hand to hand combat. It feels like it's the Arkham games roided up with some hack and slash juice. Almost all the upgrades are hand combat based, the vast majority of combat encounters are hand to hand. It's how the game was advertised, it's what all the reviews talk about, it's why I was interested in it, and why it was recommended to me. And you know what? I was way more into the shooting than the hand to hand combat.
The game does not seem all that proud of its gunplay, there's not a place to buy or customize guns, you just have to pick them up when a firefight starts and drop them after, and there's only like 3 guns total in the game. But it's some of the most fun gunplay I've played in years in a third person shooter. It heavily utilizes slow motion when you jump over cover or kick an enemy and leap into the air, incentivizing you to not just stay in cover the whole game. It really reminds me of Vanquish, which is one of my favorites in the third person shooter genre of all time.
So this got me curious, what are some games that others have enjoyed for "wrong" reasons? Wrong is in quotes, because, well, it is still something meant to be enjoyed if it's in the game, but it clearly wasn't the focus of either dev time, or marketing, or general hype around the game, or all of the above. Although if you want to share something that wasn't something meant to be enjoyed at all, like something left in totally unintentionally by the developers, feel free to share that too.
Sims series, because it would let me torture people and create personal hell scenarios for the NPCs. Used to be my outlet for the entire middle schoiol.
Yeah, I wouldn't say this wasn't for the wrong reasons...at least not wrong as by the initial scope of the thread. The game, as a sandbox, was designed to be this. One of the game designers, Don Hopkins, posted several revisions of the original design documents which talks about how this behavior is designed. For example, drowning people by not including a ladder get out of the pool was an intentful design decision.
Like you made life miserable for the actual sims you played? Whose house you built?
Weren't pools without ladders kind of a meme at some point? It's kinda popular to do that in sims, I think.
Yeah, I would just create random sims, and do whatever makes them sad. Burn their food, remove the ladder from the pool, force them to interact and live with people they hate, deny them toilets, this kind of stuff. I wouldn't play the game as intended, instead I would mod it to give me basically everything because without it I would have to make their lives actually livable.
Pokémon was intended to be a simple and accessible RPG for children, but I got pretty deep into the surprisingly complex competitive scene during my teenage years, which isn't something Nintendo intended the games to be at first (and in a way, still doesn't).
I also love Breath of the Wild but rather than complete the story or hunt down all the shrines and korok seeds, I'm happy to just wander all over the place aimlessly. I find it to be very therapeutic and enjoyable treating the game as a nature simulator of sorts, as odd as that might sound...
I think you might be playing Breath of the Wild more "as designed" than a lot of people. It always seemed to me like it was harkening back to old school game design, where no one person was expected to find every collectible or secret, you just explored till you were done having fun with the game.
I play BotW pretty similarly: as an escape into a chill, virtual world in which I can cook random crap and look at scenery. I'm generally doing some quests on the way but I agree, it seems very much intended to me.
The shift from "DO THE THING" to "oooh, let's see what that is!" was weird when I felt it happen, but it felt wrong for a Zelda game, at least at first.
I wouldn't have BOTW be any different if I could go back.
You are definitely not supposed to collect all the korok seeds. The fact that your reward for doing so is literally a golden turd makes it pretty clear.
Wait, are you serious? That is hilarious! Does the turd actually do anything?
Nope.
I used to love World of Warcraft because of the mechanical complexity of the game and the sheer amount of min-maxxing involved.
There used to be five primary stats (Strength, Agility, Intellect, Stamina and Spirit) and a whole cavalcade of secondary stats (Hit, Expertise, Armor Penetration, Parry, Dodge, Block Value, Block Chance, Melee Haste, Spell Haste, five elemental resistances, Critical Strike Chance, Spell Penetration, and others I may have missed) that governed each character with its own unique effects. On top of this, the talent trees were complex and rewarded the player each time they gained a level.
Nowadays World of Warcraft has been designed for the lowest common denominator in mind and the game really suffers as a result. There are now just four primary stats and four secondary stats to take into consideration. Thing is, Strength, Agility and Intellect are identical in what they do and are found in equal amounts on all gear, so that's in actuality just two primary stats left. Stamina is largely unchanged and still provides HP, while the secondaries are just Crit, Haste, Mastery and Versatility. On top of this, Blizzard went with a CoD-style perk system which gives you a single trait every 15 levels. This means that you'd only have 8 options to make as opposed to the thousands you had before.
Levelling used to be fun. Now, it feels more like Blizzard are mocking the intelligence of their players by giving them only 2 to 3 buttons to press until around level 60. On top of this, the quest design is so tedious and un-fun that it doesn't feel good to level a character at all.
TBF to blizzard, I'm more of a filthy casual when it comes to minmaxing. I enjoy the act of optimizing my own build to some extent, comparing stuff, yada yada. But I don't wanna invest huge amounts of time into it, and if I don't do that I'm going to be behind the curve, so I'll just look at a guide online. At which point, why not cut out the middle man and dumb down the system for the average joe? I can hardly fault blizzard, though I admit they took something fun away from you (and me too in a way, but it never really was an option for me).
