Flawed Masterpieces; suboptimal/poor design choices

[Mikey the Moblin]

Oftentimes the most iconic, influential, and masterful games of all time are games that are also flawed to some degree. Some would argue all games have flaws; I don't think this is necessarily true but that can be discussed

"If players like your game, but nobody loves it, the game will fail."
-Mark Rosewater

Been thinking about this lately especially with games like elden ring, legends: Arceus, and botw2 coming out incredibly soon. Latest entries coming off of incredibly successful hallmark masterpiece titles in their past. All of which have some pretty deep and noticeable flaws.

Fans of a game are willing to overlook flaws in that game to highlight why it's so good. Given this and the above design rule, do some games intentionally design flaws to make the game more polarizing? A Stockholm syndrome style effect.

I think there is some merit to this but have nothing beyond anecdotal evidence. And, with modern games having the ability to patch the game based on community feedback where this was previously not an option, will we get these Ocarina of Times of the future?

Or is this not a topic that interests people idk

 

[mαrkαsscoρ]

I don't think its so much as that the flaws are intentional, rather than devs give certain ideas or mechanics a shot that seemed fine to them, only to be reviewed unfavorable by players

most of them set out to make the best game they can, but some ideas just backfire on them, whether big or small

 

[TheGreatCthulhu]

I don't think flaws are intentional, that implies some nefarious need to put a flaw in the game just to make it somewhat polarizing.

What's far more likely is that that was an aspect of the game they overlooked, wasn't caught until release, etc.

No game is 100% perfect, and all games have what I would call mere flicked boogers against a robust core. What's really saddening is when a game starts off with a good idea, but because of several factors, sometimes avoidable or not, the game was flawed when the first line of code was coded.

That's what happened with Psychotoxic. That game had the best ideas, but a maelstrom of bad luck, unforeseen circumstances, budget issues, and other bad news just piled up until it was congealed failure.

Sometimes flaws occur because a developer agrees to use an engine, signs a contract, and the engine just doesn't fit with their game's vision.

The final product we see as consumers are really compromised versions of the developers' original vision anyways, and good developers can prioritize what's important for the good of the game, overall.

At least, that's how I've come to see it.

 

[twilitfalchion]

I'd say flaws like that are usually just ideas that didn't stick the landing with their execution, so to speak. I'd also venture to say that it's borderline never where a developer would go out of their way to intentionally put flaws into their game for the sake of sparking controversy.

Either the devs had a specific idea they wanted to see realized but didn't work out like they thought, or one that ultimately wouldn't work no matter how much effort was put into it for a variety of reasons. And, of course, there's also the kind of situation where a vision is realized, but people simply don't like it, as has been mentioned already.

To use Zelda as an example, I don't doubt that a lot of effort was put into making the motion controls of Skyward Sword be as good as they could possibly be, but technical limitations and user experiences with the hardware not working as intended led to that aspect of the game being considerably unpopular, despite the fans that gimmick has, as well as the work put in by the developers.

There's other possibilities, of course, but these seem the most likely in the majority of cases, to me.

 

[LordErec42]

I would say that yes, some games have major intentional flaws. Maybe not so much to make the game more polarizing, but more to make the game more monetizable. Any game that contains time based mechanics that punishes players for not playing (i.e. rewards that can only be obtained by playing during a specific time window), or mechanics that allow players to pay to skip intentionally grindy/tedious parts of the game (like farming currency at a very slow rate vs buying it with real money) are intentionally flawed. In both cases the game is intentionally designed to frustrate the player with the solution being either adapting their schedule to the game, or spending real money to make the problem go away.

Nintendo has generally been good about this in the past about not doing these things, but their mobile games are starting to use these (IMHO abusive) mechanics more and more and it's very sad to see.

Outside of these kinds of cases I would say that most flaws aren't intentional (there may be some indie devs that do things like this to get attention), but come as a result of the design and development process where the devs might have had a great idea on paper that didn't pan out in the gameplay, design oversights, or lack of time/budget to fully flesh out features before release. For example, as much as I view BoTW as a deeply flawed game in many ways, I don't think Nintendo did this intentionally for PR. I think they were trying their best to make a compelling game and the reality of the finished game didn't quite match their ambitions. Same for Skyward Sword with the motion controls, on paper controlling a sword with a motion controller sounds like a lot of fun. Unfortunately that wasn't reality, but they tried their best to kinda make it work even if in the end it resulted in a game that just wasn't fun to play at times.

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

For example, as much as I view BoTW as a deeply flawed game in many ways, I don't think Nintendo did this intentionally for PR

I don't necessarily mean that these flaws exist "for PR" but since you brought up breath of the wild let's talk about it
a lot of people consider it to be a masterpiece and now, 4 years later, people still don't care about any of its flaws. Let's take the weapon durability, for example. It's not hard to see what Nintendo was trying to make the player do by forcing you to constantly scavenge weapons, even in the middle of combat at times. For a handful of people this or some other flaw ends up being a deal breaker, and it's such a central part of the experience that you're sitting there wondering "does nintendo do NO QA at all?" People who tout BoTW as a masterpiece tend to say something like, "Yes the durability sucks, but it's supposed to suck. It never really bothered me anyway, so maybe you're just lame/stupid/etc" and this is what I mean by flaws being intentionally polarizing.
People who love botw will love it so much to accept the flaws, and people who hate it will hate it because of the flaws. Is this what makes your game a masterpiece, given the truism about players liking a game vs loving it?

 

[thePlinko]

Ok but, flaws to one person aren’t the same to another.

You can make the argument as to why you think something is a flaw, but at the end of the day it’s what you think.

So no, developers don’t intentionally do things that they think is a bad design choice, they do things that they think is a good design choice, and you think it’s not.

I despise the weapon durability in BotW, it’s by far one of the worst aspects of it, or any Zelda game for that matter. But that doesn’t change the fact that some people actively think that it’s a good addition. Yes, I think it’s a flaw, but just because I think it’s a flaw doesn’t mean that everyone should think it’s a flaw.

There is no set definition for “good game design.” There are certain mindsets, sure, but just because a game doesn’t adhere to yours doesn’t mean that it has a flaw that was specifically made for people to dislike it.

 

[LordErec42]

Fair point on flaws being in the eye of the beholder. I would argue that there are classes of flaws that could be interchangeable with bugs that are pretty universally disliked (unless they're exploitable to the benefit of the player) where things didn't work out the way the developer intended at all but the broken system/etc still made it into release, but polarizing decisions like the BoTW weapon durability definitely doesn't fall into this category. It was an intentional decision with a lot of thought behind it that just didn't result in an enjoyable experience for a lot of players.

I was just reading about Spec Ops: The Line and I think that's a good example of an intentionally flawed masterpiece. The game itself is a satire of modern military shooters, and as such it intentionally embraces many of their flaws for players to experience.

 

[Bowsette Plus-Ultra]

I certainly wouldn't call the flaws intentional.

It can depend. Sometimes a game considered by its fans to be a masterpiece is from a different, more primitive gaming time. I'm sure fans of games like Elder Scrolls Arena, Doom, and Ocarina of Time will point to those games as ageless masterpieces, but all three feature design elements that feel downright primitive by modern gaming standards (the jump to 3D was kind to no one).

More often, I suspect it's just believing something is designed well and finding out later (or years later) that it could have been improved or was just limited by at the time. An easy example would be the decision for Ocarina of Time to play at a constant 20 fps, which was sub-optimal even at the time. It's a flaw that feels much more noticeable now than back then.

 

[Mikey the Moblin]

Garfield's answer to this particular question can likely be found here. Thought it was serendipitous that it came up pretty soon after I made this thread