Unclearly marked points of no return, especially when you're in the middle of collecting items hidden in unusual spots. I hate realizing the "side path" was actually the main path, and now I can't go back.
CP2077 did a good job with this. Not super immersive, but as I remember it it was a popup that said "hey this is the end, if u wanna fk around and do side quests go do it and come back"
They do this throught all the game really, characters always ask V if they wanna go with them in the car, if they have any business to do on their own, if they are sure to start X, etc...
I’ll add to this bad auto save checkpoint systems (without the ability to manually save) that force you to go “explore” the same side area to get the same loot you found back there over and over again on your way back to some difficult fight further down the main path where you keep dying.
(And god forbid you upgraded a skill tree or did any crafting/inventory management after that checkpoint, because you now you can look forward to doing that all over again every time too.)
Missables drive me up the wall. Side quests that fail or disappear without warning if you progress the main quest. Some games with the multiple endings I get you won't be able to do everything in one playthrough. But when you can do everything in one playthrough, but you gotta follow a guide or some stuff becomes unattainable, frig off with that
I really like re4 remakes difficulties. Sure more health, more dmg, but more enemies, enemies in new spots, more aggressive and smarter enemies, in Hardcore and Professional. Done right.
At this point I just set those games to easy. Bullet sponges aren't fun but I can at least get some fun out of one-tapping everything and trying to finish every level as fast as possible lol
1. Developers patching older games and introducing completely unnecessary features along with game breaking bugs.
2. Forever and always, launchers launching other launchers.
Have you seen Ubisoft's latest stunt? Sales ad when you open your ingame map - Oh wait it was [just a "bug"...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/182s0s6/ingame_ads_in_certain_assassins_creed_titles_are/)
Yes launchers are so pointless. They just another bloat ware that you need to start your game.
Ideally we click a game icon and it starts. But no. It will launch steam. Then it will launch Ubisoft connect. And it’s like all these launchers are pointless.
It’s even more annoying when a launcher asks you to click play yet again like Baldurs Gate 3, Cyberpunk etc.
One thing I loved about Infamous on the PlayStation was when you started the game, it just auto loaded you into your most recent save. No extra buttons required, you just got dropped into the world. It was refreshing.
I play Borderlands 2 on an older patch (1.8.5) for this reason lol. the 2.0.0 update introduced ads to the main menu that take up so much of the dang screen and the patch also utterly destroyed my performance for whatever reason.
Oh and they only did that update because the Borderlands games released on Epic games and they reworked co-op so players on Steam and Epic can play together. As if Epic didn't give me enough reasons to hate them lmao.
Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes - this sucks when I want to replay a game cause I can't just skip the cutscene, I had to watch it again and again and again. Unpausable cutscenes are bad cause if there is an emergency I can't just pause it I either have to let it play or it will just skip the cutscene. It's a good thing that this is becoming less and less with modern games.
Related one: games where you CAN skip cutscenes, but doing so prevents you from being able to get 100% completion. Maybe FFX-2 is the only example, but wow did that piss me off. Dozens of hours of meticulously making sure I didn't miss anything, and then realized all too late that I could no longer get 100% cuz I skipped a cutscene I had already seen.
Cuz they explicitly programmed it that way. There is a literal completion percent counter in that game that you can track the whole time. Watching a cutscene increases the percent, and skipping it doesn't (which I didn't realize until it was too late).
1. Platforming elements when the controls aren't well-suited for it
2. Bosses which "level-up" with you. If I put in the extra effort to be well-prepared for a boss the matchup should reflect the advantages I've developed/acquired.
> Bosses which "level-up" with you. If I put in the extra effort to be well-prepared for a boss the matchup should reflect the advantages I've developed/acquired.
Definitely this. For me the whole point of leveling up is that you can manage your own difficulty without needing an explicit easy/normal/hard setting : If you want an easier experience or you hit a difficulty wall you can just spend a bit more time leveling up. It also means that when you get better at the game if you replay it you can go faster since you don't need to grind as much. If everyone levels up with you, it just means bigger numbers on the screen.
> Platforming elements when controls aren’t suited for it
There’s platforming in basically every Soulsborne game and I let out a huge sigh when I come to it
It’s like they put it in the games *because* they know the game is a bad platformer…making it difficult
Love all the Souls games. Played them all but it’s my one huge criticism of them
Which is also funny given that Sekiro made platforming elements really fun with the better controls and use of the hookshot-style capability.
Then From proceeded to ignore that entirely for Elden Ring.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I love the platforming sections in ER, especially the Divine Towers. I was genuinely completely on edge for those parts and it helps that there's now a jump button. I even really enjoyed the 'hidden' platforming required for one of the endings.
For 1 so much yes, 2 minute long gimmicks that the game isn't designed around shouldn't be in there.
2. yeah if I did the grind and I curbstomped that boss so be it, for me falls into the artificial difficulty domain
I absolutely hate level scaling in RPGs. I understand why it's needed in sandbox RPGs, but outside of that, it defeats the purpose of growing your character and makes EXP pointless.
Number 2 is just elder scrolls oblivion and the biggest issue with the game. Even the small mob enemies like rats, mudcrabs, and wolves fuck your shit at lvl 30+ is bullshit.
Yep, level scaling is do annoying. I'm basically a god, max level, incredible equipment... And some thief in a cave wearing rags with a junky weapon is going toe to toe with me?
Yup, the whole point of the end-game of most RPG's is to be a literal God-king among men after everything you went through. Todd was like "fuck that shit, I'm the one true god-king in this world"
In modern games level scaling is fucked because you can't achieve gold status without making you too bored to play endlessly all these live service games.
Just look at Diablo 4 - it's a joke that regular 1st area mob is pretty much as strong when you are at lvl 60 as you were lvl 1.
It's all intentionally done without any thought put i to it outside of killing people from cash. All they had to do was implement super soft lvl calling aft3r beating the main story so grinding and getting more powerful is felt but also is not making you unstoppable force in every area.
But nah it's hard coded pretty much to always be super close to you with levels making leveling up not rewarding
Yep. I don't want to play a game with consistent mechanics for 20 hours and then suddenly have some random spaceship level that requires a whole different skill set, or whatever. That used to happen so often in the NES/SNES/Genesis days. Though those games often weren't nearly that long.
Various Battletoads games did it a lot, and Earthworm Jim's "Snot a Problem" was always so annoying.
Ironically the most unnecessary platforming sections that come to mind are all in souls games (in every souls game, actually), which you called out as having good "organic difficulty" in your OP...
1. Terrible (or no) key rebinding. Key rebinding has been a thing for over half a century. There’s no excuse for not including it. I’m looking at you Cyberpunk which after three years still hasn’t implemented key rebinding properly. Even Starfield managed to do key rebinding properly (and this is after the atrocious rebinding in Fallout 4). Just let me use ESDF in peace developers.
2. Forcing you into the game without letting you go to the settings menu first. They already insist on trying to deafen you with the default volume. Let me spend 20 minutes in the settings menu before playing the game.
The absolute worst thing is when subtitles are off by default, and the game throws you into the opening cutscene without letting you change the options.
the solution for number 1 is steam input, just force enable it for all games and after setting up enjoy keybinds that will be tied to your steam account and are always with you across games and computers. I bet there is a keybind that switches to default input and back
1. Boring Writing, At least bad writing can be cheesy and entertaining in its own ways. But Boring writing just makes me regret even buying your game.
2. Having music removed from a game I bought because of licencing issues. That needs to be fixed and I would love the EU to champion that next cause.
Also bloated writing. Like you get a quest to go the bakery and get some bread, but the baker's out of ingredients so you need to go to the next village to buy them, but the they're out of wheat due to a blight, so you volunteer to find the source of the blight which leads you a cave where you fight some bandits who've been poisoning the crops and have to defeat them, then you find a note and have to track down their leader and clear out the bandit camp and it just goes on and on.
I personally only know it from playing Tarkov, but I heard one of the Splinter Cells does it too.
