Invisible walls

Red Faction, a game about smashing things that for some mystifying reason seems to delight in regularly imposing its shitty driving model on players by forcing them to traverse a maze of mountains across the map every few minutes, eventually gives the player a short-range jetpack. Suffering players may think – “Excellent! Now I can just fly over that annoying mountain range there, rather than going the tedious long-way around”. They would be wrong. Not because the mountains are too steep for the jetpack – but because the game blocks the player with INVISIBLE WALLS. You can fly up and down, but you’re not going through that imaginary impenetrable barrier.

No! You shall go back and walk around it. It’s our way of ensuring you get your money’s worth (in terms of time) of entertainment.

Seriously, developers, fuck off.

Solution: Don’t use invisible walls. Particularly when they’re not even necessary to keep the player on the map – they’re just there to stop the player taking a less boring and time-consuming route. If there must be a barrier, fit it into the environment plausibly. At least make it visible, so that the player does waste time trying to surmount an obstacle that he or she should, according to the other rules of the game, be able to conquer.