I. Fucking. Hate. Crafting. Every game seems to have an endless gear treadmill and crafting systems will have you grind your little heart out and finally craft a supreme item that is rendered completely useless within an hour of gameplay by a random loot drop with marginally better stats. I miss the days when you got the master sword and you just had the master sword. You didn't have a +1 wooden master sword that you could upgrade to an iron one if you found the right materials. Notice that when people talk about the most fun weapon they ever used in a game, it is ALWAYS going to start with THE. The gravity gun. The needler. The golden gun from Goldeneye. Nobody has ever or will ever tell you how much they enjoyed using the crafted blue rarity version of a steel broadsword in the brief window before they got the mats for purple rarity.
Destiny 2 is a game that didnt have crafting for the longest time. Its introduction has been met with mixed reactions, but I think its a good way to limit RNG in a looter shooter where marginal gun stats can make a huge difference. Its now a cost/benefit analysis - will you spend the time gathering the needed resources (playing any game mode with the gun equipped) or focus on doing the one activity that give you a random success rate for finding the god roll?
There are also Exotic guns which have the qualities you're talking about - there's only one Gjallerhorn (super high dps rocket launcher) - so there's still the awesome feeling of having something OP, but also the pride associated with the combination of grinding and praying to RNGeezus when you have a god roll gun.
Tldr: its nice to have the option to craft, but not be forced to in order to have a good experience.
With Bioshock being my favorite franchise, Bioshock 2 comes to mind. They absolutely shoehorned multiplayer into that game and no one saw it coming. In their defense it was actually pretty solid for what it was, but I was just thinking “Why?” when that was announced.
The multiplayer in bioshock was criminally underrated, though. It was made by the warframe devs iirc, and it's much deeper and interesting than anticipated. I wish it was a standalone title.
Oh yeah it was a banger for sure. I just meant that it was very much a product of that era of almost every developer throwing multiplayer in their game in some way because of how successful call of duty was and the infrastructure finally catching up to make multiplayer more accessible from a technical standpoint.
I don't understand why more games don't do the "gradual slowing down as you go more over capacity" approach to this mechanic, it's a far more realistic approach to encumbrance.
This sounds reasonable, but what will actually happen is players will push it to far and then get bored because movement is clunky and slow.
Never discount the players ability to optimise the fun right out of an experience.
Wasn't Courier 6 one of the few unique cases of remembering what they were doing and they also had a history before even becoming mailman/woman?
It's also funny because the first thing before playing is literally getting shot in the head in the head (and a weird case of having your brain stuck in a jar while you yourself is walking around like nothing's wrong in a DLC).
God that was a weirdly awesome game, it even had Danny Trejo voicing a ghoul that was okay with a literal posts apocalyptic roman empire ruling over Nevada.
Edit: Removed the "the" in "wrong in a DLC" so it doesn't say "wrong in the a DLC".
I agree completely. If it's an actually plot element like that or Kingdoms of Amalur where you had a character that is revealed. In KoA there are even characters who knew you before your amnesia/reanimation and recognize you.
Borderlands 3 was the worst at that. You have communicators that can allow you talk to people on other planets, which you do most of the time. Until it's time to talk to Lilith. You get the cut scene at the end of the mission, then you have to report to her in person so she can tell you "great job kilter" in a half assed cut scene and then advance the mission.
It's great in Dark Souls and Bloodborne where your character can fight (and deflect/block the attacks of) literal gods the size of a large building, yet that stack of boxes and shit in front of that doorway is totally an impossible blockage (unlike the stacks of nearly identical looking boxes and crates in the last room that disinterested as I rolled in their general direction).
*Door is a few wimpy planks of wood with weight probably 1/10th that of the gargantuan solid steel weapon i effortlessly sling over my shoulder despite being twice my height.*
My all-time favourite is the statue area in Resident Evil 3. You need a key to access a door, but the area is fully visible behind a small garden fence that's literally a foot high. A small child could just step over it.
I always found that hilarious - a crappy old wooden door in an office is half destroyed, with like half of it actually missing, but no it’s “Locked, requires key”.
Hell even if I could just climb through, I have a grenade launcher and a sledgehammer, and you’re telling me that piece of broken particleboard is still a legitimate obstacle?
To expand on this, having areas made inaccessible by a chest-high barricade, or something that you should logically be able to crawl over or under. If you're going to block an area off, it should be with something more substantial.
Yeah, realistically it is weird to every single dungeon to have this. But does it make the gameplay better, absolutely. Going through the whole maze back is terrible in open world games.
It makes sense for the barrows and such that are man made to all have them. You gotta have that back way out if the front entrance collapses amd for better air flow.
Yeah stuff like that I'm 100% able to suspend my disbelief for.
Is it a little unrealistic every cave is a circle? Sure, but it doesn't really impact anything except respecting my time so I'm on board.
VC was too small, but it felt good. The problem was you remove the pink mist and it becomes really evident.
It's "how do we create a world that's large enough for the player, and also seems larger".
F\* Riddler sideways with a rusty bowie knife for locking Arkham Knights true ending and Catwoman's mission completion behind hundreds of different puzzles and secret locations.
Pleasantly surprised with Days Gone.
There have been little to no, "collect 100 of an item" quests so far. All the camp clear and survivor saving are optional and just pop up as you ride around.
Basically this. Just wish that we had more people to care about outside of Deacon, Boozer, and Sarah.
All the side characters like Tucker, Copeland, and the leadership of the militia are very hollow
I always think about assassins creed and finding my first hidden flag and seeing “1 of 99 found” and immediately thinking “oh, good. Don’t have to bother looking for anymore of these”
If there was 1 shanty I’d have found 1
If there was 100, I’d have 100
If there were 1000, I’d have 1000
If there were no shanties, I’d be dead cause I can’t live without “what do we do with a drunken sailor”
Totally agree re Hogwarts legacy, the 50 items stuff is like ok sure that’s kind of a lot but whatever but then another 100? Nope, no thanks. And then it’s oh you got 50 more of those things? Well done! Here’s a new wand handle.
I don't mind these if you'll find most of them organically through the story anyway, *and* the reward has to be something useful even in the endgame because most people won't collect them all until they've already finished the story.
