Pet Peeves with Games?

[zotethemighty@lemmy.zip]

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.

[edible_funk@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[edible_funk@sh.itjust.works]

You've described like 90% of modern gaming.

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

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.

[deepthought42@lemmy.world]

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.

[rebekahwsd@lemmy.world]

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.

[pcurd@feddit.uk]

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!

[mrfinnbean@lemmy.world]

Coming back to the map markings. It is also economics. How many players are going to use the feature versus how much work it is. It migh seem simple thing, but when you add option for player to write on the map there are lots of things you need to take in to account.

How many symbols can be used, what happens if the games resolution is changed from the settings, how the text wraps if its close to the edge of map, what if there appears new automatic map marker under text user has wroten, are there interactive symbols for fast travelling or something else, will those go under the text or on top, what if writing uses special characters etc etc. Not to mention if devs have been cute with the map and its not just a flat texture. Skyrims map for example is the game world and you can see storms on it.
Spending time to make and test all those features when it really serves a tiny fraction of the playerbase is wastefull.

About saving the game. For better or worse its also a game mechanic and now days its not necessary about the limitation. For example if you could save in a middle of an battle in pokemon you could just save the moment you start a fight with shiny pokemon and you could infinetly try to catch it without any stakes. Or if you could save in middle of epic multiphase jrpg boss it would take away from the feeling of succes after long battle.

But i absolutelly agree games should atleast have exit save, so if real live happens and you need to close the game, it should not punish the player and loose their progression.

[cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

Yes, but in the case of some games, the save data is shared.

I don't have a Pokémon game on Switch, so I can't speak to it directly.

On Animal Crossing, the first player goes through an orientation scene at the airport where they are told they won an island getaway package. They create their character, and then they choose an island shape from four randomly generated choices. Once all that's done, you fly to the island and get to see the airport colour (this matters to some people), the native fruit (determines what recipes you can make, and some have preferences), and who your starter animal villagers (always a Big Sister personality female and a Jock personality male) will be. Sometimes you don't like one of those, so you reset. I had to reset seven times to get an island I wanted (blue airport, oranges, and I forget who my starters were now — they have both moved away).

So anyway, the second player does not get the orientation and the island picker. Instead, their orientation has them joining the first player's island. The first player will always be the "Island Representative" and this is the only player Tom Nook (the racoon "boss" of the island, so to speak) will talk to about upgrades for the island and features you can unlock by completing simple quests. The other player(s) will have access to these once the "island representative" has unlocked them, but if they required learning a recipe, the other players will NOT be given that recipe. They can find it randomly in a message bottle on the beach, shot down from a balloon by a slingshot, or from a villager who is crafting something. Or, they can get it from another player, such as a hacked player running a treasure island where you can get ALL the recipes.

Case in point: My wife's island. My wife bought the Switch for Animal Crossing, then decided she did not like Animal Crossing (it IS kind of a slow and pointless "chill" game), so she stopped playing. She unlocked a couple things, but I could not unlock anything else. So she agreed to let me delete her island and start a new one.

Case in point 2: My island. I've been playing my own island since May. EVERYTHING is unlocked. So she can start a new character, move onto my island, and have access to all the features. There may be a few things she can't craft because she doesn't have the recipe, and the game is less likely to spawn a recipe the island rep got for free (it's considered lower priority).

Sorry for the long reply, just wanted to clarify how it actually works. This is intentional: for "personal" games like Pokémon and Animal Crossing, Nintendo fully expects the second player to buy their own Switch and their own copy of the game. Once you've done that, you're both island reps on your own islands, and you can visit each other over a local connection (no paid Nintendo Switch Online account required!). Now this is where it's super important to make sure your second island does not have the same native fruit. There are five fruits (orange, apple, cherry, peach, and pear) and you will always have a native fruit, your fruit trees only grow this. You will have a secondary fruit your "mom" will send you and other villagers will gift you, and mystery islands have a low percentage chance of spawning. Once you figure out what those two are, you want to make sure the second island doesn't use either as its native... and hope its secondary isn't the same either. Then, you can trade fruits, and now you have access to four. You'll need to trade with at least two other players to get access to all five fruits. (There are also coconuts but everyone is guaranteed to get those.)

