Video Game Pet Peeves

[Lookingglassman]

A game that burned my butt was Sleeping Dogs. Early in the game you have to go in the club and fight all these guys and go into a room as your health drops steadily and there is really no way to bring your health back up. I fought and fought and actually made it to the room with little health, but got hit and died again. I gave up and traded this game in.

Right now I am playing Metro 2033 and about to stop because I am on the part in the library where ape like creatures are stalking me. I listened to one character say not to run but back away from these creatures and shooting wont help. Well I tried that and they still attack and kill me. Shooting sure doesn't help because they don't die. I was enjoying this game until this part.

 

[Evil Twin]

Respawning. When I clear an area of enemies, I want it to stay clear, dammit! Otherwise it removes all sense of accomplishment. Fallout 4 was especially awful in this regard, where you'd clear out a raider encampment, come back a week later or whatever aaaand they're back, and not only that, but all the loot and containers are restocked as well. Fuck that. Fortunately I found a mod that increases the respawn timer to practically never, and now I can safely declare the Commonwealth pacified after all my hard work!

 

[Lookingglassman]

I also hate games where you have to press a button at the right time to do something and if you fail to do it you have to start all over. In Killzone Shadow Fall there is a part where you are falling through a machine and have to dodge the turning arms as you fall through the shaft. Right before you hit bottom you have to press a button to deploy an airbag or something to land safely. I constantly kept dying. I gave up and started playing something else.

 

[Random_Spock]

I also hate games where you have to press a button at the right time to do something and if you fail to do it you have to start all over. In Killzone Shadow Fall there is a part where you are falling through a machine and have to dodge the turning arms as you fall through the shaft. Right before you hit bottom you have to press a button to deploy an airbag or something to land safely. I constantly kept dying. I gave up and started playing something else.

I hate those as well. It's why I'm not very good at Guitar Hero and similar games to it.

Also games where you have to get everything done in an area before moving on or else you're not able to come back to it (points of no return). Golden Sun: Dark/Dawn, I'm talking to you. It's one reason why that game isn't my favorite in the series.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Or what about final encounters as QTEs. Talk about underwhelming. I miss the days when bosses would actually put up a fight and make you feel like you've accomplished something. Now it's like: Press these buttons and watch a cutscene. Hooray!

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Trophies/collection oriented gaming.

To me, the goal of your game should be to beat the game and challenge yourself. Or if it's a game with a story, also to experience the story and learn about the characters and the world.

I won 500 fights, I collected 5000 coins, I defeated 60 enemy types, who cares? The only goal I need is to beat the game, and any additional goals and further challenges are up to me to decide, not the game.

Yeah, I guess I can ignore it if I want, but the thing is games are being *designed* around this aspect of gaming. Mario games hide their hardest and funnest levels behind collecting. In RPGs challenge is balanced around the assumption you did lots of quests, and quests are usually very disposable and repetitive. "Kill this thing", "Collect 50 of this thing." Side content is designed as a checklist of doing variations of the same thing over and over instead of actually giving you real side stories or unique levels. So I can't really ignore it.

I HATE when the game forces me to do collection work instead of just playing the game naturally at the pace I want to play, and if it's not technically forcing me, if the game is balanced so I'm underlevel if I don't, it's basically forcing me. And if you have to do the tedious collection work to get to the fun content like in most recent Mario games, it's absolutely forcing me.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I think collections make more sense in an open-world game where you can revisit areas, but I've noticed there are a lot of linear games too that have them. I think they work best when paired with plot-based objectives or when you're given a major choice. The worst are the very specific objectives in the Assassin Creed games that are inhumanly possible, that end up making you feel like the game is punishing you.

 

[BK613]

Some of mine:
-Loot boxes and micro-transactions in general. Every year games seem to be closer to the printer/printer ink model.
-Lack of LAN support. Miss LAN parties TBH.
-Unskippable cutscenes and tutorials.
-Forced grouping in MMOs.

 

[Random_Spock]

I'm no fan of unskippable cut scenes either. Especially if I'm working to try to soft reset for a shiny Pokemon in a Pokemon game.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Another I just thought about. Games that require you to sign up or sign on with an account in order to receive full benefits even though they're single-player games. Largely EA and Ubisoft games. This absolutely irks me seeing as there's little benefit for the player and moreso for the company in the way of collecting data, but sometimes they'll wall off a certain percentage. I seem to remember hearing about a fairly recent game that actually walled off part of its main story unless you logged in. Not cool.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I can deal with just about everything else, as I just see them as part of the creator/artist intent - and just like I don't like every song or movie, I'm not going to like every video game, and that's okay. The three that really get to me, though, are:

1. Cut scenes that can't be skipped.
2. Games that are broken so as not to be fully playable, either due to sloppy programming and QA, or due to them being intentionally broken so some functionality can be sold to us as DLC or unlockable content. I don't mind nice full expansions coming out after the fact, if they were legitimately made afterward, but if you've got a game in mind, make and sell me that game, don't nickel and dime me for parts of it.
3. Rails. If nothing I, as the player, am doing matters at all, why am I bothering? Just make a movie, please.

 

[Random_Spock]

I can deal with just about everything else, as I just see them as part of the creator/artist intent - and just like I don't like every song or movie, I'm not going to like every video game, and that's okay. The three that really get to me, though, are:

1. Cut scenes that can't be skipped.
2. Games that are broken so as not to be fully playable, either due to sloppy programming and QA, or due to them being intentionally broken so some functionality can be sold to us as DLC or unlockable content. I don't mind nice full expansions coming out after the fact, if they were legitimately made afterward, but if you've got a game in mind, make and sell me that game, don't nickel and dime me for parts of it.
3. Rails. If nothing I, as the player, am doing matters at all, why am I bothering? Just make a movie, please.