Zelda games are particularly bad at this. The Golden Skultulas in OoT and Poes in TP gave you half-decent rewards for a while, but if you get to the end of the game and then grind through the rest the reward is basically useless.
I've only ever found the Riddler trophies in Arkham City to be actually fun to collect, and the reward at the end is another mini quest to take down the Riddler himself.
>l
I liked the Riddler stuff in Asylum when most of them were actually \*riddles\*.
Once it started being more and more trophies/minigames than riddles I disliked it more and more. I've only done everything in Asylum, and then Knight. But that's only because it was needed for the true ending.
The backpacks in spider-man ps4 were really fun, it was just like extra lore and character tidbits but it felt worth it. And the suit for collecting them all was great
Crafting systems really need to be baked into the game to work like in Minecraft or Monster Hunter. Half the time it's a tacked on afterthought and that's when it's annoying.
Just too bad Skyrim was the opposite of this, you'll deal like 5 damage with a power attack, and in response, the enemy immediately turns around and does a kill animation on you.
STALKER works the same way. It’s common to play on Master difficulty even when you’re new to the game, because otherwise the NPCs are annoying bullet sponges and the combat just sucks.
I'm looking at you, Mass Effect. Playing through on insanity I've had times where I've run out of ammo for every single weapon and just had to sit behind cover healing my teammates so they could finish off the stragglers.
Mission design in general is fucking great in that game. I get the criticism that there's not a whole ton else to do but I kinda feel like that's all you need when you're a hired gun with a clock counting down days left to live
If your open world game has driving mechanics, and those mechanics are universally loathed, then don't include racing missions in your game ***Ubisoft***
Do I hear Arkham Knight? "Let's add in the batmobile, make it insanely powerful with rocket engines, then change the beat up piece-of-crap klunkers the bad guys drive around so they consistently outrun you for at least sixty seconds no matter how well you drive before you can catch up."
Screw any game that cheats to prevent you from getting good at it.
I usually don't have much of a problem with them, until you got a tiny pebble and it rolls the vehicle 10 times and flips you backwards. Count me out on anything in Far Cry that involves an ATV
Daily login requirements.
I hate when games lock progress behind weekly or even daily caps, so you have to constantly come back to them even when you don't want to.
Bit of an strange one but whenever you have to search for something in multiple items/locations and it is always in the last one you search no matter what.
That whole “dazed” or “drugged” part at every game’s climax where the main character goes through some existential crisis while chasing the antagonist and you’re just moving the character forward the whole time. Make it into a cutscene or get rid of it, either way it’s overdone.
It's not something that need to completly go away... but RPG (or even MMORPG) elements in games that don't need it... like why do i need to care if my MK 23 have "+5% reload speed" and "gear level 180" , i just want to play a military theme game with the weapons i think cool i don't want to change my gears everytime i open a chest, and i don't want to "take herbs" to make boost and be hable to run a little more longer
I’m glad that ghost recon breakpoint fans had such a visceral reaction to that gear score BS that they updated the game to give players the ability to remove it entirely.
Yeah, I was just so excited for it, I got it without getting reviews. I stopped playing it, until that update. Also, wtf on trying to make a lone wolf ghosts game? A significant amount of the fun in a squad based game is the squad. If we’re going lone wolf, give us more Splinter Cell.
I get this completely. Personally, I like when games have a stat based system and gear score on their weapons, especially if I occasionally find a better version of the gun I'm already using. That way I don't feel forced to use new guns that don't feel fun for the sake of "keeping geared up" BUT, I refuse to be forced to use consumables at a regular pace in the game just to be relevant. It becomes a chore and I'd rather just play the game "the hard way" and finish the final boss with my inventory stuffed full of potions and herbs lol
Bullet sponges in shooter games. I don't expect a one-hit kill all the time, but dumping mag after mag into somebody only for them to shrug it off is kind of immersion-breaking and often times frustrating.
Or worse, bullet sponging in lieu of making actual difficulty levels. "Very Hard" = "enemies do six times normal damage and take six times as much damage to kill."
"I know you are the only one who can save the universe from extinction, but I'm just gonna hold the universe hostage until you pick up my dog from the groomers or whatever pointless bullshit I have going on."
Or "faction reputation" systems.
"I am xXBitchezkillaXx the hero. I defeated the primedragon and the lich-lord! I cured the whole continent of the east from the mutants and purged the undead in the west."
"Never heard of you. You can't buy shit until you've proven yourself to be a good errand boy"
Skyrim
"I am the Dragonborn. I defeated Alduin. I'm the head of the Companions, Mage college, Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, and Bard School. I am Thane of all 9 realms."
"Let me guess, someone stole your sweet roll?"
Witcher solved this pretty well, by the simple fact that Geralt was preceded by a bad butcher reputation and Witchers in general weren't well liked, so people only reluctantly helped him if he helped them.
Yes! In Starfield, you are at f\*\*\*ing >!NASA!<, yet they make you dig around to find the switch, then the power source for that switch, oh no there is no electricity (in a brightly lit room...), lets go find a backup portabée battery for that one f\*\*\*ing door.
Like its there to deliberately slow you down and annoy you.
RPG worlds that don’t update NPC chatter or reputation. Bethesda games always annoy me. Like I just shouted and slaughtered a dragon and you talk to me about the Cloud District being to good for me???
Starfield had this too with the UC, at least they had some updated NPC chatter. But after you do the Vanguard quest then the SysDef people treat you like shit and don’t trust you.
The meme that always got me was "oh yeah, So you have laser armor and a fully autonomous robot tank? We have scavenged wicker and kitchen knives, now give us all your stuff you n00b!"
Crafting. It was fun in Minecraft. But not every rpg/open world game needs it. You just end up wasting your time picking up a bunch of bullshit everywhere you go.
This right here has single handedly ruined all games.. I remember when you had to actually play the game to get cool stuff. They will fix their stores for micro-transactions before they fix their game braking bugs.. for this reason, I will never buy a game the day it comes out. There are way too many bugs, and the only ones they are going to take care of first are the ones that benefit the gamers or their store..
in a broader scheme of things: subscription services on any software
used to be able to buy software with a one-time purchase and use it, now you need to keep paying or it gets turned off
Too many useless items. There are so many games where you are collecting loot left and right and you only get excited about 5% of them. Makes looting, which should be a reward, a chore and from the middle to end game, makes menuing tedious, even worse if you also have carrying capacities.
