I love how in the original Tales of Destiny, if you beat Leon Magnus (a very difficult, early game, supposed to lose fight) you get a cutscene where the heroes go off to be treasure hunters, you win the game, and the credits roll.
My first run in Dark Souls having never played demons spuls, or even watching anything about the game, and when I met the fat demon, thought the training wheels were still on. They were, in fact, never on.
The souls games in general i think do it well. The bosses at the beginning are usually tough enough to 1 or two shot you, but give you some special items if you manage to pull it off. In demon souls you end up just dying in a much cooler way: getting punched by the dragon god. Then dark souls, you don't actually have to lose at all, you're just expected to run away from the asylum demon at first.
Jedi Survivor when I’m fighting Darth Vader. Not only do I ‘win’ then cut scene shows me lose, I KNOW this is going to happen because it’s fucking Darth Vader. Entire fight felt so pointless
Jedi Survivor did this all the time, 5 mins of just straight up nailing this dude and it cuts to a cut scene of Cal getting put on his arse immediately
Like in FFIX when fighting Beatrix. When I first played the first fight when you meet Kuja for the first time, I thought I had done something wrong. Then realized I was supposed to lose.
Technically that's not winning presented as losing. You have to survive long enough for her to use her "set everyone to 1 HP" attack (which makes your characters all appear to be near death), which ends the fight with you losing and your characters near death in the ensuing cutscene.
I think OP is talking about games where you just straight up "win" in a normal mechanical sense, but that triggers a cutscene showing you lose afterwards. Like if you actually killed Beatrix in the battle, then it switched to a cutscene where the fight ends with her kicking your ass.
I love Xenoblade 1, but there are definitely some early boss fights where you're clearly doing damage per the battle system (the game even has specific animations for when you aren't doing damage), but after you "win" the cutscene is "WE CAN'T PUT A SCRATCH ON IT".
I remember my brother fighting one of the bosses in a NG+ for Xenoblade 1, and you had to let the boss use a certain move to enter the cutscene. He ended up topple-locking the boss for like a solid minute and the CPU teammates were just continuing the chain even when he just stood back and watched.
Fucking witcher 2 did this. I was beating that king slayer dude and quick cut to geralt being flung into a wall. I literally exploited the bad combat system to where the dude couldn't even move and just hard cut to me losing badly. Fuck that
Ugh I hate unwinnable battles in jrpgs were if you know it's one and just do nothing you get a gameover, no, you have to put in some effort to drag the fight out. Utter dogshit.
*Having* to win the fight only for the cutscene to show you losing is the real sin here. If you can lose the fight to the same effect then it's annoying but whatever.
You run ahead and they stop behind you and wave for you to join them. Or, they walk as if they're on a leisurely Sunday hike.
I thought you were in a hurry, bro.
Back when I used to play WoW there was one escort that kept running back so many times that all of the mobs had a chance to respawn. That quest took 3 times as long.
* Not being 100% clear on if items/collectibles are missable. Like if I walk through door A it triggers a cut-scene but door B had a chest but the cut-scene locks me out of door B forever.
* Not having anything in game to help find missing collectibles so you have to resort to online guides.
* Not marking collected collectibles so you don't know which ones you already have or not.
Basically I want to be able to 100% a game first try at any point in my playthrough without having to replay the entire game because I missed a datapad on chapter 10.
And things like bestiary and map completion %, Final fantasy added those to many re-releases, FF1 Origins version told me every chest I missed and FF4 3D has map completion rewards.
>Not being 100% clear on if items/collectibles are missable. Like if I walk through door A it triggers a cut-scene but door B had a chest but the cut-scene locks me out of door B forever.
On the flip side of this, not being 100% clear on if you're expected to come back later. Pretty sure I wasn't supposed to defeat one of the dojo master robot's combat challenges in Nier Automata until after my second playthrough started. But I did. After 45 mins. Just to have his next stage show up when I came back around. Like am I supposed to grind the whole game or what? Also this chest is literally unreachable. Lemme risk spoilers to check when I'm supposed to get this. Ohh this game requires multiple playthroughs. Got it.
The Jedi games are actually great for this.
The map shows things you can't do yet in red, things you can do but haven't in yellow, and things you have done in green.
A very simple, effective system imo
Why I stopped playing uncharted. Needing to pan every centimeter of the world to not miss a treasure drove me insane. I couldn’t enjoy a second of the game without wondering if I’m missing something.
My pet peeve is almost the opposite of this - I don’t want every single item and point of interest pointed out of my map because then I feel like I’m not exploring, just playing checklist simulator.
Arkham City just did this to me. Left a gadget in a blow up factory, and now I can't even glide to it, get invisa walled. I 100% every part but the Riddler which needs said gadget.
Especially when the game is progressively difficult and you’re unsure whether to drop your early gear.
“Hmm this sword is called the god slayer and the boss drops it. But what am I going to do with my 999 berries I picked in chapter 1?!” lol
In their defense, we’re not their target demographic.
Like dude, they’re selling Kirby to 8 year olds, people need to stop writing these thesis type essays about how to improve games mostly aimed at tweens.
This is why I couldn't play Dragonball Z Kakarot.
The first 20 minutes is you slowly following behind kid gohan while he looks for apples. Then some long cutscene before you walk some more.
I was gonna try it but god I hate this. I think a big issue with games nowadays is that it takes a lot of time to get the gameplay rolling. Not only story exposition but limited abilities, skills or a gated sandbox
Actually the worst part is that your skills aren't gated. So you can fly at mach 5 speeds but the game *requires* you to slowly walk. If you try to mess around with the controls or flight a message pops up that is like "NO FUN ALLOWED UNTIL YOU PICK APPLES"
Sounds like it's becoming more and more a way to make sure people can't get a refund inside the window because "you played the game more than x minutes despite the fact you never got out of a cutscene, and never picked up your controller, hell, we didn't even let you adjust the settings so if you are at 3 fps, sucks to be you we won't refund you."
Been playing through FF7 Rebirth and it is loaded with these moments. Cutscene, regain control, take ten steps, cutscene. I declare game design jail for all of Square.
I like it in Valheim, because it's well implemented IMO.
It never breaks permanently (can always be repaired), basic tools and weapons can be repaired with a makeshift workbench you can build while out and about, etc. it gives you a choice between staying a while longer where you are, or coming back later. And I love improvising a very basic camp somewhere and repairing forces me to do it.
It can work in roguelikes or something where you're already expecting to divert at any moment, but when you're on a long adventure in an RPG or something, it's an absolute pain in the butt.
I could stand Oblivion's durability system because repair kits were easy to carry around and it felt like a chance to train the repair skill, but most other games just annoyed me if they tried to break my stuff.
I always play Palworld with a mod that disables the durability mechanic.
It would be fine if you could use just generic materials of the appropriate tier to repair weapons/armor, but in that game to repair more rare (and thus better) weapons and armor you also need rare materials you have to scavenge in dungeons or farm from Pals, and you need a LOT of them. I just said screw it.
Friendly counter-point: I actually like the breaking system in BotW a lot, and I'm glad that Nintendo stood their ground on the topic. It's VERY off-putting at first, but it also solves one of the biggest looting problems that's dogged every fantasy adventure game and rpg since time-of-mind: optimizing the fun out of loot. It's always a bit of a drag to open up chest-after-chest of weapons, only to stick with whatever weapon you've been using this whole time (commonly, whichever one has the highest DPS). and selling everything else.
BotW also does a good job of making sure you always have a good selection of weapons on hand, so it's not like you're frequently running out of pointy things.
I think it was inevitable that it'd rub gamers the wrong way, but I think on eval, many would realize that it's a feature of this very resource-centric game, not a bug.
Fair point, i see where you're coming from. Unfortunately for me it turns everything into "too good to use" making me actively not wanting to play with the good weapons at all.
Its why ill probably never buy ToTK even though i know its a good game.
Personally speaking it should have been a toggle, just let the user decide if he wants to have durability or not. (and as someone who actually tried a durability mod in botw i can say that was more fun to me at least)
This is exactly right though, you’ll find a special weapon and hang on to it but for every unique weapon in botw there’s 10 claymores or lesser weapons and this is after 50+ hours in the game. It’s just unnecessary tedium and punishment more than it is rewarding and experimentation
I feel like doing it to EVERYTHING is annoying but having a mix for bonus stats is cool. BotW and TotK make me hoard shit and only fight with sticks and stones because you want to save the weapons for a "worthy enemy".
