Unbearable openings of gaming

[Bhazor]

It occurred to me going through my Steam library how many games I'd like to replay but the prospect of replaying the opening level completely removes any desire to do so.

Probably the obvious one is Skyrim. Not just the notorious unskippable wagon ride and execution but the overly long starter dungeon and long trek to that first village before you can finally turn around run up a random hill and actually play Skyrim.

There's also MGSV with its hour long opening mission which has 5 minutes of actual interaction.

Half Life with not just its tram ride but also the whole experiment sequence which seems deliberately dragged out from sheer spite.

Admittedly these problems are largely gone nowadays thanks to the ability to download or import save files from the internet. But I realised that I'm essentially downloading a cheat to skip 10% of the game I want to play makes me realise how much I miss those stand alone tutorials. Like in the original Deus EX. First time playing? Click the tutorial and play a ten minute no frills run down of all the controls and features. Returning player? Click new game and go straight to the sandbox Liberty Island mission. Which is why Deus Ex has one of the best opening levels of all time because they don't need to walk you through an unskippable hour long tutorial. Once you step onto the boardwalk you're playing Deus Ex. These days the first hour of any game you play is fucking interactive tutorial.

Its not just the long unskippable cutscenes and tutorials of course. Sometimes its just the opening level being a bit shit compared to the rest of the game.

Kotor 2 for example has an incredibly opening sequence that is filled with repetitive fights, back tracking, long detours and a tedious mine field sequence. Which is a shame because the story of that sequence is pretty good and a real tone setter. But 2 god damn hours?

Baldurs Gate 2 and its prison escape was so derided that the option of skipping the whole thing is built into every mod for it.

In these skipping the opening level means not just skipping plot but skipping decision points and starting quests. So you got to just grit your teeth and push through.

[itsfredtitmus]

Funny, the tram ride always gets praised for its pacing and "world building" (dunno what that means)

[Lemming]

Alternate start mod for Skyrim, which enhances roleplaying if you're into that by giving you items and equipment relevant to the alternate start you chose

And for Half-Life, open the console, type "sv_cheats 1", then type "map c1a0". Straight past the tram ride. You could also skip the experiment by putting in "map c1a1a", but then you have to arse around spawning the HEV suit for yourself and I can't remember the code for that.


As for other awful starts, any Bioware game. Baldur's Gate 2 as you mentioned, but also Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I'm not a huge fan of either series, but any desire I do have to replay either is crushed by the openings. An hour of running around like a dipshit getting told where to go and what to do by boring characters who end up killed 5 seconds later before the games finally open up and present you with the world/galaxy map and finally give you your own party. Not having it.

[bgmnts]

Literally just finished the Peragus opening in KOTOR 2 and yeah, while its an amazing tone setter and intense experience, it is a bit too long. And thats not even counting the 20 minute T3M3 prologue bit.

Most opening missions/sections are just tutorials which is strange back in the older days as games had manuals so you could read about the controls and mechanics.

FF VIII would have a great opening if it didn't suffer from the same problem all FF's do with the incredibly slow dialogue, if that was cut down you'd get a qgreat FMV cutscene sword fight, setting up the rivalry, bossfight in lava cave, mission fighting soldiers with bossfight on a satellite tower then running the fuck away from a giant mechanical spider ans having to fight it every so often before the time runs out.

[St_Eddie]

Kotor 2 for example has an incredibly opening sequence that is filled with repetitive fights, back tracking, long detours and a tedious mine field sequence. Which is a shame because the story of that sequence is pretty good and a real tone setter. But 2 god damn hours?

You think that you have it bad?  When I first played Knights of the Old Republic II, upon release, I spent the necessary two hours, playing through that very lonely mine field section (including the horribly slow and tedious spacewalk).  Then, just when I was ready to depart; I couldn't figure out how to progress and spent at least another hour, running around the base and trying to figure out what I was missing.  Eventually, I started over and replayed the entire section, only to have my suspicions confirmed; I had hit a game stopping bug on my initial run because KotOR II is, or at least was, a buggy mess.