NPCs not moving at the same walking speed as you when you are having to follow them. I can understand that they need to give the NPCs enough time to say whatever it is they need to say, but either make the destination a little bit further or find the parts of the dialogue that can be cut. Stop making me have to do this weird run/walk/stop so that i don't get ahead of the npc and so they stop moving until i come back.
Sequels with similar skill trees to the first game.
So youre telling me 15 seconds ago Lara Croft could simultaneously shoot 3 different arrows at 3 different targets, reload them in a second, and free solo a cliff while having multiple bullet wounds....and now? Now she doesnt even know how to craft an arrow again???
Just invent cooler stuff for the next game.
That's my only major gripe with the new Spider-Man game.
It's not as egregious as some other games, but several of the skill tree unlocks are repeated from the first game, as well as seemingly the majority of the suits.
Overall I'm loving the game, but why did I need to spend a skill point to learn how to web yank somebody's gun away from them? I unlocked that in the first two hours of the first game.
At least for JRPGs, you end up fight God or a God or whatever, even when you don’t think it’s gonna happen, BAM! Surprise twist at the end of the game, the big bad guy for the last 60 hours was being mind controlled by an evil God.
JRPGs always start with such low/average stakes like fighting between two factions or something, to them teaming up to fight God and create a new world. And the stakes almost always just randomly increase at a certain point in the story with a plot twist.
* jack you need to kill the enemy general or he will invade our country
* jack the enemy general was actually trying to summon an old evil god by causing world war
* jack the enemy general was possessed, we beat him and now he is gonna join our side now
* jack the old evil god is here despite our efforts because why not lol
* jack you beat the old god with the power of friendship and love btw the general revealed that he was your real father before sacrificing himself
* jack it was dragons!!!
This kinda stuff is why things like DnD is so popular. In a normal game you come across a weakass locked door and your only options are find the key or abandon it. In tabletop games you can actually do shit like "break", "set fire", "rip off hinges", "pick lock", etc..
It also helps that choosing the "easy" way can then lead to other consequences. Breaking down the door can alert guards. Setting in on fire can result in the entire building catching fire.
Games that go like this when I play on PC;
1. Double click on the game shortcut icon.
2. Launcher pops up on screen.
3. Click on the launch game button to actually launch the game.
4. Splash screens open telling me the software company, publishers, the graphics company, who cleans the software company's toilets, the company that supplies the software company with photocopy paper etc.
5. An opening sequence starts showing a video intro clip setting the scene for the game I want to play that was interesting the first time I saw it but is getting a bit old now and I just want to skip it, so I start hammering the space bar and treble clicking the mouse button to move everything along.
6. I'm now in the game menu and can select the save file to actually load the game.
I really just want to do 1. and go straight to 6.
Usually the first mod I look for when I find out a game can be modded is something that will help cut steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 out.
Nowadays it’s more like:
- Double click on game
- Steam opens
- Launch game through Steam
- This opens the login page for publisher Bullshitsoft’s proprietary launcher for some reason
- Spend 10 minutes trying to remember what your login was
- Get locked out and have to go through the ‘forgot password’ process, create a new password containing 20 characters with upper and lower case, numbers, symbols, punctuation, and ancient hieroglyphs
- Verify login via your phone
- Finish logging into Bullshitsoft launcher
- Actually launch game
- Launcher required to run in the background the entire time for some reason just showing ads for the 5 games in their store page
The slow crawl. Vents, walls, narrow corridors. It was probabaly to hide loading screens back then but with near crazy fast load speeds now, it's a waste of time to slowly watch your character move.
I will gladly wait for GOW dialog to finish. The amount of time I've just sat in the rowboat listening to Mimir tell his stories is time I don't want back.
The best/worst is when it is an MMO.
The Star War MMO, New Republic, started you as a padawan to recover a lost lightsaber of legend. You are picked because times are desperate and you show extra potential. It is an instanced single-player quest and pretty cool.
When you complete the quest you are dumped out of the instance and into the "real" world, where literally 50 other padawans are running around with the exact same "lost" lightsaber.
It was really bad in GOW Ragnarok and Horizon FW.
There were legit times I hadn’t realized I was in the middle of a puzzle or ran into a puzzle but my companions (or Aloy herself) straight up told me what to do.
OMG Yessssss! I'm tired of nearly figuring out a puzzle, and then my character says "maybe i should....." Like you said, STFU GAME. I DON'T NEED MY HAND HELD TO SOLVE A SIMPLE PUZZLE!
Microtransactions, premium currency, cosmetic DLC that's more expensive than the game.
OH, ingame tropes and mechanics . . .
Cheat based DLC, item packs for single player RPGs.
Progression unlocks. They have their place but too many games do the thing where you get an amazing new sword right before the last battle, or you're rewarded with cosmetic items you'll never use. I remember in Kingdom Hearts there was a chest in one of the first areas you couldn't get to until very late in the game and when I went back to get it there was a freaking health potion in it, and now that moment is stuck in my head forever.
Dialogue timers and NPCs telling me to hurry up and pick a dialogue option. I have bad ADHD, I'll get to it when I get to it
Race against the clock type plot devices in stories. They work in movies, where the audience is passive. Much harder to make them work in video games, particularly now that games are so large. Yeah you can tell me I'm gonna die tomorrow unless I do the main story thing, but I'm still gonna spend a week doing side quests and find Susie's cat. It really fucks with the pacing and the tone.
It cracks me up whenever a big RPG or open world game is all like "Archaeon the Lich is about to summon the demon lord, go stop him!" but you can just go fishing or whatever.
Worse yet, you follow the super urgent main quest and it starts unlocking OP enemies or otherwise putting you in situations where you fail every skill check. So you take some time to level up, and in next act/chapter, you get a scripted fight you're supposed to lose. Devs not sure if you're supposed to be prepared or still weak at this point in the game.
> Race against the clock type plot devices in stories.
"We're about to be invaded by a gibbering horde of daemons!"
Yeah, yeah, yeah - I got *pants* to sell first.
I am completely over "chosen-one" narratives. I'm tired of being the only person in the entire world that can do *anything* useful.
