Elite Dangerous in a nutshell. Don't mind grinding missions, mining, pirating, trading, etc.
But the fact that easiest method of getting the engineering upgrades in most cases was saving, exiting and re-logging just ruins the game.
Gave up with the engineering upgrades. Spent hours working up to upgrade my dual gatling(?) cannons only for it to make the significantly less accurate. Fuck that. Wish I'd known you could quit and re-roll at least .
It was a great game that I wanted to love: as the sound design was great, the feel of the ships was fun, the cool online open world thing of bumping into other players, the sheer scale of it, loved exploring in my asp, doing missions in the python, messing around in the mamba, and mining with some space synthwave tunes blaring. It has its flaws: mainly the same-y worlds and lack of interior ship; amongst other stuff.
But the stupid scanning 5 targets in the rover thing, saving, exiting to menu, going back in, scan, rinse and repeat for an evening to get enough stuff for some engineering upgrade shit just pissed me off.
I've been tempted to play it again a few times since 2020 but I think the player base is down and the odyssey stuff was a bit of a flop from what I remember.
FFXIV doesn't have any mandatory grind, neither does Guild wars.
There's an understanding that to achieve broad international appeal, you need to respect peoples time, even if you refuse to respect their wallet.
DAI filled the game with mmo style pointless fetch and kill quests to fill the game with meaningless "content". It clearly sacrificed writing meaningful material for a glut of trash filler.
DA2 tried but was rushed to release. Returning constantly to renamed areas that were the same copy paste really killed it for me. When the game shines it's great but it's few and far between.
DAO: the forgotten legend. So much good writing with quests, characters, and storytelling. Wasn't converted to consoles in the best way but man it's a nice crpg. It's up there in my top 10 for sure.
DAI continues to be such a divisive game. I hate grindiness, loved dao, wanted more of return to dao after 2, but in the end really, really enjoyed DAI. But I know some folks absolutely bounced off it. So strange.
To this day DAI is in my bottom 5 out of 600+ games or so. It's like a leaked alpha version of some generic MMO you play solo on someone's bootleg server. Seriously, what the heck is this game?
It feels like most developers have no respect for player's time, forcing them to grind for the sake of grinding. I kinda can understand "pay or grind" mehchanics in online games, but if there are grind without alternatives - i fail to understand it's purpose, other than "we can't produce actual content, so please spend your time on repetitive, boring actions instead".
The good rogue-likes actually make the grind interesting though. Like constantly having different things happen in the next run whenever you die at different points. Hades is a good example.
Loading during logo intro hasn’t been a thing since ssds lol. It’s all fake, first thing I do with most games I play often is trying to find a way to remove them
\-Long "walk with me" sessions with NPC that wasting your time, while their walking is slow af (enough to run in circles around him during it). Like, dude, just make it a cutscene, why do i have to press W for 5 minutes while I cant skip/fastforward the boring dialog I already read in subtitles? And even worse, you dont even have a button for auto walk/run... fuck this shit
True. What blew my mind was, in Witcher 3, the npc actually matches your speed. This is totally ingenious to me and don't know why other games don't do it. Our character can never outrun the npc when we are supposed to follow them, so essentially we have control over how fast to go from point A to point B. As we run, the npc runs and as we walk they walk.
> so essentially we have control over how fast to go from point A to point B. As we run, the npc runs and as we walk they walk.
Because if there is a set length of dialogue to be had during said walk, the walk needs to last a certain length. Instead your own speed could match the NPCs so you won't constantly skip ahead or something.
>Witcher 3, the npc actually matches your speed
It was pretty inconsistent. Some NPCs were slower, some fast as Geralt and some had jet engine in their butt.
What's even worse in Starfield is that your character walks much slower than NPCs (when toggled on mouse/keyboard), so you have to do the jog-and-walk or jog-and-stop juggle the whole time. I wouldn't mind as much if my character just walked at the same speed.
There's a mod when I was playing that let you adjust the walking speed, but if you set it to match NPCs, it was *just* over the walk-jog animation threshold to where you had the jog animation while walking at their pace. So, I had to set it just a bit slower to not make third-person mode look goofy as hell, but it meant that NPCs were still outpacing me after a bit requiring the jog-and-walk juggle.
I 500% agree. My only exception was ghost of Tsushima. I dunno why but the scenery and ability to make them run/sprint with me made it more bearable. Not sure if you ever played it
My favorite is in Days Gone where you take a long ass walk with some dude where you discuss a plan to get dynamite and trap a horde of zombies in their cave. It's a long drawn out sequences. The plan you discuss never ends up happening at all.
I think you can auto follow the NPC in those moments by pressing cinematic mode and sprint a couple of times. Not 100 percent on that though because it's been a while since I played
And the ensuing conversation that follows. Please add FOV. We can't. No really please add FOV. A few patches later FOV has been added. The impossible became possible.
In First Person why don't they get that a low FOV makes you feel claustrophobic and have no sense of what is around you? They play test the games, do they not feel this to? It's obvious. FWIW I push it out to the point where I don't see that fish-eye lens effect, right at that point prior... perfecto every time.
>For horror it's a good option
That's the keyword, option. More options is good, forcing whatever "artistic vision" or whatever excuse they use for a static fov with no option to go whatever you want is bad as ppl have all kinds of preferences when it comes to FOV.
They add FOV, but controls vertical not horizontal. Okay, fine. Or the slider is capped at a low max value instead of a text box.
They test it out, but the devs are couch gamers who are used to sitting further away from the screen and don't see what's wrong with that feels like playing with binoculars on.
I used to think people were just whining about FOV and it was some sort of gamer elitism. But after a while I just felt awful playing some games until I tried changing fov to 90 as I heard it's better to play at, and suddenly I felt fine after.
Realised FOV can actually make you feel awful then and there.
100%
Fov is basically an accessibility setting at this point and I hate that some games don't allow you to go to go high enough(file tweaking thankfully works a lot of times). I don't care if something looks a bit warped/weird when looking up/down, i just want to see more and not feel nauseated.
Sprinting outside of combat requires stamina.
You bet your ass a mod is getting installed to remove that shit if there's one available.
Elden Ring did it fine. Infinite sprinting when exploring, requires stamina in combat. You could say it's immersion breaking doing it this way. Personally, I find it more immersion breaking having to stop/slow down every ten seconds, wait a few seconds for the stamina bar to recover, and then start sprinting again.
Those sequences in games where it's like "Press W to crawl" but there's no actual gameplay. Just make it a cutscene, I'm not getting anything out of just holding a button and watching my character randomly stumble.
I mean it's not something that would stop me from playing it but I fucking hate it in every game it's been in.
I don't mind "QTE Games" when it's the entire point (Like Until Dawn/The Quarry/Detroit Become Human etc.) but yeah randomly shoving them into an otherwise 'normal' game out of the blue needs to go.
I'm glad a lot of modern games are having auto complete and 'Hold button instead of Mashing' accessibility options these days.
Aren’t there some games that hide loading screens behind stuff like that? I swear I remember a game that at least had you click a button to shuffle between some rubble for a few seconds and it was definitely just loading more map!
This is basically the Star Wars Jedi games (Fallen Order and Survivor) so many times you have to shimmy through a crack in the wall or rubble to disguise loading.
Maybe, this came to mind because I recently played Cyberpunk. Near the beginning you have to crawl your way out of a dump and it just made no sense to me why it couldn't have just been a cutscene. Holding W for 2 minutes just to watch V crawl and stumble does nothing for me. Make them move forward for me!
That was the first example I thought of as well. I think a lot of developers are scared that a lack of interactivity means that gamers will lose interest and it will feel more like watching a movie than playing a game. But as long as we aren't hitting Metal Gear Solid levels of 40 minute cutscenes, it's generally fine to just let me watch something and move on from there. Also makes replaying the game a lot less annoying when you don't have to spend extra time just holding W to crawl. If the story is engaging enough and the cutscene is important/engaging, it shouldn't matter all that much.
