It’s a minor pet peeve but I’ve disliked it when games have multiple weapons that share ammo, especially when the game doesn’t explicitly tell you this. Some examples of games that do this are Doom and Half-Life do this. The reason I dislike this, is mainly because of how I play shooters in general. I always try to preserve my ammo by prioritizing my weakest weapons but in games that do this, I’m actually potentially wasting ammo because I’ll either have less ammo for the other, usually more powerful, weapon(s), or I might not even get to use that better weapon because I had no idea it shared ammo with a weaker weapon.
Biggest pet peeve of modern games is when the game repeatedly nags the player to go to the next mission or solve a puzzle. I like to explore games, to take the time to appreciate well made environments and lore, but when npcs or even the pc keep chiming in every minute with “[x] is waiting for me at the lab” or “I think I should [y]”, it starts to piss me off.
It’s like they don’t trust the player to play the game “right”. Games are more than just sprinting from one objective to another. Can’t even take the time to fully look over a puzzle before the game starts telling you what to do next.
That’s a quirk of the medium I’ve learned to accept. Some games do it well by having chunks of “on-rails” bits and others of “free-roam” based on what’s happening in the story so that it makes more sense.
Point no. 2 is why I couldn’t get through Witcher 1. There’s only so many times I can fight 3-5 sewer monsters to get enough XP to not die in chapter…4? 5?
I hate RNG so much 😂 I don’t get it. Life has too much RNG, I play video games because it’s a predominantly skill-based controlled environment.
It’s like picking up a piano and there’s a 35% chance F# is just F every time you play the damn note 😂
I guess it makes sense if you’re role playing and want your experience to mimic real life, which is why they’re mostly used in RPGs, but I also feel so immersed playing skill-based games without RNG, so I can’t assess its actual value.
The reason they’re in RPGs is the same reason they’re in any other genre. In a war game, you could be a tactical genius, but the RNG is there to simulate dumb luck, so the game is about forcing you to play the odds, because victory is almost never guaranteed. When the result is deterministic, there can often be a single 100% correct answer, and RNG throws a wrench in that. Something similar can be applied to loot games, where you’re rolling with the punches based on what you’ve found.
I mean, character action games and score chasers do tend to fall in that optimal answer bucket. You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works. If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy. And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
You’re free to freestyle and get a lower score, but without RNG, there will be one way to play that always works.
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency. And massive breadth and depth of combat interactions yield more than one way that works, not just one. Even for shmups, routing can vary depending on the player, their skill, and understanding of the game. It’s not a timid sandbox wherein only one way works.
If that counts as infinitely replayable, then so does any other game you enjoy.
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
And for fighting games, that RNG is just substituted for your opponents’ decision making.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
Most score you on style as well, not just efficiency.
Right, but the style has point values assigned to you. If they’re unchanging, there is a way that will always work best, every time. At a high level (correct me if I’m wrong, as I’m somewhat new to this genre), rewarding style is similar to rewarding variety, juggles, and getting multiple enemies in the same attack. If you go down the checklist of your arsenal, you can always hit the variety. If you know exactly how the enemies behave, you can reliably get multiple enemies in the same aerial combo that the scoring system rewards most. The same actions give you the same output, and one of those score values will be the highest out of all other possible options. One set of actions will reliably always handle the same mob if it’s deterministic.
Hmm… how does that work? I hit my opponent, they take damage, no Xcom bullshit. I don’t see any RNG-like behavior in this interaction.
That’s just damage. The rest of the fighting game is rock paper scissors. A beats B beats C beats A. At round start, what button do you press? There’s always some option that beats your option, and that’s before we’ve even calculated the resulting damage. Some of what they’re doing is responding to what you’ve been doing, but the rest of what they’re doing is trying to be unpredictable; AKA random. (And that’s before we even talk about characters like Faust.)
Keyword is enjoy. I don’t see myself replaying DMC5 for as long as I’ve been playing some of my favorite games because I enjoy it less.
That’s interesting. As I said, I’m somewhat new to this genre. The short version is that Hi-Fi Rush got me interested in checking out all of the DMC games (minus the reboot), and 5 ended up being my favorite of that series (but still not as good as Hi-Fi Rush).
I don’t mind RNG, I mind games that rely on it over proper design. Xcom has tons of RNG, but it’s generally still possible to win most maps with proper strategy. Most roguelikes have this problem where any given run is impossible to win regardless of play.
Games that offer stealth as an option over combat, but have mandatory combat bosses.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a great game, but this was a serious issue. The game has a (notoriously buggy) achievement for finishing the game without killing anyone, but every boss requires a loadout of lethal weapons to take down, leaving a minimum of slots for non-lethal alternatives. Very annoying.
I have many pet peeves when it comes to games, but the biggest that I can think of off the top of my head is the boss fights in games that don’t let you use the weapons & skills/techniques that you’d used to get to that point. It just pisses me off when they let you develop a character with particular skills and weapons only to force a particular combat style that’s contrary to what you’d used up till that point.