Skyward Sword imo solved it in a very elegant way. Have the swords and main weapons indestructible and the shields have durability. You CAN technically play the game without shields but it is freaking hard.
Depending on the game, I can see it being used well, like how the limited ammo in resident evil forced you to choose your fights. Limited durability and limited repair, either by restricting resources or repair locations, *could* be used to add a level of preparation and tactical thinking to a fight, especially in the later game. I just haven’t found a game that’s used it like that before.
I agree, RE4 for example does it perfectly. The knife is amazing in the game; it’s a get out of jail free card from many attacks, can be used to parry super effectively, and can 1-shot some of the tougher enemies while transforming. But it has limited health, so if you use it too much, it’ll break.
Great way to balance a really good, fun weapon without it making the game trivial and easy.
Absolutely. This served a purpose in horror or survival games (i hated it in system shock 2 but I get what they were going for). But in botw it feels a bit like they wanted to solve an item economy problem.
They used the durability so they could pad out the reward structure with the open world.
There's a *ton* of content in the open world Zelda games, but not enough interesting rewards for doing them. With how they instantly frontload the player with every puzzle solving tool you need right in the beginning of the game, they needed something to give to the players for completing content.
Destructible weapons was an easy fit.
It works in some games, less in others. Botw durability annoyed me because I wanted to use the loot I got, but more often than not just hoarded it. Fallout 3 / NV durability is the kind I like - you can keep using your weapon for a long time, it just gets noticeably more janky over time, and you can use other weapons of the same type to fix yours. It made me feel good looting yet another Hunting Rifle from a random raider when I knew I could get some use out of it instead of just hauling it to sell it for like 8 caps.
Games that only have autosave when you go to exit giving you the:
"Warning you will lose all unsaved progress if you leave"
With no indicator of exactly when the last autosave was.
Even worse…. unpauseable cutscenes. Like sorry something game up but now after 12hrs of gameplay I either have to watch the cutscene with my eyes glued or miss the whole thing? Fuck you developer, fuck you hard.
The Shadow of War Middle Earth game is bad for this. Every time you meet a new orc, they have unskippable dialogue. And some of them prattle on and on. It made me so mad playing the game. You’d meet an orc and listen to his dialogue, start fighting, and then ANOTHER orc comes and you have to listen to him talk.
Not being able to go back for a collectable, loot or just to explore. When I have to replay an entire level cause the 1 collectable I saw but missed or wanted to go back and just look around, but I hit a cut scene and it ends the level without being able to go back and search.
Mostly in FPS type games (boomer shooters), let me clear the level and search for secrets. ect
When the game slowly unlocks new abilities, skills, passives, mechanics for your character that you come to rely on and become more important as enemies start to become harder because they now have mechanics that rely on you using some of those skills.
Then they strip them away from you for certain parts of the game.
Recent examples:
-Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty when it suddenly becomes a survival horror game.
It would’ve been cool had they kept it short, but no it’s a whole ass scenario that can take you hours to get through because the enemy OHKOs you if it catches you.
All that cool gunplay, sneak or other mechanics you learned throughout the game? Don’t fucking matter.
-Stellar Blade
There’s sections where your Drone buddy stops being able to pulse its Radar. Combat also comes down to just using Dodge and your Drone Gun.
It felt lame to have gone from fast and mobile combat to now having to rely on standing still and shooting through sections of the game.
You’ve also had enough time to get used to having the Drone Rader pulse the environment to show you claimable areas, boxes, treasures, etc.
It becomes even more jarring when it happens again because you have unlocked way more stuff and now you’re stuck again using the same Drone Gun (now with more ammo!) with more or less the same enemies.
Games with high but inconsistent frame rates.
I would rather your game be 30 fps constantly rather then 60fps but constantly falling below that inconsistently.
Seriously just swallow your pride and downgrade the frame rate
I swear this is Halo Infinite.
Some maps run at a smooth 60 frames the whole time but other maps randomly go from 60 frames to dog shit 15 frames on and off.
I've been playing Ready or Not and it's given me a new one. AI teammates telling me that I'm in their way, or their spot, or I need to move. Eat my ass you fucking digits. I am NEVER in your way.
Any kind of FOMO/seasonal model whatsoever, outside of actual real world holiday events.
If your game needs FOMO/seasons to keep people interested, your game probably fucking sucks.
Just started Dead Space Remake from 2023, you got in the options the setting that you can put the QTE's on easy with just pressing a single button once and that's it. This or the setting to automatically pass QTE's can make a very big difference for the gameplay, when gamers don't want this. It fits both sides, the ones that like it and the ones that don't like it.
Sometimes, just making a setting in the options and giving the player the freedom to activate or deactivate something is just the best way of dealing with it.
Unskipable cutscenes before a boss fight (right after an auto save no less).
Just before you kill a boss after fighting it for ten minutes, with one health point left it comes up with some crazy special attack that oneshots you.
Awakened by BG3: quests that don't make clear that they go over multiple acts. I spent so much time >!running through the dungeons in Moonrise to find Ravenguard or through that suburb of BG to find the rest of that fucking clown!< before finally resorting to googling and finding out that it's not possible to find there, that it's genuinely infuriating
Being slowly lead around cause your character is capture or something, recently started Jedi survivor and was a bit disappointed to see that the game starts with you doing a slow walk around section compared to the first games intro that kind of threw you into a bit of platforming instead.
Edit: alrighty then since it seems u/areformedhuman wants to pull the reddit classic of reply to me then block me so I can't reply back I'll respond here, koboh's open world section is In no way only 20% of the map and even if it was that would still make the map an open world map.
I like text if it's done well. But the text needs to serve a clear purpose, and be brief. Even a visual novel's text should be no flabbier than it has to be.
Farming with 2% drops to get trophies for platinum (Dark souls 3). Still didnt farm the covenant items. They can suck it.
And no, I don't want to multiplayer.
After playing a lot of RE Games ... bullet sponge enemies that do not stop attacking + minions + VERY limited arena ammo.
Looking at you Re Rev 1 (Captain Boss) and Re Rev 2 (Fireball guy) and RE0 (Bat Boss)
I hate when a game takes away your abilities or items to raise difficulty or create a "unique challenge."
I want difficulty to come from more possible choices, not less. Don't take away from the gameplay, or the things I worked hard to get.
Crafting, especially when the item descriptions aren't helpful. like, does it tell me what enemy drops this material, or where in the world I can find it? No. does it tell me what i can build with this material? No.
And then when you do find out what upgrades it applies to, it only works for 10 levels and then you have to go from welkin "clusters" to welkin "garlands" to upgrade another 10 levels. and every item needs a different random crafting material to start with. like bruh just let me use coins or one system to upgrade everything, and adjust prices accordingly. or let everything level up automatically after certain story points or after a number of enemies defeated and xp gained.
Being constantly held back in an open world.
THERE IS LITERALLY AN OCEAN FOR ME TO EXPLORE, KING OF RED LIONS, WHY ARE YOU ALLOWING ME TO ONLY GO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO, HUH !?
Unskippable cutscenes. NOTHING annoys me more than that. I don't play games to watch movies... sometimes they're okay, but it seems like the ones with shitty narratives are also the ones you can't skip.
1. Don't make me run back to a boss fight if I die... Just restart me at the boss fight.
2. Don't make me listen to the same audio intro or watch the same video intro each time I respawn to fight the same boss.
3. Difficulty modes should increase the complexity, coordination, and reaction time of the bad guys... it should not however simply mean that the enemies have more health and do more damage. I want to play the game... not get hit once and have to restart.
4. The AI shouldn't auto target the player character if you're playing a squad game like Mass Effect Andromeda. Oh yeah... sure, a giant Krogan and an Asari Commando are literally wrecking you at knifing distance... but you're focus firing the sniper that's a battle screen away.
5. New Game + mode... have one.
Whew, that's a relief. I didn't want to work on cutscenes and story elements for my game anyway. Everything will be told in an instruction manual PDF that will come with the game.
I played around with a few CRPGs growing up where that was more or less how you had to get the story. You'd get prompted at certain points to read specific pages in the included booklet.