Could you see a system that makes everyone happy, no matter how much they invest into minmaxing their character? Maybe something where you have a hierarchical choice, i.e. avg joe chooses Preset 1 (e.g. consisting of 10 traits), I get to swap the default traits for ones more alike my style, and you get to dive deep into the traits and tinker with them.
Since the game pretty explicitly demands tanks and healers and DDs, maybe that means that everyone has only one (or very few) variables to optimize for, limiting design freedom. Do you think WoW as a game doesn't allow for such character build choice because it has such a strong meta game component that everything off-meta is either genius (and therefore next meta) or dumb?
Because that makes the game less enjoyable and less rewarding to play.
WoW suffers greatly from this issue because gear feels irrelevant until you hit the level cap. It's not like the old-school days when you could frequently purchase items on the auction house to min-max your gear for more optimal levelling or DPS in dungeons.
It's best to make the hardcore players happy, honestly. Catering to casuals and feeding them everything on a silver platter is what ruined WoW. WoW used to be a hardcore game until late into Cataclysm (though the true moment when WoW became a casual dog turd is heavily debated by fans).
Here are two eras by comparison:
Between Patch 6.2 and the launch of Legion, WoW faced a fifteen month content drought where no new progression content was released. Warlords of Draenor was so unsuccessful that the game haemorrhaged almost half its subscriber base within six months, and even shamed Activision Blizzard's directors into no longer publishing subscriber figures as of Q3 2015. And this was before the content drought. It's believed that WoW's player count probably dropped to less than two million during this period.
Compare this to the Burning Crusade which faced a similiarly lengthy eleven month drought between Patches 2.1 (Black Temple) and 2.4 (Sunwell Plateau.) Yes, Zul'aman came out in 2.3 but it didn't really count because it was a side raid filled with catch up gear.
Unlike WoD's drought, this one actually saw a rise in subscribers during the period until the game peaked at around 12 million by the start of Wrath. This drought didn't affect the majority of players because they actually had to progress through the game's content sequentially: first by doing Normal Dungeons, then Heroic Dungeons, then Tier 4 raids, then Tier 5 raids and finally Tier 6 raids. Compare this to WoD where the only thing to do was Hellfire Citadel because welfare epics invalidated the game. Of course the player base was going to get bored and unsubscribe very quickly.
There was also no Tier 6 quality welfare epics in Burning Crusade until 2.4 and even then they cost entire weeks worth of Badges of Justice. WoD however allowed you to completely skip the game's dungeons and first two raids and get geared for Hellfire Citadel LFR in an afternoon of running through Tanaan Jungle. And that's what a lot of players did because Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry became irrelevant.
WoD died because Blizzard dumbed down and pruned everything to intelligence insulting levels, then shoehorned everybody into the exact same raid on 4 different difficulty levels, with only a health and damage boost between every difficulty, oh and new mechanics being added on the Mythic versions of each raid fight.
I don't think WoW has ever been particularly mechanically difficult outside of PvP, where it continues to have some mechanical difficulty.
I don't think it's fair to say that the game is designed for the lowest common denominator now - the game is designed so that people who don't know what they're doing can still do something; there's still a lot of min-maxing, and the choices that you make now are actually relatively free and relatively important, which I think is actually preferable. With talent trees, everyone who was playing at a level that required a minimal amount of competence had the same build, with perhaps a point or two difference. Now people can actually have different builds, and the choices are relatively free choices.
With respect to stats, the simplification of Int and Spirit is what lead to having gear switch primary stats on respec, which I think is a very good quality of life benefit (as someone who switches roles, this is a life saver). For secondary stats, I hated most of the old secondary stats, because they got in the way of actually playing, and again - anyone who played at a level that required a minimal amount of competence used Reforgenator to get the best possible reforges anyways.
I agree that removing these did hurt the "RPG" part of the game, but the MMO Adventure Raid & Dungeon seems more in line with what WoW was from the start - a lighter, non-hardcore MMO that was something anyone could get into.
It's a QoL change, yes. But it's one that killed almost any gear diversity in the game. Primary stats used to have diverse effects: Strength used to provide Block Value and 2 melee AP, Agility used to provide crit chance and 2 ranged AP (1 in TBC & Wrath), while Intellect used to govern the size of your mana pool and didn't start giving spell power until Cataclysm.
Now, all three of these primaries have the identical function of being mere attack power increases and may as well be merged into one stat.
But the 'less is more' mentality really hasn't encouraged build diversity, at least in PvM anyway. For as long as there are choices, there will always be somebody with an Excel spreadsheet calculating exactly how much DPS, threat, damage mitigation and healing a talent choice can output. It's why some of the specs in BFA and Legion only had one viable talent path while others were suboptimal and would result in drastic output losses.
