Submitted 1 day ago by Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net to games@lemmy.world
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.
Alright, I’ll limit it to just pet peeves.
Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There’s a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I’ve ever seen was Xenoblade 2.
Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end. There are very few games I’ve completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it’s welcome and I’m done. The grind isn’t worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it’s because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a “fun” mechanic when it’s more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it’s boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim… 146 hours… 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).
Games that don’t really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It’s a giant fuck off world that’s mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke… like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them… Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That’s just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to “fuck Nintendo” and I didn’t buy and won’t buy a Switch 2.
Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it’s just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)… so all the extra planning and time to making a factory… like I just don’t have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn’t too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game… Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games…
Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end.
Watched a gameranx video the other day about this. It’s the lack of closure. Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.
Even MMO’s had a closure for their main story arcs and you played the end game content. The new Live Service model though doesn’t like that cause it means they can’t milk it for eternity. They’d have to keep making new stories and actual game content but that is time consuming and meticulous for creative industries. You can’t pump it out like you can cosmetics and battle passes.
It’s honestly a huge issue in the industry. The gameranx video goes much deeper into the topic.
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 in 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.
Rage inducing absolutely.
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.
Another one is QTE in the middle of a cutscene, ugh.
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.
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!
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.
I think about that surprisingly often. Also how nice would that be in real life too, not just games.
They ported it over to X-Wing in later versions. Also, play XWVM, if you haven’t already.
I add non-Steam games to Steam just so I can use Steam Input for controller rebinding
Not being able to pause or save at any point.
I’m a “grown-up” these days, but I grew up with games and they’re part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they’re still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will always nearly always outrank them.
“We don’t let you pause because it’s a simulation and and you can’t pause real life so it means the game is more realistic” = piss off
Yeah, or you can pause the game by opening the menu, but not when you’re in dialogue, when it matters most.
Long cutscene that you’ve tried so hard to reach. Will pressing start pause the game or skip it forever?
Live service games that start getting long in the tooth adding too much content.
There’s plenty to hate on with Dead by Daylight, but I was at one point pretty good at it both killer and survivor. Eventually I started to feel there were too many perks and characters to keep track of and I lost interest.
I felt the same about Team Fortress 2 when they started adding new weapons. That’s probably not a popular opinion but the initial updates tying weapon unlocks to achievements really soured me on the game, permanently. I stopped playing.
I’m left-handed and while key rebinding has gotten better in some ways, it has recently regressed in gaming in the past few years.
I make custom layouts for every game I play. IJKL to move, Semicolon to sprint, Quote to crouch, etc. I find many games where “I” is hard-bound to inventory, some bindings overlap keys I’ve bound, some keys are unable to rebound entirely in-game, some keybindings menus require jank to actually work, and so forth.
It’s very frustrating. I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it’s this hard for me.
It’s also pretty bad when you’re not using QWERTY layouts.
I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it’s this hard for me.
I learned AutoHotkey and I genuinely couldn’t play many of the games I do without it.
Unfortunately, some games seem to monitor keyboard activity directly, not letting AutoHotkey assignments take effect.
Same, but I left Windows. On Linux/Wayland, it’s a bit more difficult and less powerful with current tools. AHK can’t be beat.
Games that wont let you quit to desktop in game.
I’ve noticed this is especially bad in Japanese games for whatever reason.
PC Gaming market in Japan is treated like Second Class Gaming Citizens, sadly
Alaternatively, PUBG lets you quit to desktop from the in-game pause menu, and I’ve hit it accidentally so many times.
*flashbacks to The Forest pause menu having the exit game button in the same place as the back button*
May I introduce you to my good old friend: alt+F4 😬
in old dos games "boss key" was usually ctrl+b or ESC
I never understood the point until I grew up a bit.
Honestly this is my favorite feature of the Steam Deck and SteamOS.
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 fiften seconds for us to begin the process of launching the game.
I want to punch your comment.
Points of no return and anything else that's permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.
It really depends of the implementation for me.
I completelly understand that if you take a mission where you kill a merchant, you loose the option to purchace from them or miss their questline etc. Its a story point where your acts changed the world.
But if you miss some unique loot item from dungeon you can go trough only once, because, it was too well hidden or it was behind some convoluted puzzle that you missed, im pissed.
Especially when there is some kind of “open every treasure chest” type of achievement, with one or two things locked out. So if you miss them in your initial playthrough, you’re completely locked out of that achievement until you replay it from the beginning.