I must have spent at least five hours playing through that bloody mine field section on my first day of playing.  Even when replaying the game these days, with official and fan patches applied, I get incredibly nervous when I'm nearing the section of leaving the mine field base, out of fear that I'll run into that same bug again.  I believe that I hit another bug when I completed the game too because upon defeating the final boss, it just cut to the end credits.  No ending cutscene or anything.  I have my suspicions that this was due to my character being force neutral (bang on in the middle; neither light side, nor dark).  Holy Kermit eating out Miss Piggy's pork rind, the shipped version of that game is an unfinished travesty.

[Timothy]

That tram ride in Half Life is amazing.

I had it with Xenoblade 2. Most boring opening of a game ever.

[Zetetic]

"world building" (dunno what that means)

In this case, it helps with the illusion that Black Mesa is a real place, with real physical geometry and architecture, with a real purpose.

(Notably Xen gets a kicking in small part because it thoroughly breaks with this - you're not just somewhere alien and full of frustrating jump puzzles, you're also somewhere that feels like it would only exist as a level in a computer game.)

But I can understand that it wears a bit thin after the nth playthrough.

[Zetetic]

Fallout 4 shows that Bethesda was fairly set on deepening their madness, as the game is a hand-forcing slog through guff pretty much all the way until after the deathclaw set piece.

I wonder if they'll change direction for the next few. I think the suggestion that these tie into a recent design philosophy of a single playthrough where the player is meant to see and do everything is a plausible one.

Edit: It's odd in that light that Bioware's games have historically had issues with stodgy openings, since these seem much more intended to be replayed than Bethesda's latest, despite their overall scale.

New Vegas stands out as how neat an opening can be; it's pretty much the face and SPECIAL stuff in the Doc's house and you're fairly free (to make even a few different paths into the world).

[Z]

The intro to half life was amazing for its time imo, it's probably a bit tedious now that it's a very basic version of a thing loads of games do.

Any intro that has an unskippable tutorial is pretty troublesome usually. Even worse if it's not very interactive (but also not just a video you can leave shiteing on).
The winner for this thread, by a fucking landslide, is Okami; about 15 minutes of stupidly slow text that you have to wait to complete before you manually move onto the next line; with this one N64 style sound effect running behind it throughout. By the time I got through the intro I just wanted to save the game and turn it off.
Seriously, just put this on in the background and see how long it takes to annoy you https://youtu.be/ZcgaGbtmj_4?t=3m41s Bear in mind they're using the fast text rollout option (hold the square button iirc) that wasn't available on the original game.

[Kelvin]

Twilight Princess; a game with such an awful opening, it's hard to know at exactly which point the game truly starts. You spend an hour fucking about in your village, learning skills you'll have to use twice in the entire game, then a dull chase through some ugly woods, followed by a whole other day doing chores in the village, before finally getting sucked into the Twilight Realm, and setting the main plot in motion.

And yet, even when you escape from the Twilight, you still have to go back to the village in wolf form, do a bunch of tedious sneaking about, then re-enter the twilight, do a shit collectathon, and finally enter your first dungeon.

I reckon, 3-4 hours will have passed before you actually enter that dungeon, and almost everything leading up to it feels like interminable busywork. You don't actually step out into Hyrule Field until an hour or so later. - and even then, the vast majority of it is blocked off by ugly, sky high barriers. Reaching that point takes 5 or so hours, but I honestly think it's more like 15-20 hours before the game actually opens up enough to feel fun and worth exploring.

[Shay Chaise]

Yeah, another good call. I really enjoyed it on the Wii and it was actually the first Zelda I completed, believe it or not. The slow opening kind of worked for me because it got me back into the swing of what Zelda is and brought back memories of Ocarina. Even still, it felt interminable and that first venture out onto Hyrule only to be cock blocked by invisible barriers is so irritating. And then the enforced wolf sneaking stuff is just awful.

I'd actually put Wind Waker in this conversation, too. I bounced off it several times due to the unbearable stealth shit and that confusing Fort right at the start. It took until WW HD for me to give it another go and force myself to get past that section. Instant restart stealth sections are probably the worst bits of gaming for me, even worse than QTEs or Nathan Drake.

[Bhazor]

Zelda is notorious for this stuff with its obsession of young man entering the world trope, Skyward Sword being the worst for me, so BotW completely blowing that convention out of the water might be its single most important change.

