I’m playing Overlord right now. It’s a humorous, fun game… but I keep running into two chief frustrations: the camera and the save game system.
These problems are ancient, yet they still appear in many new games.
Good cameras are hard to do. They’re a very complex, expensive problem to tackle in any 3D game world. It should be considered throughout the design, including the world & level design. The problem is sufficiently complicated and difficult that I don’t expect games to have great cameras, but they damn well better not have horrible and often unplayable cameras. I run into this a lot in Overlord, and the game gives me almost no control over the camera. Ninja Gaiden II is another horrible offender in this area, but it’s made even worse by the split-second timing in that game. It’s hard to have fun when you can’t see what you’re doing.
Few 3D games have ever done the camera right. So, I’m mildly forgiving about poor cameras… but save systems? Give me a break. Overlord’s like a step back from 16-bit RPG save systems. You have the equivalent of save spots, but all they do is trigger an auto-save, and there’s a clunky option to change which slot you auto-save to. So save spots without the benefit of solid control and with the added ability to screw yourself over if you walk across a hidden save spot. Oh, and sometimes there are lots of enemy spawns on the save spots. And you don’t start with any minions when you load.
There’s no excuse to have a crappy save system in the late 2000’s.