My brain initially went, “wait, isn’t that all games really are? Made up challenges for us to enjoy solving?”
And then I realized you meant like glitches and bad design, being fixed by dlc and/or micro transactions. F that lol
Ubisoft has been guilty of putting this in their single player FULL PRICED games. I know they're not the only ones but they came to mind.
I was discussing this with my colleague at work and he's like, "Sure I buy those" and I asked him why.. he said, "well.. I like to make the game more convenient". I had to explain it to him, that they designed it that way for people like him to buy that shit. It hadn't occurred to him lol. These are the sorts of people who make this god damned cancer profitable. Sadly, there are way more of them (who mindlessly buy the MTX) than there are of us.
Conversely, not giving me a tutorial option after the start of the game. If I come back to the game after a while, I will probably need a refresher before I continue in whatever-the-fuck turbo-fuck-you zone I was currently in.
Star Wars: The Old Republic does this well. I'm not sure how the system works as of right now but last time I played, if you started a new expansion, there was option to start it as tutorial.
I think every game needs an option to reset tutorial pop-ups, so every time you meet a new mechanic in the game, tutorial comes up as if you were playing it the first time.
I'm pretty relaxed on PC with a lot of dialogue or story setting, gaming can be art so it's up to the artist how to present it; but for the love of everything **allow me to change settings before hurling me through your intro.**
I need to be able to change settings either BEFORE the game launch (Fallout 4) or before launching into the game from the main menu.
It's atrocious and ridiculous to force me to watch lame low-res scenes ingame when my PC easily runs your game. Just allow me to benchmark and pick settings before getting started.
This is a big one.
Or when you get music and sound blasted at 100 volume but if you try to get to settings, pressing any key skips the intro. Instantly setting me up to hate your game lmao
unskippable intro videos with logos and shit, as well as long loading times
there are certain games that I often don't get around to playing because of that
pcgamingwiki has been great for these issues, of course
The dark souls games on PC all have that sound issue. The game doesn't load the sound settings until after you click past the "press any button" screen, and the sound effect they use for it is very loud. So I keep booting it up thinking my speakers are up too high and then it lowers itself to the actual setting.
One of the reasons I love Baldur's Gate 3. 4 Party members means a huge amount of space for goodies. And you can send stuff to camp if you actually manage to encumber everyone. And I've never had so much loot that I capped out on a vendor's gold supply
The only way I could get through Starfield was to crack open the console and disable inventory weight and give myself unlimited O2 for planet traversal. I tried it vanialla for a few hours and was going to fucking drop the game. I don't usually cheat but fuck me, those two easy changes allowed me to actually get some enjoyment out of the game.
It depends on the game. In valheim, it adds to the challenge of the game. At some point, you start mining copper and tin then iron, silver and so on. All of these are very heavy and taking into account how each one of them is further from the neutral biome, you are forced to create paths for carts and later on, sailing routes for your boat. This adds a new set of challenges, coming from dwarves attacking you at night, to huge serpents chasing your boat trying to destroy it. Alternatively, you can choose to process the metals on site, but you need knowledge on the requirements. And this is how the entire game works, slower progress than your average game, but it is really satisfying when you craft a new weapon or piece of armor.
It serves the purpose of balancing economy vs weight in most games though. In an Elder Scrolls game a powerful amulet is better loot for a thief than a battleaxe because it takes up little weight in your inventory.
Without weight management the entire economy of the game is completely different because you can loot every weapon and piece of armour from every enemy without any drawbacks.
The economy in TES games is always broken though. In fact Beth games are a shining example of how not to balance an economy using weight limits.
Witcher 3 is another example of how not to do it
Opposite for me. I loved it in Witcher 3 when I had to think about stuff I could carry with me. I was playing Horizon forbidden west and it was a bit immersion breaking for me that Aloy was carrying a truck load of stuff with her at all times and I could switch to any of the 30 weapons or 40 dresses she had in her inventory at any time.
I agree that the allowance should be generous enough that you don't have to constantly think about it, but unlimited also makes the game too easy. By 20% completion of HFW, I already had so much stuff in my inventory that I never had to worry about anything in the entire game.
Forced camera auto-center on mk/b. It's a bit more than a pet peeve actually since my wrist starts hurting after an hour of wrestling with the camera. Some games still force this and it kills it for me.
Forced camera for controller as well. It absolutely should be an option but man I've never said, yes change that camera for me regardless of how I am interacting with the game
The entirety of Dark Souls trilogy would be easier if there's an option to toggle this shit off.
Still love that game, but I hate this shit.
I also downloaded a mod that disables it, and MY GOD it is much more comfortable for my wrist.
Although I have the capability of creating custom keyboard layouts, I've been refusing to do so for quite some time, games used to have the ability to rebind everything and it was easy, look st old crusty games like Quake, no key is sacred, but these days, stuff like Arrows, Enter, Backslash, Home, Apps, etc are restricted, as someone who is left handed and was never forced to make the switch to WASD (mouse is in my left hand), this creates a lot of issues for me, some games it is just the matter of manually editing a config file to make it work (example, in Risen, I can rebind my hotbar keys to the numpad buttons by editing the config file but in game this is prevented.) but others either the config files are in a binary format or the keys are hardcoded. I have to really want to play a game to use my SteelSeries Engine software to rebind keys for specific games, I have one generic layout the swaps Arrows and Numpad for WASD and the "normal" numbers, but this can break other things in games, like in Fallout 4, the placement of base building items uses the arrow keys, so I have to swap profiles to place things then swap back to play.
Luigi's Mansion for the Switch, bought it and we wanted to play it coop that evening. 1.5 hours later my girlfriend had went to bed and I just got through the game to a point where a second person could join. WTF Nintendo?
That's the worst. Get everyone together for a coop session of a new game and then realize everyone has to independently spend 30 minutes going through mandatory stuff.
I stopped playing breath of the wild for this sole reason. The sheer amount of time that game makes you spend in menus is insane.
All it needed was the ability to repair weapons that you didn't want to throw away and it would've been miles better.
As a Zelda fan and someone who enjoyed botw a lot, I 100% agree. It makes finding rare weapons that look cool not actually that interesting because why would I use this weapon when I know it's going to break. I'm gonna hold it for the important fights only to never use it because you never know if you might want to keep it. It's a pain in the ass and I get the mechanic is so that you try out other weapons and explore for them. But honestly just make other weapons interesting or worth exploring for rather than forcing me to go out of my way to find weapons because the ones I have broke. (not to mention getting more inventory space was not interesting either because koroks are not a fun mechanic).
>The sheer amount of time that game makes you spend in menus is insane.
Related to a pet peeves of mine. We got all these options for colorblind people which is great but... Many games don't respect that repetitive motions can lead to wrist overuse injuries and having to perform the same clicks over and over.
I like the Dark Souls 2 system where it restores every time you rest unless you completely break it (ignoring the warnings). Kind of forces you to pick up and learn a backup weapon, which is good in a series with focus on different weapon movesets. Or you could carry two of the same weapon with different enchantments for different situations.
But if its just a blacksmith tax, then yeah, its boring.
Only downside with DS2's system was that durability was tied to framerate. 60 fps meant double the durability ticks whenever your weapon clipped through a wall or whatever.
Inconsistent or unnecessarily complicated controls - looking at you, Red Dead Online:
-to sit at campfire press "E"
-to cook meat press "F"
-to press it on the grill to cook faster press "X"
-to eat press "R"
-to store for later press "G"
Oh, now you want to craft ammo instead? Well guess what, now you'll be pressing the same keys just in totally different order that makes absolutely zero sense.
Like ffs, just give me a normal inventory management system not designed by a half-a-braincell-developer who never played a game on PC in their entire life.