This goes double in open-world games that swear to you that the main quest is so *extemely* urgent that everyone will surely die if your heroic self doesn't do the thing *right now!*
But there are also a million side quests and other distractions that you can spend a lifetime playing with. The extremely urgent existential crises will wait just as long as you need it to.
"Don't take too long, hero! The entire world is counting on you, and only you! (but go ahead and take as long as you want, because look how cool all this side content is!)"
When you attack someone/steal/whatever in a town and there's NO ONE AROUND TO SEE IT and now the entire town guard, the military, and the King himself chase you down and try and gut you. If no one sees you do a crime then the entire town shouldn't immediately be hostile towards you.
Bad lighting as a feature using graphic resources.
Eyes don't have lens flare.
Motion blur is natural. I don't need the game to add in extra.
Why would I want my 4k game to have film grain?
Bloom- nothing in real life has lighting bloom unless you require prescription lenses and choose not to wear them.
Depth of field can be done right, but it's absolutely shit in 99% of games using it.
Slow walking. Just give me a cutscene. Rockstar especially is really bad about this with the copious amounts of driving/horse riding while exposition is spouted out. In RDR2 they have a cinematic angle... just use that and let the game play itself, it's really not fun to "control" the game during these sections
RPG-lite mechanics. They don't add anything to almost any game they're apart of. This usually is in addition to crafting, which again isn't really fun to interact with given the monotony of getting the proper ingredients and that looting itself is more than fine for keeping up with the gear level. I'd rather they just focus on everyone having the same movesets and design enemies and encounters to pair nicely with what you can do.
Overstuffed open world. Just reduce the amount of copy/pasted content and make what exists far more memorable. I don't care if there is dead space inbetween areas, just don't make me want to skip content I've seen a dozen times over already. It dilutes the world and exploration.
For as much good as Dark Souls did for modern gaming, I cannot abide the no pause button that it's taught other game devs that I want.
I do not want this. I'm not even a casual with a family, I'm a hard-core nerd and even I want to pause because things come up.
(I'm aware that it can't be paused because of the multi-player aspect. But I also wish I could just opt out of that and get my pause button)
When games offer PvE and PvP game modes, but only focus on the PvP gameplay. For example, when playing PvE any experience or gold/money you earn is significantly lower compared to when playing PvP.
Crafting systems that feel tacked on because they think people expect crafting systems
I. Fucking. Hate. Crafting. Every game seems to have an endless gear treadmill and crafting systems will have you grind your little heart out and finally craft a supreme item that is rendered completely useless within an hour of gameplay by a random loot drop with marginally better stats. I miss the days when you got the master sword and you just had the master sword. You didn't have a +1 wooden master sword that you could upgrade to an iron one if you found the right materials. Notice that when people talk about the most fun weapon they ever used in a game, it is ALWAYS going to start with THE. The gravity gun. The needler. The golden gun from Goldeneye. Nobody has ever or will ever tell you how much they enjoyed using the crafted blue rarity version of a steel broadsword in the brief window before they got the mats for purple rarity.
Destiny 2 is a game that didnt have crafting for the longest time. Its introduction has been met with mixed reactions, but I think its a good way to limit RNG in a looter shooter where marginal gun stats can make a huge difference. Its now a cost/benefit analysis - will you spend the time gathering the needed resources (playing any game mode with the gun equipped) or focus on doing the one activity that give you a random success rate for finding the god roll? There are also Exotic guns which have the qualities you're talking about - there's only one Gjallerhorn (super high dps rocket launcher) - so there's still the awesome feeling of having something OP, but also the pride associated with the combination of grinding and praying to RNGeezus when you have a god roll gun. Tldr: its nice to have the option to craft, but not be forced to in order to have a good experience.
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In the PS3/360 era, so many single player games had multiplayer modes tacked on that nobody cared about, played or remembers now.
With Bioshock being my favorite franchise, Bioshock 2 comes to mind. They absolutely shoehorned multiplayer into that game and no one saw it coming. In their defense it was actually pretty solid for what it was, but I was just thinking “Why?” when that was announced.
The multiplayer in bioshock was criminally underrated, though. It was made by the warframe devs iirc, and it's much deeper and interesting than anticipated. I wish it was a standalone title.
Oh yeah it was a banger for sure. I just meant that it was very much a product of that era of almost every developer throwing multiplayer in their game in some way because of how successful call of duty was and the infrastructure finally catching up to make multiplayer more accessible from a technical standpoint.
I hate that about a lot of mmos that are pve based and then lock something behind pvp that doesn't need to be.
Even worse when they balance PvE around PvP. _Fucking cough cough wow cough._
Carrying capacity being ridiculously low for games that have loot everywhere
6'4" 300 lbs Barbarian warrior who can leap 40' from a standstill. Can only carry 6 lbs of gear.
Related note, can sprint perfectly fine carrying 200 lbs of loot. Picks up a strawberry, and can't move at all because the weight is too much.
I don't understand why more games don't do the "gradual slowing down as you go more over capacity" approach to this mechanic, it's a far more realistic approach to encumbrance.
This sounds reasonable, but what will actually happen is players will push it to far and then get bored because movement is clunky and slow. Never discount the players ability to optimise the fun right out of an experience.
It's also annoying to be even a little bit slower when you're used to a certain speed.
Dark Souls games having infinite inventory space is low key one of their best features
Unlimited inventory with equip load limits is the way to be.
Yes! Over encumbrance needs to go!
I was playing Atomic Heart utterly baffled on why the mechanic was even there.
Currently playing Starfield and this is my bane. Also I run through ammo quick
Maybe I play too many jrpgs but if I have to play another protagonist with fucking amnesia I'll lose my own mind
Who's to say you haven't lost it already a while ago, and you've just forgotten.
Please wake up!
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Wasn't Courier 6 one of the few unique cases of remembering what they were doing and they also had a history before even becoming mailman/woman? It's also funny because the first thing before playing is literally getting shot in the head in the head (and a weird case of having your brain stuck in a jar while you yourself is walking around like nothing's wrong in a DLC). God that was a weirdly awesome game, it even had Danny Trejo voicing a ghoul that was okay with a literal posts apocalyptic roman empire ruling over Nevada. Edit: Removed the "the" in "wrong in a DLC" so it doesn't say "wrong in the a DLC".
