Invisible walls.
Don’t want me to go somewhere on the map? Put an actual obstruction there. A wall, a tree, a boulder, just something rather than an arbitrary line I just can’t cross.
Kingdom Come was something that has recently made me annoyed by it
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The choices thing in games. Specifically it’s the ones that are an illusion of choice but the outcome doesn’t change. The most egregious example of this I’ve come across is in Infamous on the PS3.
You’ve got to save your girlfriend or six other scientists who are dangling from the top of a skyscraper and have to pick one of the two. If you tried to save your girlfriend you found it was a scientist and you girlfriend fell to her doom. If you reloaded your save and went for the scientists now expecting the double cross… you’d find your girlfriend wasn’t with them and she’d still fall to her death!
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I absolutely loathe this in Pokemon games or other RPGs. It’ll be like “Can you help me?” [Yes] [No] and if you select no, it’ll loop dialogue until you pick yes. Just a waste of time.
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I’ve been playing the original Metroid and I love almost everything about it except that there is not a good way to refill your energy quickly and reliably. It’s not so bad when you only have a few energy tanks but now I’m at the maximum of 6 and it’s just a massive grind.
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Emphasis on “quickly” - no better part of a Metroid playthrough than spending some time refueling at the ol’ air hole.
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A little bugbear of mine comes from being too faithful to the source material when adapting a tabletop game into video game form. A lot of that stuff translates very poorly and becomes obnoxious in a single player context. I genuinely keep falling off Baldur’s Gate 3 entirely because of how much I hate the concept of a natural 1 critical fail, and there’s no option to turn the most annoying Dungeons & Dragon rule off. BG3 ain’t exactly Disco Elysium, so failure just constantly feels like failure instead of something entertaining or interesting happening instead.
But the real annoying bit is when they transfer terms that will mean something else to people who are only used to RPG in video game form. The fact that KOTOR called what is effectively the evasion stat “defense” drove me up a wall for a very long time, among many things it doesn’t really tell you about the system that only make sense to people familiar with D&D 2E and the TTRPGs that borrowed ideas from it.
It makes me appreciate Owlcat’s work post Kingmaker for actually giving a ton of difficulty options, while also making it clear what exactly everything does (though you still have to wiki here and there because of specific situations where you have to know how certain rules interact in practice, which is for obscure combinations solely for min-maxers).
Yup! We timed how long it took to refill doing this and it was a half hour. It wouldn’t be so bad if these guys would drop health every time or something. I don’t think it needs to be really easy to get health but maybe if the game had something like Legend of Zelda’s fairy fountains, a specific place you could go to refill your health.
Here’s a few others that drive me crazy:
• Shops: highlighting new gear should give you some kind of indication as to whether that gear is better or worse than what you have equipped. Not being able to equip new gear directly from the shop menu is also annoying, even more so when the shop keeper has too many lines that they have to spit at you whenever you have to talk to them again after backing out and equipping your new stuff.
• Moves: tell me what a move does. Don’t just let me learn a new move and give me no description of what it does and make me waste turns in battle figuring out what it does.
• Cutscenes: please god let players skip cutscenes that we’ve already seen. If you die against a boss and have to restart, don’t make players sit through cutscenes again.
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I gotta come in defense of Brawl here because I spent so much time with it and I got rose tinted lenses on hard.
I think yeah, it’s a clash of ideals from the developers and players. I’m not too certain smash was meant to be a hardcore competitive game at all but the melee scene was very competitive.
Items were obviously the way to play casually, but without items on you were at the mercy of the opponent so some other method of balance was needed and it totally makes sense that tripping would help that problem. That said… you kind of have to be a decent player to even take advantage of a fall anyway and if you were in the middle of getting clapped by someone you’re probably not going to be ready to just jump in at a moment’s notice with no warning. I think it failed to really balance anything and made the tripping player feel worse for… moving?
“Casual fighting game“ just kind of feels like an oxymoron but I think they’re doing well at refining that as time goes on with the extra modes and weird modifiers that can come with them like those found in ultimate. I kinda wonder how much further they’ll go if there is a new one someday. It’s a weird design problem at the very least
Anyway, onto what I hate: Always online single player games. Or even multiplayer games, lemme play co op over LAN. I really wanted to play Diablo 4 but… over the network? With a laggy butcher? Nah I’ll pass.
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Apparently a fuck ton of people will skip all tutorials and then get angry at not understanding how things work that just got explained, it’s why at this point I just want tutorials to be quick and easy to understand if you force them on me.
As an actual answer, a lot of my annoyance is just entirely dependent on how much friction I can handle in the moment and how much I planned for in my mind.
Expeditions Rome I recently got (waiting to play once I have an actual gaming pc functional again) and a friend of mine warned me ahead of time. It’s doing some historical realities, so while it lets you play as a woman it’s lot harder. One of the things in character creation is an instant “Women in Rome didn’t get a first (or last, can’t remember) name” and yes, it blocks out that field.
It’s a sort of friction that’d drive me up a wall if I wasn’t aware of it ahead of time, but I am and I’m actively choosing to go along with this friction.
I think one of the actual universal annoyances I have is when a game wants to railroad you, but refuses to just do that and instead makes any “wrong” choice very punishing. I dropped Assassin’s Creed Odyssey over it, it so desperately wanted me to do one thing, but I only learned what exact thing it was as everything else just punished me severely. In that case just put me on the tracks instead of making me find the tracks through trial-and-error.
Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time and I’m still actively turned off by this. XD
(Hopefully one day there’ll be a sweeping OpenMW mod that does away with it and rebalances the game accordingly)
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Live service games that have an entry fee fundamentally changing the way the game works in a update, making the game you paid for no longer playable (looking at you, overwatch)
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i really do not like the unlock systems that are ever-present in action games. people rag on unskippable tutorials, and rightly so; does making me unlock all the tools in a game not turn the first 5, 10, 20 hours of the game into an unskippable tutorial? i understand the desire to not overwhelm players, and to give them a concrete Sense Of Progression, but i’d much rather just be given all the tools, figure them out myself, and “progress” through the game the normal way. the new doom games are particularly bad about this - the 2016 doom had something like 10 separate unlock systems. does the game really feel more rewarding if you have to play for a dozen hours to unlock air control? a usable weapon switch speed? for me, no.
(unlocking characters, or like the skulls in halo or something, are a different thing that i am fine with)
destiny 2 is the worst offender here for me. i bought a bungie fps campaign, i would like to go back to play the bungie fps campaign i paid money for, but bungie can’t allow me to download it without the rng loot grind mmo it’s stapled to ballooning to 30000 gigabytes, so i am not allowed to play the bungie fps campaign i bought lol
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looks at physical copy of Evolve
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What weirds me out the most is a developer being so against their game developing a competitive scene for no reason to the point of going way too far to shut down events and such.
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If I was a developer and gave my game skippable tutorials and then I got emails from people being angry because they don’t understand how to play the game, I would ask them if they skipped the tutorial, and if they say yes I would reply to them with “you’re a moron” ngl lol.
This is why I love Ninja Gaiden, only one unlock system and it’s simply just spending points from killing enemies in leveling up weapons.
Although I would prefer having everything from the get-go, regardless of how overwhelming it might be because, at the end of the day, the game is not forcing you to use everything. They’re just tools at your disposal.
Execution QTEs
- Often excessively, uncomfortably violent
- Unless they offer a reward like in DOOM 2016, what is even the point
- This is murder porn
Games that don’t properly close-caption all spoken dialogue even when subtitles are turned on
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