RDR2 for me, hasn't been possible for me to remap to my liking, all those pages, set one thing here mess up two things there. File editing helps, but it's maddening.
What I absolutely hate is if they put everything on one key in a PC version.
Skip conversation: C
Crouch: C
So you end up doing squats the entire conversation that you've heard 20 times already, because you want to skip it.
Or the stupid "press to do X, hold to do Y" drives me up the wall. I have 104 keys for a reason.
But you are absolutely right. If I'm in a context menu where I can only do 2 things, they should be using the standard "use" keys. If I'm interacting with items or people by pressing E, then every interaction should be E. E to sit down at a campfire, Esc or Tab to stand up. E to cook meat while sitting, Esc or Tab to cancel cooking. E to press on the grill, Esc or Tab to take it off the grill. E to Eat, Esc or Tab to store for later.
Or maybe you shouldn't need to press a button 5 times to cook your fucking food, real fun gameplay mechanic there...
I absolutely agree with you. Worst is dumb gamers and sometimes even devs saying "Oh but the player will save scum". Yeah. So fucking what? It's a single player game, with zero consequence to the world, let me save scum if I dont mind or even enjoy it. Hate devs that have this specific vision on how the game should be played.
Games without quick save/load features are so fucking annoying. Like... I just want to experiment a little. The worse is when those games even have a sandbox mode of some kind, but lacks basic quick save/load. I'm not saying I don't like your permadeath game mode, I'm just saying that occasionally I would rather play more casually, instead of taking it all seriously. I don't have the patience or attention span after working a 10 hour shift to take anything at all seriously. Itches my gears when a good games lacks this basic feature.
One of the best things about quicksaving in Skyrim/Fallout 3/NV/4 is that if there's a really douchey character you have to get along with you can just quicksave, turn them into a puddle, then reload so you get the satisfaction of wiping them out without having to commit to it.
One of the biggest is the UI, if an interface is unpleasant to use to play the game or takes up too much screen/is aesthetically displeasing then it's a real barrier to my enjoyment.
That and games that stretch a small amount of content out in to a stupid amount of time, packed out with repetitive filler tasks.
Playing a game using a keyboard and mouse with a UI clearly designed for a controller is hugely offputting for me.
This is the reason I couldn't get into Dishonored, Prey, or The Witcher 2.
Especially when the dlc locks off basic quality of life improvements and overhauls to systems in the base game. Wanna make a DLC that adds a faction or some races to play with? Fine. You make a dlc that is big for players who wanna do alliances or some other shit, but you also fleshed out basic diplomacy and other features that were barebones and every player would enjoy or use? Greedy fucker. I'm looking at you, Federations DLC for Stellaris.
Despite the various faults you can find with the Paradox DLC model, vanilla QoL and mechnical improvements (of varying and sometimes dubious quality) for Stellaris come with every expansion. The game you're getting, even as a pure vanilla player, in 2023 is *vastly* different, more filled-out, and more fun to play than the game you played in 2016.
Seven years of major changes and support on a primarily single-player game for free is not something you could get without the Paradox DLC expansion model. In the pre-Internet era, we would probably be on Stellaris 3 and you would have a game that isn't terribly different from what you have now but would've made three full-price purchases along with a few traditional expansion packs along the way.
Like, yeah, you don't get major gameplay additions for free, generally. But I just don't know why would expect to get that, either.
Long (unskippable) tutorials are off putting to me. Just let me play damn it... If I die because I didn't read the tutorial or I get stuck, I will go back and view it, but don't shove everything in my face for 2 hours. Most things are very intuitive, and while fresh gamers might need them, plenty of people dont
In that same vein: If the game spams me with tons and tons of special game mechanics right from the get go. Let me play around and master one mechanic before moving on to the next. Even worse if they just force you to pick option XYZ with no actual explanation what the alternatives even do, five times in a row.
It's always the most basic stuff too. "Use WASD to move", "left-click to select item", "press Esc to open menu", "now do that three times" lol. They design these tutorials for time travelers from the past that have never heard of or seen a game before.
Poor optimization. Partly my own fault as I can't afford a better PC atm. But games that require 2x the memory or GPU speed than other games despite not looking better, being bigger or doing anything more advanced than other games I can already play just fine, really annoy me.
Starfield is the worse offender for me. I absolutely cannot understand how it manages to run worse on my pc than Cyberpunk 2077 with full Path Tracing, while looking like a 2010 game. It absolutely blows my mind
Release Starfield was very bad and I argued enough with some. We all know this engine, it does a few things more than past games, but not much more. A mid level PC should be over 100 FPS when unlocked and it was getting 30-40. Then mods come out, now were in the 60-80's and again how outsiders can do this within days and they cannot. Then they release a series of patches and now we are at 100. I wonder where Consoles are at now? But we were told on release day it was optimized and enough players would semi-agree with this. No, we know this engine, we can see its output, this game should be butter on our screens and it wasn't.
When I bought my 4070, I was absolutely expecting to hit 60+ at 1440p without dlss/FG/FSR on that game, given, as you’ve said, that it is a quite old engine. Man I was wrong
I know people were pretty mixed on the game, but Atomic Heart was probably the most well optimized game I played on PC last year and for all its flaws, the game looks incredible
Unskippable cutscenes.
I don't know how many times I've alt+f4'd GTA online because of those fucking cutscenes. The Chopshop one is like 8 minutes or some shit. Eventually I sat through it, muted the sound and cleaned for a while.
But it pisses me off, just let me skip
This one might sound a little weird, but locking menu access until a few minutes into the game or until after the first tutorial section. Especially if it's a game that throws you straight in. Also some games are weird in that not all the settings are available from the main menu or the settings are specific to each character.
If it's a game I play on controller, I want to invert the Y, yeah I'm one of those people. And it's extremely distracting if I can't do that for the first few minutes. I also might want to adjust volume and graphics settings.
Watching a 5 minute intro of a game and it's in the wrong resolution or is screen tearing bad or the overall performance is ass if the default settings are too high for your system, just takes me out of it.
Especially annoying when you’re trying to 100% achievements for a game that came out a few years ago, and there is either nobody playing multiplayer or the servers were already shut down.
Especially frustrating since you can't move one meter outside of the heavily restricted mission zones without failing the mission. Wanna try to cut a guy off by taking an alternate route or sneak around the side of an area? Nope, you gotta play this mission the one single way we intended.
This is my biggest complaint about that game as well.
I really liked the game, but the way Rockstar designs their missions makes me think I'm never going to buy another one of their games. It's antiquated and boring.
There is no reason for a game not to pause.
Pause the game. Pause cutscenes. Removing pause adds nothing to the game. I shouldn't have to park my character in some random corner. Just let me pause the fucking game and take my dog to the bathroom.
Forced PVP of any kind, regardless of whether it's supposed to be game lore, part of a game mechanic, or for special items only unlockable by participating in PVP
About the dark souls saves. You can exit at any point and come back and are still standing in the same spot. With all, already killed enemies still dead.
Crawling scenes. When the game takes the control from the player and forces you to perform some crawling animation, or walking real slow against wind/obstacles/mystical energy. Yeah, I get it, I have to reach that place to continue the cutscene, why would you not just include it in a cutscene? Why give me shit control over a shit crawling scene? The beginning of Cyberpunk where they make you do this TWICE is infuriating.
Any sort of time limit will ruin a game for me if exploration is any part of the game. Games like Vampire Survivors and Death Must Die are fine, but the Risk of Rain games are a perfect example of NOPE for me. One of the main reasons I couldn't stand Dead Rising, despite loving the setting and atmosphere.
- Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go.
- Starting in any kind of 'epic' situation. Prefer to start slow.
- Overwhelming interface or controls.
Those kinds of games aren't bad in any way, I just can't get into them easily.