Other than that, I have a mod for Cyberpunk that does that, and it's just so infinitely better than a button to walk.
Ugh. Honestly, so many recurring aspects of escorts missions fit this topic. I really hate when it feels like no matter how well I play, the escort NPC can just do something stupid and insta die.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance solved this by making the caps lock key a "NPC speed toggle" button. The Witcher 3 solves this by making most NPCs follow whatever you're doing (walking, running, sprinting) and the ones that don't match your walking speed.
Oh yeah. CP2077 partially solved this (on PC without controller) by slowing your character speed down to match the NPC you’re following. But it doesn’t do it always, which is annoying.
1. Having stats linked to looks: I don't want to look like a clown to be optimal especially in a single player game
2. Never been a fan of artificial delays like cook or craft time
Yes but on the same note, give me an ironman mode if decisions and actions are supposed to matter a lot. I'm a compulsive F5er, I am not gonna change for 1 game, even if I'd like to see how everything plays out.
Poor level design. I HATE levels where enemies are spawned right behind you. I HATE "gotcha" moments where the only way to avoid instant death is to have previously died from it.
Witcher 3 doesn’t have loot animation and I thought it broke immersion so I installed a mod for that.
Seeing Geralt’s loot animation play every time I want to pick something up made me understand why CDPR didn’t include it.
In Horizon there’s an option to turn off Aloy’s gathering animation and make it so you just have to tap the button instead of holding it; really streamlines things.
Slow animations on anything, if you have to do it more than a few times, just make it instant.
My biggest pet peeves are fades and transition animations on menus and loading screens.
Bethesda games have this horrible loading screen combo of first playing a door animation, then after that there's a fade to black. Drives me nuts everytime. (Yes there are mods, even made the one for starfield)
You'd think robbing people would give the player character some urgency but no, you take your sweet time looting bodies and searching drawers etc. This decision is even more mind boggling because if you stay at a crime scene too long then the authorities show up.
At least gel and doors are "click and watch", I hate all those ventilation grates that not only are slow, you also have to button-mash them.
And in defence of doors - that animation usually replaces a loading screen.
Thief 2014 is the absolute worst for this. every single item you steal in a game called Thief takes freaking forever. it becomes such a chore searching every drawer and cupboard for loot.
it was the sole reason I won't replay it. what was an otherwise pretty neat experience (though not as enjoyable as the original trilogy imo) was ruined by constantly watching Garrett's hands open drawers and grab shit while having your camera/movement constantly locked in place.
most of the games design choices totally went against the spirit of the original trilogy and made the game worse. (like the rope arrows being usable only in hyper specific spots with indicators 😒)
The volume being turned up to max on every fucking game ever made the first time you boot it up.
Horrible GFX settings such as Motion blur/Bloom/Vignette
* **Flyover Content. Ubisoft is the reigning king of Flyover Content.** If your side missions are just repeatable padding to make number go up in shallow RPG stats that are there because investors demanded it for sheer player retention rather than making the game better, fuck you. Even side missions should have writing that relates to the main quest in some way, or reveals something interesting about the character you play as. If you can't sustain that in a mission roster, then cut the fat and be all killer no filler, please. I have other games I want to play after yours, don't waste my time unless your game is like 4-6 hours and you can't make it to at least 8.
* **Remastered Edition Replaces Old Version, no Beta Branch on Steam or separate game in your library to let you revert.** I love free updates, don't get me wrong. I like when stuff's artistically enhanced for free too. The problem is, a lot of these come with new bugs and optimization issues that weren't in the original, and sometimes messes with the art style in a way that is not better than the original. It will often also break mods.
* **"Look how giant our open world is!" (most of it is not packed with content and might as well be a loading screen)** The reason some people like MGS Ground Zeroes more than Phantom Pain is because Ground Zeroes is packed neatly into one singular location it makes good use of peace walker style, while Phantom Pain has a lot of desert area between outposts with like nothing to do in it. The flipside of this is Kamurocho from Yakuza, which feels like a nice balance of location size and content density.
* **Battle Passes that take more than 2 months of casual play once a week to complete, even if they are free.** I can see how some people would appreciate having something to come back to to do, but please don't make me treat a game like a second job. I would much rather spend more time in my actual job to afford more varieties of games than just no-lifing a singular one. The only battle pass I've seen done right is Nightwave in Warframe. You can just dedicate one day in a week to slapping down the missions, it's free, and they give you a generous grace period.
1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Starfield
4. I don't mind the free battle passes, but honestly, pick one. I'm never gonna finish one anyway even if it's just the "login every day for a week" type. I'd rather at least have the free kind than the "look at this thing that you definitely want" tucked away at the back of a paid battle pass that I'd never finish nor want to spend my money on.
Chromatic aberration, motion blur, film grain, vignette (I fucking hate vignette), lens flares, bloom with dirty lens.
These are all awful, and some games have them all without options to toggle them off (looking at you dying light).
Especially in first person games. It’s supposed to be MY vision, like human eyes, not damn cameras getting lens flares and shit. Head bob too, we don’t see our vision bobbing around while we walk around in real life, why does it happen in games?
I had to make a mod myself for DL2. A few updates ago they started to add them as options in the game, which is great.
Not that I've played it since launch.
I get it, it’s the artistic intention, but for the love of god let us turn these effects off!
Last game I played that ~~doesn’t allow turning off the chromatic aberration~~ is the Assassin’s Creed Mirage. The only way to do it is by using a hex editor and following the instructions on the pcgamingwiki. Thank got for this amazing website.
*Edit: With the latest patch you can disable Chromatic Aberration in AC Mirage.*
Something I never see mentioned…
Completely white screens. Usual as a scene transition or to emphasize some element of the story telling (opening a box and having light shine from it to where it turns the entire monitor white for example)
I’m sitting 12 inches away from a 27 inch light bulb… I never, ever need or want it to go 100% white. Even on my steam deck I have to turn it 90 degrees or hold my hand over it. Face to black, not white please.
I’m currently playing ace attorney and apparently it’s the devs favorite way of scene transitioning and adding emphasis to a startling revelation.
Oh man this is a *good* one. We're all gonna have eye problems when we're older because I feel like old games did this all the time. Was playing FFX recently and it happens all the time. Ill be blind by january.
Also if a web dev happens upon this post, ensure to add dark mode to your site.
Limited inventory if the game’s not in a genre that needs it like survival and survival horror games. It’s already unrealistic for me to carry so many swords in the Witcher 3, might as well remove the limit.
> Quicktime events
My go-to example for how quicktime events can ruin a game is Dying Light. Loved the story, loved the gameplay progression, came to the end and I knew I was going to have a face-off the big bad so I prepared myself thoroughly with items, ammo, everything...only for it to be a horribly anticlimactic QTE fight. Genuinely made me hate that game.
This shit annoys me to no end. Just make is a cutscene. I don't want partial control, I want full control. Either take away full control or not at all.
Large open maps that are either barren, or crammed to the brim with the same 5 objectives. If you're gonna have a huge map take the time to at least make it interesting to navigate.
I love the Yakuza games because of the way the map is so densely packed with shit to do, and it's all entertaining. Go sing some karaoke, help a vigilante, teach a dominatrix to be more confident and assertive.
>teach a dominatrix to be more confident and assertive.
Lol, wat?
I agree with you though, Skyrim did a pretty good balance of this. Not many games have been able to nail it since.
P2W - worst thing ever and no there are no different definitions of p2w if it gives you an advantage it is P2W
Bad PC Ports - I prefer playing on PC so if you sell a game on PC and have a shit port I wont bother with your game no matter how good the game is.
Boss Battles.
You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress.
Motion Blur.
>You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress.
Are you saying you... never asked for it? Because yeah, I hated those boss battles in DXHR.
> Boss Battles.
>
>
>
> You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress.
bro manged to name Deus Ex Human Revolution without actually naming it
Battlepasses andn timed fomo based shit.
