10 Ambitious Gameplay Ideas That Broke Everything
Doom's most interesting enemy also ruins the whole damn game.
Nobody wants to see a video game simply coast on its franchise's prior glories and give us the same damn thing again and again until we're sick of it.
Video game series can evolve by introducing bold new mechanics which end up becoming the norm, but it's also fair to say that these concepts don't always hit.
Sometimes an ambitious, ground-breaking mechanic leaves large swaths of players cold, but it can certainly get much worse than that.
Sometimes the gameplay concept fails spectacularly enough that it basically ruins the entire game, one way or another.
Maybe it fundamentally alters the gameplay's DNA in a way which most fans hate, introduces major technical headaches, or just straight-up breaks the core loop beyond recognition.
Whatever the knock-on effect, these intriguing and creative gameplay concepts all ended up falling pancake-flat, leaving most wishing that the developers never even bothered at all.
Though players should certainly want to foster and encourage creativity in their favourite video game franchises, there are evidently limits to this, and these botched mechanics all prove precisely why. The interest was there, but the execution? Ehh...
10. The Batmobile - Batman: Arkham Knight
Batman: Arkham Knight attempted to expand the series' open world further still by finally making the Batmobile fully playable - an awesome idea in theory which many were dying to see, and yet ended up being the game's overpowering undoing.
As neat as a summonable Batmobile sounds on paper, Rocksteady ultimately made players excessively reliant on the vehicle, enough that it becomes a genuine annoyance, the infamous mandatory tank missions proving especially groan-inducing.
Long before the game has reached its end, the Batmobile has outstayed its welcome, proving not merely an example of too much of a good thing, but how horribly misappropriated Batman's greatest "gadget" could be.
It's an addition to the series which ultimately tanks (sorry) the whole game, turning an otherwise thrilling wish fulfilment exercise into a stamina-annihilating bore. And let's be honest, is there anything worse for a freakin' Batman game to be than boring?