10 Video Game Abilities Developers Always Get Wrong
5. Being A Passenger In Vehicles
EA
Transport tends to be a huge element of gameplay in military shooters. For franchises like Battlefield, the ability for the player to traverse great distances in a manner of aircraft, ground and sea vehicles is essential, and yet it doesn't always come off without a hitch.
What most players are really after is the seamless ability to walk into a helicopter or some other vehicle and just... be fine. Try that now and you'll end up clipping through and most likely plummeting to your death during take-off, even if there's clear space to either sit down or stand.
The transition between positions on a given vehicle also just never feels as cinematic as it should be. Switching positions shouldn't take place during a quick fade to black, but that's how it is in most titles.
Yes, there are a whole host of implications in allowing players simply to walk onto a vehicle and take off - namely overcrowding - but there's still something to be said about maximising the space available in certain transport craft, as well as including more dynamic ways of exiting aircraft when they're airborne.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