[ephera@lemmy.ml]

I think, this was on my mind: https://pt.mezzo.moe/w/waYE4NkZGpqQ9qpW1th1ga?start=15m10s

I don't know, with this example in particular, I find it quite disruptive, too, that there's explanations of the game mechanics and then the character barges in with some funky expression and some rhethoric question à la "And then I'm that thing?". Yeah, dude, did you not listen to the tutorial ghost explaining that just then?

In fairness, this is a game that's pretty much story-first with a bit of puzzling in between. And it was only that Let's Play that I saw; I would've almost certainly skipped that game, if I came across the store page, since I assume, it would've been obvious that it's a story game.
Well, and also in fairness, this is a pretty fringe game. There's a decent chance that it isn't considered 'good' in other aspects either.

In general, I don't want to be too critical. Not every game has to be for me. Well, most don't have to be, since I don't play an insane variety of games to begin with. But yeah, still just wanted to throw that into the conversation as a pet peeve of mine, since there's (perhaps less egregious) examples of that in a variety of games.

[auth@lemmy.world]

Games that dont let you skip the tutorial and all cutscenes. Like I get that most people want to watch the story or read the dialogue but I dont.

Games that are to easy. Its so annoying when a good game spends way to long scaling up the difficulty and you have to play for like 10 hours before the fights stop being completely mindless. Its such a waste of time.

My last pet peeve is for sandbox games and myself. Its so annoying when I have built a thing that has a lot of intergrated parts and then I decide to do a massive redesign of some part. Then I remove the parts and dont finish building the replacement. So next time i log in im immediately hit with an entire system that doesnt work and I have try clean up my own mess.

[jeffool@lemmy.world]

You're completely right of course, but I'll say it bugs me too at times. I was always able to forgive it but as we got more advanced visually it bugged me more. Then finally in Oblivion it was too much for me. I still love and respect the game, but it actively bugs me there are portals around the world that are just waiting for me to decide I want to fight. I know it's dumb, but it is what it is.

[jeffool@lemmy.world]

I've often wondered why some more advanced games like Elder Scrolls don't keep track of dramatic actions in some way and offer them up to you when you leave the game for a while. A "previously..." kind of element. Big budget action games too, like from Rockstar.

Obviously they just don't think it's worth the work, but I do wonder if it would affect completion rates.

[hollownaught@lemmy.world]

When games have a designated button to show interactive elements in the environment

This just screams "we don't know how to make an uncluttered game"

[jjjalljs@ttrpg.network]

Broadly, where the optimal path is the boring or tedious path.

Imagine an action game where you fight monsters and get coins for defeating them. Coins can be exchanged to buy new moves, advance the plot, and so on. Basic game loop.

Now imagine that you get triple coins if you wear the red shirt when fighting red monsters. Every time you see a red monster, you could go into the menu, into equipment, into body armor, swap on the red shirt, exit all the menus, and kill the monster. Then repeat all that for blue shirt and blue monsters.

This is a made up example but some games do shit like that, where you have to do something tedious for a big payoff.

[els@lemmy.zip]

Death Stranding 2 offers this feature. Useful, since the story is kookydooks.

[konraddo@lemmy.world]

Since Steam implemented the notes feature, I can remember what to do, like if I don't have time to explore a place but the game already marked visited simply because I went there, etc.

[konraddo@lemmy.world]

My major pet peeves with games is that features available in a game are often absent in a sequel, or revamped for no reason. Unless a game receives critical reception these days, I often buy games that have been released a year ago to increase the chance they get fixed with patches.

Example: the notorious Civilization series.

[kolanaki@pawb.social]

With games like Elder Scrolls, they have the quest log that usually keeps track of things you have done.

But I have seen a couple games, not a lot, that have a thing very much like a "Last time on..." with dialogue/cutscenes telling you what the story is thus far that you either can optionally select from a menu OR, that just play as the loading screen whenever you load the game up instead of just a spinning widget and a static image/screen.

It definitely should be used more. I probably would not start an entire new game just because I stopped half-way through and didn't remember jack shit when I go to play again.

[dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world]

Your example sounds like Ikaruga if it were deliberately designed to be annoying.

...We probably shouldn't give any mobile game developers any ideas.