Trails in the Sky has some interesting logic behind this where the gameplay serves the story.
You’ll do some quests for people who actually end up being evil later in the plot. There’s also party members who temporarily join you while they have time off from their other job - then as the story progresses, their “lunch break is over” and they go back to their life. So, if you try to save content for later, it won’t be there anymore.
Those little things end up putting more focus on what is accessible at a given moment, so a level 60 player isn’t going back to the starting area to wrap up quests he doesn’t care about for completion.
Unrealistic loot.
Like when you kill a wolf and get shotgun shells as loot.
But also more subtle stuff like enemies in a remote place that don’t carry or have any kind of food and drink with them.
And when the enemy is clearly carrying a weapon, but it’s not lootable and you get some random stuff instead.
Reminds of the old pile of gold (empty) meme
I think shotgun slugs would be good loot from a werewolf, but they should be a junk item or a crafting item to combine with gunpowder and casings to make new ammo, not ready to use shells that’s just silly why does a werewolf have those?
The fact that games act like climbing doesn’t exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.
Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.
It’s even worse in VR games. As much as I love Half Life Alyx, there were certain barriers that are literally just a pile of rubble or a chain link fence.
Lack of accessibility options, not unlike you.
Most games are better about this now, but subtitles, difficulty options, and the ability to turn off flashing lights are critical to the point I can’t play for long, sometimes at all without them.
Thank you for saying difficulty as an accessibility feature. So many people think difficulty is something inherent to a game’s design but completely miss the fact that difficulty is subjective.
Every game should have difficulty options. No exceptions.
Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.
If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.
There’s also things that aren’t often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.
With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.
It’s not an easy fix this can break a game’s economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.
I completely disagree. Difficulty is not an accessibility option. They are a cheap way out of fixing more complex problems, but ultimately easier difficulty just means that you won’t have to interact with the game as much to get through it. No problem if the parrying lacks clear indications when you can just take the very weak hits from the enemies instead of learning the parry system.
But for most games, it doesn’t really impact anyone if you add a difficulty slider, so game developers just do that instead of dealing with accessibility issues in their core systems.
And then there’s the souls games. These games would become objectively worse by adding a difficulty option. When overcoming impossible odds is the core principle of the game, then adding a slider to make the odds mildly inconvenient instead of impossible will actively jeopardize that very principle!
In fact there are countless stories of people with severe disabilities who found new hope in clawing through the souls games. They let go of their learned helplessness precisely because they realized that what their playing is hard and failing over and over again is an important part of the process.
That being said, the souls games do deserve some criticism in some aspects regarding accessibility. There’s a lot in the UI and feedback department that could be done to improve accessibility without having a negative impact on the game itself.
Well I think your mom only has easy mode.
Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.
"Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain
You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.
I disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it’s not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a level difficulty experience.
For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they’ve pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can’t thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can’t humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren’t dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn’t really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I’ve argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I’m talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There’s a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that’s what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, like you’re against impossible odds, like you’re supposed to fail, like there’s no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you’ve failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don’t feel the failure you can’t feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
Dark Souls is not a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can’t have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
Currently, I’m replaying The Witcher 3, and the main annoyance I’m having right now is not being able to pause during timed choices (and timed choice are a whole other problem in games too).
You can pause during non-time-sensitive dialog choices, but not during timed ones. I don’t know why they specifically deny pausing for those. Maybe to prevent people from pausing and thinking it out? But, some of these times sensitive choices greatly effect the story. I want to be able to think about these choices when they effect the story.
I mean that is kinda exactly what the developers want to provoke with timed dialogue choices. Timed dialogue choices are a game design mechanic to try and get a player to answer on instinct/gut feeling, rather than over analysing and trying to optimise the dialogue.
You not getting to think about it long is very much the intended effect, and allowing a pause would entirely defeat it.
There are of course definite accessibility concerns that should be considered and worked around, such as people with dyslexia who may not be able to properly parse the dialogue options before the timer runs out, but as a game mechanic I think forcing the player to pick on instinct definitely has merit. It helps make the game more immersive, because it puts you under the same pressure to react as your character is in the story right now, and it can lead to more interesting and ultimately enjoyable games by forcing players to potentially make a mistake, and having to find out a way to deal with the fallout.
Timed choices have their place in games as a valid storytelling mechanism but please not in my open-world, RPG, fantasy hack-n-slasher.