And even if in a perfect world, Blizzard quickly made balance and gameplay adjustments where necessary rather than waiting until the next expansion to make drastic changes, the game has sacrificed far too much of its identity for the sake of making these changes.
The low level game has particularly suffered from Blizzard's heavy-handed stat, talent and ability pruning. It feels so tedious, boring and unrewarding that it almost seems like Blizzard are deliberately making it shitty to push $60 level boost sales.
When WoW's inspiration at the time was EverQuest, it wasn't exactly hard to make a game more casual than that. It was a hardcore MMO with severe amounts of grinding, heavy penalties for dying, raid bosses originally thought to be unkillable which even the SOE devs tried to stop players from killing, etc.
There's also a very huge disregard for old content that comes out of the design and balance changes Blizzard make. Two examples:
It's not just the RPG elements of the game that Blizzard have harmed. They've also hurt the MMO aspect as well through other changes.
Every single major quest line in the past few years has been heavily instanced, heavily scripted and heavily phased to the point where the game feels more like a bad single player experience than a true MMO. Examples of this include Tanaan Jungle, Broken Shore, the Artifact Weapon quests, each of the major story quests in BFA/Legion, and many others. The game doesn't feel like a persistent living world anymore. It feels like a conveyor belt to the next quest hub.
The worst part is that a lot of these quests are either unskippable (by gating content behind them) or can only be skipped by developer oversights. The Tanaan Jungle quests are a huge example. There is no option to talk to a NPC and skip the whole hour long quest line. The way to skip it entirely is to find an underwater cave in the Timeless Isle, sit in a chair, interact with a fireplace, get teleported for no apparent reason to Gorgrond, then swim for about 15 mins to the Iron Docks and talk to a flight master to fly to your Garrison.
Min-maxing was my jam back in the day. All the ways you mentioned but I also used to play my own game with healing meters. Due to Downranking I'd have 3-5 levels of each healing spell on my bar and try for 0-death + 0-overheal dungeon runs. It was actually very challenging! Always felt great when I pulled it off. Then they murdered Downranking and my little game was ruined.
When the first Halo came out its physics engine was fairly novel. I spent hours just using grenades to launch Warthog buggies skyward. My friends and I would compete to pull off the most ridiculous stunts.
Another buggy-related story... Mass Effect's Mako exploration got a lot of criticism, but I really enjoyed it. I made a point of wandering every planet with the thing and thought the ability to do that made the galaxy feel a lot richer. (It reminded me in some ways of an update to the resource collection of Star Control 2 / Ur-Quan Masters.) I was disappointed when Mass Effect 2 replaced it with that shallow "scan from orbit" mechanic, which just made planets feel like signposts instead of actual places.
Ha, I remember hours wasted away in the Halo: Combat Evolved demo. There was one summer where a few times my cousins and I would get online in blood gulch (the only available map for multiplayer in the demo) and just screw around with the warthogs and the banshees. Oh, the places we managed to wedge that warthog...
I also loved the Mako! I used to drive it just for the fun of it, trying to get up mountains just because and such. When Andromeda announced there will be driving and exploration again I was happy, but ugh, we all know how that turned out.
My Final Fantasy VIII playthrough completely devolved into obsolescence once the game opened up Triple Triad, a card minigame. I never actually finished the story and instead just wandered to different areas of the game to play Triple Triad and get new cards. At some point my devotion to the card game made the context of FFVIII itself feel like a burden, so I shed the actual gameplay of the actual game in favor of a freeware recreation of Triple Triad on my computer. It was much more efficient! I no longer had to worry about navigating Squall from area to area and suffering through dialogue! Instead I could just play, play play--the minigame of course--as my game discs and Playstation gathered dust.
It's not that the developers didn't want us to enjoy Triple Triad, I just don't think they wanted it to completely supplant the larger game it sat within. As such, my playthrough of Final Fantasy VIII will always be both "wrong" and incomplete--usurped by its own offspring.
I had a similar feeling towards FFIX's Tetra Master . It's an absolute shame that Square Enix re-released as an online only subscription based addon to FFXI, which wasn't even part of the Xbox 360 version of the game!
I used to play NASCAR in the wrong way. Destroying all vehicles was much more fun than actually racing.
Sonic Adventure 2: Battle was absolutely, 100% all about the Chaos for me. Breeding them to get cool colour combos, maxing their stats out, collecting all the evolution types, buying all the stuff from the stores. I ended up getting all the emblems with my brother, but I was prouder of my Chao accomplishments.
Grand Theft Auto Vice City + San Andreas
After I found out there are multiplayer mods for those, I quickly learned about "stunting", which basically is using the physics engine in creative ways, e.g. bumping on a street curb/low wall would let you "jump" on top of a roof. I then also found out there's a whole community called GTAStunting.net. It also got me into image/video editing, had quite some fun creating custom "skins" for people.