There was simply no room for the plot. 💾
This is something that you can't do that much anymore as a dev, except for some niche-genres. Like i play wargames and titles like War in the East 2 have very detailed manual with 570 pages that tells you every mechanic in-depth, but outside of the niche, do you think people would want to read so much?
Even a 50 pages manual about the game basics is too much for most people. Like we had it in the old times like Warcraft II came with a book that had the manual, artworks and then also the entire background-storyline with explaining the characters etc. in the old times, that was the standard and not some collectors edition. You had also every unit mentioned there, the advantages and disadvantages etc.
Today, ingame tutorials replaced this. It's okay for me, i don't have a problem with most titles. But sometimes, a manual would be a great thing.
This is why I don’t play JRPGs. Or complicated RPGs that pride themselves on being impossible to grind everything.
“Want new boots? Yeah that’ll take 13 iron, 12 feathers, 5 mythic stones, 2 bags of sugar, 1 legendary shard, 69 boxes of cheerios, 42 pencils, and 999 bird droppings”
Then you look up online and its guides upon guides of “optimized loadouts” and it looks like higher division mathematics. Like wtf this is a VIDEO GAME
When you skip the main menu and get out right into the game without the ability to adjust your options. Who cares if the game is too loud or if your sensitivity is wrong, your playing this first level in an inconvenient way no matter what.
Don't get me started on my growing pet peeve of "no shit Sherlock" tutorials. I know how to move games. I don't need it taught to me every time.
They've gotten better as of late but I'm pretty sure that's because everyone who's had to suffer through 007 Goldeneye's escort mission has grown up and are now making games.
There's a reason for why they have weird speeds in escort quests. If they ran at your speed you could never catch up to them. and you wouldn't want them in walking speed as that would be ridiculously slow. So somewhere inbetween walking and a players maximum speed is generally what they go for.
There are ways to improve this, like making the escortee go faster if you're ahead, which many games do to an extent. Escort quest where the NPC runs off to fight things and gets itself killed is a pain in the ass though.
Yeah I guess I still have a lot of PTSD about NPCs just being too slow for my liking, even though things are better(especially with games having that match pace mechanic). Definitely kills me inside when NPCs you need to protect decide they want to go be a martyr for no reason. Was deathly afraid of that happening in Dragons Dogma
I'm tired of every open world game where the main character is a master climber / parkour expert.
Horizon, Star wars, ghost of Tsushima, FF7 remake and so many other games do this now and it takes me out of the realm of believing for some reason. Even though I KNOW the main character is supposed to be some super powerful person it's the fact they can effortlessly scale a mountain/ wall the breaks it for me.
Yeah it’s tough to get true realism in the open world genre. I dunno my man, I can’t think of anything else. Red dead, watch dogs.. but if you’ve plat’d days gone, I’m guessing you hit those a long time ago.
Bless your heart if you enjoy them but, games that you can die within 2 seconds of a round starting after makin you wait in a lobby/queue for several minutes just to have to wait in the lobby/queue for another few minutes for another game, this is what turned me off of playing battle Royale type games
I used to love PUBG & was hooked on this game yet it feels like such a slap in the face the time it takes to load up a damn match, run around for 20 minutes doing nothing challenging or fun & then bam instant death
Detective vision that changes the color of the world. I love the arkham series, but that was something that games should have not copied. I prefer when it is a quick scan .
Unskippable, overly hand-holding tutorials that go way too long. Especially if I'm replaying the game. If it's multiple steps let me do them all at once instead of stopping me with a text box. Even better, integrate your tutorial into the game so I can get playing faster
Any tutorial that forces you to learn every single mechanic of a game before playing it.
If there's nothing more to learn then why should i stay? Let me figure things out by myself.
Games that start out fine at launch, but over time add more and more mechanics and expansions and crap until it becomes impossible for new players to catch up.
The mandatory "weak" sections, your powers may be fully stripped, you may have limited/no weapons, they may even throw combat it, and the worst of all being that your movement is slowed to a crawl due to injury or whatnot.
Games with 100 different types of material for crafting. It just fills my inventory with stuff I don't super care about and I'm too dumb to keep mental tabs on what I need for crafting.
This is such a small thing but I hated having to start the game to exit the game. Like, you are playing, you pause and exit. Then it takes you back to the title screen, where you have to hit start, then go to a menu to quit. Like, just let me exit directly, please.
Wasting my fucking time through artificial game lengtheners. If there’s not a reason for something to take a long time then it fucking shouldn’t.
Example - having to go through the same meaningless dialogue options to complete an action that, in a normal playthrough, is intended to be completed many, many, times over.
Shop keeper interactions for instance. I shouldn’t have to walk up to the shop keeper and go through 4 pages of dialogue AND click to respond with “I’d like to trade” every god damn time. Just make a seamless trade UI pop up when I get close after having completed that dialogue once.
for me it's when people intentionally make noises and put on fireworks, or even try to light your character when you're in the middle of playing music in Sky : Children Of The Light. like let me play my music damnit !
When my character one-shots enemies in cutscenes they cant one shot in gameplay
When my character jumps (flies?) in a cutscene but cant jump or fly in gameplay
When enemies dont drop the weapon theyre carrying after death. Like where the fuck did it go?
i'm getting flashbacks to one of the metal gear solids that had a 45 minute unskippable video before a boss. i would play after work, but i kept falling asleep during that video. i tried for 4 days in a row, but alas i was unable to complete the game.
Hidden parameters or traits on weapon, specially ones that are very unobvious and would require extended testing to notice properly. I dont like i miss out on some stuff just because i see stats that i didnt know thing had, and i had to use it in some particular fashion to find out. One of things I disliked in fallout 2. Like some weapon has damage reduction ignore , but its hardly spelled out in game, and its something you cant really find out other than you seem to do more damage than supposed to which might as well be luck. Traits like sledghammer knowckback , ok thats very visible, or knockdown.
Carry weight. I understand it’s use in some games but in others like fallout it’s basically saying instead of carrying what you want, make sure to teleport back to your base to drop something off or load your companion with 100 items like just let me fucking carry my shit.
In games where I can choose between different playable characters I often have a few favorites or meybe just one I like to stick with. Its annoying when the game forces me to play as other characters.
I like Age of Calamity a lot but there are a lot of missions where I am locked out of my favorite characters or even locked in to specific characters.
Slavish devotion to creating a cinematic experience (commonly through cutscenes). If I wanted to be passively staring at some forgettable action-set pieces, I'd go watch an MCU movie. I'm here to play a game, and MAKE my own action set pieces. If your cutscene goes on too long, I'm just going to skip it.
Gran Turismo 7. First time I went to play I had to wait to install it. Then had to wait for a big ass update. I didn't even play it that night because I ended up doing something else.
Oh yeah! This one really gets me too, OP. I want to experience the gameplay and decide whether or not I'm enjoying it before I want to commit to a longwinded introduction. Also, on PC I want to be able to access game options before any opening cinematics.
Cutscenes longer than like 2 minutes or are inessential to the story. Fromsoft has deprogrammed me from being able to enjoy lengthy cutscenes, unless important character work is being done. As far as plot, you can say anything in under two minutes. If you can't convey an idea in the time the time it takes for a pop song to reach its chorus, you bungled it. Start over. It's especially annoying when there are action sequences you can't play.
Tons of weapons and different swords, but they all look the same and have stats that are practically useless.
This sword is .03% increased damage on water enemies but .05% decreased damage to enemies that are jumping and .02% damage increase to zombies within 50 meters of a pond. But also increases luck by .01% but decreases fate by .04%.
Me: so…I just won’t use it then.
bad side quests. i try my best to complete all side content in games im really enjoying, but i honestly dont know why they're generally so bad. it made sense up to the ps2 era where they had to pad out content because of limitations, but since games have advanced so much, i dont understand why we still have tedious fetch quests or escort missions sprinkled throughout them. i'd much prefer to have 5-10 incredible side quests, than 100 junk quests. witcher 3 is obviously the prime example here, but cyberpunk also did an amazing job with their gigs in phantom liberty.
At the end of the game - boss after boss after boss with no save (looking at you FF7 Remake - got to the absolute final boss, was just about to kill him when he interrupted my move and killed me, putting me 45 minutes back).
I agree on not having early access to gameplay but for another reason - I love to mod, tweak, and test games on different setups. I need a quick test play mode, there's nothing stopping devs from having a level that lets you test if your gamepad, resolution and recording setup works before starting the main story.