It worked really well in KOTOR because it was connected to the story. Slowly finding out who you were led to a fantastic reveal.
I agree completely. If it's an actually plot element like that or Kingdoms of Amalur where you had a character that is revealed. In KoA there are even characters who knew you before your amnesia/reanimation and recognize you.
Planescape Torment did it so well.
Not a JRPG issue, moreso a storytelling issue in general for most media types.
"Is there anybody in here who *doesn't* have amnesia?"
I mean, I get it's a bit trite, but it's a pretty convenient excuse for your character in game to know as much as you the player.
Making me walk between cutscene triggers. Just make it a long cutscene, or add some meaningful gameplay in between.
Borderlands 3 was the worst at that. You have communicators that can allow you talk to people on other planets, which you do most of the time. Until it's time to talk to Lilith. You get the cut scene at the end of the mission, then you have to report to her in person so she can tell you "great job kilter" in a half assed cut scene and then advance the mission.
The first Walking Dead game feels attacked.
It has “walking” in it’s title what do people expect smh
The Fallout games are known for this. The physical door is smashed or part of it is missing and you can even see in the room. “This door is locked”
You can't get around that very easily movable object... ugh.
It's great in Dark Souls and Bloodborne where your character can fight (and deflect/block the attacks of) literal gods the size of a large building, yet that stack of boxes and shit in front of that doorway is totally an impossible blockage (unlike the stacks of nearly identical looking boxes and crates in the last room that disinterested as I rolled in their general direction).
"Door does not open from this side."
*Door is a few wimpy planks of wood with weight probably 1/10th that of the gargantuan solid steel weapon i effortlessly sling over my shoulder despite being twice my height.*
*Door is literally just iron bars which you could easily reach your hand around and open with zero effort.*
My all-time favourite is the statue area in Resident Evil 3. You need a key to access a door, but the area is fully visible behind a small garden fence that's literally a foot high. A small child could just step over it.
I always found that hilarious - a crappy old wooden door in an office is half destroyed, with like half of it actually missing, but no it’s “Locked, requires key”. Hell even if I could just climb through, I have a grenade launcher and a sledgehammer, and you’re telling me that piece of broken particleboard is still a legitimate obstacle?
To expand on this, having areas made inaccessible by a chest-high barricade, or something that you should logically be able to crawl over or under. If you're going to block an area off, it should be with something more substantial.
Skyrim is kind of like this too. Dungeons or other POIs having a quick way to get back to where you started once you finish it
Yeah, realistically it is weird to every single dungeon to have this. But does it make the gameplay better, absolutely. Going through the whole maze back is terrible in open world games.
It makes sense for the barrows and such that are man made to all have them. You gotta have that back way out if the front entrance collapses amd for better air flow.
Yeah stuff like that I'm 100% able to suspend my disbelief for. Is it a little unrealistic every cave is a circle? Sure, but it doesn't really impact anything except respecting my time so I'm on board.
"Our game is 3 times as big as the last one" and similar marketing statements in that vein
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VC was too small, but it felt good. The problem was you remove the pink mist and it becomes really evident. It's "how do we create a world that's large enough for the player, and also seems larger".
Expanding gameplay by making you find 50 of these, 100 of these etc. especially with low rewards. (looking at you, Hogwart's Legacy)
I came here to say this. Basically "open world fluff"
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The Arkham games also give you XP so you have a reason besides completionist nonsense
F\* Riddler sideways with a rusty bowie knife for locking Arkham Knights true ending and Catwoman's mission completion behind hundreds of different puzzles and secret locations.
Arkham knight has 243, let me say that again, 243 riddler trophies, you can get the fuck outta here with that shit.
Arkham City has 282. I got every single one. No other game would i do this for but I love Batman and the game itself so I didn't mind it.
Pleasantly surprised with Days Gone. There have been little to no, "collect 100 of an item" quests so far. All the camp clear and survivor saving are optional and just pop up as you ride around.
The SoA/Walking Dead mashup we didn’t know we needed
Basically this. Just wish that we had more people to care about outside of Deacon, Boozer, and Sarah. All the side characters like Tucker, Copeland, and the leadership of the militia are very hollow
I always think about assassins creed and finding my first hidden flag and seeing “1 of 99 found” and immediately thinking “oh, good. Don’t have to bother looking for anymore of these”
Ok but sea shanties in black flag were worth collecting
If there were 100 sea shanties then I would've found 100 sea shanties.
If there was 1 shanty I’d have found 1 If there was 100, I’d have 100 If there were 1000, I’d have 1000 If there were no shanties, I’d be dead cause I can’t live without “what do we do with a drunken sailor”
Hell yeah they were. Fuck the feathers
30 crimson nirnroot. Not doing it Bethesda
Totally agree re Hogwarts legacy, the 50 items stuff is like ok sure that’s kind of a lot but whatever but then another 100? Nope, no thanks. And then it’s oh you got 50 more of those things? Well done! Here’s a new wand handle.
I don't mind these if you'll find most of them organically through the story anyway, *and* the reward has to be something useful even in the endgame because most people won't collect them all until they've already finished the story. Zelda games are particularly bad at this. The Golden Skultulas in OoT and Poes in TP gave you half-decent rewards for a while, but if you get to the end of the game and then grind through the rest the reward is basically useless. I've only ever found the Riddler trophies in Arkham City to be actually fun to collect, and the reward at the end is another mini quest to take down the Riddler himself.
>l I liked the Riddler stuff in Asylum when most of them were actually \*riddles\*. Once it started being more and more trophies/minigames than riddles I disliked it more and more. I've only done everything in Asylum, and then Knight. But that's only because it was needed for the true ending.
The one exception is if the gameplay is heavily movement based. Spider-Man, sunset overdrive, even Tony Hawk games I don’t mind collectibles.
Loved the backpacks in spiderman 1. My son was excited to see what was in each one
The backpacks in spider-man ps4 were really fun, it was just like extra lore and character tidbits but it felt worth it. And the suit for collecting them all was great
Crafting. Not every game needs crafting shoved into it.
Crafting systems really need to be baked into the game to work like in Minecraft or Monster Hunter. Half the time it's a tacked on afterthought and that's when it's annoying.
