Things games should have, but don't

[Shadowth117]

This may sound silly, but it needs to be said. Playtesting. Playtesting, playtesting, playtesting. Some games do it well, some do not. And some don't seem to do it all. To use an example of something that could have been seriously improved from playtesting, lets look at Modern Warfare 2 since it was and is rather popular.

The One Man Army perk. Now this was a good idea, but god damn is it stupid in practice. What it does is sacrifice the player's secondary weapon slot for a backpack. With this backpack, a player can switch to any of his classes at any time. It sounds cool being able to do that when you decide you want to snipe the guy standing in the open on the other side of the map, or you want to switch to an riot shield to provide a distraction for your teammates to exploit by flanking the enemy or a number of other cool things. Sadly, its ruined by not only allowing you to switch to the same class an unlimited number of times, effectively providing infinite ammo, but it also replenishes explosives. This breaks the perk completely by allowing people to either camp retardedly well with a wall of infinite claymores mines between them and their camping spot without penalty, repeatedly launch their grenade launchers like mortars all over the map, or even do both at the same time. Combined with the Danger Close perk, while it is counterable it becomes one of the most overpowered techniques in the game while requiring little skill or even effort to use.

For a more recent example, I'll mention Halo Reach and its Armor Lock armor ability. Once again there's no reason this ability had to be overpowered. The concept is basically that when shit's going down, you can use this ability to become invincible for up to 6 seconds to protect from a rocket, a vehicle, or whatever. By all means there should be nothing wrong with this. But because of a combination of minor issues, it becomes a real gamebreaker. First of all, you can use it to bounce off sticky grenades. Now obviously this makes sense if its still in the air, but when its melted onto your armor and you're at the point where in any other game in the series you would be seriously screwed, the game allows you to use Armor Lock and suddenly the grenade just bounces off harmlessly. Sure I can live with that, however annoying it may be when you do get the rare stick on another player, but whatever. However its also an ace in the hole in melee combat. With melee combat being a huge part of the multiplayer since Halo 3, this is a large issue. A few silly things make this a problem.

The first is that after Armor Locking a player is shifted to third person view and is able to look around 360 degrees. Now the issue with this is that not only can the Armor Locked player instantaneously turn in the direction he is facing in third person, but he can also melee without any recovery time as soon as he releases the armor ability button. So both players could melee, one could Armor Lock, the other could try to back up while circling around, but because the Armor Locked player can instantly turn and melee by deactivating the Armor Lock whenever he choose, this becomes a problem. Not only that, but he can also pull a feint and deactivate the ability before instantly reactivating it. This usually causes the other player to melee the invincible player and then get killed because his melee was unable to recover before the other player could cancel his ability and melee him in return. Now some of the problem is most certainly to do with latency issues, but it could easily been modified to avoid these and the more obvious issues because of the way it was designed.

Now I realize both my examples are from shooters since those are the games I usually play, but I highly doubt that none of you have experienced other gamebreaking things that have occured in your games that could have easily been fixed if the the developers took two seconds to see how idiotic these things were and modified a variable or two to fix them.