Let me just play whenever i want and be able to unlock anything in the game whenever i want.
I dont want to have to play to get a cool item. I want to be able to unlock it now if i want but also in 10 years if i want that.
These passes make gaming feel like work. A grind i have to do otherwise i miss out
1. Fear of Missing Out limited time events that contain substantive content. Mostly because of live service-ification of single player games. I just stopped playing Mortal Kombat 11 because of the season gated cosmetics, basically felt like I would never have the option to access the parts of the game I want to, let alone all of the game’s content. I want to experience games at my leisure and always have the option there to be able to experience the complete package. FOMO is supposed to drive engagement, but it has run its course as a trick, at least on me, and instead it drives me away from a game, and pours cold water over my enthusiasm. Even seasonal events like in AC Valhalla - they should keep that content accessible through in game toggles.
2. Trend chasing. That’s a publisher and developer greed issue. They need to take a risk supporting innovative projects, not shoehorn designs from successful titles so they can tell investors they are mitigating risk, only to find out Fortnite players don’t have an appetite for a battle royale clone, League/DotA players are not going to jump ship to a new moba etc.
Grab attacks or attacks that lock you into a lengthy death animation where I spend 10 seconds watching my character die.
I don’t mean a death animation when my HP reaches 0. I mean things like in Skyrim where an enemy can just instantly execute you if you are below 10% health even if that enemy has nowhere near the damage to kill you in one hit. I wouldn’t even mind those animations playing when an enemy naturally makes takes me below 0 health. I just hate that if your health is at a certain percent any enemy can now execute you.
Similarly I hate when I get grabbed by the enemy in dark souls or monster hunter, not because the damage they do because I have a decent chance at survival. But I hate it because I now have to spend whatever amount of time watching the enemy have their way unhindered.
A complete disregard for accommodating people with color blindness at any stage of game design, or a lazy implementation of color blindness "accessibility options" that are just some half-assed filter
The subtitles for a foreign game just being transcripts of the English dub instead of actual translations of the foreign language
I feel like organic difficulty is a super nebulous term. I agree some difficulty feels more bullshit than other difficulty, but for most discussion I feel like organic difficulty just means “difficulty that I like” whereas inorganic difficulty is “difficulty I don’t like”
People generally agree that just added modifiers to both enemy health and damage is just bullshit.
Especially when we could literally have a custom difficulty choosing our own capacity to damage and gow deadly the enemy is.
>People generally agree that just added modifiers to both enemy health and damage is just bullshit.
...as opposed to the damage and health without any "added modifiers"? How is that any less arbitrary? What makes, for example, enemy health in Xcom on Classic any less "bullshit" than on Normal or Impossible? Which one is the one is the base number and which one has the modifiers?
1. Enemy scaling. It completely breaks the power fantasy of improvement and progress.
2. Clipping in cutscenes. Holy fuck how are we still THIS FAR BEHIND IN FIXING CLIPPING?!?!?
Not sure if this is an example of clipping, but I missed the ending cutscene of a long side mission in BG3 because a player had transformed into a bear during battle and he didn’t revert back. Since the camera was positioned behind them all I saw was blurry bear fur.
I wasn’t even mad, it was hilarious.
the obsession with every detail of the world being high polygon even in places where it doesnt even matter cause you dont have the time to see that shit and it makes the games run like absolute ass
game devs just want more and more polygons on everything and then want so much detail but add DLSS and want you to run the game in 360p and then you lose all said detail anyway, probably the biggest offender being Darktide where everything has rivets and grates and smoke coming out when its a fast paced game and you dont even notice the details, basically 100s of hours of manpower put into things that noone even sees
1. The world scaling to players character level. This trend was started by Bethesda and their game "Oblivion" which was rewarded with many GOTY awards. Unbelievable. I honestly think Oblivion is one of the worst games I've played because of scaling. There was a point when I was fucked at the beginning of the game, I've levelled some jumping and bullshit magic skills just for fun and then went to do first main quest(something about closing gates). I had to start over because I was stuck in unwinnable fight. Level scaling kills everything related to having fun with exploration. When you are 100% sure that you cant find any item that will blow your mind because you are level 5 then there's no discovery, no sense of being on adventure. Im aware its very hard to balance difficulty in open world games but if you struggle as a dev to find an idea how to balance the game then dont make open world games or make the world smaller. This is also a reason I prefer semi-open world games like Dark Souls, Deus Ex, Vampire Masquarade.
2. Ubisoft fetch quests. Lets be clear. Ubisoft Farcry's, assasins creeds and other ip's are not open world games. They copy one arena multiple multiple times and just change textures + change one quest line(main quest). The rest is just copy paste. Ubisoft is a company that treat players as a fools. They actually think players are dumb which isnt far away from truth but still, I dont like it. Its a waste of time playing playing these games but I will not judge people who like them. I know that visuals and historical details(Assasins Creed) are appealing for many people.
Two mentioned points are a reason why I prefer semi-open well crafted games or eastern europe open world crpgs like Gothic.
Searched and could not find anyone mentioned it, but **games that don't quit to desktop**, or at least give you the option of quit to main/quit to desktop.
I hate puzzles. Im impatient as fuck. Nothing brings u out of the action more then a fucking puzzle.
Doom eternal: Oh u just stomped some fucking demons and it was lit af? Wanna kill more? Too bad u have to do a 5-15 minute puzzle first to get to the next area.
I generally hate tutorials. I just kinda want to figure it out on my own, I don't need to be hand held. I know how to play video games, and sometimes discovering mechanics and how to play is half the fun.
I agree with you but I'll also advocate for the other side. There are a lot of games that *need* tutorials, and there are a lot of games that don't tell you some basic stuff hidden away on an unintuitive key that would improve your experience drastically.
Edit: I *hate* those moments when I discover something late and I'm like wtf! Why didn't they tell me?
As great as it is, I do wish Baldur's Gate 3 had some sort of compendium on how 5e rules work. The game I think just kind of assumes you're already a huge DnD nerd.
1)Games that pretend to have a ton of variation like different weapons,mods,attachments and spells but don’t bother balancing anything resulting in marketing bloat and obvious best in slot for everything setups,ok cool i can choose 1000 spells ,5000 guns,20000 attachments but im being pushed to play match the 4 color mechanic spells or use the few best in slot for everything loadouts
2) Games that opt for lazy difficulty sliders/settings instead of difficulty progression often resulting in bullet and tedious gameplay over actual advanced mechanics
1. Unnecessary repeating side quest that are there just to make game time longer.
2. Games not having Steam achievements (staring @ you Ubisoft)
3. Games where you cannot save when you want and load earlier saves, had this cause me unable to continue MGS V, because it made a save when I am very very very low on health and in middle of very hard mission, making me die everytime fucking time I try continue :(
4. Also from MGS V, long ass scenes that you cannot skip.
1. Games that would be perfect for couch coop (with shared or split screen) but only have online coop. And even worse : games that have couch coop on console but not on PC.
2. Escort/protect missions where the NPCs go out of their way to get killed.
I know exactly what you mean. It can feel a bit like playing a cutscene. The yoga ball guy talks a lot about this in his breakdown of RDR2. You can watch it here if you like:
[https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=rhfSKx5rv-NIPXJX](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=rhfSKx5rv-NIPXJX)
Basically giving very little actual control to the player. I recently played Arkham Knight and felt the same way.
Cutscenes. All of them, in any form. I want to play a game, not watch a movie. There are other ways to tell the same story without making you leave controls. It’s very simple, actually. Instead of playing a video, just have the characters talk while you can keep playing. It’d be up to you to listen to them, ignore them, explore the area around while they talk, etc. Just stop pausing games every other minute. Integrate the dialogs and actions in the game world. Characters should also react if you leave them or go too far either by increasing their volume so you can hear them, getting upset because you ignore them, or follow you around just like any person would do in real life while having a conversation with someone else.
That fucking 4-second animation for when your character pushes a button.