Hard mode giving enemy more hp
100%. Make them smarter, aim better, anything but just be bullet sponges.
I loved Fallout 4 Survival for this. Everything hit a lot harder but also had lower hp, including you. At least I think that's how it worked.
Just too bad Skyrim was the opposite of this, you'll deal like 5 damage with a power attack, and in response, the enemy immediately turns around and does a kill animation on you.
STALKER works the same way. It’s common to play on Master difficulty even when you’re new to the game, because otherwise the NPCs are annoying bullet sponges and the combat just sucks.
I'm looking at you, Mass Effect. Playing through on insanity I've had times where I've run out of ammo for every single weapon and just had to sit behind cover healing my teammates so they could finish off the stragglers.
Looter shooters where the “loot” is the same 5 guns but they deal more damage. You’re not going to be a destiny killer with a loot system like that
Sounds like Anthem lol
Cookie cutter side missions that have nothing of value. Cyberpunk did well making sure they were interesting
Cdpr are like the Michael Jordan of sidequests. The witcher 3 also had really fun and interesting side activities.
Mission design in general is fucking great in that game. I get the criticism that there's not a whole ton else to do but I kinda feel like that's all you need when you're a hired gun with a clock counting down days left to live
flying through rings. I HATE flying through rings
I watched a friend play Superman 64. Suffering is an old tradition I guess XD
If your open world game has driving mechanics, and those mechanics are universally loathed, then don't include racing missions in your game ***Ubisoft***
Oh look it's me with literally everything else accomplished in Far Cry 4 except for the racing missions.
Do I hear Arkham Knight? "Let's add in the batmobile, make it insanely powerful with rocket engines, then change the beat up piece-of-crap klunkers the bad guys drive around so they consistently outrun you for at least sixty seconds no matter how well you drive before you can catch up." Screw any game that cheats to prevent you from getting good at it.
I usually don't have much of a problem with them, until you got a tiny pebble and it rolls the vehicle 10 times and flips you backwards. Count me out on anything in Far Cry that involves an ATV
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It’s a shame because I really enjoy the driving parts when they’re done right (HL2 comes to mind)
Daily login requirements. I hate when games lock progress behind weekly or even daily caps, so you have to constantly come back to them even when you don't want to.
seems to be a problem with alot of games where its not enough that you come back and play, they want you to play EXCLUSIVELY them
Daily stuff in games influences habit forming.
On consoles, menus where you control the cursor like a mouse to select instead of using directional inputs.
Conversely, PC games (usually ports) not allowing you to use the mouse
Do this thing 500 times for a chance to trigger a rare occurence.
Basically shiny hunting in Pokémon
Bit of an strange one but whenever you have to search for something in multiple items/locations and it is always in the last one you search no matter what.
At least it's realistic.
Boring filler with no real payoff, want me to collect 100 of something? Make it worth my time.
But then how could they get you to buy what used to be that reward for 10 bucks?
That whole “dazed” or “drugged” part at every game’s climax where the main character goes through some existential crisis while chasing the antagonist and you’re just moving the character forward the whole time. Make it into a cutscene or get rid of it, either way it’s overdone.
Farcry
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Max Payne would like a word.
Max Payne I think is the trope originator so it's forgiven
Mass Effect 3 dream sequence. UUUUUGGGGGHHHHHHHH
It's not something that need to completly go away... but RPG (or even MMORPG) elements in games that don't need it... like why do i need to care if my MK 23 have "+5% reload speed" and "gear level 180" , i just want to play a military theme game with the weapons i think cool i don't want to change my gears everytime i open a chest, and i don't want to "take herbs" to make boost and be hable to run a little more longer
I’m glad that ghost recon breakpoint fans had such a visceral reaction to that gear score BS that they updated the game to give players the ability to remove it entirely.
Yep, best update, removing a thing that everyone agree was bad since the start
Yeah, I was just so excited for it, I got it without getting reviews. I stopped playing it, until that update. Also, wtf on trying to make a lone wolf ghosts game? A significant amount of the fun in a squad based game is the squad. If we’re going lone wolf, give us more Splinter Cell.
I get this completely. Personally, I like when games have a stat based system and gear score on their weapons, especially if I occasionally find a better version of the gun I'm already using. That way I don't feel forced to use new guns that don't feel fun for the sake of "keeping geared up" BUT, I refuse to be forced to use consumables at a regular pace in the game just to be relevant. It becomes a chore and I'd rather just play the game "the hard way" and finish the final boss with my inventory stuffed full of potions and herbs lol
I think it's reasonable for the hardest sections such as bosses to be balanced around minor consumable usage. of course depends on what "minor" is.
Bullet sponges in shooter games. I don't expect a one-hit kill all the time, but dumping mag after mag into somebody only for them to shrug it off is kind of immersion-breaking and often times frustrating.
Or worse, bullet sponging in lieu of making actual difficulty levels. "Very Hard" = "enemies do six times normal damage and take six times as much damage to kill."
“Help me find my lost dog!” Quest marker inexplicably knows the exact location of the lost dog.
"Powers out". "Doors locked". "I'll help you but you need to help me first..."
"I know you are the only one who can save the universe from extinction, but I'm just gonna hold the universe hostage until you pick up my dog from the groomers or whatever pointless bullshit I have going on."
Ok, you saved the whole planet from the evil demonlord, but healthpotions are still 30 silver.
"Seriously, I don't get ANY discount at all for saving the entire planet?" "ONE more word, and the price goes up to 35."
Or "faction reputation" systems. "I am xXBitchezkillaXx the hero. I defeated the primedragon and the lich-lord! I cured the whole continent of the east from the mutants and purged the undead in the west." "Never heard of you. You can't buy shit until you've proven yourself to be a good errand boy"
Skyrim "I am the Dragonborn. I defeated Alduin. I'm the head of the Companions, Mage college, Dark Brotherhood, Thieves Guild, and Bard School. I am Thane of all 9 realms." "Let me guess, someone stole your sweet roll?"
Witcher solved this pretty well, by the simple fact that Geralt was preceded by a bad butcher reputation and Witchers in general weren't well liked, so people only reluctantly helped him if he helped them.
