Pet Peeves with Games?
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Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I'm curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you're doing?
I think, you're perhaps conflating story with gameplay here? I do think, it's good to incorporate the tutorial into normal gameplay. So, you start playing the actual game right away and get told the controls as you need them. And sure, if it is a story-driven game, that probably means there has to be a story segment before all that to explain why you're starting on this journey to begin with. So, I'm not saying I want the tutorial to be an entirely separate thing, like it typically was in the 90s.
I'm mainly just complaining about when it's too intermixed, because I'd like to be able to skip all the text boxes where they're rambling about the story. If they switch mid-sentence to explaining what you're supposed to do and what buttons to press, then I'm likely to miss that while skipping through the story bits.
Preferably, there's a separate info box on screen after the dialogue ends (which is a good idea for several reasons), but it could also just be highlighted, if they want it to be within the dialogue. -
When you know a choice you made should have immediate or impending consequences, but the world carries on as if it's business as usual. I was actually surprised when the opposite happened in Outer Worlds 2 recently. If you trigger a certain event and don't go deal with it ASAP, it will happen without you and there are consequences.
In theory this is really cool, but unless you really get into a game and are willing to replay, it just feels bad as a player missing content because of a timer you didn't know about.
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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.
This is specifically for rhythm games, but I hate it when they don't give you a judgement error during the play (early/late indicators) or a total of early/late hits in the results screen.
Even when they do show that information, sometimes they don't even tell you by how much on average in ms, only the amount of hits that are early and late. You could be consistently late by as small as 5ms, or something stupid like 50ms but you wouldn't know. And now you just have to eyeball the offset adjustment, going back and forth, in and out between the settings menu and a song to check if you did it right.
Oh, and I hope the game uses millisecond offset instead of some esoteric arbitrary scale with no label — bonus points if it's not granular enough to set right so you end up with an offset that is either uncomfortably early or uncomfortably late no matter what you do.
And also, the offset calibration tool is useless in every rhythm game. It does not help whatsoever, and if anything it makes it more confusing to set things up
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I’d really like to see a set of publishers/creators that take a hard line stance on this, and reject contracts with, eg, Speedtree, if they insist on a dedicated startup video.
Kudos to Arc Raiders. When I boot it up, aside from an EAC launcher logo, it goes straight to Speranza.
Iirc Masahiro Sakurai (the guy from smash bros) openly stated to he refused to work with dolby in Kirby in the forgotten land because they insisted their logo be plastered before the title screen.
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Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes
Been playing Monster hunter World recently and holy crap is that game obnoxious with the cutscenes, even mid-fight if a monster you've never seen before happens to wander past.
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It's a minor pet peeve but I've disliked it when games have multiple weapons that share ammo, especially when the game doesn't explicitly tell you this. Some examples of games that do this are Doom and Half-Life. The reason I dislike this, is mainly because of how I play shooters in general. I always try to preserve my ammo by prioritizing my weakest weapons but in games that do this, I'm actually potentially wasting ammo because I'll either have less ammo for the other, usually more powerful, weapon(s), or I might not even get to use that better weapon because I had no idea it shared ammo with a weaker weapon.
Deus Ex Invisible War did this except EVERY weapon used the same ammo type lol
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Nintendo is infamous for this. Animal Crossing is a great game on the Switch, but it’s meant for one person. You can join an island, but unless the island creator has everything unlocked, you can’t progress the game. And even if they have, there are certain recipes you can’t get without cheating (treasure islands) for some reason.
Pokémon is the same way. They literally want you to buy a second Switch.
You can create/use multiple users on the Switch itself, are the saves then not separate?
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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 don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:
Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.
Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.
Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.
Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.
Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.
Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.
If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?
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Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters "talking" at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting your input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I've read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.
I'm adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn't even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.
I have to disagree with you on the Vampire Survivors chest, the music that plays during the animation is an absolute banger
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It's a minor pet peeve but I've disliked it when games have multiple weapons that share ammo, especially when the game doesn't explicitly tell you this. Some examples of games that do this are Doom and Half-Life. The reason I dislike this, is mainly because of how I play shooters in general. I always try to preserve my ammo by prioritizing my weakest weapons but in games that do this, I'm actually potentially wasting ammo because I'll either have less ammo for the other, usually more powerful, weapon(s), or I might not even get to use that better weapon because I had no idea it shared ammo with a weaker weapon.
I love the way they handled this in Doom Eternal - 6 out of your 7 basic weapons are matched in pairs, so you have 4 ammo types, but very low max ammo count for all of them. Instead you can pretty easily refill your ammo every ~20 seconds (using your chainsaw on an enemy drops ammo, and your chainsaw regens one fuel every ~20 seconds).
This means you never have an incentive to use weak weapons, EXCEPT for if you're waiting for your fuel to regen. What makes it work is that your "weak weapons" changes depending on the enemies, as every enemy has at least one weakpoint for one of your weapons.
So instead of making you play cautiously and conservatively, Eternal wants you to always use your best weapons and to aggressively push forward. This type of gameplay isn't for everyone, but as someone who usually ends their games with almost all items because "I might need them later!", Eternal really allowed me to just have fun with all the best stuff it has to offer.
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I think, you're perhaps conflating story with gameplay here? I do think, it's good to incorporate the tutorial into normal gameplay. So, you start playing the actual game right away and get told the controls as you need them. And sure, if it is a story-driven game, that probably means there has to be a story segment before all that to explain why you're starting on this journey to begin with. So, I'm not saying I want the tutorial to be an entirely separate thing, like it typically was in the 90s.
