What are some things that just get under your skin about games?
For me, it’s games that do not allow controller rebinding. I have neuropathy and my fingers don’t all work. If I can’t rebind buttons so that I have necessary moves (for example: parry) be on buttons I can reliably press the entire game becomes unplayable.
And on console, where I can’t refund a game after I downloaded it (fuck you Sony) then it really screws me over wasting what limited funds I have on games I just can’t play.
My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. ‘What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?’ Or ones where the options on screen are ‘A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?’ but selecting C means the character isn’t just asking for clarification because ‘What?’ actually points at the voiceline, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.’ If I can’t have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I’m not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.
Not being able to jump in a first person game.
Then coming across a knee high wall or something you can easily just walk over blocking progression but, nope, can’t jump and the game isn’t treating it like stairs.
It’s such a small thing but can completely take the wind out of your sails when playing.
Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.
Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.
Unskippable cutscenes at boss fights. God forbid the boss kills you.
Yeah, when the start button instead just skips the cutscene with no additional prompt? Extremely annoying!
Same with unskippable cutscenes, especially before a difficult boss. It’s no fun to have to sit through it over and over if I’m struggling with said boss, or have to sit through a cutscene I’ve seen several times in previous playthroughs. This also applies to the game’s credits.
“It is I, Ansem”
Games you can’t pause. I love Dark Souls, but PLEASE give me a real pause button !
I’m okay with the inventory not pausing, that’s part of the game design. I’m not okay with the fact I can’t pause at all, so if my neighbour rings for their spare key when I’m fighting Kalameet I just have to die 🤷🏻♀ (true story btw)
Photo modes that limit camera movement to within a tiny radius of the player character. FF7 Remake/Rebirth, and FF16, are glaring examples of this.
Or photo modes that fade out NPCs or objects when the camera gets close enough for good screenshots of them.
Just give me a boundless flying camera option and let me live with the unfinished bits if I so choose.
Oooh these are good pet peeves. Photo modes can be hit or miss.
I love the ones in the Spoderman games. Got some amazing screenshots from all 3
Definitely with you on controller rebinding! Now that I’m an old man I also absolutely hate how damn tiny the text is when playing games on a TV. Gamers are getting old, we don’t all have young eyes or sit in front of a monitor to play games!
Obligatory tutorials. Make it a choice.
QTE “final bosses”. Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.
“Open world” or “Sandbox” games that don’t care about your progress, where it’s painfully obvious that your actions don’t matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield
Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes “Hah, you were just lucky!”
3D level design where you can get stuck on elements when you just want to move past them. Especially frustrating in racing games or sections where you have to move fast. Controls are just not precise enough to deal with this under stress.
Visible polygons and interactable polygons are not the same thing. Play Banjo Kazooie and Yookah Laylee (including the remake) to see the difference. The latter has you constantly bump into things because the environment is not smoothed out.
On the other hand some studios take it to the other extreme and make you walk almost on rails, childproofing every corner. A good middle ground is needed.
I have two.
- The Culture
I do not claim to be a ‘gamer’. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a ‘gamer’ would play games by. But I’ve been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc
Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it’s a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.
- Game-Padding
Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you’d find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.
When the music doesn’t stop on the Pause screen.
Needing to log into an online account to play a single-player game.
When a single-player game keeps pausing to tell me it can’t connect to the server.
Especially when this happens in small indie games.
You were the chosen one Anakin!
unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You’re forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you and the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.
Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.
My wife has the unique ability to always want my attention during cutscenes.
All this. Everyone focuses on not being able to skip a cutscene but not being able to pause it is even worse for me, especially when trying to pause actually does skip the cutscene.
Being able to replay a cutscene would also be nice.
omg yes, I loved when games gave a replay stories or replay core concepts section of the menu, it’s not that hard to add but it lets you recap as well!
Feel like that used to be more common for games to have a “Movie/Cinematics” option in the “Extras” menus, treating cutscenes like unlockables, where you could go back and rewatch everything.
Really disappointing that more games don’t do this. It’s not like it’s a hard thing to add to a game code wise. It’s just a menu to the mp4 files with a “yes/no” check against the save file for if the scene has been unlocked or not.
It’s a sign of the times. When I was a kid the cutscenes were the reward for winning the game, or a portion of the game for those bigger games that could afford more than two cutscenes.
But for my kids cutscenes are the boring things that keep you from playing.
I mean I remember it being a thing all the way up to the OG Xbox before it started dying off.
Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.
Rage inducing absolutely.
I’m up-voting as hard as I can…
I never pause cuscenes, not because I don’t want to ever but because I’m always afraid I’ll skip it instead.
For me, it’s cutscenes in general. I know there are people who do care in general, but for me a game where I care about the plot is very rare. And the examples I can think of (Outer Wilds, or Ico, for two examples) either have no cutscenes or very few brief ones, and tell the story in a different, more immersive way.
For me, a general rule is - if the game forces moments on me when I can put the controller down and wander into a different room, then that’s not what I’m interested in. I want to actually play the game.
Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.
I don’t want to have to miss half of the cutscenes just because someone interrupted me or the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I’m on my 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.
Oh, and modern games that allow manual saving at any time, not having any kind of regular auto save (looking at you here BG3).
If you’re fine from a gameplay pov with having the player save whenever, then there’s really no good reason whatsoever to not have one or two auto save slots that get saved every 10-20 minutes or so, at least as an option in the menu. ESPECIALLY in open world games (like BG3…) where you can easily go literal hours at a time without hitting a checkpoint save. And yes, I am still salty over learning about BG3’s lack of regular auto save when I lost like 2.5 hours of progress on my first run.
Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.
This is the main reason I cannot replay Valkyrie Profile
I wanted to love Monster Hunter World, but jesus, I could not skip anything on it.
I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.
Forget it, there’s no way you’re taking Kairi’s heart!
- Follow this character to the objective
- Walking
- Too slow
- Running
- Too fast
jfkajfADAHSVb
And then there are games that seamlessly matches your pace and animation with the NPC once you get close to them. cooms
I cannot fathom how Bethesda still can’t get this right. It can’t be difficult to just set NPC speed to match player speed.
it just works
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only). Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
They ported it over to X-Wing in later versions. Also, play XWVM, if you haven’t already.
I think about that surprisingly often. Also how nice would that be in real life too, not just games.
We have that option for cars to match speed with each other in the same travel lane … It’s called a “train”. We should build more of them.
When they have motorway roadworks here there they often have “average speed limit zones”. set like 40-60mph. speed camera enforced at start and end.
Everyone just pootles along steadily at very close to 39 or 49mph no overtaking. It’s great.
Logins. I hate games with accounts. Just let me play.
oh, hey, you haven’t launched this game in a year
please download and install the new launcher. please login to the new launcher. your login does not work, please go to the website to reactivate your account. you must restart your system to reset the launcher login screen. please wait a full minute for the launcher to finish loading. please wait thirty seconds for us to process your login credentials. please wait fifteen seconds for us to begin the process of launching the game.
I want to punch your comment.