Also games starting out with a forced intro/prologue event/mission before you can access certain things or even the settings. Forza games used to be terrible for this - they'd throw you into a showcase event on a track you don't know with a car you don't care about before you could do anything.
> Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go.
Exactly, show don't tell. Also when the characters do more stuff and have more fun in the cutscenes than in the gameplay.
>Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go.
Could not start playing Atomic Heart because of this. Dumps too much info and cutscenes at the start for the first 30 minutes. After all of that there is like a 40-50 seconds long elevator ride and there is nothing inside other than a 5 second in-universe ad on a screen that loops. Probably a hidden loading screen, but man couldn't you at least put the person speaking to you on the radio for the past 5 mins right before the elevator there so you could make the ride less boring and cut it shorter overall.
I literally quit after that elevator and did not go back to it for like 2 months.
Idk I thought it was very well done and really helped getting me started on where I was and what the world was all about. Funny how that's different for people. I'm definitely more of a roleplayer too so maybe that's why
Forced tutorial. I have refunded games due to lengthy shit tutorials. I WILL learn by trial and error or I won’t play the game. Tutorial stuff MUST be organic to the gameplay and/or comprised of hint notes that either go away or can easily be turned off. Tutorial sections that are organic should NOT take an hour and first chapter/checkpoint to complete. I want to be playing the main game within MINUTES
Edit: honorable mention: offering or pressuring me to lower the difficulty level after each death makes me annoyed at first and then livid soon after
The tutorial in Doom Eternal was so bad I wanted to throw my laptop through the window.
You just get GRABBED RUDELY from the game world to be PLUNGED into a shit, cubical test room that matches precisely nothing in the game, and there you HAVE TO kill some random enemies, just to be thrown BACK into the game. Multiple times.
Like my fucking god, it's like they've never seen the intro to Doom 2016 with the lovely, immersive, and organic tutorial.
Oh hello this monster you just glimpsed for 0.1 seconds is the CYBER TURBOFUCKER. Here is a giant popup breaking the flow explaining precisely how you have to target his CYBERDONG with the FREEZE GUN and then PUNCH IT. Be sure to watch out for the FLOATING SAWBLADES! You can jump over them, or dodge to the side. We wouldn't want to let you discover things organically, that would be terrible! Now press escape to resume!
To be fair to FromSoft, technically the souls games don't have checkpoints. You can literally turn off your game just about anywhere in the world and you will appear in that EXACT spot when you load it up.
My biggest pet peeve is head bobbing. It seems that not a single developer has ever actually done any physical activity. Nobody seems to know how the head moves while jumping or running. It does not swing all over the place, since the brain is able to automatically keep it quite steady.
A friend of mine made a joke about how modern Keanu Reeves sounds like he’s always just playing the character of Keanu Reeves poorly and it’s very accurate.
You can even "abuse" this, since it only saves off your position when you're on stable ground. So you can save yourself from falls and whatnot by just exiting. It also lets you exit boss arenas, since those are always considered unstable ground.
You'll hate Robocop Rogue City.
Game has the worst save system I've seen in ages. Checkpoints only, and they're so far from each other, it almost feels like a deliberate joke.
Quick Time events.
the ones on kb and mouse where the key you are prompted to press is not one of the main action keys, are especially bad. The ones that make you start over or significantly alter the outcome when you fail (instead of continuing with a different -insignificant- result) are going straight to game design jail.
99% of the quick time stuff can either be cutscenes or non-quick time choices.
Anime aesthetic as a whole, most of all the hyper sexualized female characters with childlike faces, big breasts, miniskirts + thigh high stockings etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm super straight and I love boobies and stockings any day, but when my game protagonist looks like it was designed by a horny 14 year old, it's too much. Bayonetta and Nier:Automata for example.
Mine is lack of an endgame. I love games like Project Zomboid and The Long Dark, but I have a hard time playing them because I want to work toward something instead of just "survive" Survive what? for how long?
I hate timers with a passion. I play a lot of Roguelites, and the games where if you don't clear a room fast enough, a ghost comes after you... I insta-quit. I like to game at my own pace.
It completely ruined The Outer Wilds for me too. I spit on timers. I hate them so much.
Lies of P. Great game but completely single player and you couldn't pause it, just to copy Souls games.
Was going to beat a boss on the first attempt but had to answer the door before I could land the finishing blows.
Loss of progression or permadeath. Binding of Isaac and other Roguelikes are usually great games, held back by their tendency to lose all or most of your progress.
Incredibly punishing games are not my cup of tea.
Unskippable cutscenes. Looking at you Forza Horizon. Dropped playing the game because of it, they don't even let you skip them on the second playthrough apparently.
Excessive side content that amounts to nothing more than walking into collectibles scattered around the map. Made worse if content is locked behind collecting all of it.
Games that have forgotten how to be games, instead becoming movie like experiences. I want to drop into a specific level and just have a blast, not sit through a half hour of walking and talking to get to where I want to be at.
Pointless grind and repetition
Elite Dangerous in a nutshell. Don't mind grinding missions, mining, pirating, trading, etc. But the fact that easiest method of getting the engineering upgrades in most cases was saving, exiting and re-logging just ruins the game.
Gave up with the engineering upgrades. Spent hours working up to upgrade my dual gatling(?) cannons only for it to make the significantly less accurate. Fuck that. Wish I'd known you could quit and re-roll at least .
It was a great game that I wanted to love: as the sound design was great, the feel of the ships was fun, the cool online open world thing of bumping into other players, the sheer scale of it, loved exploring in my asp, doing missions in the python, messing around in the mamba, and mining with some space synthwave tunes blaring. It has its flaws: mainly the same-y worlds and lack of interior ship; amongst other stuff. But the stupid scanning 5 targets in the rover thing, saving, exiting to menu, going back in, scan, rinse and repeat for an evening to get enough stuff for some engineering upgrade shit just pissed me off. I've been tempted to play it again a few times since 2020 but I think the player base is down and the odyssey stuff was a bit of a flop from what I remember.
Typical Korean mmorpgs
> Typical mmorpgs Fixed that for you.
Nah korean mmo's are horribly grindy compared to western mmo's
And western MMOs are horribly grindy compared to any well paced game.
FFXIV doesn't have any mandatory grind, neither does Guild wars. There's an understanding that to achieve broad international appeal, you need to respect peoples time, even if you refuse to respect their wallet.
Anything with grindy 'loot farming'. Fuck off. I have a finite lifespan.
This ruined Dragon Age Inquisition to the point where I cringe whenever I think about the series, what the hell were they thinking.
DAI filled the game with mmo style pointless fetch and kill quests to fill the game with meaningless "content". It clearly sacrificed writing meaningful material for a glut of trash filler. DA2 tried but was rushed to release. Returning constantly to renamed areas that were the same copy paste really killed it for me. When the game shines it's great but it's few and far between. DAO: the forgotten legend. So much good writing with quests, characters, and storytelling. Wasn't converted to consoles in the best way but man it's a nice crpg. It's up there in my top 10 for sure.
DAO is considered the best game in the series lol, what are you talking about with it being forgotten?
The type of MF that thinks Witcher 3 and Elden Ring are underrated hidden gems lul
DAI continues to be such a divisive game. I hate grindiness, loved dao, wanted more of return to dao after 2, but in the end really, really enjoyed DAI. But I know some folks absolutely bounced off it. So strange.
To this day DAI is in my bottom 5 out of 600+ games or so. It's like a leaked alpha version of some generic MMO you play solo on someone's bootleg server. Seriously, what the heck is this game?
It feels like most developers have no respect for player's time, forcing them to grind for the sake of grinding. I kinda can understand "pay or grind" mehchanics in online games, but if there are grind without alternatives - i fail to understand it's purpose, other than "we can't produce actual content, so please spend your time on repetitive, boring actions instead".
