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.
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.
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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
I hadn’t heard of PCGamerWiki before, and it looks super useful. Thanks!
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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.
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.
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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.
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!
What Miyamoto game is this describing? If anything I'd say he's got a reputation for being anti-text.
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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.
This is why I’d almost rather linear games that teach one core mechanic rather than “Build your character the way you want them”.
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Okay, I felt bad. I came back to read it and am now firmly on your side!
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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.
Personally I don't like having anything on stick press (at least for game controls, I can tolerate occasional use to open a menu or something). I think it feels terrible and I have no idea why this progressively became a thing on controllers since mid-00s.
Worst use of that I've ever found was Fable (at least the 360 version). The game wants you to push the left stick while also using it to move to sneak.
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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.
Point no. 2 is why I couldn’t get through Witcher 1. There’s only so many times I can fight 3-5 sewer monsters to get enough XP to not die in chapter..4? 5?
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I'm always verbose. If you see that penguin knife over a post you ought to know what you're signing up for.
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Personally I don't like having anything on stick press (at least for game controls, I can tolerate occasional use to open a menu or something). I think it feels terrible and I have no idea why this progressively became a thing on controllers since mid-00s.
Worst use of that I've ever found was Fable (at least the 360 version). The game wants you to push the left stick while also using it to move to sneak.
Hmm… I think for action games it's somewhat of a necessity because there are so many actions the character can take at any given point, so you kinda need to utilize every clickable button.
That said, I agree it never feels great. No matter how good the controller is, it always somehow feels wobbly, specifically after long-term use.
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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 thought of another one: shitty covers. OMG, The Surge? WTF is that Steam library cover? There are exceptions like Catherine: Classic, but most covers where the protagonist stares at the camera suck so much.
Specifically if it's an action game: show the character in action, FFS. The Wonderful 101 has a great cover. So does Vanquish.
And when half the cover is the logo… just stop with that already. Or an atrocity like Scarlet Nexus… it's just a cropped image… like Bandai couldn't afford to commission a cover.
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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.
Menu -> Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down - > Exit Game -> Yes
Scroll Down -> Exit to Desktop -> Yes
Exit Launcher -> Yes
Jackbox is one of the worst offenders of this. Have to exit 4 times to actually exit the game.
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Hmm… I think for action games it's somewhat of a necessity because there are so many actions the character can take at any given point, so you kinda need to utilize every clickable button.
That said, I agree it never feels great. No matter how good the controller is, it always somehow feels wobbly, specifically after long-term use.
I guess it would depend on the game, but I rarely play games where those are necessary.
I mean, we've reached a state where controllers have more or less been standardized as 2 sticks, 4 face buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, 2 triggers, usually 2 small buttons used for menus/map. Plus 4 directions on the D-Pad, if it's not used for movement. That's a lot already.
That said, every once in a while I do get a game in which they go absolutely crazy on stick press commands. No man's sky use them all the time, including a baffling right stick press to sprint.
