What are your gaming pet peeves?

[Owain Taggart]

How about this one: Games that switch genres at the 11th Hour. I can't remember which game it was, either Two Worlds or its Sequel, both terrible games. But in either case, I'm playing an RPG. I've spent many hours in-game, levelled up many times and gained many skills. Skills mind you, that I'd hope to be able to use in the final boss fight. I should be awesome and all-powerful and... and... wait, are you kidding me?? In their infinite wisdom, the developers decided the final boss had to be some target practice against a flying dragon using mounted artillery points, and you couldn't use your skills at all. None of it figured into the battle. It stopped being an RPG at that point, and I remember it peeving me to no end at the time. It's not fair to the players and the time they've spent on it, to say, you know what, this doesn't matter anymore.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Rage bait videos like this one. Huge pet peeve of mine that generates clicks on youtube.... Yes it's a gaming pet peeve

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[Owain Taggart]

Yeah, I dislike that as well. Just yesterday, I saw a video headline proclaiming that Indiana Jones and the Great Circle was woke.... just a mere few hours after its release... Seriously?

I feel sorry for people who have to find fault in everything and can't simply enjoy games anymore. If they nitpick everything, they soon won't have anything to play. I'd be curious to see how high their stress levels are when they're raging all the time.

 

[Smellincoffee]

Releasing half-completed games and then using DLC to 'complete' the game. The most egregious example of this is The Sims 4, which upon release didn't even have features that came in base-game The Sims 1 and The Sims 2. I waited 4 years to buy it, and that was when it was on sale for something like $5 and patches/updates had made it a proper vanilla experience.

 

[Owain Taggart]

^Yeah, that's so annoying. Like you buy a game and it doesn't even properly complete a story and asks you to buy a DLC to find out what happens next. And yes, I've seen that happen. Game straight up stops cold without any resolution.

 

[Oddish]

Most open world type games, it seems, follow one path or another. They either (a) end suddenly, with no closure, or (b) just go on forever. It would be cool if they could sort of split the difference.

 

[Akiraprise]

Here's a board game pet peeve. I purchased a newer version of Sorry as my old one has been lost to time and now they no longer use bi-fold boards but rather quad-fold. Stupid board won't lay flat.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Here's another one. Might have been mentioned earlier:

Chasing the trend of live-service gaming. Here and there some might be successful, let's get that out of the way. But putting all your eggs in one basket is just a disaster waiting to happen. Sony had announced announced a push for 12 live-service games not that long ago and have already cancelled quite a few of them; Concord bombed hard and was removed from sale shortly after release, the last of us multiplayer game, god of war multiplayer, among others, have all been cancelled, with possibly more cancellations coming. The market is so saturated with live-service games right now, and it feels like a real gamble to be working on something that isn't even a sure bet, especially if developers might not even get to see their work get to market.

It's not just that they went trend chasing It's that in doing this, the studios involved are often being told to work on something they have no real experience doing at the expense of displacing something they're good at doing, and everyone ends up suffering for it. Either the studios end up closing for failing to meet expectations, or games get retooled. Dragon Age: The Veilguard, I hear was originally supposed to be live-service oriented, but they eventually changed direction, but it was too late to change their world hub. They were lucky enough to get that released at least.

I just hope that studios are getting the message that chasing the live-service trend isn't the cash-cow they think it is.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

Had Concord not had butt ugly main characters it might have done a slightly bit better. It wasn't just them. the setting and worlds everything was hideous....... I feel sorry for people that bought it will they still be able to play or was that money down the plughole?

 

[Owain Taggart]

The tragic thing about Concord was that it was a failure in reading the room. They must have been seeing some of the signs during production that this was something that they'd have difficulty selling. I remember shortly before it released, there were a lot of moans that there wasn't much unique about it, much of it the same old. And that's part of the problem. If you're going to be making something that requires an investment in time from the players, you need to find that something unique that can be used as a selling point. And it becomes harder the more live-services games you have on the market. And if you don't do well, like Concord, all that time and money spent on developing it... gone.

 

[Oddish]

That does suck.

I've been lucky... all the games I really got into were either stand-alone or successful.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I play the things that appeal to me, not what is trendy

 

[F. King Daniel]

VR never taking off. Yes it's expensive as fuck and awkward to use but it's ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

 

[Owain Taggart]

VR is Amazing! I agree, and I do think the Meta Quest 3 is doing its part in making VR more accessable for the mainstream. I myself got a Meta Quest 3 earlier this month and I'm constantly amazed at what I'm able to do with it. If there's one disappointment about it, it's the battery life preventing me from doing too much in VR before I have to charge it.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

VR might take off more if the headsets didn't have to look so ridiculous and cumbersome

 

[Owain Taggart]

As far as headsets go, the Meta Quest 3 is a fairly compact one, unlike earlier headsets. It helps that it's standalone too.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

As far as headsets go, the Meta Quest 3 is a fairly compact one, unlike earlier headsets. It helps that it's standalone too.

It's Meta though so tied to Zuck hard pass

 

[Owain Taggart]

I had my reservations too, but the tech itself is quite cool! There are so many things it does incredibly well. For instance, with older headsets, it used to be you'd have to use external sensors in order to mark the periphery of your play area, but that's no longer necessary as the sensors are all onboard, and can map the room in realtime, and going so far that you can map out objects such as furniture so that they can be used in mixed-reality games.