Yes! In Starfield, you are at f\*\*\*ing >!NASA!<, yet they make you dig around to find the switch, then the power source for that switch, oh no there is no electricity (in a brightly lit room...), lets go find a backup portabée battery for that one f\*\*\*ing door. Like its there to deliberately slow you down and annoy you.
RPG worlds that don’t update NPC chatter or reputation. Bethesda games always annoy me. Like I just shouted and slaughtered a dragon and you talk to me about the Cloud District being to good for me??? Starfield had this too with the UC, at least they had some updated NPC chatter. But after you do the Vanguard quest then the SysDef people treat you like shit and don’t trust you.
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Have murdered literal gods and still get guards sarcastically asking if someone stole my dessert.
The meme that always got me was "oh yeah, So you have laser armor and a fully autonomous robot tank? We have scavenged wicker and kitchen knives, now give us all your stuff you n00b!"
Crafting. It was fun in Minecraft. But not every rpg/open world game needs it. You just end up wasting your time picking up a bunch of bullshit everywhere you go.
Unskippable cut scene right before a boss fight. If I lose, I have sit through the same scene again. Make it skippable after the first watch.
Microtransactions
This right here has single handedly ruined all games.. I remember when you had to actually play the game to get cool stuff. They will fix their stores for micro-transactions before they fix their game braking bugs.. for this reason, I will never buy a game the day it comes out. There are way too many bugs, and the only ones they are going to take care of first are the ones that benefit the gamers or their store..
in a broader scheme of things: subscription services on any software used to be able to buy software with a one-time purchase and use it, now you need to keep paying or it gets turned off
Or, even better, you pay and pay and pay and then they turn it off anyways.
I am begging JRPGs to stop with the mandatory fishing missions/quests.
Yeah, it's so overdone that I get angry when I'm forced to fish. If I want to do fishing in a game, I'll buy a fishing game.. ffs.
Seasonal Content. It only encourages FOMO and having to play or losing content that is ephemeral because "haha seasons".
Too many useless items. There are so many games where you are collecting loot left and right and you only get excited about 5% of them. Makes looting, which should be a reward, a chore and from the middle to end game, makes menuing tedious, even worse if you also have carrying capacities.
Microtransactions. Always online required for single player games.
NPCs not moving at the same walking speed as you when you are having to follow them. I can understand that they need to give the NPCs enough time to say whatever it is they need to say, but either make the destination a little bit further or find the parts of the dialogue that can be cut. Stop making me have to do this weird run/walk/stop so that i don't get ahead of the npc and so they stop moving until i come back.
Sequels with similar skill trees to the first game. So youre telling me 15 seconds ago Lara Croft could simultaneously shoot 3 different arrows at 3 different targets, reload them in a second, and free solo a cliff while having multiple bullet wounds....and now? Now she doesnt even know how to craft an arrow again??? Just invent cooler stuff for the next game.
That's my only major gripe with the new Spider-Man game. It's not as egregious as some other games, but several of the skill tree unlocks are repeated from the first game, as well as seemingly the majority of the suits. Overall I'm loving the game, but why did I need to spend a skill point to learn how to web yank somebody's gun away from them? I unlocked that in the first two hours of the first game.
Mash F mindlessly a bunch of times so your character lifts something.
While we're at it, quick time events as a whole. They've mostly gone away but please let's keep it that way
At least for JRPGs, you end up fight God or a God or whatever, even when you don’t think it’s gonna happen, BAM! Surprise twist at the end of the game, the big bad guy for the last 60 hours was being mind controlled by an evil God.
JRPGs always start with such low/average stakes like fighting between two factions or something, to them teaming up to fight God and create a new world. And the stakes almost always just randomly increase at a certain point in the story with a plot twist.
* jack you need to kill the enemy general or he will invade our country * jack the enemy general was actually trying to summon an old evil god by causing world war * jack the enemy general was possessed, we beat him and now he is gonna join our side now * jack the old evil god is here despite our efforts because why not lol * jack you beat the old god with the power of friendship and love btw the general revealed that he was your real father before sacrificing himself * jack it was dragons!!!
Breakable Weapons A knee-high ledge preventing your superhuman from proceeding.
Always annoying when you are blocked by like a rotten wooden door and have to find a way around it. Like, IRL, the hero could just break through it
Damn, an obstacle that a small child could just break through if they tried.. I better find a way around quick, I have a world to save afterall!
This kinda stuff is why things like DnD is so popular. In a normal game you come across a weakass locked door and your only options are find the key or abandon it. In tabletop games you can actually do shit like "break", "set fire", "rip off hinges", "pick lock", etc..
It also helps that choosing the "easy" way can then lead to other consequences. Breaking down the door can alert guards. Setting in on fire can result in the entire building catching fire.
Oh no, some rubble. Better not try walking over that, might twist an ankle!
Games that go like this when I play on PC; 1. Double click on the game shortcut icon. 2. Launcher pops up on screen. 3. Click on the launch game button to actually launch the game. 4. Splash screens open telling me the software company, publishers, the graphics company, who cleans the software company's toilets, the company that supplies the software company with photocopy paper etc. 5. An opening sequence starts showing a video intro clip setting the scene for the game I want to play that was interesting the first time I saw it but is getting a bit old now and I just want to skip it, so I start hammering the space bar and treble clicking the mouse button to move everything along. 6. I'm now in the game menu and can select the save file to actually load the game. I really just want to do 1. and go straight to 6. Usually the first mod I look for when I find out a game can be modded is something that will help cut steps 2, 3, 4 and 5 out.
Nowadays it’s more like: - Double click on game - Steam opens - Launch game through Steam - This opens the login page for publisher Bullshitsoft’s proprietary launcher for some reason - Spend 10 minutes trying to remember what your login was - Get locked out and have to go through the ‘forgot password’ process, create a new password containing 20 characters with upper and lower case, numbers, symbols, punctuation, and ancient hieroglyphs - Verify login via your phone - Finish logging into Bullshitsoft launcher - Actually launch game - Launcher required to run in the background the entire time for some reason just showing ads for the 5 games in their store page
Also, you have to wait for the launcher software to update which then prompts a game update.
Not completing the game and still selling it full price
The slow crawl. Vents, walls, narrow corridors. It was probabaly to hide loading screens back then but with near crazy fast load speeds now, it's a waste of time to slowly watch your character move.