I think I was an hour into Triangle Strategy before I refunded. It story dumped for 45 minutes, gave me one tutorial mission and went back to story dumping. I'm guessing that's where tue mixed reviews come from.
Bad localization.
Topical because a recent game, Eiyuden Chronicle, is the latest victim of this extremely reliable phenomenon, though I would also highlight the Yakuza series (lately in particular) as outstanding examples of sh-- localization.
What's conspicuous about it is that very nearly all game localization is bad... whereas very nearly all anime localization (sub OR dub) is good. There are two extremely different localizing cultures at play. I wish the anime localizers would muscle in on the game localizing market and put those miserable dinosaurs back in fast food.
That intro was spectacular but also had me looking at my watch haha. Luckily the game is gorgeous enough to distract you from the brain numbing tediousness of playing as young Aloy and learning how to track the machines
Enemies with rpg's with no sense of self preservation, you run towards them in hopes of them not shooting and yet they shoot right in front of themselves killing both of you in the process, makes no sense
One I haven’t seen that I recently noticed I hate is when you press to interact but you’re too close for the animation so it automates you walking to a very specific spot then plays the animation. Not so much for chests but for NPC interaction or environmental interactions it really bothers me.
dark souls. i dont like grinding for 20 minutes to lose it all to some bullshit like the floor falling under you or that bit in the catacombs where the statues stab you. not to mention the entirety of blighttown, tombs of the giants, duke archives, depths, and undead burg lower. the combat is slow as hell but the enemies can still gang up on you and at that point you are watching a glorified death animation because there is not chance for escape after that. my favorite areas were ash lake and kiln of the first flame, because in ash lake i could escape the game map and chill and kiln is the part where the game ends. kiln and ash lake look kinda dope though. but dont even get me started on curses. resistance is useless unless you REEAAAALLLY dont like getting cursed. it has the slowest progress bar in history, and then you die instantly and lose half your health bar. if they removed curses from the game everybody would be completely satisfied with the remaster, which, by the way, literally did absolutely nothing to the game. its pretty much just the normal game with the artorias dlc. the graphics havent changed at all, the only thing that really became better was the performance. other than that i cant name a thing. also, you can only roll in four ways. forward, left, right, or back. you are either getting closer, running, or dodging but never two at the same time. not to mention when locked on to targets you cant run backwards or to the sides. the game just doesnt cut you any bullshit. you have to beat this hardass game with clunky controls which are terrible on keyboard and an inability to jump directly upwards. fuck the great hollow.
The problem is that 98% of games, even good games, do not have stories that are original and interesting enough to support themselves outside the actual game. No, I don't want to read about this dark lord and the legendary heroes that vanquished it before playing this 9834th game set in an off-the-shelf medieval fantasy world.
Not coincidentally, this is also why my game has zero story. If you're not demolishing stuff in 2 minutes, I've failed as a dev.
Guards with no ounce of suspicion lasting longer than 30 seconds. An example is Hitman, all of your buddies are disappearing or even seen dead and your idea is to just put your weapon away and go back to normal patrol after doing a small sweep around where you found them after dragging the body away.
Up security, everyone be paranoid or on alert at the slightest sound. I know it's a game but it just annoys me how guards will go back to like nothing happened after a minute.
A way too long intro/ tutorial sections that takes like 30 hours to complete but instead of showing alot of cool crap, it shows you the same thing over and over. looking at you Perona 5 Royal.
Oh and flashbacks to something that just happened
Same reason why I made my friend play Persona 5 Strikers instead of Royal even though it's a sequel. Waiting 3 hours to really start playing and with a lot of tutorials isn't fun. Beating a ton of enemies right after starting shows you how the gameplay is, and leaves yo wanting to know how you got there
Exclusive pre-order rewards and other limited time rewards. I love being able to collect everything in a game and I deal with massive FOMO. It just makes me feel bad when I end up missing something.
A companion or some idiot on the radio speaking up as soon as I enter a new room/area with comments like:
"This wall looks weak."
"With three keycards and a PIN, we can get this crane to position that girder close to the sewer entrance."
"Hurry up!"
All before I have even crossed the threshold.
If I want to spend ten minutes trying to read the notices pinned to the wall, that's my affair. We keep being told how expensive and difficult modern games are to make, so I reserve the right to at least try and appreciate the craft.
That piece of pizza that's in the way while Dante is flying through the trailer.
Seriously though, my biggest pet peeve is games that force PvE players to PvP. I just don't enjoy it.
Having a long intro that may or may not include a break for character creation, or has character creation and then a long cutscene/mildly interactive scene.
Bethesda seems to love this. Skyrim should give you the option to skip straight to character creation, then skip again to where you choose which group you enter the keep with.
Fallout 4 should let you build your character, then skip ahead to at least where Shaun is taken.
that was the reason i got into cyberpunk only like a year after buying (also performance tho dlaa saved me there a bit). Now one of my favorite story games till today
I always hate when games make you shuffle/shimmy across tight ledges or in between a tight space. It seems like it’s meant to be a scary moment but it’s always just hold the stick left/right. It’s never epic and just randomly slows down pacing for ~5 secs
My biggest is when i try to play a fun killer vs survivor game but the side with the biggest advantage complains to the point they are given another advantage and they still complain to the point where i rather just uninstall!
Winning a boss fight only for the following cutscene show your character getting beat. Just make it to where I’m supposed to lose in the first place
Ahh, a staple in many JRPGs.
I love how in the original Tales of Destiny, if you beat Leon Magnus (a very difficult, early game, supposed to lose fight) you get a cutscene where the heroes go off to be treasure hunters, you win the game, and the credits roll.
"Use your amazing final move now. Yay the boss is dead. Enjoy being level 1 now."
My first run in Dark Souls having never played demons spuls, or even watching anything about the game, and when I met the fat demon, thought the training wheels were still on. They were, in fact, never on.
lol Gaius from FF14.. they really decided to go Kojima with the dialogue.
At least make the boss fight to where their health only goes down like 3/4 of the way before the cutscene begins.
I think elden ring did this perfectly with it's first boss. If you beat it you literally just have a cliff fall out under you and you die anyways lol
The souls games in general i think do it well. The bosses at the beginning are usually tough enough to 1 or two shot you, but give you some special items if you manage to pull it off. In demon souls you end up just dying in a much cooler way: getting punched by the dragon god. Then dark souls, you don't actually have to lose at all, you're just expected to run away from the asylum demon at first.
Jedi Survivor when I’m fighting Darth Vader. Not only do I ‘win’ then cut scene shows me lose, I KNOW this is going to happen because it’s fucking Darth Vader. Entire fight felt so pointless
Someone on reddit once called his health bar in that fight a 'patience bar', which makes this better for me
Jedi Survivor did this all the time, 5 mins of just straight up nailing this dude and it cuts to a cut scene of Cal getting put on his arse immediately
OverCooked
Xenoblade 2 was so bad about this.
Like in FFIX when fighting Beatrix. When I first played the first fight when you meet Kuja for the first time, I thought I had done something wrong. Then realized I was supposed to lose.
Technically that's not winning presented as losing. You have to survive long enough for her to use her "set everyone to 1 HP" attack (which makes your characters all appear to be near death), which ends the fight with you losing and your characters near death in the ensuing cutscene. I think OP is talking about games where you just straight up "win" in a normal mechanical sense, but that triggers a cutscene showing you lose afterwards. Like if you actually killed Beatrix in the battle, then it switched to a cutscene where the fight ends with her kicking your ass. I love Xenoblade 1, but there are definitely some early boss fights where you're clearly doing damage per the battle system (the game even has specific animations for when you aren't doing damage), but after you "win" the cutscene is "WE CAN'T PUT A SCRATCH ON IT".
I remember my brother fighting one of the bosses in a NG+ for Xenoblade 1, and you had to let the boss use a certain move to enter the cutscene. He ended up topple-locking the boss for like a solid minute and the CPU teammates were just continuing the chain even when he just stood back and watched.
I don’t understand what this means. You beat a boss and the next cutscene you get beaten? Explain please
Fucking witcher 2 did this. I was beating that king slayer dude and quick cut to geralt being flung into a wall. I literally exploited the bad combat system to where the dude couldn't even move and just hard cut to me losing badly. Fuck that
Ugh I hate unwinnable battles in jrpgs were if you know it's one and just do nothing you get a gameover, no, you have to put in some effort to drag the fight out. Utter dogshit.