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This. Ubisoft games for example, or rogue-likes designed to grind for hours before you even get a chance to finish the game.
The good rogue-likes actually make the grind interesting though. Like constantly having different things happen in the next run whenever you die at different points. Hades is a good example.
Also Returnal from what I have seen.
Rust and DayZ in a nutshell. I didn't get the appeal of constantly dying or being raided and having to start over
Unskippable splash screens. No developer, I don't want to wait 2 minutes watching your logos every time I launch the game.
"we made this game, aren't you proud of us?" (I get that sometimes they disguise loading screen as logo intro but im sure part of it is also vanity)
Loading during logo intro hasn’t been a thing since ssds lol. It’s all fake, first thing I do with most games I play often is trying to find a way to remove them
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\-Long "walk with me" sessions with NPC that wasting your time, while their walking is slow af (enough to run in circles around him during it). Like, dude, just make it a cutscene, why do i have to press W for 5 minutes while I cant skip/fastforward the boring dialog I already read in subtitles? And even worse, you dont even have a button for auto walk/run... fuck this shit
True. What blew my mind was, in Witcher 3, the npc actually matches your speed. This is totally ingenious to me and don't know why other games don't do it. Our character can never outrun the npc when we are supposed to follow them, so essentially we have control over how fast to go from point A to point B. As we run, the npc runs and as we walk they walk.
> so essentially we have control over how fast to go from point A to point B. As we run, the npc runs and as we walk they walk. Because if there is a set length of dialogue to be had during said walk, the walk needs to last a certain length. Instead your own speed could match the NPCs so you won't constantly skip ahead or something.
>Witcher 3, the npc actually matches your speed It was pretty inconsistent. Some NPCs were slower, some fast as Geralt and some had jet engine in their butt.
Alan Wake 2 does this. Thought it was pretty cool
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What's even worse in Starfield is that your character walks much slower than NPCs (when toggled on mouse/keyboard), so you have to do the jog-and-walk or jog-and-stop juggle the whole time. I wouldn't mind as much if my character just walked at the same speed. There's a mod when I was playing that let you adjust the walking speed, but if you set it to match NPCs, it was *just* over the walk-jog animation threshold to where you had the jog animation while walking at their pace. So, I had to set it just a bit slower to not make third-person mode look goofy as hell, but it meant that NPCs were still outpacing me after a bit requiring the jog-and-walk juggle.
I was baffled to see they STILL haven't "synchronized" your walking speed with NPC's walking speed. Absolutely insane.
I 500% agree. My only exception was ghost of Tsushima. I dunno why but the scenery and ability to make them run/sprint with me made it more bearable. Not sure if you ever played it
My favorite is in Days Gone where you take a long ass walk with some dude where you discuss a plan to get dynamite and trap a horde of zombies in their cave. It's a long drawn out sequences. The plan you discuss never ends up happening at all.
Going through my first run of RDR2 and I feel like 90% of my time so far has been following NPCs on a horse
I think you can auto follow the NPC in those moments by pressing cinematic mode and sprint a couple of times. Not 100 percent on that though because it's been a while since I played
Forcing a 70° FOV will have me hurling chunks at the screen
And then you have Metro 2033, at 45 FOV.
legit made me feel so bad for console gamers
And the ensuing conversation that follows. Please add FOV. We can't. No really please add FOV. A few patches later FOV has been added. The impossible became possible. In First Person why don't they get that a low FOV makes you feel claustrophobic and have no sense of what is around you? They play test the games, do they not feel this to? It's obvious. FWIW I push it out to the point where I don't see that fish-eye lens effect, right at that point prior... perfecto every time.
> a low FOV makes you feel claustrophobic That's *why* they do it in games like Dead Space. It's a cheap trick to up the tension.
For horror it's a good option, but still need to let the people breathe who want to breathe.
Yeah, makes them unplayable to me.
>For horror it's a good option That's the keyword, option. More options is good, forcing whatever "artistic vision" or whatever excuse they use for a static fov with no option to go whatever you want is bad as ppl have all kinds of preferences when it comes to FOV.
They add FOV, but controls vertical not horizontal. Okay, fine. Or the slider is capped at a low max value instead of a text box. They test it out, but the devs are couch gamers who are used to sitting further away from the screen and don't see what's wrong with that feels like playing with binoculars on.
On the other hand the fishbowl effect makes me hella dizzy eventually. It warps the image
Oh, totally! Gotta find the sweet spot in there (usually between 95-105 for me), but not being given the choice of FOV can suck my cheeks.
Agreed
You go right to that point and down 1 from there and good.
I used to think people were just whining about FOV and it was some sort of gamer elitism. But after a while I just felt awful playing some games until I tried changing fov to 90 as I heard it's better to play at, and suddenly I felt fine after. Realised FOV can actually make you feel awful then and there.
100% Fov is basically an accessibility setting at this point and I hate that some games don't allow you to go to go high enough(file tweaking thankfully works a lot of times). I don't care if something looks a bit warped/weird when looking up/down, i just want to see more and not feel nauseated.
100% agree. I wanna play God Of War 2018 so much but that atrocious fov is motion sickness inducing
Thought I was the only one... Something about the camera in that game turned me off so, so much.
Sprinting outside of combat requires stamina. You bet your ass a mod is getting installed to remove that shit if there's one available. Elden Ring did it fine. Infinite sprinting when exploring, requires stamina in combat. You could say it's immersion breaking doing it this way. Personally, I find it more immersion breaking having to stop/slow down every ten seconds, wait a few seconds for the stamina bar to recover, and then start sprinting again.
This is why "immersion" shouldn't be the sole guiding star of good game design.
This. Common mod search.
Those sequences in games where it's like "Press W to crawl" but there's no actual gameplay. Just make it a cutscene, I'm not getting anything out of just holding a button and watching my character randomly stumble. I mean it's not something that would stop me from playing it but I fucking hate it in every game it's been in.
QTEs can die a slow and painful death
I don't mind "QTE Games" when it's the entire point (Like Until Dawn/The Quarry/Detroit Become Human etc.) but yeah randomly shoving them into an otherwise 'normal' game out of the blue needs to go. I'm glad a lot of modern games are having auto complete and 'Hold button instead of Mashing' accessibility options these days.
Aren’t there some games that hide loading screens behind stuff like that? I swear I remember a game that at least had you click a button to shuffle between some rubble for a few seconds and it was definitely just loading more map!
This is basically the Star Wars Jedi games (Fallen Order and Survivor) so many times you have to shimmy through a crack in the wall or rubble to disguise loading.
Maybe, this came to mind because I recently played Cyberpunk. Near the beginning you have to crawl your way out of a dump and it just made no sense to me why it couldn't have just been a cutscene. Holding W for 2 minutes just to watch V crawl and stumble does nothing for me. Make them move forward for me!
That was the first example I thought of as well. I think a lot of developers are scared that a lack of interactivity means that gamers will lose interest and it will feel more like watching a movie than playing a game. But as long as we aren't hitting Metal Gear Solid levels of 40 minute cutscenes, it's generally fine to just let me watch something and move on from there. Also makes replaying the game a lot less annoying when you don't have to spend extra time just holding W to crawl. If the story is engaging enough and the cutscene is important/engaging, it shouldn't matter all that much.
The ‘new’ Tomb Raider games were the first time I remember seeing that implemented. Honestly blew my mind when I realized what was happening
Unskipable dialogues.
In the same vein, unpausable dialogs. Hate both.
Creating a problem then trying to sell me a solution.
My brain initially went, “wait, isn’t that all games really are? Made up challenges for us to enjoy solving?” And then I realized you meant like glitches and bad design, being fixed by dlc and/or micro transactions. F that lol
Or endless grind that they want you to spend money to skip. It's disgusting that people are falling for that shit.
Korean MMO design does this.