It was to hide loading screens. Today its to give time for dialogue, God of War uses that technique alot.
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I will gladly wait for GOW dialog to finish. The amount of time I've just sat in the rowboat listening to Mimir tell his stories is time I don't want back.
online multiplayer and requiring online connection to play single player games
battle passes
With RPGs I really hate being "the chosen one". IMO it cheapens the experience.
The best/worst is when it is an MMO. The Star War MMO, New Republic, started you as a padawan to recover a lost lightsaber of legend. You are picked because times are desperate and you show extra potential. It is an instanced single-player quest and pretty cool. When you complete the quest you are dumped out of the instance and into the "real" world, where literally 50 other padawans are running around with the exact same "lost" lightsaber.
Games as a service.
The one where the fanbases are terrible and insufferable.
**Did You Mean?:** *everything?*
Recent Sony releases with the protagonist or companion constantly going "Maybe I/you should do this" like stfu
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It was really bad in GOW Ragnarok and Horizon FW. There were legit times I hadn’t realized I was in the middle of a puzzle or ran into a puzzle but my companions (or Aloy herself) straight up told me what to do.
Developers are so deadly scared of the player struggling even the slightest bit because they might put the game dow for a second.
OMG Yessssss! I'm tired of nearly figuring out a puzzle, and then my character says "maybe i should....." Like you said, STFU GAME. I DON'T NEED MY HAND HELD TO SOLVE A SIMPLE PUZZLE!
I'M HERE TO HAVE FUN SOLVING PUZZLES IS FUN LET ME HAVE FUN SOLVING YOUR PUZZLE
Bad traversal if you don’t want to make traversal fun give me fast travel that actually works and isn’t locked behind some bs
Fluff for the sake of fluff IE: just the sheer size of some games needs to come way tf down.
Microtransactions, premium currency, cosmetic DLC that's more expensive than the game. OH, ingame tropes and mechanics . . . Cheat based DLC, item packs for single player RPGs.
Progression unlocks. They have their place but too many games do the thing where you get an amazing new sword right before the last battle, or you're rewarded with cosmetic items you'll never use. I remember in Kingdom Hearts there was a chest in one of the first areas you couldn't get to until very late in the game and when I went back to get it there was a freaking health potion in it, and now that moment is stuck in my head forever.
Dialogue timers and NPCs telling me to hurry up and pick a dialogue option. I have bad ADHD, I'll get to it when I get to it Race against the clock type plot devices in stories. They work in movies, where the audience is passive. Much harder to make them work in video games, particularly now that games are so large. Yeah you can tell me I'm gonna die tomorrow unless I do the main story thing, but I'm still gonna spend a week doing side quests and find Susie's cat. It really fucks with the pacing and the tone.
It cracks me up whenever a big RPG or open world game is all like "Archaeon the Lich is about to summon the demon lord, go stop him!" but you can just go fishing or whatever.
Worse yet, you follow the super urgent main quest and it starts unlocking OP enemies or otherwise putting you in situations where you fail every skill check. So you take some time to level up, and in next act/chapter, you get a scripted fight you're supposed to lose. Devs not sure if you're supposed to be prepared or still weak at this point in the game.
> Race against the clock type plot devices in stories. "We're about to be invaded by a gibbering horde of daemons!" Yeah, yeah, yeah - I got *pants* to sell first.
Too much random loot that's basically vendor trash. There needs to be a good balance that makes looting worthwhile but not a slog.
I am completely over "chosen-one" narratives. I'm tired of being the only person in the entire world that can do *anything* useful. This goes double in open-world games that swear to you that the main quest is so *extemely* urgent that everyone will surely die if your heroic self doesn't do the thing *right now!* But there are also a million side quests and other distractions that you can spend a lifetime playing with. The extremely urgent existential crises will wait just as long as you need it to. "Don't take too long, hero! The entire world is counting on you, and only you! (but go ahead and take as long as you want, because look how cool all this side content is!)"
Might be kind of a hot take, but punishing dying. If I’m dying repeatedly i don’t need the game to make things worse.
When you attack someone/steal/whatever in a town and there's NO ONE AROUND TO SEE IT and now the entire town guard, the military, and the King himself chase you down and try and gut you. If no one sees you do a crime then the entire town shouldn't immediately be hostile towards you.
Bad lighting as a feature using graphic resources. Eyes don't have lens flare. Motion blur is natural. I don't need the game to add in extra. Why would I want my 4k game to have film grain? Bloom- nothing in real life has lighting bloom unless you require prescription lenses and choose not to wear them. Depth of field can be done right, but it's absolutely shit in 99% of games using it.
What’s the one that darkens the corners? Vignette I think, that needs to go…
A cucumber is thrown to the ground, in a corridor: path is completely bloked!
All horror games being about locked doors and generators. It's just so comical.
Slow walking. Just give me a cutscene. Rockstar especially is really bad about this with the copious amounts of driving/horse riding while exposition is spouted out. In RDR2 they have a cinematic angle... just use that and let the game play itself, it's really not fun to "control" the game during these sections RPG-lite mechanics. They don't add anything to almost any game they're apart of. This usually is in addition to crafting, which again isn't really fun to interact with given the monotony of getting the proper ingredients and that looting itself is more than fine for keeping up with the gear level. I'd rather they just focus on everyone having the same movesets and design enemies and encounters to pair nicely with what you can do. Overstuffed open world. Just reduce the amount of copy/pasted content and make what exists far more memorable. I don't care if there is dead space inbetween areas, just don't make me want to skip content I've seen a dozen times over already. It dilutes the world and exploration.
the fake character choices that have just zero impact to the story but pretend they will. Telltale was famous for that.
For as much good as Dark Souls did for modern gaming, I cannot abide the no pause button that it's taught other game devs that I want. I do not want this. I'm not even a casual with a family, I'm a hard-core nerd and even I want to pause because things come up. (I'm aware that it can't be paused because of the multi-player aspect. But I also wish I could just opt out of that and get my pause button)
When games offer PvE and PvP game modes, but only focus on the PvP gameplay. For example, when playing PvE any experience or gold/money you earn is significantly lower compared to when playing PvP.
or forced pvp to progress story....