*Having* to win the fight only for the cutscene to show you losing is the real sin here. If you can lose the fight to the same effect then it's annoying but whatever.
Quests that make you escort an npc with a trash AI
[удалено]
You run ahead and they stop behind you and wave for you to join them. Or, they walk as if they're on a leisurely Sunday hike. I thought you were in a hurry, bro.
Come on you slow bastard! No, not that way! Why are you walking into that wall?!
Back when I used to play WoW there was one escort that kept running back so many times that all of the mobs had a chance to respawn. That quest took 3 times as long.
* Not being 100% clear on if items/collectibles are missable. Like if I walk through door A it triggers a cut-scene but door B had a chest but the cut-scene locks me out of door B forever. * Not having anything in game to help find missing collectibles so you have to resort to online guides. * Not marking collected collectibles so you don't know which ones you already have or not. Basically I want to be able to 100% a game first try at any point in my playthrough without having to replay the entire game because I missed a datapad on chapter 10.
In game achievement menus need to make a strong return.
And things like bestiary and map completion %, Final fantasy added those to many re-releases, FF1 Origins version told me every chest I missed and FF4 3D has map completion rewards.
>Not being 100% clear on if items/collectibles are missable. Like if I walk through door A it triggers a cut-scene but door B had a chest but the cut-scene locks me out of door B forever. On the flip side of this, not being 100% clear on if you're expected to come back later. Pretty sure I wasn't supposed to defeat one of the dojo master robot's combat challenges in Nier Automata until after my second playthrough started. But I did. After 45 mins. Just to have his next stage show up when I came back around. Like am I supposed to grind the whole game or what? Also this chest is literally unreachable. Lemme risk spoilers to check when I'm supposed to get this. Ohh this game requires multiple playthroughs. Got it.
The Jedi games are actually great for this. The map shows things you can't do yet in red, things you can do but haven't in yellow, and things you have done in green. A very simple, effective system imo
Why I stopped playing uncharted. Needing to pan every centimeter of the world to not miss a treasure drove me insane. I couldn’t enjoy a second of the game without wondering if I’m missing something.
My pet peeve is almost the opposite of this - I don’t want every single item and point of interest pointed out of my map because then I feel like I’m not exploring, just playing checklist simulator.
Arkham City just did this to me. Left a gadget in a blow up factory, and now I can't even glide to it, get invisa walled. I 100% every part but the Riddler which needs said gadget.
Never enough bag space. 😤
I can live with limited bag space, it becomes a problem for me when the extra bag space is paywalled
especially when not picking up worthless items is more trouble than its worth just taking everything
Especially when the game is progressively difficult and you’re unsure whether to drop your early gear. “Hmm this sword is called the god slayer and the boss drops it. But what am I going to do with my 999 berries I picked in chapter 1?!” lol
Those are the times you have to start Fat Princess-ing your way through the food in your inventory to pick up that one quest item.
"Seamless" loading that's just poorly concealed behind a cutscene every 10 seconds. Max Payne 3, I'm looking directly at you.
It broke the flow of combat so bad that I got bored. Bored. Playing a *Max Payne* game. Max, dearest of all my friends...
I thought the newer god of war games did this very well.
Best "seamless" transition is still Castlevania Symphony of the Night
If you're on PC there's a mod that allows you to instantly skip all cutscenes
Ridiculously excessive handholding and over explanation of mechanics repeatedly. I'm looking at you Nintendo.
In their defense, we’re not their target demographic. Like dude, they’re selling Kirby to 8 year olds, people need to stop writing these thesis type essays about how to improve games mostly aimed at tweens.
8 year olds don't want to play bad games either. Dreamland is an easy game; epic yarn is an unloseable game.
Walking ten steps to have exposition dumped on me, then doing that over and over again (Forspoken toward the end, Final Fantasy XVI, Alan Wake II)
This is why I couldn't play Dragonball Z Kakarot. The first 20 minutes is you slowly following behind kid gohan while he looks for apples. Then some long cutscene before you walk some more.
I was gonna try it but god I hate this. I think a big issue with games nowadays is that it takes a lot of time to get the gameplay rolling. Not only story exposition but limited abilities, skills or a gated sandbox
Actually the worst part is that your skills aren't gated. So you can fly at mach 5 speeds but the game *requires* you to slowly walk. If you try to mess around with the controls or flight a message pops up that is like "NO FUN ALLOWED UNTIL YOU PICK APPLES"
Sounds like it's becoming more and more a way to make sure people can't get a refund inside the window because "you played the game more than x minutes despite the fact you never got out of a cutscene, and never picked up your controller, hell, we didn't even let you adjust the settings so if you are at 3 fps, sucks to be you we won't refund you."
Don't ever play a Hideo Kojima game, then.
I loved Death Stranding but to be fair I found it more interesting than the other examples
Been playing through FF7 Rebirth and it is loaded with these moments. Cutscene, regain control, take ten steps, cutscene. I declare game design jail for all of Square.
Item durability. So fucking boring to be out and about and have your shit break and have to divert to fix that instead of doing what you wanted to do.
I like it in Valheim, because it's well implemented IMO. It never breaks permanently (can always be repaired), basic tools and weapons can be repaired with a makeshift workbench you can build while out and about, etc. it gives you a choice between staying a while longer where you are, or coming back later. And I love improvising a very basic camp somewhere and repairing forces me to do it.
It can work in roguelikes or something where you're already expecting to divert at any moment, but when you're on a long adventure in an RPG or something, it's an absolute pain in the butt. I could stand Oblivion's durability system because repair kits were easy to carry around and it felt like a chance to train the repair skill, but most other games just annoyed me if they tried to break my stuff.
I always play Palworld with a mod that disables the durability mechanic. It would be fine if you could use just generic materials of the appropriate tier to repair weapons/armor, but in that game to repair more rare (and thus better) weapons and armor you also need rare materials you have to scavenge in dungeons or farm from Pals, and you need a LOT of them. I just said screw it.
Especially when they can break permanently (looking at you BOTW) that just makes the feeling of finding a new shiny thing worthless to me.
Why use my shiny, powerful weapons, when I can just display them because it took way too long to find them and I don't want to lose them.
Friendly counter-point: I actually like the breaking system in BotW a lot, and I'm glad that Nintendo stood their ground on the topic. It's VERY off-putting at first, but it also solves one of the biggest looting problems that's dogged every fantasy adventure game and rpg since time-of-mind: optimizing the fun out of loot. It's always a bit of a drag to open up chest-after-chest of weapons, only to stick with whatever weapon you've been using this whole time (commonly, whichever one has the highest DPS). and selling everything else. BotW also does a good job of making sure you always have a good selection of weapons on hand, so it's not like you're frequently running out of pointy things. I think it was inevitable that it'd rub gamers the wrong way, but I think on eval, many would realize that it's a feature of this very resource-centric game, not a bug.
Fair point, i see where you're coming from. Unfortunately for me it turns everything into "too good to use" making me actively not wanting to play with the good weapons at all. Its why ill probably never buy ToTK even though i know its a good game. Personally speaking it should have been a toggle, just let the user decide if he wants to have durability or not. (and as someone who actually tried a durability mod in botw i can say that was more fun to me at least)
This is exactly right though, you’ll find a special weapon and hang on to it but for every unique weapon in botw there’s 10 claymores or lesser weapons and this is after 50+ hours in the game. It’s just unnecessary tedium and punishment more than it is rewarding and experimentation
I feel like doing it to EVERYTHING is annoying but having a mix for bonus stats is cool. BotW and TotK make me hoard shit and only fight with sticks and stones because you want to save the weapons for a "worthy enemy". Skyward Sword imo solved it in a very elegant way. Have the swords and main weapons indestructible and the shields have durability. You CAN technically play the game without shields but it is freaking hard.
Depending on the game, I can see it being used well, like how the limited ammo in resident evil forced you to choose your fights. Limited durability and limited repair, either by restricting resources or repair locations, *could* be used to add a level of preparation and tactical thinking to a fight, especially in the later game. I just haven’t found a game that’s used it like that before.
I agree, RE4 for example does it perfectly. The knife is amazing in the game; it’s a get out of jail free card from many attacks, can be used to parry super effectively, and can 1-shot some of the tougher enemies while transforming. But it has limited health, so if you use it too much, it’ll break. Great way to balance a really good, fun weapon without it making the game trivial and easy.