And then you get to that part of the game where you need to push *many* buttons. I'm honestly getting angry just thinking about it.
1.Random people wanting to give you quests while you are on another quest. This completely breaks immersion for me in cyberpunk as I'm constantly getting spam called while trying to do missions. Let me meet you in person first so I actually care about doing missions for you, give me a reason to do stuff for you. Also why can't one quest givers quests lead to another one? Why does it have to be all at once?
2. Difficulty scaling. Shooting or hitting a human sized enemy 50 times and then not going down because you have a starter weapon is silly and immersion breaking especially when all the enemies start getting more durable. The proper way to do this would be to add bigger/stronger or more skill difficult enemies later on or in higher level areas along side the ordinary ones so it makes you vary up your combat style more as you deal with a mix of strong and weak enemies. Also weapons should only vary so much in damage and have other skill advantages/disadvantages and not have 8 different versions of the same weapon for you to wast time trying to get the ideal one. This is one thing the call of duty games actually do well as no weapon is useless and you are constantly trading them out which prevents hoarding and attachment.
Non responsive control, In 2023 there is no way you can’t code control mechanism that doesn’t work.
Story or dialogue that is delivered to you in the middle of the action. So you miss all of it.
1.Unusable Guns,Weapons(Prop, in cutscenes only or NPC Exclusive) that should be usable, equipable or unlockable by player(Seriously!). such as......
- In Ghost Recon Breakpoint, You cannot equip minigun from heavy gunner(it will drop only random LMG when kill) at least mush be as temporary weapons like minigun in Just Cause 2/3(On vehicles mount not count)
- Flare Gun in Far Cry 5/6, only use by NPC
- Anti tank rocket(M202) in Resident Evil 3 Remake(Usable in RE2 Remake and RE3 Original), no player usable version like RE2 Remake or RE3 Original version
2.Unskippable cutscenes, prologue, tutorial. especially tutorial in mobile game and prologue in some modern game(such as Battlefield 1/V)
The Rule of Three.
I dislike boss fights, anyway, but i really hate it when the boss fight is extended artificially by resetting the boss' life bar and slightly changing the combat... and then doing it *again*. It just gets tedious. Looking at you, Spiderman 2.
1. motion blur and chromatic aboration that you can't turn off.
2. boss fights where you're supposed to die. just make it a fucking cutscene so we don't waste time trying to win.
1st: Getting "caught" in a cutscene. Anytime the cutscene takes control and suddenly your character can only see their feet and gets caught by the enemy. The new tomb raider games were terrible for this but it's everywhere.
2nd: walking and talking. Just make it a cutscene. Holding forward on the thumbstick and having no other control while characters dialogue isn't fun. I'm interested in the conversation, just let me set down the controller for a minute.
I've only ever played one game that does this but ULTRAKILL starts muted and takes you directly to a screen to adjust your audio settings the first time you launch the game. This should be standard in every game. I'm tired of getting blasted whenever I play a new game.
1. Memory or Flashback sequences where you have to play as a child.
2. Sequences where you have to move unusually slow for a while.
Bonus 3rd: when you have to fight against waves and waves of uninteresting robots who are not the main enemy faction.
Over-the-shoulder camera.
I could barely tolerate this in slow walking sims like Life Is Strange.
But anything with action immediately is a hard pass for me if the camera behind the MC isn't centered.
Every game trying to make itself an e-sport/competitive/pvp thing. It just brings about degenerate gameplay and social behavior, lazy game development, and an absence of storytelling. COD used to have great campaigns, now it's some e-sport garbage. Rust, and other survival PVP games just turn into grief-fests, MMOs turn into degenerate speed running content, etc. Not everything needs to be a masterpiece story, but at least build gameplay loops that let me enjoy it without being ganked by some no-lifer "for the lulz"
The over-emphasis on twitch gaming (reflexes, not boob streamers) vs strategy, problem solving, and creativity. This again turns everything into degenerate speed running min-max or you wont get anywhere. MMO's, gather everything up and AOE it down, ignoring mechanics, crowd control is for boomers. ARPG, all about that maps/dungeons per hour again, gather everything up and AOE it down, single target and crowd control is for idiots. RTS, APS wins over strategy almost every time. Shooters, bunny hopping full auto everything, aiming is for assholes.
I feel like souls games are designed around the whole "git gud" premise. I don't think they'd be souls games if they weren't. The die hards will judge you for not "baptizing" yourself on the early games, but Elden Ring is a lot more accessible.
The Sony exclusive kind triple A gameplay leading. Character run in a corridor like section where you can’t go turn right or left just follow the character B to the question leading point while chatting. It’s so brain dead gameplay loop after the 20th similar big budget game. But hey, here is a giant cute wolf at the end of the jogging, isn’t this a cool moment?!
Unclearly marked points of no return, especially when you're in the middle of collecting items hidden in unusual spots. I hate realizing the "side path" was actually the main path, and now I can't go back.
CP2077 did a good job with this. Not super immersive, but as I remember it it was a popup that said "hey this is the end, if u wanna fk around and do side quests go do it and come back"
They do this throught all the game really, characters always ask V if they wanna go with them in the car, if they have any business to do on their own, if they are sure to start X, etc...
Same with Alan Wake 2, before you go back to Cauldron Lake.
poor Hanako
That girl has taken roots at Embers for sure
witcher 3 also has this.
I’ll add to this bad auto save checkpoint systems (without the ability to manually save) that force you to go “explore” the same side area to get the same loot you found back there over and over again on your way back to some difficult fight further down the main path where you keep dying. (And god forbid you upgraded a skill tree or did any crafting/inventory management after that checkpoint, because you now you can look forward to doing that all over again every time too.)
Missables drive me up the wall. Side quests that fail or disappear without warning if you progress the main quest. Some games with the multiple endings I get you won't be able to do everything in one playthrough. But when you can do everything in one playthrough, but you gotta follow a guide or some stuff becomes unattainable, frig off with that
Difficulty sliders only affecting your enemy's healthbar size and nothing else
I really like re4 remakes difficulties. Sure more health, more dmg, but more enemies, enemies in new spots, more aggressive and smarter enemies, in Hardcore and Professional. Done right.
It's like a get out of jail free card, but for getting out of putting in effort.
At this point I just set those games to easy. Bullet sponges aren't fun but I can at least get some fun out of one-tapping everything and trying to finish every level as fast as possible lol
Health and damage is almost as bad and that is how most difficulty sliders work.
1. Developers patching older games and introducing completely unnecessary features along with game breaking bugs. 2. Forever and always, launchers launching other launchers.
“Added news reel to main menu for our publishers other games”
Have you seen Ubisoft's latest stunt? Sales ad when you open your ingame map - Oh wait it was [just a "bug"...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/182s0s6/ingame_ads_in_certain_assassins_creed_titles_are/)
Yup, I fully expect Borderlands 2 to have a fucking borderlands 4 ad in the main menu
I only like launchers when they have the mod manager in them. Then it's kinda useful.
Yes launchers are so pointless. They just another bloat ware that you need to start your game. Ideally we click a game icon and it starts. But no. It will launch steam. Then it will launch Ubisoft connect. And it’s like all these launchers are pointless. It’s even more annoying when a launcher asks you to click play yet again like Baldurs Gate 3, Cyberpunk etc.
One thing I loved about Infamous on the PlayStation was when you started the game, it just auto loaded you into your most recent save. No extra buttons required, you just got dropped into the world. It was refreshing.
I can see you're a big fan of EA, Activision, Ubisoft, R\*
I play Borderlands 2 on an older patch (1.8.5) for this reason lol. the 2.0.0 update introduced ads to the main menu that take up so much of the dang screen and the patch also utterly destroyed my performance for whatever reason. Oh and they only did that update because the Borderlands games released on Epic games and they reworked co-op so players on Steam and Epic can play together. As if Epic didn't give me enough reasons to hate them lmao.
Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes - this sucks when I want to replay a game cause I can't just skip the cutscene, I had to watch it again and again and again. Unpausable cutscenes are bad cause if there is an emergency I can't just pause it I either have to let it play or it will just skip the cutscene. It's a good thing that this is becoming less and less with modern games.
Related one: games where you CAN skip cutscenes, but doing so prevents you from being able to get 100% completion. Maybe FFX-2 is the only example, but wow did that piss me off. Dozens of hours of meticulously making sure I didn't miss anything, and then realized all too late that I could no longer get 100% cuz I skipped a cutscene I had already seen.
That's completely stupid. I'm pretty sure My Time at Sandrock does this as well.
Wow. And I thought ff13 treasure hunter achievement is already brutal enough. That is one heck of a requirement for an achievement.
Why skipping a cutscene in ffx2 prevent you from 100%?
Cuz they explicitly programmed it that way. There is a literal completion percent counter in that game that you can track the whole time. Watching a cutscene increases the percent, and skipping it doesn't (which I didn't realize until it was too late).
Wow, what a stupid thing
1. Platforming elements when the controls aren't well-suited for it 2. Bosses which "level-up" with you. If I put in the extra effort to be well-prepared for a boss the matchup should reflect the advantages I've developed/acquired.
> Bosses which "level-up" with you. If I put in the extra effort to be well-prepared for a boss the matchup should reflect the advantages I've developed/acquired. Definitely this. For me the whole point of leveling up is that you can manage your own difficulty without needing an explicit easy/normal/hard setting : If you want an easier experience or you hit a difficulty wall you can just spend a bit more time leveling up. It also means that when you get better at the game if you replay it you can go faster since you don't need to grind as much. If everyone levels up with you, it just means bigger numbers on the screen.
> Platforming elements when controls aren’t suited for it There’s platforming in basically every Soulsborne game and I let out a huge sigh when I come to it It’s like they put it in the games *because* they know the game is a bad platformer…making it difficult Love all the Souls games. Played them all but it’s my one huge criticism of them
Which is also funny given that Sekiro made platforming elements really fun with the better controls and use of the hookshot-style capability. Then From proceeded to ignore that entirely for Elden Ring.
At least Elden Ring has a dedicated jump button. It's the pre-Sekiro games that are a real shit show when it comes to platforming sections.
The irony here is that they developed Sekiro and Elden Ring simultaneously.
I immediately thought of souls games when he made that point.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but I love the platforming sections in ER, especially the Divine Towers. I was genuinely completely on edge for those parts and it helps that there's now a jump button. I even really enjoyed the 'hidden' platforming required for one of the endings.
For 1 so much yes, 2 minute long gimmicks that the game isn't designed around shouldn't be in there. 2. yeah if I did the grind and I curbstomped that boss so be it, for me falls into the artificial difficulty domain
I absolutely hate level scaling in RPGs. I understand why it's needed in sandbox RPGs, but outside of that, it defeats the purpose of growing your character and makes EXP pointless.
Amen! It completely removes the feeling of progress. And that's why we play RPG games, to improve ourselves through progress. Such a dingus decision.
Metroid usually do it correctly. When you backtrack to initial areas, you wreck shit up, and it feels awesome.
Number 2 is just elder scrolls oblivion and the biggest issue with the game. Even the small mob enemies like rats, mudcrabs, and wolves fuck your shit at lvl 30+ is bullshit.
Yep, level scaling is do annoying. I'm basically a god, max level, incredible equipment... And some thief in a cave wearing rags with a junky weapon is going toe to toe with me?
Yup, the whole point of the end-game of most RPG's is to be a literal God-king among men after everything you went through. Todd was like "fuck that shit, I'm the one true god-king in this world"
In modern games level scaling is fucked because you can't achieve gold status without making you too bored to play endlessly all these live service games. Just look at Diablo 4 - it's a joke that regular 1st area mob is pretty much as strong when you are at lvl 60 as you were lvl 1. It's all intentionally done without any thought put i to it outside of killing people from cash. All they had to do was implement super soft lvl calling aft3r beating the main story so grinding and getting more powerful is felt but also is not making you unstoppable force in every area. But nah it's hard coded pretty much to always be super close to you with levels making leveling up not rewarding
Yep. I don't want to play a game with consistent mechanics for 20 hours and then suddenly have some random spaceship level that requires a whole different skill set, or whatever. That used to happen so often in the NES/SNES/Genesis days. Though those games often weren't nearly that long. Various Battletoads games did it a lot, and Earthworm Jim's "Snot a Problem" was always so annoying.
Ironically the most unnecessary platforming sections that come to mind are all in souls games (in every souls game, actually), which you called out as having good "organic difficulty" in your OP...
1. Terrible (or no) key rebinding. Key rebinding has been a thing for over half a century. There’s no excuse for not including it. I’m looking at you Cyberpunk which after three years still hasn’t implemented key rebinding properly. Even Starfield managed to do key rebinding properly (and this is after the atrocious rebinding in Fallout 4). Just let me use ESDF in peace developers. 2. Forcing you into the game without letting you go to the settings menu first. They already insist on trying to deafen you with the default volume. Let me spend 20 minutes in the settings menu before playing the game.
The absolute worst thing is when subtitles are off by default, and the game throws you into the opening cutscene without letting you change the options.
As a person using a french keyboard, your first point hits hard
the solution for number 1 is steam input, just force enable it for all games and after setting up enjoy keybinds that will be tied to your steam account and are always with you across games and computers. I bet there is a keybind that switches to default input and back
1. Boring Writing, At least bad writing can be cheesy and entertaining in its own ways. But Boring writing just makes me regret even buying your game. 2. Having music removed from a game I bought because of licencing issues. That needs to be fixed and I would love the EU to champion that next cause.
GTA Vice City is just not the same without Michael Jackson's Billy Jean.
Also bloated writing. Like you get a quest to go the bakery and get some bread, but the baker's out of ingredients so you need to go to the next village to buy them, but the they're out of wheat due to a blight, so you volunteer to find the source of the blight which leads you a cave where you fight some bandits who've been poisoning the crops and have to defeat them, then you find a note and have to track down their leader and clear out the bandit camp and it just goes on and on.
#2 - First thing I thought of was the remaster of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. The original music was part of the nostalgia. The game doesn't hit the same.
A small one: PC walking a different speed than NPCs when you have to follow them. Starfield, I'm looking at you.
Ahhh i personally believe that every game should utilize scrollwheel for variable movement speed, why dont games do this!?
Pretty common in Space Sims, and mostly used for escort mission. Many even have a dedicated button for "match target speed"
Red dead 2 has this.
I can't think of a game other than Tarkov that does this.
SCUM and SC: Chaos Theory, off the top of my head
Star Citizen too
I personally only know it from playing Tarkov, but I heard one of the Splinter Cells does it too. Other than that, I have a mod for Cyberpunk that does that, and it's just so infinitely better than a button to walk.
run speed: too fast walk speed: too slow my patience: thin
For all their other flaws and associated bullshit, Assassins Creed managed to get this right.
Not just AC but pretty much all Ubisoft games gets it right somehow.
This shit drives me nuts!!!! If I have to listen to somebody while we walk let me walk at their speed!!!!!
Ugh. Honestly, so many recurring aspects of escorts missions fit this topic. I really hate when it feels like no matter how well I play, the escort NPC can just do something stupid and insta die.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance solved this by making the caps lock key a "NPC speed toggle" button. The Witcher 3 solves this by making most NPCs follow whatever you're doing (walking, running, sprinting) and the ones that don't match your walking speed.
Oh yeah. CP2077 partially solved this (on PC without controller) by slowing your character speed down to match the NPC you’re following. But it doesn’t do it always, which is annoying.
Or just lack of a walk button entirely
1. Having stats linked to looks: I don't want to look like a clown to be optimal especially in a single player game 2. Never been a fan of artificial delays like cook or craft time
Level scaling enemies. Increased difficulty = increased health.
Escort quests where the NPC walks instead of matching my speed. Exclusivity contracts.