As for other awful starts, any Bioware game. Baldur's Gate 2 as you mentioned, but also Mass Effect and Dragon Age. I'm not a huge fan of either series, but any desire I do have to replay either is crushed by the openings. An hour of running around like a dipshit getting told where to go and what to do by boring characters who end up killed 5 seconds later before the games finally open up and present you with the world/galaxy map and finally give you your own party. Not having it.

Well Dragon Age: Origins is a wierd one. Theres like 6 different opening scenarios which are totally different with unique casts and a couple decent fights. So replaying the game you can pick a brand new scenario you've never seen before. But then all those endings tie into a single level where it turns to tedious shit for about 5 hours. It is this second level that stops me touching the game again. It feels like they couldn't decide which opening level to have, the heroic last stand or the character driven out of his home, so they decided to use both.

[Kelvin]

Zelda is notorious for this stuff with its obsession of young man entering the world trope, Skyward Sword being the worst for me, so BotW completely blowing that convention out of the water might be its single most important change.

Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword all suffer from the problem, yes. Although I think I resent it most in Twilight Princess because it's not just limiting your freedom, it's also taking place in this ugly, boring forest, full of unusually bland characters, whereas as least WW and SS are oozing with charm right from the start.

I don't think it's the "boy entering the world" trope that's the problem, though. OoT and LttP both had that, but get into the story and action almost immediately. You can enter a dungeon within two minutes fo LttP, and within ten minutes of OoT. You can enter the overworld within an hour. That wasn't true of any of the games that followed Ocarina.       

[monolith]

You think that you have it bad?  When I first played Knights of the Old Republic II, upon release, I spent the necessary two hours, playing through that very lonely mine field section (including the horribly slow and tedious spacewalk).  Then, just when I was ready to depart; I couldn't figure out how to progress and spent at least another hour, running around the base and trying to figure out what I was missing.  Eventually, I started over and replayed the entire section, only to have my suspicions confirmed; I had hit a game stopping bug on my initial run because KotOR II is, or at least was, a buggy mess.

I must have spent at least five hours playing through that bloody mine field section on my first day of playing.  Even when replaying the game these days, with official and fan patches applied, I get incredibly nervous when I'm nearing the section of leaving the mine field base, out of fear that I'll run into that same bug again.  I believe that I hit another bug when I completed the game too because upon defeating the final boss, it just cut to the end credits.  No ending cutscene or anything.  I have my suspicions that this was due to my character being force neutral (bang on in the middle; neither light side, nor dark).  Holy Kermit eating out Miss Piggy's pork rind, the shipped version of that game is an unfinished travesty.

Kotor 2 wasn't just a buggy mess, it was a buggy unfinished mess. It was pushed out incomplete. Even if you forgive the bugs (which is difficult) the final third of the game just isn't there and everything that has been building up just sort of stops.

It's such a shame as the original KOTOR was fantastic and there's a really decent sequel somewhere in KOTOR 2. I spent years following Team Gizka as they threatened to finish the game, only for another group of fans to finish it before they ever but their version out. The finished version is much better but it doesn't have the impact that it could have had if the game was finished on release.

[biggytitbo]

The interminable unskippable shite you have to sit through in many classic Nintendo games takes some beating, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time are two obvious ones, even some of the SNES ones too.

[Old Nehamkin]

The interminable unskippable shite you have to sit through in many classic Nintendo games takes some beating, Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time are two obvious ones, even some of the SNES ones too.

Eh? Mario 64 has a thirty-second opening cutscene before you hop out of a pipe and you're free to proceed directly to the first level. It's actually one of the most simple, immediate game openings I can think of.

[Bhazor]

Currently playing Dying Light. Really enjoying it but that prologue was fucking atrocious.

[bgmnts]

Kotor 2 wasn't just a buggy mess, it was a buggy unfinished mess. It was pushed out incomplete. Even if you forgive the bugs (which is difficult) the final third of the game just isn't there and everything that has been building up just sort of stops.

It's such a shame as the original KOTOR was fantastic and there's a really decent sequel somewhere in KOTOR 2. I spent years following Team Gizka as they threatened to finish the game, only for another group of fans to finish it before they ever but their version out. The finished version is much better but it doesn't have the impact that it could have had if the game was finished on release.

For a buggy unfinished mess its still really really good.

[Bhazor]

Kotor 2 for me is one of the best RPGs ever made and makes Kotor 1 look like a shitty fanfic or a kids cartoon. One of the most maturely written and politically inclined games ever made. A game all about the morality of interventionism and cyclic violence released during the ramp up to the war in Iraq.

