Pet Peeves with Games?
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
Games that lack a checkpoint between inordinate amounts of bullshit and a boss fight where you're highly likely to die: It's annoying as hell.
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So many games have like ~10-15 seconds of unskippable logos whenever you open the game and it pisses me off every single time. I don't understand why they still do this.
On PC, often those are short videos. If you can find those files, you can remove the file and they won't play. Pcgamerwiki is helpful
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Getting lost. I like exploring until I'm done exploring, and then I have a low tolerance for wandering aimlessly. I don't need an indicator and a map to tell me where to go, but I appreciate a sign post or NPC to nudge me in the right direction if I need it. Sometimes level/world design does not help in areas that look samey, so landmarks or some sort of unique feature are appreciated.
I wish more games did better sign posting too. I'm not a fan of following the dotted line, but I see too many games where there's no other way to do it. The NPC tells you to go somewhere, and doesn't actually give you directions.
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Any game ported to the PC needs to recognize controllers that are plugged in after launch and need to have a "quit to desktop" option.
Absolutely, especially with handheld PC gaming becoming more popular. Drives me nuts having to fiddle with settings just to get it functional only to realize I missed something that was critical for a game play mechanic
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes
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I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don't let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you'd used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that's contrary to what you'd used up till that point.
Deus Ex Human Revolution's initial release was the worst about this. A bunch of people who took the skills and inventory for non-lethal/stralth/hacking gameplay found themselves at boss fights that were straight-up gunfights. If you were kitted out and skilled properly to face-tank while using explosives and big guns, you were just screwed and couldn't progress.
In subsequent releases, they added additional options in the arenas that allowed you to kill them using stealth and hacking skills.
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
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Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.
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Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
My biggest pet peeve are collectables in games not primarily about exploration.
I guess it can be implemented in a fun way, but I hate backtracking or not being sure I can continue without looking in every corner in a segment of a level.
Replayed Mario Galaxy and it was pleasantly surprised being able to play it in your own way.
~I am aware that nothing is stopping me to do so, even with collectables. Unfortunately I hate half progress bars just as much TT.~
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of "progress bar" to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.
Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn't it just be a button press?
Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that's the first game I can remember where it was "hold button to interact;" except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.
ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn't respect my, the player's, time. That stupid "lockpicking" mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?
And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it's also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
Combat system that is advertised as skill based but you find out it's actually damage based and randomized.
Doing really well and winning the impossible mission because you spent time and effort leveling up and honing your skill to defeat a boss or level that you know is going to be difficult. Only for you to fail the mission and get reset or perma death because the plot demanded it.
No controller support on PC
Mobile games with fake game play advertising and demos. In game banner ads or forced ads.
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Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of "progress bar" to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.
Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn't it just be a button press?
Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that's the first game I can remember where it was "hold button to interact;" except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.
ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn't respect my, the player's, time. That stupid "lockpicking" mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?
And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it's also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.
Depends on the game. I play Jump Space that occasionally does this (not all buttons, but some). It is to ensure that you deal with enough enemies so they won't interrupt you while holding/charging the button. If you're interrupted, you need to start over. It ensures you don't simply sprint past everything while hitting the buttons.
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Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.
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Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.
Yeah, I don't like being shoved in an intro cinematic without being able to turn on subtitles.
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player's time, intelligence, or most often both. I'm looking very hard in Nintendo's direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they're offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they're not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So. Also cutscenes you can't skip even after you've already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can't skip after you've seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can't press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn't even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I'm a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That's probably why I write so many words. You don't need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It's called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I'm also including stuff like, "You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it's a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type."
No Man's Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I'm glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can't be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
::: spoiler Also,
Don't even come at me with, "But realism! Everyone needs to sleep!" First of all, the other denizens of your boat don't sleep because they are all dead souls. And second of all, the game can't even hold it in until the actual ending before revealing that so are you, so it turns out Stella doesn't even need to sleep either.
:::The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it's not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can't figure out a way to teach your game's most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn't for you.
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Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.
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Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.
Skipping straight to action instead of main menu and options is annoying.
When I started playing [game name here, atm can't remember it, it's from warframe people] it immediately started a plot cutscene which wasn't available later on. I sure wanted to see that plot presented in a 720p medium settings on my large 1440p display.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things the plot in the game is irrelevant as it can be, but damn it, let me enjoy it full screen.
They have likely fixed, but holy hell, why was it like that in the first place. Abysmal new player experience.
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On PC, often those are short videos. If you can find those files, you can remove the file and they won't play. Pcgamerwiki is helpful
They're almost always .bik files somewhere in the game directory. I have no clue why so many games still insist on using this specific format in particular even today, but at least it makes them easy to find. I have determined that quite a few games will barf if you delete the files outright, but if you just replace them with an empty text file with the same name it will still allow the game to launch.
Console players are usually out of luck.
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Games that jump straight into things without letting me see the options menu first.
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Not having the Playstation icons as a preset when I want to use my PS4 controller on PC.
Unless I missed it, Where Winds Meet forces you to do an entire damn boss-fight before you can invert the vertical camera! Unbelievable. I realize I'm the freak for learning "flight control" aiming where down is up, but I've been doing it for decades; can't change it now! It's unhinged to not let people access or change options until after you've beaten a boss...
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
I believe it is going to be a huge deal as the gamers are aging out. (And if you play on a Tv).
Give me a freaking texts size option!
And not just size 6 to size 8! Big effin text!
It is a huge pet peeve of mine. -
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player's time, intelligence, or most often both. I'm looking very hard in Nintendo's direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they're offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they're not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So. Also cutscenes you can't skip even after you've already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can't skip after you've seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can't press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn't even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I'm a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That's probably why I write so many words. You don't need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I'm afraid I'm going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It's called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I'm also including stuff like, "You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it's a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type."
No Man's Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I'm glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can't be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
::: spoiler Also,
Don't even come at me with, "But realism! Everyone needs to sleep!" First of all, the other denizens of your boat don't sleep because they are all dead souls. And second of all, the game can't even hold it in until the actual ending before revealing that so are you, so it turns out Stella doesn't even need to sleep either.
:::The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it's not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can't figure out a way to teach your game's most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn't for you.
I agree with you. I think. I have stuff to do and stopped reading after the second paragraph...
EDIT: I came back and read the entire thing. They're 100% right, if a bit verbose.
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Depends on the game. I play Jump Space that occasionally does this (not all buttons, but some). It is to ensure that you deal with enough enemies so they won't interrupt you while holding/charging the button. If you're interrupted, you need to start over. It ensures you don't simply sprint past everything while hitting the buttons.
Sure, sometimes it kinda makes sense from a mechanic or gameplay perspective. I'm talking about games that require you to hold buttons to interact for everything whether it makes sense or not.
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Mine always is, completely forgetting what I was doing and where I was going after not touching a save file for a long time. This is happening to me right now with Stardew Valley.
I'm in Year 4, married Maru, have a decent farm going, I have yet to build the movie theater I just found out so that's something I can do. And I know up until that point, I called it a conclusion of a game, but yet I forgot completely about there being some minor goals or things I wanted to do. Completely out of my head. It was a year ago since I last touched that save.
This happens a lot with old saves, because sometimes I have had something in mind as to how I was going to play the game or where I was going with a character.
In 3rd-person games with a free moving camera, pressing the joystick not repositioning the camera behind my character. It's so annoying in action games to have to manually reposition the camera while 5 enemies are happy to attack you from off screen.