I'm mainly just complaining about when it's too intermixed, because I'd like to be able to skip all the text boxes where they're rambling about the story. If they switch mid-sentence to explaining what you're supposed to do and what buttons to press, then I'm likely to miss that while skipping through the story bits.
Preferably, there's a separate info box on screen after the dialogue ends (which is a good idea for several reasons), but it could also just be highlighted, if they want it to be within the dialogue.Ah, I see. In a lot of games, tutorial, story, and gameplay are happening all at once. Do you have an example offender that was on your mind originally?
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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 job. No seriously, that’s my pet peeve. I could play so many more great games if I didn’t have to work.
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Games that don’t act like they are games. Too many designers think they are making “high art”. Examples:
Not being able to save any time for any reason - I have a life, stuff happens. I need to be able to save and leave the game at any time - during gameplay, dungeons, cutscenes, any time. Make it a suspend state if it must - but respect reality.
Non-pausable cutscenes - you are not the most important part of my life so you need to be able to pause without losing content.
Non-skippable cutscenes - I might have seen this 10 times before, let me skip.
Dialogue history - if you let me skip dialogue then you must have a dialogue history. I might have hit the skip button by accident so let me see what I missed.
Indicate when there isn’t new dialogue - make the chat options change when there is new dialogue, making it so I have to interact with the NPC or object again just to see if there is new dialogue is infuriating.
Show when an activity will fail - don’t make me search barrels that are empty. Skyrim does this perfectly.
If you have a map let me annotate it - somehow a magicly populating map is allowed in your world but I don’t have a pencil to write “come back here with a shovel”?
Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.
Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.
About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.
Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark "digging spot #31" just is not necessary.
I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.
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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.
When you first start playing, you should be in a room that's moderately graphically intense and you can stand there indefinitely doing nothing. I need some time to dial in my graphics settings and controls. I hate when a game immediately drops you into a combat situation and I'm joining the action 5 seconds at a time as I twiddle with settings.
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Unpausable and unskippable cutscenes
Unpausable is unforgivable in the modern age but I generally don't mind unskippable if and only if it's the first time the scene plays on a profile.
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- Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
- games that have excessive grinding as part of the main gameplay.
- Games where randomness is the primary factor in winning and losing.
You've described like 90% of modern gaming.
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I have to disagree with you on the Vampire Survivors chest, the music that plays during the animation is an absolute banger
Especially the gold chests that give you a fiver. However, my gripe is with the 3-4 second delay after it goes "bling" but before it presents you the button that allows you to dismiss the popup.
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Cyberpunk 2077 one of the quests in the expansion drops you into basically Alien: Isolation when up until that point you can beat the shit out of or hack the brains out of any other NPC you've come across. You go from being a cybered out demigod to basically a rat in a maze being chased by a giant metal invincible doberman.
Yeah, I played that. Didn't bother me as much as some boss fights though. They clearly didn't intend for you to fight that robot, so the only option was to sneak around it and I rather enjoy stealth gameplay.
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You can create/use multiple users on the Switch itself, are the saves then not separate?
For some reason, no. Not for things like Animal Crossings New Horizons. It's the same island so the same save so to speak. If my twin started playing the game on their profile, they could do whatever they wanted to my island because it's the same island.
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Three first ones can also be game engine limitations. Im not saying its good desing and its always because the limitations, but there might be more happening under the hood that does not show to the end user. Things like quest stage flags or loading things behind the cut scenes.
Dialogue history i agree completelly. I love the way pillars of the eternity did this. I also loved how text refering to things like cities, characters and gods were highlighted and you could see short summary hovering your mouse over the higlighted text and clicking it opened the codex where you could read about the topic. This helped me immerse to game because my character would what the capital of the country is or what god uggapugga is. Also it helped when there was long times between game sessions.
About map markers. I like when i can add markers or text on the game map, but inherently i think game should do these things for you, either adding a symbol in the map, or adding something in to games quest log or codex. But on the other hand i lived in a era where if i wanted a map for game i needed to draw it by myself on the grid paper. The habit has stayed with me and in games like Dark souls, Remnant and blue prince i keep small notebook with me, where i write my notes and stupid theories. To me its really fun to read those scribles later and try to figure out what i have missed or how dumb i was.
Hollow knight, Project Zomboid, minecraft and Legend of Grimrock have all very different tools for you marking your map and in all of them the map system is part of the game desing and gameplay loop. While these games benefit from the map system to most of the games its just unnecessary. The ability to mark "digging spot #31" just is not necessary.
I love how in pillars of eternity and satisfactory you have in game notepads. And now days steam notepad is also great. You can even add screemshots to it, but i like my oldschool hand writing stuff more.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Engine limitations I can excuse to a limited degree (it just says to me it wasn’t prioritised correctly) but not for saving any time - at least from the world map, or similar out of engagement situations. If I can save from a church (looking at you, Dragon Quest) I can save from an inn or a bridge or a bush.
I played a game where the cutscenes could only be skipped once loading was done, can’t remember which though - one of the Call of Duty games maybe? That would be a fair compromise.
Drawing maps out by hand is definitely a habit I am pleased not to have to do any more! Back in the days when a game lived in its big box next to my computer it wasn’t a big problem to keep paper in it but nowadays any written notes I made would get lost immediately! If the game designers allow an in game map it should have some basic features like zooming, annotations, and auto-population. I agree that marking every little detail can make a map unusable but it should be my choice as the player what I do with the map, even if that means recording somewhere I found a random horse I want to go back to.
Mostly your comment is making me want to go back to Pillars of Eternity so thank you for that!