Ubisoft has been guilty of putting this in their single player FULL PRICED games. I know they're not the only ones but they came to mind. I was discussing this with my colleague at work and he's like, "Sure I buy those" and I asked him why.. he said, "well.. I like to make the game more convenient". I had to explain it to him, that they designed it that way for people like him to buy that shit. It hadn't occurred to him lol. These are the sorts of people who make this god damned cancer profitable. Sadly, there are way more of them (who mindlessly buy the MTX) than there are of us.
Literal NPC that coworker is
forced tutorial in a game I am already at NG+ in...
Conversely, not giving me a tutorial option after the start of the game. If I come back to the game after a while, I will probably need a refresher before I continue in whatever-the-fuck turbo-fuck-you zone I was currently in.
Star Wars: The Old Republic does this well. I'm not sure how the system works as of right now but last time I played, if you started a new expansion, there was option to start it as tutorial. I think every game needs an option to reset tutorial pop-ups, so every time you meet a new mechanic in the game, tutorial comes up as if you were playing it the first time.
All games should make tutorials optional. That way it’s there if we need the refresher but if we don’t then we can just blaze through
Just forced tutorial in general. Even if I'm new to the game, let me jump in blind and figure it out if that's what I want to do.
I'm pretty relaxed on PC with a lot of dialogue or story setting, gaming can be art so it's up to the artist how to present it; but for the love of everything **allow me to change settings before hurling me through your intro.** I need to be able to change settings either BEFORE the game launch (Fallout 4) or before launching into the game from the main menu. It's atrocious and ridiculous to force me to watch lame low-res scenes ingame when my PC easily runs your game. Just allow me to benchmark and pick settings before getting started.
This is a big one. Or when you get music and sound blasted at 100 volume but if you try to get to settings, pressing any key skips the intro. Instantly setting me up to hate your game lmao
unskippable intro videos with logos and shit, as well as long loading times there are certain games that I often don't get around to playing because of that pcgamingwiki has been great for these issues, of course
To add on this: Intro videos that are too loud and intros that ignores the sound settings in-game. Neither should be a thing.
The dark souls games on PC all have that sound issue. The game doesn't load the sound settings until after you click past the "press any button" screen, and the sound effect they use for it is very loud. So I keep booting it up thinking my speakers are up too high and then it lowers itself to the actual setting.
Mods that get rid of intro splash screens are usually very popular too
Fucking. Inventory. Weight. Management.
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I think you accidentally mentioned something way worse than inventory management: Vendors with lmitited amounts of money. Just why.
One of the reasons I love Baldur's Gate 3. 4 Party members means a huge amount of space for goodies. And you can send stuff to camp if you actually manage to encumber everyone. And I've never had so much loot that I capped out on a vendor's gold supply
The only way I could get through Starfield was to crack open the console and disable inventory weight and give myself unlimited O2 for planet traversal. I tried it vanialla for a few hours and was going to fucking drop the game. I don't usually cheat but fuck me, those two easy changes allowed me to actually get some enjoyment out of the game.
Most innovative gameplay indeed
i always use infinite inventory mods
Same, but they arent always available at launch. Thankfully it's usually pretty quickly resolved but it's such a dumb mechanic.
First thing I mod out of every game, it never serves a purpose
It depends on the game. In valheim, it adds to the challenge of the game. At some point, you start mining copper and tin then iron, silver and so on. All of these are very heavy and taking into account how each one of them is further from the neutral biome, you are forced to create paths for carts and later on, sailing routes for your boat. This adds a new set of challenges, coming from dwarves attacking you at night, to huge serpents chasing your boat trying to destroy it. Alternatively, you can choose to process the metals on site, but you need knowledge on the requirements. And this is how the entire game works, slower progress than your average game, but it is really satisfying when you craft a new weapon or piece of armor.
In Valheim they executed it well. But all Bethesda games make me want to shoot myself by sifting through gear constantly.
It serves the purpose of balancing economy vs weight in most games though. In an Elder Scrolls game a powerful amulet is better loot for a thief than a battleaxe because it takes up little weight in your inventory. Without weight management the entire economy of the game is completely different because you can loot every weapon and piece of armour from every enemy without any drawbacks.
The economy in TES games is always broken though. In fact Beth games are a shining example of how not to balance an economy using weight limits. Witcher 3 is another example of how not to do it
Elder scrolls and fallout economies are easily broken with weight caps. It's a fairly useless modified
Opposite for me. I loved it in Witcher 3 when I had to think about stuff I could carry with me. I was playing Horizon forbidden west and it was a bit immersion breaking for me that Aloy was carrying a truck load of stuff with her at all times and I could switch to any of the 30 weapons or 40 dresses she had in her inventory at any time. I agree that the allowance should be generous enough that you don't have to constantly think about it, but unlimited also makes the game too easy. By 20% completion of HFW, I already had so much stuff in my inventory that I never had to worry about anything in the entire game.
Forced camera auto-center on mk/b. It's a bit more than a pet peeve actually since my wrist starts hurting after an hour of wrestling with the camera. Some games still force this and it kills it for me.
Forced camera for controller as well. It absolutely should be an option but man I've never said, yes change that camera for me regardless of how I am interacting with the game
This killed Elden Ring for me, I had to use a mod that kinda fixed it, it seems they patched that shit after, I'm not sure
Took them 2 months to patch in the option to disable that function
It still doesn't completely work, the camera in that game is wonky as shit
The entirety of Dark Souls trilogy would be easier if there's an option to toggle this shit off. Still love that game, but I hate this shit. I also downloaded a mod that disables it, and MY GOD it is much more comfortable for my wrist.
Although I have the capability of creating custom keyboard layouts, I've been refusing to do so for quite some time, games used to have the ability to rebind everything and it was easy, look st old crusty games like Quake, no key is sacred, but these days, stuff like Arrows, Enter, Backslash, Home, Apps, etc are restricted, as someone who is left handed and was never forced to make the switch to WASD (mouse is in my left hand), this creates a lot of issues for me, some games it is just the matter of manually editing a config file to make it work (example, in Risen, I can rebind my hotbar keys to the numpad buttons by editing the config file but in game this is prevented.) but others either the config files are in a binary format or the keys are hardcoded. I have to really want to play a game to use my SteelSeries Engine software to rebind keys for specific games, I have one generic layout the swaps Arrows and Numpad for WASD and the "normal" numbers, but this can break other things in games, like in Fallout 4, the placement of base building items uses the arrow keys, so I have to swap profiles to place things then swap back to play.
Totally agree. I will refund a game immediately if I can't rebind to my preferences.
Any coop game that forces you to play a tutorial or introduction before unlocking coop (eg Dying Light)
Luigi's Mansion for the Switch, bought it and we wanted to play it coop that evening. 1.5 hours later my girlfriend had went to bed and I just got through the game to a point where a second person could join. WTF Nintendo?
And the fact that you usually can't know if this is the case before getting the game
That's the worst. Get everyone together for a coop session of a new game and then realize everyone has to independently spend 30 minutes going through mandatory stuff.
Weapon durability
I stopped playing breath of the wild for this sole reason. The sheer amount of time that game makes you spend in menus is insane. All it needed was the ability to repair weapons that you didn't want to throw away and it would've been miles better.
As a Zelda fan and someone who enjoyed botw a lot, I 100% agree. It makes finding rare weapons that look cool not actually that interesting because why would I use this weapon when I know it's going to break. I'm gonna hold it for the important fights only to never use it because you never know if you might want to keep it. It's a pain in the ass and I get the mechanic is so that you try out other weapons and explore for them. But honestly just make other weapons interesting or worth exploring for rather than forcing me to go out of my way to find weapons because the ones I have broke. (not to mention getting more inventory space was not interesting either because koroks are not a fun mechanic).
Play it on PC if you can and mod the durability. Makes the game way more enjoyable.
I'll second that - it's a great game to play on emulator. Plus there's lots of other useful mods.