Absolutely. This served a purpose in horror or survival games (i hated it in system shock 2 but I get what they were going for). But in botw it feels a bit like they wanted to solve an item economy problem.
They used the durability so they could pad out the reward structure with the open world. There's a *ton* of content in the open world Zelda games, but not enough interesting rewards for doing them. With how they instantly frontload the player with every puzzle solving tool you need right in the beginning of the game, they needed something to give to the players for completing content. Destructible weapons was an easy fit.
It works in some games, less in others. Botw durability annoyed me because I wanted to use the loot I got, but more often than not just hoarded it. Fallout 3 / NV durability is the kind I like - you can keep using your weapon for a long time, it just gets noticeably more janky over time, and you can use other weapons of the same type to fix yours. It made me feel good looting yet another Hunting Rifle from a random raider when I knew I could get some use out of it instead of just hauling it to sell it for like 8 caps.
Games that only have autosave when you go to exit giving you the: "Warning you will lose all unsaved progress if you leave" With no indicator of exactly when the last autosave was.
I hate ones like Psycho Yuppie that use an inventory item to safe. Ran out of paper? No save for you!
Unskippable cutscenes🤮
Even worse…. unpauseable cutscenes. Like sorry something game up but now after 12hrs of gameplay I either have to watch the cutscene with my eyes glued or miss the whole thing? Fuck you developer, fuck you hard.
Those are usually the ones where you aren't listening to a word they're saying because you're busy thinking how bad you have to pee.
Unskippable developer logos every time you start the game.
But those are probably hiding some kind of loading.
Might just be me, but I would rather stare at a loading screen.
The Shadow of War Middle Earth game is bad for this. Every time you meet a new orc, they have unskippable dialogue. And some of them prattle on and on. It made me so mad playing the game. You’d meet an orc and listen to his dialogue, start fighting, and then ANOTHER orc comes and you have to listen to him talk.
Forced gameplay sections that are different to the gamestyle of the rest of the game. I.e an action game with a forced stealth section
graphics get better, games get worse
Not being able to go back for a collectable, loot or just to explore. When I have to replay an entire level cause the 1 collectable I saw but missed or wanted to go back and just look around, but I hit a cut scene and it ends the level without being able to go back and search. Mostly in FPS type games (boomer shooters), let me clear the level and search for secrets. ect
When the game slowly unlocks new abilities, skills, passives, mechanics for your character that you come to rely on and become more important as enemies start to become harder because they now have mechanics that rely on you using some of those skills. Then they strip them away from you for certain parts of the game. Recent examples: -Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty when it suddenly becomes a survival horror game. It would’ve been cool had they kept it short, but no it’s a whole ass scenario that can take you hours to get through because the enemy OHKOs you if it catches you. All that cool gunplay, sneak or other mechanics you learned throughout the game? Don’t fucking matter. -Stellar Blade There’s sections where your Drone buddy stops being able to pulse its Radar. Combat also comes down to just using Dodge and your Drone Gun. It felt lame to have gone from fast and mobile combat to now having to rely on standing still and shooting through sections of the game. You’ve also had enough time to get used to having the Drone Rader pulse the environment to show you claimable areas, boxes, treasures, etc. It becomes even more jarring when it happens again because you have unlocked way more stuff and now you’re stuck again using the same Drone Gun (now with more ammo!) with more or less the same enemies.
I hate when your Collison box doesn't change when you crouch and you can't go under things.
Cutscene. Walk a few steps. Cutscene. Just link them together in one long one, please.
And make them skippable or pausable or both
Pausable, and subtitles. This game is portable, everyone doesn't want to her space robot get murdered.
Games with high but inconsistent frame rates. I would rather your game be 30 fps constantly rather then 60fps but constantly falling below that inconsistently. Seriously just swallow your pride and downgrade the frame rate
I swear this is Halo Infinite. Some maps run at a smooth 60 frames the whole time but other maps randomly go from 60 frames to dog shit 15 frames on and off.
This is why frame time is a much better method of talking about performance
I’m pretty sure it took about 40 minutes for me to see combat in tales of arise. That was annoying.
I shit you not I was playing Tales of Arise when I made this post. The art style is so cool, but my god. Shut the fuck up and let me play
I've been playing Ready or Not and it's given me a new one. AI teammates telling me that I'm in their way, or their spot, or I need to move. Eat my ass you fucking digits. I am NEVER in your way.
Any kind of FOMO/seasonal model whatsoever, outside of actual real world holiday events. If your game needs FOMO/seasons to keep people interested, your game probably fucking sucks.
Whenever a game takes away control from me. QTEs, stunlock mechanics... I'm a player, let me play!
Just started Dead Space Remake from 2023, you got in the options the setting that you can put the QTE's on easy with just pressing a single button once and that's it. This or the setting to automatically pass QTE's can make a very big difference for the gameplay, when gamers don't want this. It fits both sides, the ones that like it and the ones that don't like it. Sometimes, just making a setting in the options and giving the player the freedom to activate or deactivate something is just the best way of dealing with it.
Shitty auto camera
Unskipable cutscenes before a boss fight (right after an auto save no less). Just before you kill a boss after fighting it for ten minutes, with one health point left it comes up with some crazy special attack that oneshots you.
Awakened by BG3: quests that don't make clear that they go over multiple acts. I spent so much time >!running through the dungeons in Moonrise to find Ravenguard or through that suburb of BG to find the rest of that fucking clown!< before finally resorting to googling and finding out that it's not possible to find there, that it's genuinely infuriating
Being slowly lead around cause your character is capture or something, recently started Jedi survivor and was a bit disappointed to see that the game starts with you doing a slow walk around section compared to the first games intro that kind of threw you into a bit of platforming instead. Edit: alrighty then since it seems u/areformedhuman wants to pull the reddit classic of reply to me then block me so I can't reply back I'll respond here, koboh's open world section is In no way only 20% of the map and even if it was that would still make the map an open world map.
The bitch really blocked you cuz you disagreed with and had a discussion... jfc it wasn't even controversial. People are so fuckin soft.
Text! Endless text. Genshin I am looking at you! I do not need all this excessive dialogue.
I like text if it's done well. But the text needs to serve a clear purpose, and be brief. Even a visual novel's text should be no flabbier than it has to be.
This! I love the pokemon series despite the latest flaws but ive never felt like i had to button mash through their dialogue (besides pokemon center)
The reason I dropped Genshin. After Inazuma it got ridiculous, you have to go through 30mins of dialogue just to start a quest.
I hate when cutscenes aren't pausable. Even worse when the skip button is the pause button.
Biggest pet peeve ? Not optimized games for pc specific requirements
Farming with 2% drops to get trophies for platinum (Dark souls 3). Still didnt farm the covenant items. They can suck it. And no, I don't want to multiplayer.
After playing a lot of RE Games ... bullet sponge enemies that do not stop attacking + minions + VERY limited arena ammo. Looking at you Re Rev 1 (Captain Boss) and Re Rev 2 (Fireball guy) and RE0 (Bat Boss)
I hate when a game takes away your abilities or items to raise difficulty or create a "unique challenge." I want difficulty to come from more possible choices, not less. Don't take away from the gameplay, or the things I worked hard to get.
Crafting, especially when the item descriptions aren't helpful. like, does it tell me what enemy drops this material, or where in the world I can find it? No. does it tell me what i can build with this material? No. And then when you do find out what upgrades it applies to, it only works for 10 levels and then you have to go from welkin "clusters" to welkin "garlands" to upgrade another 10 levels. and every item needs a different random crafting material to start with. like bruh just let me use coins or one system to upgrade everything, and adjust prices accordingly. or let everything level up automatically after certain story points or after a number of enemies defeated and xp gained.
me, a yakuza fan watching majima's 20 minute introduction scene in yakuza 0
“In-game” cutscenes that slow your movement and force you to wait for everyone to stop talking.
Being constantly held back in an open world. THERE IS LITERALLY AN OCEAN FOR ME TO EXPLORE, KING OF RED LIONS, WHY ARE YOU ALLOWING ME TO ONLY GO WHERE YOU WANT TO GO, HUH !?
You dont want to touch yakuza games op
Unskippable cutscenes. NOTHING annoys me more than that. I don't play games to watch movies... sometimes they're okay, but it seems like the ones with shitty narratives are also the ones you can't skip.
