What are your gaming pet peeves?

[Gingerbread Demon]

So what are your pet peeves when it comes to electronic gaming?

One of my least favourite ones to start this off "unskippable cutscenes"

Especially in games that you really like that you have played a lot beforehand. Why no option to skip scenes if you have already beaten the game once or twice before?

 

[Turd Ferguson]

I, for the most part, despise online gaming. Sure, it can be fun in some cases (Fall Guys), but I can't stand COD, Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy some couch co-op or battles (GoldenEye, Halo, Mario Kart), but I never got into online gaming.

That being said, I'm also a trophy/achievement hunter, and I HATE when publishers throw in random online trophies/cheevos. For example, I have all the trophies for Far Cry 5, minus the online ones. My Red Dead Redemption II trophies sit at 50%, because I have no interest in playing Red Dead Online.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I, for the most part, despise online gaming. Sure, it can be fun in some cases (Fall Guys), but I can't stand COD, Fortnite, Apex Legends, etc. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy some couch co-op or battles (GoldenEye, Halo, Mario Kart), but I never got into online gaming.

That being said, I'm also a trophy/achievement hunter, and I HATE when publishers throw in random online trophies/cheevos. For example, I have all the trophies for Far Cry 5, minus the online ones. My Red Dead Redemption II trophies sit at 50%, because I have no interest in playing Red Dead Online.

I hate the co-op trophies that require you to sit and do X with another player just to get the trophy...... They generally are a pain.

 

[Smellmet]

Online gaming. Cannot be bothered with it any more. The amount of idiots on it who spoil the experience are just ridiculous, and what they've done to GTAV is beyond a joke. Micotransactions can get fucked too.

Give me an immersive single player campaign any day.

 

[ED-209]

One of my least favourite ones to start this off "unskippable cutscenes"

They tend to do that because the game is loading in the background.

 

[Timby]

They tend to do that because the game is loading in the background.

That's less and less of a problem with modern solid-state drives, but, yeah, even going all the way back to Metroid Prime, the elevators and doors were to get textures and objects out of memory so new resources could be loaded.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Online gaming. Cannot be bothered with it any more. The amount of idiots on it who spoil the experience are just ridiculous, and what they've done to GTAV is beyond a joke. Micotransactions can get fucked too.

Give me an immersive single player campaign any day.

Those are getting harder, and harder to find today and also getting way too dumbed down..

Oh elevators, Mass Effect says "hi" because I hated those in the very first game but knew they were a necessary evil to load assets.

 

[Smellmet]

Those are getting harder, and harder to find today and also getting way too dumbed down..

The single player campaigns on GTA5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 were both excellent. I'm also currently playing Gran Turismo 7's offline single player campaign, which is also very long and very good. I'm currently playing Astro Bot in VR which has a great campaign mode. I've also played most of the Lego games and Beat Sabre with my 7 year old daughter on single player, which are also of a decent length. I could probably list more that I've played.

The day single player offline campaigns become a thing of the past completely will signal the end of my gaming days. I stopped enjoying online play whilst playing GTA5 online where I just instantly got hunted down by people who'd purchased the top cars and weapons and it was simply pointless even trying to fight back, which is absolutely no fun whatsoever.

 

[Alexander Corrino]

I second the whole "I want more single player campaigns" thing. I love the single player campaigns in GTAV and RDR2. And I love single player games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Horizon Forbidden West. I also really enjoyed the single player campaign in Dying Light and I was thrilled about the massive The Following DLC for the game. It's so sad that this kind of thing is so rare nowadays. I mean it's fine to offer the multiplayer OPTION because I guess you have to do this kind of thing these days for some reason, but when an entire game's DLCs and updates focus on multiplayer stuff I lose interest immediately. (I will admit that I enjoy GTAV's and RDR2's multiplayer versions but those are really the exceptions from the rule for me, and I hate how GTAV in particular got abandoned just so that R* could milk the multiplayer version for that sweet shark card money.)

Oh and another pet peeve of mine? Missions you can't skip when you fail them multiple times. Just give me the option to skip. I'm the type of plyer who prefers to chill out while playing games, not rage quit stuff, so, I love it when a game is like "oh you failed this mission for the third time in a row would you like to skip it?".

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I found GTA 5 to be the exception in my catalog... It's great fun and a good story but playing Far Cry 4 right now and the story is abysmal and just non engaging... I just want to shoot everyone because all the characters are irritating levels of dumb. I'd love the option to skip missions if you fail them a few times at least GTA 5 did that.

 

[Gul Sengosts]

About cutscenes being used for loading, sure sometimes they are, but in cases like the elevators of Metroid Prime or Mass Effect 1 I'd hardly even call them cutscenes, as they're such obvious glorified load screens with no narrative purpose.

"Real" narrative/cinematic cutscenes are usually just that, and even if stuff is being loaded in the background, they take longer than a load screen which is over as soon as the loading is done. Cutscenes are used even without any need to load anything, most obviously in older games on ROM cartridges like Metroid Fusion (GBA) that had almost zero load time.