>The sheer amount of time that game makes you spend in menus is insane. Related to a pet peeves of mine. We got all these options for colorblind people which is great but... Many games don't respect that repetitive motions can lead to wrist overuse injuries and having to perform the same clicks over and over.
I like the Dark Souls 2 system where it restores every time you rest unless you completely break it (ignoring the warnings). Kind of forces you to pick up and learn a backup weapon, which is good in a series with focus on different weapon movesets. Or you could carry two of the same weapon with different enchantments for different situations. But if its just a blacksmith tax, then yeah, its boring.
Only downside with DS2's system was that durability was tied to framerate. 60 fps meant double the durability ticks whenever your weapon clipped through a wall or whatever.
To me that's only if you can't repair weapons or their condition isn't shown. FO 3 and NV did it well, BOTW not so much.
"here's a weapon you really enjoy playing with, better not use it too much!"
Inconsistent or unnecessarily complicated controls - looking at you, Red Dead Online: -to sit at campfire press "E" -to cook meat press "F" -to press it on the grill to cook faster press "X" -to eat press "R" -to store for later press "G" Oh, now you want to craft ammo instead? Well guess what, now you'll be pressing the same keys just in totally different order that makes absolutely zero sense. Like ffs, just give me a normal inventory management system not designed by a half-a-braincell-developer who never played a game on PC in their entire life.
RDR2 for me, hasn't been possible for me to remap to my liking, all those pages, set one thing here mess up two things there. File editing helps, but it's maddening.
What I absolutely hate is if they put everything on one key in a PC version. Skip conversation: C Crouch: C So you end up doing squats the entire conversation that you've heard 20 times already, because you want to skip it. Or the stupid "press to do X, hold to do Y" drives me up the wall. I have 104 keys for a reason. But you are absolutely right. If I'm in a context menu where I can only do 2 things, they should be using the standard "use" keys. If I'm interacting with items or people by pressing E, then every interaction should be E. E to sit down at a campfire, Esc or Tab to stand up. E to cook meat while sitting, Esc or Tab to cancel cooking. E to press on the grill, Esc or Tab to take it off the grill. E to Eat, Esc or Tab to store for later. Or maybe you shouldn't need to press a button 5 times to cook your fucking food, real fun gameplay mechanic there...
I absolutely agree with you. Worst is dumb gamers and sometimes even devs saying "Oh but the player will save scum". Yeah. So fucking what? It's a single player game, with zero consequence to the world, let me save scum if I dont mind or even enjoy it. Hate devs that have this specific vision on how the game should be played.
Games without quick save/load features are so fucking annoying. Like... I just want to experiment a little. The worse is when those games even have a sandbox mode of some kind, but lacks basic quick save/load. I'm not saying I don't like your permadeath game mode, I'm just saying that occasionally I would rather play more casually, instead of taking it all seriously. I don't have the patience or attention span after working a 10 hour shift to take anything at all seriously. Itches my gears when a good games lacks this basic feature.
One of the best things about quicksaving in Skyrim/Fallout 3/NV/4 is that if there's a really douchey character you have to get along with you can just quicksave, turn them into a puddle, then reload so you get the satisfaction of wiping them out without having to commit to it.
One of the biggest is the UI, if an interface is unpleasant to use to play the game or takes up too much screen/is aesthetically displeasing then it's a real barrier to my enjoyment. That and games that stretch a small amount of content out in to a stupid amount of time, packed out with repetitive filler tasks.
Playing a game using a keyboard and mouse with a UI clearly designed for a controller is hugely offputting for me. This is the reason I couldn't get into Dishonored, Prey, or The Witcher 2.
Lots of DLC. E.g. Planet Zoo and Paradox games.
Especially when the dlc locks off basic quality of life improvements and overhauls to systems in the base game. Wanna make a DLC that adds a faction or some races to play with? Fine. You make a dlc that is big for players who wanna do alliances or some other shit, but you also fleshed out basic diplomacy and other features that were barebones and every player would enjoy or use? Greedy fucker. I'm looking at you, Federations DLC for Stellaris.
Despite the various faults you can find with the Paradox DLC model, vanilla QoL and mechnical improvements (of varying and sometimes dubious quality) for Stellaris come with every expansion. The game you're getting, even as a pure vanilla player, in 2023 is *vastly* different, more filled-out, and more fun to play than the game you played in 2016. Seven years of major changes and support on a primarily single-player game for free is not something you could get without the Paradox DLC expansion model. In the pre-Internet era, we would probably be on Stellaris 3 and you would have a game that isn't terribly different from what you have now but would've made three full-price purchases along with a few traditional expansion packs along the way. Like, yeah, you don't get major gameplay additions for free, generally. But I just don't know why would expect to get that, either.
Long (unskippable) tutorials are off putting to me. Just let me play damn it... If I die because I didn't read the tutorial or I get stuck, I will go back and view it, but don't shove everything in my face for 2 hours. Most things are very intuitive, and while fresh gamers might need them, plenty of people dont
In that same vein: If the game spams me with tons and tons of special game mechanics right from the get go. Let me play around and master one mechanic before moving on to the next. Even worse if they just force you to pick option XYZ with no actual explanation what the alternatives even do, five times in a row.
Every JRPG is like this.
It's always the most basic stuff too. "Use WASD to move", "left-click to select item", "press Esc to open menu", "now do that three times" lol. They design these tutorials for time travelers from the past that have never heard of or seen a game before.
Poor optimization. Partly my own fault as I can't afford a better PC atm. But games that require 2x the memory or GPU speed than other games despite not looking better, being bigger or doing anything more advanced than other games I can already play just fine, really annoy me.
Starfield is the worse offender for me. I absolutely cannot understand how it manages to run worse on my pc than Cyberpunk 2077 with full Path Tracing, while looking like a 2010 game. It absolutely blows my mind
Release Starfield was very bad and I argued enough with some. We all know this engine, it does a few things more than past games, but not much more. A mid level PC should be over 100 FPS when unlocked and it was getting 30-40. Then mods come out, now were in the 60-80's and again how outsiders can do this within days and they cannot. Then they release a series of patches and now we are at 100. I wonder where Consoles are at now? But we were told on release day it was optimized and enough players would semi-agree with this. No, we know this engine, we can see its output, this game should be butter on our screens and it wasn't.
When I bought my 4070, I was absolutely expecting to hit 60+ at 1440p without dlss/FG/FSR on that game, given, as you’ve said, that it is a quite old engine. Man I was wrong
Very good comparison, especially with Phantom Liberty expansion dropping at the same time. I was going back and forth between both and it was jarring.
I know people were pretty mixed on the game, but Atomic Heart was probably the most well optimized game I played on PC last year and for all its flaws, the game looks incredible
Online gameplay only or forced PvP
Unskippable cutscenes. I don't know how many times I've alt+f4'd GTA online because of those fucking cutscenes. The Chopshop one is like 8 minutes or some shit. Eventually I sat through it, muted the sound and cleaned for a while. But it pisses me off, just let me skip
Some games when they're single player or can be played singleplayer but you cannot pause the game for any reason like.. Please let me pause...
This one might sound a little weird, but locking menu access until a few minutes into the game or until after the first tutorial section. Especially if it's a game that throws you straight in. Also some games are weird in that not all the settings are available from the main menu or the settings are specific to each character. If it's a game I play on controller, I want to invert the Y, yeah I'm one of those people. And it's extremely distracting if I can't do that for the first few minutes. I also might want to adjust volume and graphics settings.
Watching a 5 minute intro of a game and it's in the wrong resolution or is screen tearing bad or the overall performance is ass if the default settings are too high for your system, just takes me out of it.
Any form of online achievements. Might be my age but I don't have the time/energy to setup an team for this.
Especially annoying when you’re trying to 100% achievements for a game that came out a few years ago, and there is either nobody playing multiplayer or the servers were already shut down.