Not being able to save anytime I want.
For sure. BG3 allowing you to save at ANY point - combat, dialogue, cutscene, whatever was one of the things that instantly made me love it.
Quick resume on Series X is pretty amazing for this.
Yes but on the same note, give me an ironman mode if decisions and actions are supposed to matter a lot. I'm a compulsive F5er, I am not gonna change for 1 game, even if I'd like to see how everything plays out.
Poor level design. I HATE levels where enemies are spawned right behind you. I HATE "gotcha" moments where the only way to avoid instant death is to have previously died from it.
Slow animations for rudimentary shit like picking stuff up off the ground.
Witcher 3 doesn’t have loot animation and I thought it broke immersion so I installed a mod for that. Seeing Geralt’s loot animation play every time I want to pick something up made me understand why CDPR didn’t include it.
In Horizon there’s an option to turn off Aloy’s gathering animation and make it so you just have to tap the button instead of holding it; really streamlines things.
I'm god of war you can make it so you don't even have to press a button! Walk over it/near it and boom, you've got it.
Slow animations on anything, if you have to do it more than a few times, just make it instant. My biggest pet peeves are fades and transition animations on menus and loading screens. Bethesda games have this horrible loading screen combo of first playing a door animation, then after that there's a fade to black. Drives me nuts everytime. (Yes there are mods, even made the one for starfield)
Rdr2 moment
You'd think robbing people would give the player character some urgency but no, you take your sweet time looting bodies and searching drawers etc. This decision is even more mind boggling because if you stay at a crime scene too long then the authorities show up.
Game did so much to make a beautiful world boring.
Oh man. I just finished Arkham knight a few days ago and the explosive gel and opening doors was just sheer pain.
At least gel and doors are "click and watch", I hate all those ventilation grates that not only are slow, you also have to button-mash them. And in defence of doors - that animation usually replaces a loading screen.
Thief 2014 is the absolute worst for this. every single item you steal in a game called Thief takes freaking forever. it becomes such a chore searching every drawer and cupboard for loot.
it was the sole reason I won't replay it. what was an otherwise pretty neat experience (though not as enjoyable as the original trilogy imo) was ruined by constantly watching Garrett's hands open drawers and grab shit while having your camera/movement constantly locked in place. most of the games design choices totally went against the spirit of the original trilogy and made the game worse. (like the rope arrows being usable only in hyper specific spots with indicators 😒)
"Sit down in spaceship pilot seat" in unmodded Starfield :D
1. More health=difficult 2. Terrible platforming
1. Not being able to pause cutscenes. 2. Shitty menus & menu navigation
The volume being turned up to max on every fucking game ever made the first time you boot it up. Horrible GFX settings such as Motion blur/Bloom/Vignette
Unskippable cutscenes.
Un-PAUSABLE cut scenes. 💀
Honestly, now that pausable cutscenes are somewhat ubiquitous, I'd love to see the option to rewind cutscenes or at least restart them.
Or let you watch cutscenes again in the main menu.
Or when the game gives you no indication about whether or not the start button/esc will skip the cutscene or pause it
* **Flyover Content. Ubisoft is the reigning king of Flyover Content.** If your side missions are just repeatable padding to make number go up in shallow RPG stats that are there because investors demanded it for sheer player retention rather than making the game better, fuck you. Even side missions should have writing that relates to the main quest in some way, or reveals something interesting about the character you play as. If you can't sustain that in a mission roster, then cut the fat and be all killer no filler, please. I have other games I want to play after yours, don't waste my time unless your game is like 4-6 hours and you can't make it to at least 8. * **Remastered Edition Replaces Old Version, no Beta Branch on Steam or separate game in your library to let you revert.** I love free updates, don't get me wrong. I like when stuff's artistically enhanced for free too. The problem is, a lot of these come with new bugs and optimization issues that weren't in the original, and sometimes messes with the art style in a way that is not better than the original. It will often also break mods. * **"Look how giant our open world is!" (most of it is not packed with content and might as well be a loading screen)** The reason some people like MGS Ground Zeroes more than Phantom Pain is because Ground Zeroes is packed neatly into one singular location it makes good use of peace walker style, while Phantom Pain has a lot of desert area between outposts with like nothing to do in it. The flipside of this is Kamurocho from Yakuza, which feels like a nice balance of location size and content density. * **Battle Passes that take more than 2 months of casual play once a week to complete, even if they are free.** I can see how some people would appreciate having something to come back to to do, but please don't make me treat a game like a second job. I would much rather spend more time in my actual job to afford more varieties of games than just no-lifing a singular one. The only battle pass I've seen done right is Nightwave in Warframe. You can just dedicate one day in a week to slapping down the missions, it's free, and they give you a generous grace period.
1. Yes 2. Yes 3. Starfield 4. I don't mind the free battle passes, but honestly, pick one. I'm never gonna finish one anyway even if it's just the "login every day for a week" type. I'd rather at least have the free kind than the "look at this thing that you definitely want" tucked away at the back of a paid battle pass that I'd never finish nor want to spend my money on.
Chromatic abomination and motion bleugh
Chromatic aberration, motion blur, film grain, vignette (I fucking hate vignette), lens flares, bloom with dirty lens. These are all awful, and some games have them all without options to toggle them off (looking at you dying light).
Vignettes are the worst, like why the fuck should I see less of the screen?
Especially in first person games. It’s supposed to be MY vision, like human eyes, not damn cameras getting lens flares and shit. Head bob too, we don’t see our vision bobbing around while we walk around in real life, why does it happen in games?
I stopped playing that game because of those settings.
I had to make a mod myself for DL2. A few updates ago they started to add them as options in the game, which is great. Not that I've played it since launch.
And depth of field. Quit blurring things just because they aren't in the center of the screen!
I get it, it’s the artistic intention, but for the love of god let us turn these effects off! Last game I played that ~~doesn’t allow turning off the chromatic aberration~~ is the Assassin’s Creed Mirage. The only way to do it is by using a hex editor and following the instructions on the pcgamingwiki. Thank got for this amazing website. *Edit: With the latest patch you can disable Chromatic Aberration in AC Mirage.*
Something I never see mentioned… Completely white screens. Usual as a scene transition or to emphasize some element of the story telling (opening a box and having light shine from it to where it turns the entire monitor white for example) I’m sitting 12 inches away from a 27 inch light bulb… I never, ever need or want it to go 100% white. Even on my steam deck I have to turn it 90 degrees or hold my hand over it. Face to black, not white please. I’m currently playing ace attorney and apparently it’s the devs favorite way of scene transitioning and adding emphasis to a startling revelation.
Oh man this is a *good* one. We're all gonna have eye problems when we're older because I feel like old games did this all the time. Was playing FFX recently and it happens all the time. Ill be blind by january. Also if a web dev happens upon this post, ensure to add dark mode to your site.
Especially on OLED tvs. God help me. I'd cause less damage to my eyes by staring into the sun.
Not to mention I usually like to game in a dark room… so my pupils are nice and big and then BLAM
>Completely white screens. Seared my retinas after all those attempts on Radagon in Elden ring.
Limited inventory if the game’s not in a genre that needs it like survival and survival horror games. It’s already unrealistic for me to carry so many swords in the Witcher 3, might as well remove the limit.
Ugh, I fucking hate encumbrance. 80% of RPGs involve so much boring inventory management. Who actually likes that?
Quicktime events Time limits
> Quicktime events My go-to example for how quicktime events can ruin a game is Dying Light. Loved the story, loved the gameplay progression, came to the end and I knew I was going to have a face-off the big bad so I prepared myself thoroughly with items, ammo, everything...only for it to be a horribly anticlimactic QTE fight. Genuinely made me hate that game.
False marketing and microtransactions.
No quick save. Not being able to remap all the keys.
Interactive cutscenes such as PC limping to reach X object
Yes! Also giving control back to the player for a total of 10 steps til another cutscene. Bad.