I must have been the only person to not get any critical bugs back when I played it on the Xbox. The only bug I had was a side quest not letting me get the reward. It is telling that one of the very first things Disney did when they bought Lucas Arts was repackage the deleted content mod as an offical patch. In one month they had done more to preserve the game than Lucas Arts had done in the previous decade.

[bgmnts]

Yeah that ^^

Obsidian were so talented.

[biggytitbo]

Eh? Mario 64 has a thirty-second opening cutscene before you hop out of a pipe and you're free to proceed directly to the first level. It's actually one of the most simple, immediate game openings I can think of.

Was it 30 seconds long? Seemed to last about 3 hours. Maybe I just sat through it too many times.

[St_Eddie]

Kotor 2 wasn't just a buggy mess, it was a buggy unfinished mess. It was pushed out incomplete. Even if you forgive the bugs (which is difficult) the final third of the game just isn't there and everything that has been building up just sort of stops.

It's such a shame as the original KOTOR was fantastic and there's a really decent sequel somewhere in KOTOR 2. I spent years following Team Gizka as they threatened to finish the game, only for another group of fans to finish it before they ever but their version out. The finished version is much better but it doesn't have the impact that it could have had if the game was finished on release.

You're preaching to the converted.

Kotor 2 for me is one of the best RPGs ever made and makes Kotor 1 look like a shitty fanfic or a kids cartoon. One of the most maturely written and politically inclined games ever made. A game all about the morality of interventionism and cyclic violence released during the ramp up to the war in Iraq.

The writing in KotOR II is exemplary and Kreia is the greatest character from throughout all of Star Wars.  The game itself though, is a buggy and incomplete mess.

[Twed]

Would agree that Super Mario 64 is an odd choice.

Worse than interminable openings is games that have unskippable stuff after save points before a big boss. FFVII, I'm looking at you.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

Batman: Arkham Asylum copies the opening of Half-Life, with you taking an unskippable journey into the heart of the titular facility. For some reason though, they decided to leave the player in full control, so you can't naff off to make a cuppa while the caped crusader gets on with it. You just have to hold forward on the joystick for what feels like ten minutes.

[Bhazor]

All of the Assassin's Creed games. But especially 4.

https://youtu.be/UOgvbS4GkF0?t=44s

[madhair60]

Any time there's a voice-over and a fucking map

[Bazooka]

Every fucking modern game that throws a tutorial message on the screen x20, no I did not read it ,and yes I will get a grasp of the mechanics later.

Zelda 3D's are of course clear choices, although OOT being the best game ever made gets the opening perfect.  I think generally there is no problem with overlong openings until you want to play the game again, of course this is not a design consideration priority at development stage.

[a peepee tipi]

Everything said about KOTOR 2/Obsidian is correct.


Both Kingdom Hearts games. KH2's opening is ridiculous in every aspect, but that KH1 is still praised for its emphasis on exploration is mind-blowing, fucking shit ass puzzles and running around Hollow Bastion for 4 hours just to get your bearings. I mean, the immediate opening sequence is fine, but Destiny Island is a preamble to the game's tedium and beginning with a stupid fetch quest nearly stopped me from giving it a fair chance back then.

[chand]

All of the Assassin's Creed games. But especially 4.

https://youtu.be/UOgvbS4GkF0?t=44s

The opening of Origins is relatively snappy, thankfully. The boring present-day stuff in Origins is so perfunctory it actually barely makes sense, it feels like someone cut about an hour of crap out and left about ten minutes where you play as a woman who walks through a cave briefly.

I never played Black Flag but the opening of 3 was awful, there's about 90 minutes of pissing about on a boat for some reason and then an extended prologue section before you get dropped into a completely different timeline where the actual main game happens. Once you get to that point an enjoyable game breaks out but I almost never made it that far.

The ship stuff seems to have appeared in a bunch of AssCreed games, even Origins has three long ship battles, despite the map being completely centralised with all the main areas being entirety accessible by land. Someone at Ubisoft has a big boner for trying to make a naval battle sim, I presume.

[Sebastian Cobb]

The opener to Driver on the PlayStation was an absolute chore. It wasn't until about 20 years later that I saw the Bruce Dern film that it all made sense.