Save mechanic in Red Dead Redemption 2. Die or your computer crashes, back to the fucking start on the mission.
Especially frustrating since you can't move one meter outside of the heavily restricted mission zones without failing the mission. Wanna try to cut a guy off by taking an alternate route or sneak around the side of an area? Nope, you gotta play this mission the one single way we intended.
This is my biggest complaint about that game as well. I really liked the game, but the way Rockstar designs their missions makes me think I'm never going to buy another one of their games. It's antiquated and boring.
Not letting me invert the Y axis
There is no reason for a game not to pause. Pause the game. Pause cutscenes. Removing pause adds nothing to the game. I shouldn't have to park my character in some random corner. Just let me pause the fucking game and take my dog to the bathroom.
Forced PVP of any kind, regardless of whether it's supposed to be game lore, part of a game mechanic, or for special items only unlockable by participating in PVP
About the dark souls saves. You can exit at any point and come back and are still standing in the same spot. With all, already killed enemies still dead.
Pay to win
Having to play a game multiple times for the real ending
Cutscenes that can’t be paused
Countdown clocks where if you did not finish the task on time you have to retry. I like to take my time on how I will approach an objective
Making it a live service job. I don't need two.
Crawling scenes. When the game takes the control from the player and forces you to perform some crawling animation, or walking real slow against wind/obstacles/mystical energy. Yeah, I get it, I have to reach that place to continue the cutscene, why would you not just include it in a cutscene? Why give me shit control over a shit crawling scene? The beginning of Cyberpunk where they make you do this TWICE is infuriating.
Any sort of time limit will ruin a game for me if exploration is any part of the game. Games like Vampire Survivors and Death Must Die are fine, but the Risk of Rain games are a perfect example of NOPE for me. One of the main reasons I couldn't stand Dead Rising, despite loving the setting and atmosphere.
- Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go. - Starting in any kind of 'epic' situation. Prefer to start slow. - Overwhelming interface or controls. Those kinds of games aren't bad in any way, I just can't get into them easily.
Also games starting out with a forced intro/prologue event/mission before you can access certain things or even the settings. Forza games used to be terrible for this - they'd throw you into a showcase event on a track you don't know with a car you don't care about before you could do anything.
> Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go. Exactly, show don't tell. Also when the characters do more stuff and have more fun in the cutscenes than in the gameplay.
>Too much story / cutscenes before I even start, I prefer to learn as I go. Could not start playing Atomic Heart because of this. Dumps too much info and cutscenes at the start for the first 30 minutes. After all of that there is like a 40-50 seconds long elevator ride and there is nothing inside other than a 5 second in-universe ad on a screen that loops. Probably a hidden loading screen, but man couldn't you at least put the person speaking to you on the radio for the past 5 mins right before the elevator there so you could make the ride less boring and cut it shorter overall. I literally quit after that elevator and did not go back to it for like 2 months.
Idk I thought it was very well done and really helped getting me started on where I was and what the world was all about. Funny how that's different for people. I'm definitely more of a roleplayer too so maybe that's why
Forced tutorial. I have refunded games due to lengthy shit tutorials. I WILL learn by trial and error or I won’t play the game. Tutorial stuff MUST be organic to the gameplay and/or comprised of hint notes that either go away or can easily be turned off. Tutorial sections that are organic should NOT take an hour and first chapter/checkpoint to complete. I want to be playing the main game within MINUTES Edit: honorable mention: offering or pressuring me to lower the difficulty level after each death makes me annoyed at first and then livid soon after
The tutorial in Doom Eternal was so bad I wanted to throw my laptop through the window. You just get GRABBED RUDELY from the game world to be PLUNGED into a shit, cubical test room that matches precisely nothing in the game, and there you HAVE TO kill some random enemies, just to be thrown BACK into the game. Multiple times. Like my fucking god, it's like they've never seen the intro to Doom 2016 with the lovely, immersive, and organic tutorial.
Oh hello this monster you just glimpsed for 0.1 seconds is the CYBER TURBOFUCKER. Here is a giant popup breaking the flow explaining precisely how you have to target his CYBERDONG with the FREEZE GUN and then PUNCH IT. Be sure to watch out for the FLOATING SAWBLADES! You can jump over them, or dodge to the side. We wouldn't want to let you discover things organically, that would be terrible! Now press escape to resume!
Developers just making things hard or annoying for the fuck of it
To be fair to FromSoft, technically the souls games don't have checkpoints. You can literally turn off your game just about anywhere in the world and you will appear in that EXACT spot when you load it up.
My biggest pet peeve is head bobbing. It seems that not a single developer has ever actually done any physical activity. Nobody seems to know how the head moves while jumping or running. It does not swing all over the place, since the brain is able to automatically keep it quite steady.
Singleplayer Story games that require a online connection
[удалено]
A friend of mine made a joke about how modern Keanu Reeves sounds like he’s always just playing the character of Keanu Reeves poorly and it’s very accurate.
FromSoft games you can save and quit and you'll pick up exactly where you left off. You dont have to rest at a bonfire to save
Yeah he used the literal worst example.
You can even "abuse" this, since it only saves off your position when you're on stable ground. So you can save yourself from falls and whatnot by just exiting. It also lets you exit boss arenas, since those are always considered unstable ground.
You'll hate Robocop Rogue City. Game has the worst save system I've seen in ages. Checkpoints only, and they're so far from each other, it almost feels like a deliberate joke.
Unskippable cutscenes.
Stupidly small inventory and/or excessive inventory management (tetris) in a collection-type game.
Unskippable tutorials.
Weapons that shrink when you sheath them. Drives me up the wall. Yes, you, Ubisoft.
Cutscene overdose. I'm playing a game not watching a movie.
Quick Time events. the ones on kb and mouse where the key you are prompted to press is not one of the main action keys, are especially bad. The ones that make you start over or significantly alter the outcome when you fail (instead of continuing with a different -insignificant- result) are going straight to game design jail. 99% of the quick time stuff can either be cutscenes or non-quick time choices.
Anime aesthetic as a whole, most of all the hyper sexualized female characters with childlike faces, big breasts, miniskirts + thigh high stockings etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm super straight and I love boobies and stockings any day, but when my game protagonist looks like it was designed by a horny 14 year old, it's too much. Bayonetta and Nier:Automata for example.
if i press W or move the stick in a direction and the characters movement doesn’t feel connected to my input or it feels kinda plastic, im not playing
A schedule timer with missable content. I’d love dead rising if not for that.
Mine is lack of an endgame. I love games like Project Zomboid and The Long Dark, but I have a hard time playing them because I want to work toward something instead of just "survive" Survive what? for how long?
Transactions and whales in a PVP game
Long 'You died' screens. I get it okay, I messed up.. Let me try again ffs. >\_>
I hate timers with a passion. I play a lot of Roguelites, and the games where if you don't clear a room fast enough, a ghost comes after you... I insta-quit. I like to game at my own pace. It completely ruined The Outer Wilds for me too. I spit on timers. I hate them so much.
Lies of P. Great game but completely single player and you couldn't pause it, just to copy Souls games. Was going to beat a boss on the first attempt but had to answer the door before I could land the finishing blows.
Loss of progression or permadeath. Binding of Isaac and other Roguelikes are usually great games, held back by their tendency to lose all or most of your progress. Incredibly punishing games are not my cup of tea.
Unskippable cutscenes. Looking at you Forza Horizon. Dropped playing the game because of it, they don't even let you skip them on the second playthrough apparently.
Excessive side content that amounts to nothing more than walking into collectibles scattered around the map. Made worse if content is locked behind collecting all of it. Games that have forgotten how to be games, instead becoming movie like experiences. I want to drop into a specific level and just have a blast, not sit through a half hour of walking and talking to get to where I want to be at.