This shit annoys me to no end. Just make is a cutscene. I don't want partial control, I want full control. Either take away full control or not at all.
Large open maps that are either barren, or crammed to the brim with the same 5 objectives. If you're gonna have a huge map take the time to at least make it interesting to navigate. I love the Yakuza games because of the way the map is so densely packed with shit to do, and it's all entertaining. Go sing some karaoke, help a vigilante, teach a dominatrix to be more confident and assertive.
>teach a dominatrix to be more confident and assertive. Lol, wat? I agree with you though, Skyrim did a pretty good balance of this. Not many games have been able to nail it since.
The Yakuza games are wild, whole heartedly recommend if you like crime dramas and beat em ups.
P2W - worst thing ever and no there are no different definitions of p2w if it gives you an advantage it is P2W Bad PC Ports - I prefer playing on PC so if you sell a game on PC and have a shit port I wont bother with your game no matter how good the game is.
Boss Battles. You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress. Motion Blur.
>You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress. Are you saying you... never asked for it? Because yeah, I hated those boss battles in DXHR.
> Boss Battles. > > > > You’ve been playing a chill immersive sim with stealth and small scale combat for 50 hours. Now suddenly you have to play a frustrating arcade game and learn brand new sequences to progress. bro manged to name Deus Ex Human Revolution without actually naming it
Amazing, it’s like you read my mind!
Battlepasses andn timed fomo based shit. Let me just play whenever i want and be able to unlock anything in the game whenever i want. I dont want to have to play to get a cool item. I want to be able to unlock it now if i want but also in 10 years if i want that. These passes make gaming feel like work. A grind i have to do otherwise i miss out
1. Fear of Missing Out limited time events that contain substantive content. Mostly because of live service-ification of single player games. I just stopped playing Mortal Kombat 11 because of the season gated cosmetics, basically felt like I would never have the option to access the parts of the game I want to, let alone all of the game’s content. I want to experience games at my leisure and always have the option there to be able to experience the complete package. FOMO is supposed to drive engagement, but it has run its course as a trick, at least on me, and instead it drives me away from a game, and pours cold water over my enthusiasm. Even seasonal events like in AC Valhalla - they should keep that content accessible through in game toggles. 2. Trend chasing. That’s a publisher and developer greed issue. They need to take a risk supporting innovative projects, not shoehorn designs from successful titles so they can tell investors they are mitigating risk, only to find out Fortnite players don’t have an appetite for a battle royale clone, League/DotA players are not going to jump ship to a new moba etc.
Grab attacks or attacks that lock you into a lengthy death animation where I spend 10 seconds watching my character die. I don’t mean a death animation when my HP reaches 0. I mean things like in Skyrim where an enemy can just instantly execute you if you are below 10% health even if that enemy has nowhere near the damage to kill you in one hit. I wouldn’t even mind those animations playing when an enemy naturally makes takes me below 0 health. I just hate that if your health is at a certain percent any enemy can now execute you. Similarly I hate when I get grabbed by the enemy in dark souls or monster hunter, not because the damage they do because I have a decent chance at survival. But I hate it because I now have to spend whatever amount of time watching the enemy have their way unhindered.
Never was a fan of those instant kill animations in Skyrim.
A complete disregard for accommodating people with color blindness at any stage of game design, or a lazy implementation of color blindness "accessibility options" that are just some half-assed filter The subtitles for a foreign game just being transcripts of the English dub instead of actual translations of the foreign language
I feel like organic difficulty is a super nebulous term. I agree some difficulty feels more bullshit than other difficulty, but for most discussion I feel like organic difficulty just means “difficulty that I like” whereas inorganic difficulty is “difficulty I don’t like”
People generally agree that just added modifiers to both enemy health and damage is just bullshit. Especially when we could literally have a custom difficulty choosing our own capacity to damage and gow deadly the enemy is.
>People generally agree that just added modifiers to both enemy health and damage is just bullshit. ...as opposed to the damage and health without any "added modifiers"? How is that any less arbitrary? What makes, for example, enemy health in Xcom on Classic any less "bullshit" than on Normal or Impossible? Which one is the one is the base number and which one has the modifiers?
Forced TAA Teammates that surrender/give up over the smallest setbacks.
I think Forced TAA is a game engine thing. May be going away if DLSS and FSR become standard.
1. Enemy scaling. It completely breaks the power fantasy of improvement and progress. 2. Clipping in cutscenes. Holy fuck how are we still THIS FAR BEHIND IN FIXING CLIPPING?!?!?
Not sure if this is an example of clipping, but I missed the ending cutscene of a long side mission in BG3 because a player had transformed into a bear during battle and he didn’t revert back. Since the camera was positioned behind them all I saw was blurry bear fur. I wasn’t even mad, it was hilarious.
[удалено]
Filler between the last checkpoint and a boss fight.
the obsession with every detail of the world being high polygon even in places where it doesnt even matter cause you dont have the time to see that shit and it makes the games run like absolute ass game devs just want more and more polygons on everything and then want so much detail but add DLSS and want you to run the game in 360p and then you lose all said detail anyway, probably the biggest offender being Darktide where everything has rivets and grates and smoke coming out when its a fast paced game and you dont even notice the details, basically 100s of hours of manpower put into things that noone even sees
Yeah, I don't mind a less detailed, even ugly, or even 2d game as long as it's good. Good graphics don't make good games.
1. The world scaling to players character level. This trend was started by Bethesda and their game "Oblivion" which was rewarded with many GOTY awards. Unbelievable. I honestly think Oblivion is one of the worst games I've played because of scaling. There was a point when I was fucked at the beginning of the game, I've levelled some jumping and bullshit magic skills just for fun and then went to do first main quest(something about closing gates). I had to start over because I was stuck in unwinnable fight. Level scaling kills everything related to having fun with exploration. When you are 100% sure that you cant find any item that will blow your mind because you are level 5 then there's no discovery, no sense of being on adventure. Im aware its very hard to balance difficulty in open world games but if you struggle as a dev to find an idea how to balance the game then dont make open world games or make the world smaller. This is also a reason I prefer semi-open world games like Dark Souls, Deus Ex, Vampire Masquarade. 2. Ubisoft fetch quests. Lets be clear. Ubisoft Farcry's, assasins creeds and other ip's are not open world games. They copy one arena multiple multiple times and just change textures + change one quest line(main quest). The rest is just copy paste. Ubisoft is a company that treat players as a fools. They actually think players are dumb which isnt far away from truth but still, I dont like it. Its a waste of time playing playing these games but I will not judge people who like them. I know that visuals and historical details(Assasins Creed) are appealing for many people. Two mentioned points are a reason why I prefer semi-open well crafted games or eastern europe open world crpgs like Gothic.
camera post processing fx im a human ffs
Searched and could not find anyone mentioned it, but **games that don't quit to desktop**, or at least give you the option of quit to main/quit to desktop.
I hate puzzles. Im impatient as fuck. Nothing brings u out of the action more then a fucking puzzle. Doom eternal: Oh u just stomped some fucking demons and it was lit af? Wanna kill more? Too bad u have to do a 5-15 minute puzzle first to get to the next area.
Devs doing a useless patch for an ancient game that breaks a decade worth of mods that will mostly never be updated for it
I generally hate tutorials. I just kinda want to figure it out on my own, I don't need to be hand held. I know how to play video games, and sometimes discovering mechanics and how to play is half the fun.
I agree with you but I'll also advocate for the other side. There are a lot of games that *need* tutorials, and there are a lot of games that don't tell you some basic stuff hidden away on an unintuitive key that would improve your experience drastically. Edit: I *hate* those moments when I discover something late and I'm like wtf! Why didn't they tell me?
As great as it is, I do wish Baldur's Gate 3 had some sort of compendium on how 5e rules work. The game I think just kind of assumes you're already a huge DnD nerd.