Metroid Fusion is an interesting case because it has a lot of unskippable cutscenes and dialogue compared to most other games in the series, including a purely narrative intro that takes almost 5 minutes. I think that's a puzzling decision in a game that's designed to be replayed a lot--and on top of that, speedrunned. But even the preceding Super Metroid and succeeding Zero Mission had unskippable intros or cutscenes for no good reason--leave it to fan game creators to fix it and make it like most players apparently want it: in AM2R, if you press start in the intro, the game simply jumps directly to the landing site where you actually start playing. Done! Everyone's happy. Why can't Nintendo do this?

Another interesting case is Borderlands 3, which originally had unskippable cutscenes like the earlier games did. But BL3 had exceptional post-launch support and the devs listened quite a lot to fan feedback--and the most common complaint was, surprise surprise, unskippable cutscenes. They actually listened and added a skip feature, and learned from that experience so that their next game, Tiny Tina's Wonderlands, had it from the get go. Massive improvement, everyone's happy. I don't understand why so many developers insist on this unskippable nonsense when it's abundantly clear that a huge portion of players hate it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I guess because from the pov in part they don't want people to skip the scenes as it shows off all the hard work they did to make them.

 

[Gul Sengosts]

I can see the desire to have people see the stuff you made, but I think this is one of the cases where player choice should really, really be respected. And if they absolutely have to make you watch it, there's still one solution: make them unskippable only on the first playthrough. At the danger of sounding like a whiny entitled gamer, I do think there's no excuse for permanently unskippable cutscenes.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I can see the desire to have people see the stuff you made, but I think this is one of the cases where player choice should really, really be respected. And if they absolutely have to make you watch it, there's still one solution: make them unskippable only on the first playthrough. At the danger of sounding like a whiny entitled gamer, I do think there's no excuse for permanently unskippable cutscenes.

Oh no that's a perfectly sensible option....... I wish most games would do that so on the 2nd or 3rd run even a switch is flipped and you can skip those scenes on that next run.

 

[Owain Taggart]

One of my recent peeves is level scaling. In certain cases, it makes sense. In others, it's purely a source of annoyance. Case in point, I've been playing AC: Odyssey over the last several months, and I'm near the end and wanting to do the Between Two Worlds storyline, because I really want to experience everything the game gave me, but because of the level scaling and the way it's implemented, those boss fights are just stupidly difficult and frustrating me to the point of wanting to give up. I've been playing the game on easy too, and I'm about to try them with level scaling set to light. I know people like having a challenge, but the fact that I even have to do this is absurd, and it's an example of the wild difficulty spikes that the game has.

 

[FPAlpha]

Cosmetic enhancements ( and sometimes you even need to pay real money for it) - i just don't get it. Making a sometimes huge fuss over aquiring new skins, wardrobe options etc. It really gets on my nerves and adds nothing to the game, at least for me.

I always groan when a game excessively uses this - last one was Midnight Suns ( tactical/rpg game featuring Marvel Superheroes where a third of the game subjectively revolves around getting all the variant costumes of the superheroes and outfitting your room with stuff).

 

[vandevere]

My Pet Peeve is Loot Boxes in supposedly free to play Games. If course, I'm an old fogey who prefers ro pay up front, either through subs, or Buy to Play. But that Loot Box bs has also been known to taint those games too...

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Cosmetic enhancements ( and sometimes you even need to pay real money for it) - i just don't get it. Making a sometimes huge fuss over aquiring new skins, wardrobe options etc. It really gets on my nerves and adds nothing to the game, at least for me.

I always groan when a game excessively uses this - last one was Midnight Suns ( tactical/rpg game featuring Marvel Superheroes where a third of the game subjectively revolves around getting all the variant costumes of the superheroes and outfitting your room with stuff).

That Fort game, you know the one the kids play has that and more and a lot of stuff you have to fork over real money for. I detest Epic Games

 

[jenji120]

Online gaming. Cannot be bothered with it any more. The amount of idiots on it who spoil the experience are just ridiculous, and what they've done to GTAV is beyond a joke. Micotransactions can get fucked too.

Give me an immersive single player campaign any day.

This is where Elder Scrolls Online really stands out as a gem. The community is amazing but it's a different kind of MMO because ZOS knew half their player base was using it as methadone for another single-player TES game. A lot of players play it as a single player game that just happens to be online. But I can't say enough about the community - they picked me up off the floor when SO got sick. They made sure that even though my situation was tough that I could get into elite raids. And they would run dungeons with me knowing full well I might have to stop in the middle of things. I got to laugh a ton while hanging out in guild chat sitting in a hospital room wondering whether or not the SO would come out of things alive (I gamed a ton at the hospital - university hospitals have great internet ).

But like any MMO it goes through lulls, Right now, I'm a bit bored with it but I'm waiting on new content to drop.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Games that force you to spend lots of time on filler content and chores.

When I play a game, I want to be moving forward. The next dungeon, the next level, the next story point. So when the game is balanced to make you do lots of repetitive side quests to stay strong enough to advance because stats have more impact than skill, it pisses me off. Or cases like Breath of the Wild where you have to constantly craft things or replace broken weapons.

If the side content has unique dungeons, character development or world building I can line with it. But 9 out of 10 times it’s some one dimensional NPC demanding you pick up groceries or something.