1. Don't make me run back to a boss fight if I die... Just restart me at the boss fight. 2. Don't make me listen to the same audio intro or watch the same video intro each time I respawn to fight the same boss. 3. Difficulty modes should increase the complexity, coordination, and reaction time of the bad guys... it should not however simply mean that the enemies have more health and do more damage. I want to play the game... not get hit once and have to restart. 4. The AI shouldn't auto target the player character if you're playing a squad game like Mass Effect Andromeda. Oh yeah... sure, a giant Krogan and an Asari Commando are literally wrecking you at knifing distance... but you're focus firing the sniper that's a battle screen away. 5. New Game + mode... have one.
Whew, that's a relief. I didn't want to work on cutscenes and story elements for my game anyway. Everything will be told in an instruction manual PDF that will come with the game.
I played around with a few CRPGs growing up where that was more or less how you had to get the story. You'd get prompted at certain points to read specific pages in the included booklet. There was simply no room for the plot. 💾
This is something that you can't do that much anymore as a dev, except for some niche-genres. Like i play wargames and titles like War in the East 2 have very detailed manual with 570 pages that tells you every mechanic in-depth, but outside of the niche, do you think people would want to read so much? Even a 50 pages manual about the game basics is too much for most people. Like we had it in the old times like Warcraft II came with a book that had the manual, artworks and then also the entire background-storyline with explaining the characters etc. in the old times, that was the standard and not some collectors edition. You had also every unit mentioned there, the advantages and disadvantages etc. Today, ingame tutorials replaced this. It's okay for me, i don't have a problem with most titles. But sometimes, a manual would be a great thing.
So Destiny.
Crafting. Just let me fucking buy arrows
This is why I don’t play JRPGs. Or complicated RPGs that pride themselves on being impossible to grind everything. “Want new boots? Yeah that’ll take 13 iron, 12 feathers, 5 mythic stones, 2 bags of sugar, 1 legendary shard, 69 boxes of cheerios, 42 pencils, and 999 bird droppings” Then you look up online and its guides upon guides of “optimized loadouts” and it looks like higher division mathematics. Like wtf this is a VIDEO GAME
When you skip the main menu and get out right into the game without the ability to adjust your options. Who cares if the game is too loud or if your sensitivity is wrong, your playing this first level in an inconvenient way no matter what. Don't get me started on my growing pet peeve of "no shit Sherlock" tutorials. I know how to move games. I don't need it taught to me every time.
Run with “L,” light attack with “x.” Oh shit thank you so much! I definitely hadn’t planned to use any of those buttons
Escort quests in general, but specifically ones where whoever you’re escorting walks at a different speed than you
They've gotten better as of late but I'm pretty sure that's because everyone who's had to suffer through 007 Goldeneye's escort mission has grown up and are now making games.
There's a reason for why they have weird speeds in escort quests. If they ran at your speed you could never catch up to them. and you wouldn't want them in walking speed as that would be ridiculously slow. So somewhere inbetween walking and a players maximum speed is generally what they go for. There are ways to improve this, like making the escortee go faster if you're ahead, which many games do to an extent. Escort quest where the NPC runs off to fight things and gets itself killed is a pain in the ass though.
Yeah I guess I still have a lot of PTSD about NPCs just being too slow for my liking, even though things are better(especially with games having that match pace mechanic). Definitely kills me inside when NPCs you need to protect decide they want to go be a martyr for no reason. Was deathly afraid of that happening in Dragons Dogma
I'm tired of every open world game where the main character is a master climber / parkour expert. Horizon, Star wars, ghost of Tsushima, FF7 remake and so many other games do this now and it takes me out of the realm of believing for some reason. Even though I KNOW the main character is supposed to be some super powerful person it's the fact they can effortlessly scale a mountain/ wall the breaks it for me.
Days Gone might be what you’re looking for
Already beat and got the platinum for it.
Yeah it’s tough to get true realism in the open world genre. I dunno my man, I can’t think of anything else. Red dead, watch dogs.. but if you’ve plat’d days gone, I’m guessing you hit those a long time ago.
Bless your heart if you enjoy them but, games that you can die within 2 seconds of a round starting after makin you wait in a lobby/queue for several minutes just to have to wait in the lobby/queue for another few minutes for another game, this is what turned me off of playing battle Royale type games
I used to love PUBG & was hooked on this game yet it feels like such a slap in the face the time it takes to load up a damn match, run around for 20 minutes doing nothing challenging or fun & then bam instant death
Detective vision that changes the color of the world. I love the arkham series, but that was something that games should have not copied. I prefer when it is a quick scan .
Unskippable, overly hand-holding tutorials that go way too long. Especially if I'm replaying the game. If it's multiple steps let me do them all at once instead of stopping me with a text box. Even better, integrate your tutorial into the game so I can get playing faster
Any tutorial that forces you to learn every single mechanic of a game before playing it. If there's nothing more to learn then why should i stay? Let me figure things out by myself.
Online multiplayer achievements, when you would have to pay extra to play multiplayer.
Games that start out fine at launch, but over time add more and more mechanics and expansions and crap until it becomes impossible for new players to catch up.
Motion blur
The mandatory "weak" sections, your powers may be fully stripped, you may have limited/no weapons, they may even throw combat it, and the worst of all being that your movement is slowed to a crawl due to injury or whatnot.
Tutorials that control the first 30 minutes or an hour. I don't learn like that. I learn by doing and tutorials kill all my hype for a game.
Games with 100 different types of material for crafting. It just fills my inventory with stuff I don't super care about and I'm too dumb to keep mental tabs on what I need for crafting.
This is such a small thing but I hated having to start the game to exit the game. Like, you are playing, you pause and exit. Then it takes you back to the title screen, where you have to hit start, then go to a menu to quit. Like, just let me exit directly, please.
Wasting my fucking time through artificial game lengtheners. If there’s not a reason for something to take a long time then it fucking shouldn’t. Example - having to go through the same meaningless dialogue options to complete an action that, in a normal playthrough, is intended to be completed many, many, times over. Shop keeper interactions for instance. I shouldn’t have to walk up to the shop keeper and go through 4 pages of dialogue AND click to respond with “I’d like to trade” every god damn time. Just make a seamless trade UI pop up when I get close after having completed that dialogue once.
for me it's when people intentionally make noises and put on fireworks, or even try to light your character when you're in the middle of playing music in Sky : Children Of The Light. like let me play my music damnit !
Hyper-realism. I don't want breakable weapons or "you're carrying too much. you walk slow now" bullshit in my videogames thanks.
Unskipable, hyper-loud splash screens, the game's menu starting on 100% sound colume, unskipable cutscenes, QTEs, spongey enemies.
Long (+10 minutes) cut scenes need to come with warnings, and the option save before it starts [side eyes Persona 5]
When my character one-shots enemies in cutscenes they cant one shot in gameplay When my character jumps (flies?) in a cutscene but cant jump or fly in gameplay When enemies dont drop the weapon theyre carrying after death. Like where the fuck did it go?
i'm getting flashbacks to one of the metal gear solids that had a 45 minute unskippable video before a boss. i would play after work, but i kept falling asleep during that video. i tried for 4 days in a row, but alas i was unable to complete the game.
I need more info. I’m almost certain every MGS has skippable cutscenes (with a few exceptions, granted) so I’m unsure who/ or how you were stuck on.
Hidden parameters or traits on weapon, specially ones that are very unobvious and would require extended testing to notice properly. I dont like i miss out on some stuff just because i see stats that i didnt know thing had, and i had to use it in some particular fashion to find out. One of things I disliked in fallout 2. Like some weapon has damage reduction ignore , but its hardly spelled out in game, and its something you cant really find out other than you seem to do more damage than supposed to which might as well be luck. Traits like sledghammer knowckback , ok thats very visible, or knockdown.
escort missions
Carry weight. I understand it’s use in some games but in others like fallout it’s basically saying instead of carrying what you want, make sure to teleport back to your base to drop something off or load your companion with 100 items like just let me fucking carry my shit.
In games where I can choose between different playable characters I often have a few favorites or meybe just one I like to stick with. Its annoying when the game forces me to play as other characters. I like Age of Calamity a lot but there are a lot of missions where I am locked out of my favorite characters or even locked in to specific characters.