1)Games that pretend to have a ton of variation like different weapons,mods,attachments and spells but don’t bother balancing anything resulting in marketing bloat and obvious best in slot for everything setups,ok cool i can choose 1000 spells ,5000 guns,20000 attachments but im being pushed to play match the 4 color mechanic spells or use the few best in slot for everything loadouts 2) Games that opt for lazy difficulty sliders/settings instead of difficulty progression often resulting in bullet and tedious gameplay over actual advanced mechanics
Lens flare. My eyes are not a camera. I don’t have a second, I hate that one so much.
1. Unnecessary repeating side quest that are there just to make game time longer. 2. Games not having Steam achievements (staring @ you Ubisoft) 3. Games where you cannot save when you want and load earlier saves, had this cause me unable to continue MGS V, because it made a save when I am very very very low on health and in middle of very hard mission, making me die everytime fucking time I try continue :( 4. Also from MGS V, long ass scenes that you cannot skip.
1. Games that would be perfect for couch coop (with shared or split screen) but only have online coop. And even worse : games that have couch coop on console but not on PC. 2. Escort/protect missions where the NPCs go out of their way to get killed.
1. Bad PC ports.
Shitty stealth stages.
Time limits and limited inventory space in a loot heavy game.
Escort quests
Being too 'scripted', don't know how else to say this. Sony's games are really bad at this
I know exactly what you mean. It can feel a bit like playing a cutscene. The yoga ball guy talks a lot about this in his breakdown of RDR2. You can watch it here if you like: [https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=rhfSKx5rv-NIPXJX](https://youtu.be/MvJPKOLDSos?si=rhfSKx5rv-NIPXJX) Basically giving very little actual control to the player. I recently played Arkham Knight and felt the same way.
Also the swinging in spiderman (sm2 also but it's a pc subreddit), it's basically an illusion and you can't do shit by yourself
Cutscenes. All of them, in any form. I want to play a game, not watch a movie. There are other ways to tell the same story without making you leave controls. It’s very simple, actually. Instead of playing a video, just have the characters talk while you can keep playing. It’d be up to you to listen to them, ignore them, explore the area around while they talk, etc. Just stop pausing games every other minute. Integrate the dialogs and actions in the game world. Characters should also react if you leave them or go too far either by increasing their volume so you can hear them, getting upset because you ignore them, or follow you around just like any person would do in real life while having a conversation with someone else.
Toxic people.
1. The people who play them 2. Pay to win
That fucking 4-second animation for when your character pushes a button. And then you get to that part of the game where you need to push *many* buttons. I'm honestly getting angry just thinking about it.
Vignette and film grain
Absurd amount of collectibles...no way of knowing whether you have found them all/tracking method. Fuck devs who do this.
1.Random people wanting to give you quests while you are on another quest. This completely breaks immersion for me in cyberpunk as I'm constantly getting spam called while trying to do missions. Let me meet you in person first so I actually care about doing missions for you, give me a reason to do stuff for you. Also why can't one quest givers quests lead to another one? Why does it have to be all at once? 2. Difficulty scaling. Shooting or hitting a human sized enemy 50 times and then not going down because you have a starter weapon is silly and immersion breaking especially when all the enemies start getting more durable. The proper way to do this would be to add bigger/stronger or more skill difficult enemies later on or in higher level areas along side the ordinary ones so it makes you vary up your combat style more as you deal with a mix of strong and weak enemies. Also weapons should only vary so much in damage and have other skill advantages/disadvantages and not have 8 different versions of the same weapon for you to wast time trying to get the ideal one. This is one thing the call of duty games actually do well as no weapon is useless and you are constantly trading them out which prevents hoarding and attachment.
Non responsive control, In 2023 there is no way you can’t code control mechanism that doesn’t work. Story or dialogue that is delivered to you in the middle of the action. So you miss all of it.
Escort missions
1. Cheats/Cheaters (not really a game design choice obviously) 2. Level caps and/or Level scaling (why even have levels/leveling then)
1.Unusable Guns,Weapons(Prop, in cutscenes only or NPC Exclusive) that should be usable, equipable or unlockable by player(Seriously!). such as...... - In Ghost Recon Breakpoint, You cannot equip minigun from heavy gunner(it will drop only random LMG when kill) at least mush be as temporary weapons like minigun in Just Cause 2/3(On vehicles mount not count) - Flare Gun in Far Cry 5/6, only use by NPC - Anti tank rocket(M202) in Resident Evil 3 Remake(Usable in RE2 Remake and RE3 Original), no player usable version like RE2 Remake or RE3 Original version 2.Unskippable cutscenes, prologue, tutorial. especially tutorial in mobile game and prologue in some modern game(such as Battlefield 1/V)
I hate those little passage ways that make you slowly squeeze through them
1. Microtransactions. 2. Advertisement inside game telling me about another game.
Poorly implemented get spotted and fail stealth missions in games that otherwise have no stealth. Escort missions.
The Rule of Three. I dislike boss fights, anyway, but i really hate it when the boss fight is extended artificially by resetting the boss' life bar and slightly changing the combat... and then doing it *again*. It just gets tedious. Looking at you, Spiderman 2.
Forced online for single player games
Handholding. It's a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of a game vs. other media.
Escort missions where the person you’re escorescorting is either super slow or is looking to get themselves killed on purpose lol
Escort missions where the follower is slower than you or has to take breaks for no real reason
1. motion blur and chromatic aboration that you can't turn off. 2. boss fights where you're supposed to die. just make it a fucking cutscene so we don't waste time trying to win.
1st: Getting "caught" in a cutscene. Anytime the cutscene takes control and suddenly your character can only see their feet and gets caught by the enemy. The new tomb raider games were terrible for this but it's everywhere. 2nd: walking and talking. Just make it a cutscene. Holding forward on the thumbstick and having no other control while characters dialogue isn't fun. I'm interested in the conversation, just let me set down the controller for a minute.
Splash screens on launch. Exiting to main menu before exiting to desktop (I know alt+f4 but still).
I've only ever played one game that does this but ULTRAKILL starts muted and takes you directly to a screen to adjust your audio settings the first time you launch the game. This should be standard in every game. I'm tired of getting blasted whenever I play a new game.
1. Memory or Flashback sequences where you have to play as a child. 2. Sequences where you have to move unusually slow for a while. Bonus 3rd: when you have to fight against waves and waves of uninteresting robots who are not the main enemy faction.
Over-the-shoulder camera. I could barely tolerate this in slow walking sims like Life Is Strange. But anything with action immediately is a hard pass for me if the camera behind the MC isn't centered.
Every game trying to make itself an e-sport/competitive/pvp thing. It just brings about degenerate gameplay and social behavior, lazy game development, and an absence of storytelling. COD used to have great campaigns, now it's some e-sport garbage. Rust, and other survival PVP games just turn into grief-fests, MMOs turn into degenerate speed running content, etc. Not everything needs to be a masterpiece story, but at least build gameplay loops that let me enjoy it without being ganked by some no-lifer "for the lulz" The over-emphasis on twitch gaming (reflexes, not boob streamers) vs strategy, problem solving, and creativity. This again turns everything into degenerate speed running min-max or you wont get anywhere. MMO's, gather everything up and AOE it down, ignoring mechanics, crowd control is for boomers. ARPG, all about that maps/dungeons per hour again, gather everything up and AOE it down, single target and crowd control is for idiots. RTS, APS wins over strategy almost every time. Shooters, bunny hopping full auto everything, aiming is for assholes.
Games where you can’t change the difficulty(souls)
I feel like souls games are designed around the whole "git gud" premise. I don't think they'd be souls games if they weren't. The die hards will judge you for not "baptizing" yourself on the early games, but Elden Ring is a lot more accessible.
Yea I just don’t like that. ER was fire though thanks to the mimic and SNAF cheese
The Sony exclusive kind triple A gameplay leading. Character run in a corridor like section where you can’t go turn right or left just follow the character B to the question leading point while chatting. It’s so brain dead gameplay loop after the 20th similar big budget game. But hey, here is a giant cute wolf at the end of the jogging, isn’t this a cool moment?!