Like if I’m playing a role I need to think about my choice and make sure it fits the character I’m trying to play. I’m not playing myself so my knee-jerk choice might not be the same as what I’m trying to experience.
spongy bosses don’t always mean they’re challenging. I can’t count how many times I’ve fought a boss who isn’t hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.
mechanics matter.
I love my older retro games, like I’m a huge Metroid fan, but jebus to Betsy, they fall for this trapping all too often.
I don’t fault them, those were the Wild West of gaming when devs were still figuring things out, but damn does it make going back to older games a bit rough.
When the only difference in difficulty is either by adding more waves of enemies, or giving bosses a bajillion hitpoints.
If I already learned all the game mechanics, and the only scaling is having to repeat them a lot more, that’s poor design.
I dont mean this as much for adjustable difficulty, like easy vs hard mode, but rather in game progression…
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.
Cries in shadow warrior
when you can rebind movement keys (I’m an esdf player as opposed to wasd), but it does not rebind consistently. So a map is panned using wasd still, or menu browsing is, or even basic movement in a mini-game, or driving using a vehicle etc. It seems developers rarely really test anything but wasd…
Worst was cyberpunk, which always jettisoned me from the car in a super dramatic leap… on every right turn. XD
Showing a long plot-explaining intro right after start, before I have a chance to get to “options” and set the resolution, subtitles, etc. I also “love” unskippable short logo videos at start. And a few screens with only “press any button to continue”.
Unskipable splash screens are the worst.
Luckily, at least in my experience, most of those are just a .mkv that you can either rename or delete and the game will just skip it entirely. Unfortunately that can’t be done on consoles
When rebinding the keys, the game wont let me save the changes unless everything has something assigned.
During character creation the lightning on the model is completely different what you will see in game and I end up with an ugly character (Dragon’s Dogma, Saints Row 3 remaster, etc.)
If the game supports voice chat in-game, then it is not ok to play background music while talking in-game. Just mute yourself and don’t make us listen. It’s the same as people walking around neighborhood and blasting their music from their phone as if they’re the only ones with ears.
No save option during stealth sequences or generally in stealth-heavy games. Allow me the option to either improvise and enjoy messing up or plan and execute and test every section of a stealth route carefully without having to replay the mission a thousand times, especially when the slightest hiccup will have the whole mission going awry. If that leads to some people save-scumming their way through the entire mission, so be it. Let them play their way.
Too many games are “survival” games now which really means they will make you do a bunch of chores to get to the sub par shooter or adventure game the chores gate you from. No, I don’t want to chop wood and get rope or whatever for the 50th game that never innovates on any of these mechanics to get to the “good part”
Also lots of fun games seem to be ruined because they are battle royales.
WHY THE HELL ARE GAMES SO LOUD ON STARTUP???
There are others but this is one I just can’t believe is a thing. It’s so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it’s too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.
Putting too many game mechanics into a game, like fighting system, bonus crystals, combinations of stuff to upgrade other stuff, plus pets, minigames, repetable quests, party combinations, crosswords, and more, in a single player game especially.
And dark patterns of course.
Quests that demand that the player finds X of an unimportant item in a world which has exactly X instances of said item. Thankfully most games nowadays will offer up more of said item than needed to complete the quest, so that one doesn’t end up scouring the map over and over again, in search of that elusive last bottle/scroll/pigeon, because nobody got time for that. And not even talking about optional collectathon quests for those who want that sort of thing, some games would have this sort of quest in the main storyline.
Text scaling in game where text is plot critical.
Important for things like steamdeck, some marked "verified" should be downgraded to "playable" due to the text size and inability to scale it.
No quit button or hiding it in the settings menus
No ability to rebind controls
Endless, unskippable intro videos
Taking control away to have a cutscene that is all dialogue and no action that could have just as easily been something you control as you walk and listen. Especially if it’s not even an in-engine, real-time scripted thing but a pre-rendered video that doesn’t even show your actual character as you have them dressed.
FOMO and most MTX in general.
No ping/latency stats for everyone on the server
Games that refuse to let you change the difficulty once you begin a game. More broadly, single player games that worry too much about preserving some sort of honor associated with doing well and make it annoying to play. Like rougue likes that have no save and quit for fear of people save scumming.
Devial@discuss.online 5 hours ago
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 the phone rang or something half way through. Alternatively, when I’m 23rd replay of a game, I do not want to have to sit through every cutscenes I already know by heart.