I hate #2 big time. It takes me out of the game.

 

[JD]

I hate those as well. It's why I'm not very good at Guitar Hero and similar games to it.

Me too, the Sly Cooper games had a bunch of timed button pressing, Guitar Hero type challenges, and they drove me crazy. I think I actually got stuck stuck on one of them for a week or more while I was playing for multiple hours each day.

Also games where you have to get everything done in an area before moving on or else you're not able to come back to it (points of no return). Golden Sun: Dark/Dawn, I'm talking to you. It's one reason why that game isn't my favorite in the series.

I agree here too, I really hate when you hit a point of no return like that. There were a lot of games where I had no way to get 100% because I left stuff behind in an area, not realizing I wouldn't be able to go back for it later.

Or what about final encounters as QTEs. Talk about underwhelming. I miss the days when bosses would actually put up a fight and make you feel like you've accomplished something. Now it's like: Press these buttons and watch a cutscene. Hooray!

Yeah, those are annoying.
I just remembered another one, when a level is separated into multiple sections, and they don't warn you when you are about to end the section. My mom and I play the LEGO games and we've run into this a lot. We'll be going though a level collection stuff and fighting bad guys, and one of us will either walk through a doorway or interact with something that suddenly ends the section, or even the whole level.

 

[Gul Sengosts]

Another vote for unskippable cutscenes. Unforgivable, I don't know what they're thinking. Even worse, having the checkpoint before, not after them (you may know the pain of rescuing Liara...).

And another vote for QTEs. That's the dumbest, most primitive game mechanic ever. Good gameplay = mastering the mechanics to overcome a challenge. Bad gameplay = press the button displayed on screen. wtf?

 

[captainkirk]

This leads me to a second peeve: Games that completely change their rules or game style during the final encounters.

This reminds me of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, which has pretty good gameplay throughout, until you get to the bosses. Suddenly it goes from third-person mouse-controlled movement to a weird isometric keyboard controlled mode. It just felt like a bizarre way to up the difficulty in the boss fights.

 

[Owain Taggart]

They probably did that to give it a bigger sense of scale. It was better done via a gamepad though and the transition wasn't quite as awkward, but yeah, it was annoying.

That brings up another similar memory I had while playing the first Arkham game. Everything had been fine up to this point, but when it came time for Poison Ivy, I felt the difficulty spiked. Due to the perspective change, I had a hard time seeing what was going on and I had a really hard time with her. The perspective change made it a lot harder than it should have been.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

I think collections make more sense in an open-world game where you can revisit areas, but I've noticed there are a lot of linear games too that have them. I think they work best when paired with plot-based objectives or when you're given a major choice. The worst are the very specific objectives in the Assassin Creed games that are inhumanly possible, that end up making you feel like the game is punishing you.

Collections make sense if they are strictly 'extra' content. If the game is not level-balanced around assuming you're going to do lots of it, and the game does not block main content on the collection like the recent Mario games do.

I enjoyed collecting the DK coins in the original Donkey Kong Country games, because the game was not forcing me to collect them to move forward in the game. I absolutely loathe doing it in Mario games when I have to 100% collect all of them to unlock the funnest levels.

But also, a lot of games add repetitive collection content at the expense of more interesting side content. RPGs and adventure games should use side content to flesh out the background of the characters and the world. Take an area of the character's history that has not been explored and make a side dungeon out of it. Or just tie up loose ends of your minor villains. Or just do something cool that you couldn't do in the main story like Cyan's dream in FFVI. ANYTHING is better than just having some billboard at a guild and saying "Pick up five red monkey ears" or "Kill this random monster". All these dull billboard quests that make you do the same thing over and over are being added to games at the expense of actual compelling side content.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Collections make sense if they are strictly 'extra' content. If the game is not level-balanced around assuming you're going to do lots of it, and the game does not block main content on the collection like the recent Mario games do.

Yes, that's a good point. I've got a mixed feeling about the collections in the Assassin's Creed games. They're extra, and I find them fun to collect, but the other thing is, and other games do this too, is the way 100% completion is counted. I honestly wish extras would be counted separately from the main game status. Because if I complete the game's campaign, I find it odd to see that I've only really completed, say 60% of it, with the rest being collections and secrets, etc, and because I likely didn't do all of that, I feel a bit short-changed. Beat the game at 60% and I feel like I'm missing something. It's been counted this way ever since achievements have come into play.

As for your second point, I recently played a game (Oxenfree) that was brilliant in the way it used multiple narratives to offer more playability. It's an adventure game that resembles more a platformer, and different dialogue options lead to different outcomes, but it does this completely organically and you don't really notice what it's doing until after the game you see a cutscene describing the current outcome and how different decisions could alter it, and the different dialogue options end up fleshing the characters more and even sending them in possible different directions and scenarios.

 

[JD]

The only games where I actually go for 100% of everything are the LEGO games and the Batman: Arkham games. With most other games it just takes to damn long to try to get every single thing. The LEGO and Arkham games usually base most of the collectables around puzzles and quests, so that makes it more fun. I usually just do the story focused stuff like the main missions and the side missions, I'll grab any collectables I stumble across, but I won't go out of my way for them.

 

[Random_Spock]

The only games where I actually go for 100% of everything are the LEGO games and the Batman: Arkham games. With most other games it just takes to damn long to try to get every single thing. The LEGO and Arkham games usually base most of the collectables around puzzles and quests, so that makes it more fun. I usually just do the story focused stuff like the main missions and the side missions, I'll grab any collectables I stumble across, but I won't go out of my way for them.

Exactly. Or it's near impossible to do it, meaning they make it so hard that it makes the game not fun to play.