Slavish devotion to creating a cinematic experience (commonly through cutscenes). If I wanted to be passively staring at some forgettable action-set pieces, I'd go watch an MCU movie. I'm here to play a game, and MAKE my own action set pieces. If your cutscene goes on too long, I'm just going to skip it.
Text that does not auto scroll.
Gran Turismo 7. First time I went to play I had to wait to install it. Then had to wait for a big ass update. I didn't even play it that night because I ended up doing something else.
Oh yeah! This one really gets me too, OP. I want to experience the gameplay and decide whether or not I'm enjoying it before I want to commit to a longwinded introduction. Also, on PC I want to be able to access game options before any opening cinematics.
Escort missions where the escort is slower than my default walk speed and less durable than wet paper, and the game/quest ends if they die.
Cutscenes longer than like 2 minutes or are inessential to the story. Fromsoft has deprogrammed me from being able to enjoy lengthy cutscenes, unless important character work is being done. As far as plot, you can say anything in under two minutes. If you can't convey an idea in the time the time it takes for a pop song to reach its chorus, you bungled it. Start over. It's especially annoying when there are action sequences you can't play.
When weapons and armor have condition and have to be repaired. Seems like the mechanic is only there to drag out the grind for components.
Tons of weapons and different swords, but they all look the same and have stats that are practically useless. This sword is .03% increased damage on water enemies but .05% decreased damage to enemies that are jumping and .02% damage increase to zombies within 50 meters of a pond. But also increases luck by .01% but decreases fate by .04%. Me: so…I just won’t use it then.
bad side quests. i try my best to complete all side content in games im really enjoying, but i honestly dont know why they're generally so bad. it made sense up to the ps2 era where they had to pad out content because of limitations, but since games have advanced so much, i dont understand why we still have tedious fetch quests or escort missions sprinkled throughout them. i'd much prefer to have 5-10 incredible side quests, than 100 junk quests. witcher 3 is obviously the prime example here, but cyberpunk also did an amazing job with their gigs in phantom liberty.
At the end of the game - boss after boss after boss with no save (looking at you FF7 Remake - got to the absolute final boss, was just about to kill him when he interrupted my move and killed me, putting me 45 minutes back).
Fallout 4, especially when it crashes in the intro. Long ass intro. It should save after you create a character
I agree on not having early access to gameplay but for another reason - I love to mod, tweak, and test games on different setups. I need a quick test play mode, there's nothing stopping devs from having a level that lets you test if your gamepad, resolution and recording setup works before starting the main story.
I think I was an hour into Triangle Strategy before I refunded. It story dumped for 45 minutes, gave me one tutorial mission and went back to story dumping. I'm guessing that's where tue mixed reviews come from.
Bad localization. Topical because a recent game, Eiyuden Chronicle, is the latest victim of this extremely reliable phenomenon, though I would also highlight the Yakuza series (lately in particular) as outstanding examples of sh-- localization. What's conspicuous about it is that very nearly all game localization is bad... whereas very nearly all anime localization (sub OR dub) is good. There are two extremely different localizing cultures at play. I wish the anime localizers would muscle in on the game localizing market and put those miserable dinosaurs back in fast food.
HZD must have been tough for you :)
That intro was spectacular but also had me looking at my watch haha. Luckily the game is gorgeous enough to distract you from the brain numbing tediousness of playing as young Aloy and learning how to track the machines
Same. If I need to figure it out I will, just don't force me to.
No easy mode for my old ass
Enemies with rpg's with no sense of self preservation, you run towards them in hopes of them not shooting and yet they shoot right in front of themselves killing both of you in the process, makes no sense
One I haven’t seen that I recently noticed I hate is when you press to interact but you’re too close for the animation so it automates you walking to a very specific spot then plays the animation. Not so much for chests but for NPC interaction or environmental interactions it really bothers me.
dark souls. i dont like grinding for 20 minutes to lose it all to some bullshit like the floor falling under you or that bit in the catacombs where the statues stab you. not to mention the entirety of blighttown, tombs of the giants, duke archives, depths, and undead burg lower. the combat is slow as hell but the enemies can still gang up on you and at that point you are watching a glorified death animation because there is not chance for escape after that. my favorite areas were ash lake and kiln of the first flame, because in ash lake i could escape the game map and chill and kiln is the part where the game ends. kiln and ash lake look kinda dope though. but dont even get me started on curses. resistance is useless unless you REEAAAALLLY dont like getting cursed. it has the slowest progress bar in history, and then you die instantly and lose half your health bar. if they removed curses from the game everybody would be completely satisfied with the remaster, which, by the way, literally did absolutely nothing to the game. its pretty much just the normal game with the artorias dlc. the graphics havent changed at all, the only thing that really became better was the performance. other than that i cant name a thing. also, you can only roll in four ways. forward, left, right, or back. you are either getting closer, running, or dodging but never two at the same time. not to mention when locked on to targets you cant run backwards or to the sides. the game just doesnt cut you any bullshit. you have to beat this hardass game with clunky controls which are terrible on keyboard and an inability to jump directly upwards. fuck the great hollow.
Zombie games that won't let you fucking punch zombies when you have no weapons. Im looking at you Project Zomboid.
The problem is that 98% of games, even good games, do not have stories that are original and interesting enough to support themselves outside the actual game. No, I don't want to read about this dark lord and the legendary heroes that vanquished it before playing this 9834th game set in an off-the-shelf medieval fantasy world. Not coincidentally, this is also why my game has zero story. If you're not demolishing stuff in 2 minutes, I've failed as a dev.
This one got to me after playing ff7 rebirth: Long chest opening animations and other forms of “non-responsiveness” to clicking in game items.
Guards with no ounce of suspicion lasting longer than 30 seconds. An example is Hitman, all of your buddies are disappearing or even seen dead and your idea is to just put your weapon away and go back to normal patrol after doing a small sweep around where you found them after dragging the body away. Up security, everyone be paranoid or on alert at the slightest sound. I know it's a game but it just annoys me how guards will go back to like nothing happened after a minute.
A way too long intro/ tutorial sections that takes like 30 hours to complete but instead of showing alot of cool crap, it shows you the same thing over and over. looking at you Perona 5 Royal. Oh and flashbacks to something that just happened
Same reason why I made my friend play Persona 5 Strikers instead of Royal even though it's a sequel. Waiting 3 hours to really start playing and with a lot of tutorials isn't fun. Beating a ton of enemies right after starting shows you how the gameplay is, and leaves yo wanting to know how you got there
Exclusive pre-order rewards and other limited time rewards. I love being able to collect everything in a game and I deal with massive FOMO. It just makes me feel bad when I end up missing something.
Having to follow someone talking to me but they walk faster than me but slower than my running
A companion or some idiot on the radio speaking up as soon as I enter a new room/area with comments like: "This wall looks weak." "With three keycards and a PIN, we can get this crane to position that girder close to the sewer entrance." "Hurry up!" All before I have even crossed the threshold. If I want to spend ten minutes trying to read the notices pinned to the wall, that's my affair. We keep being told how expensive and difficult modern games are to make, so I reserve the right to at least try and appreciate the craft.
I hate "starting areas" Just let me bite off more than i can chew... I don't care if I die. I want freedom!
That piece of pizza that's in the way while Dante is flying through the trailer. Seriously though, my biggest pet peeve is games that force PvE players to PvP. I just don't enjoy it.
Non skip-able cut scenes
Escort quests.
Having a long intro that may or may not include a break for character creation, or has character creation and then a long cutscene/mildly interactive scene. Bethesda seems to love this. Skyrim should give you the option to skip straight to character creation, then skip again to where you choose which group you enter the keep with. Fallout 4 should let you build your character, then skip ahead to at least where Shaun is taken.
that was the reason i got into cyberpunk only like a year after buying (also performance tho dlaa saved me there a bit). Now one of my favorite story games till today
Sifu turned that trope on its head and beat it into submission
I always hate when games make you shuffle/shimmy across tight ledges or in between a tight space. It seems like it’s meant to be a scary moment but it’s always just hold the stick left/right. It’s never epic and just randomly slows down pacing for ~5 secs
Higher difficulty = super damage sponge enemies. looking at you bethesda
My biggest is when i try to play a fun killer vs survivor game but the side with the biggest advantage complains to the point they are given another advantage and they still complain to the point where i rather just uninstall!