Deus Ex Human Revolution’s initial release was the worst about this. A bunch of people who took the skills and inventory for non-lethal/stralth/hacking gameplay found themselves at boss fights that were straight-up gunfights. If you were kitted out and skilled properly to face-tank while using explosives and big guns, you were just screwed and couldn’t progress.
In subsequent releases, they added additional options in the arenas that allowed you to kill them using stealth and hacking skills.
RPGs are absolutely terrible about giving you the ability to inflict status effects on enemies, but not giving random encounter enemies enough HP to justify inflicting statuses, and then also making the bosses immune to them.
Cyberpunk 2077 one of the quests in the expansion drops you into basically Alien: Isolation when up until that point you can beat the shit out of or hack the brains out of any other NPC you’ve come across. You go from being a cybered out demigod to basically a rat in a maze being chased by a giant metal invincible doberman.
That was mine too. I hated it. I was playing to feel like a badass in Night City, not to scamper around and hide like a rat until the invincible robot catches me and drills into my face again. I was so happy to finally get out of there. Not because i beat it, but because it was finally OVER.
Mine is similar to yours in that it’s when I come back to a game after a while. My problem is that the difficulty of the game has increased in line with where I am but I’ve forgotten the moves.
I’d be interested to see how sales of the steam deck compare. Sure, it’s a pc not a console, but the whole thing is to bring pc gaming to console gamers so I’m interested in the comparison.
EDIT: based on a quick search, 4 million as of this time last year. I did not find anything more up to date than that. Looking that up made me realize that it would be nice if this chart had a date on it since two of the consoles in the chart are still in production.
I think people think it runs way fewer games than it does. I keep updating proton, etc, and like 99% of my games work. Hell, I have all my DS and Switch games on there.
Any game that makes me hold a button for a simple interaction. Bonus points if it has some kind of “progress bar” to show just how much longer you need to hold that button down.
Why did I need to hold X/whatever just to press the thing that opens the door? Why did I have to hold that button down for a grand total of 4 seconds before you actually did your little interaction animation? Why couldn’t it just be a button press?
Part of me kinda blames Halo, as that’s the first game I can remember where it was “hold button to interact;” except in every Halo game up until 4, it was only slightly longer than a normal button press so it was still incredibly quick.
ETA: I hate the extra stuff in Mafia 3 for exactly this reason, which kind of ties into what I said above: it doesn’t respect my, the player’s, time. That stupid “lockpicking” mini game where you break into those junction boxes? Why the hell do I have to wait for the bars to line up before I can break the lock?
And then getting in and out of vehicles plays an animation that takes way too long imo. Which sucks because a lot of the other collectibles are spread out around the map in such a way that it makes it too long to go around on foot gathering them, but it’s also annoying to try to get them with a vehicle because then you need to deal with the animation and then having to run around and grab the damn thing.
Depends on the game. I play Jump Space that occasionally does this (not all buttons, but some). It is to ensure that you deal with enough enemies so they won't interrupt you while holding/charging the button. If you're interrupted, you need to start over. It ensures you don't simply sprint past everything while hitting the buttons.
Sure, sometimes it kinda makes sense from a mechanic or gameplay perspective. I’m talking about games that require you to hold buttons to interact for everything whether it makes sense or not.
I would add to this in game “cutscenes” where the game is doing exposition and the only thing you’re doing is pressing move forward because you need to follow the character who is doing the exposition dump. It’s fine and immersive the first time around but on subsequent playthroughs it gets annoying. It’s essentially a cutscene that you can’t even skip because technically you’re playing the game, but really you’re just holding down a button
Single saves. Me and husband have one computer (we’re broke?) and too many games have a single save. So we can’t play that game trading off cause there’s only one save. Like Baldur’s Gate 3? Amazing. Billion saves, hell a billion for each character even. Heaven’s Vault? Wild Bastards? One save. Guh.
Hey have you tried Steam Family or whatever it’s called? You can make a new user and they have access to all of your game library. Only one account would be able to play at a time but it would solve your save file dilemma - games files are in the common folder but save files are in the user folder
When you join a Steam Family, you automatically gain access to the shareable games that your family members own and they will also be able to access the shareable titles in your library. […]
Best of all, when you are playing a game from your family library, you will create your own saved games, earn your own Steam achievements, have access to workshop files and more.
Since they just have the one pc, they should be able to just make a second user on the pc then sign in to the single steam account. The new user won’t have any save files in the local user directories, so the game gets launched and you’ll only see the “second” set of saves. No idea how this would work with cloud saves on the steam side though.
This might have been the issue as well? All the saves were in the Cloud. But I’m not very techy. While I can follow instructions (I think), software seems to hate me. The hardware, we’re friends!
If that was the issue then doing two separate user accounts on the PC, then having a primary steam account (the existing one with all the games) and a secondary new one, and putting them into a Steam family together just like the person I replied to said would be functionally equivalent to yall having two separate PCs with your own steam accounts when it comes to saves and steam achievements and stuff, but you only need to buy and install the game once. It’ll also let you have separate config files so if one person like controls bound one way and the other another you’re not having to rebind each time yall swap who is playing and everything.
Edit - I, as an adult, took shrooms then accidentally overwrote my dad’s Skyrim save file on his PS3 back in the day and I felt terrible about it :/. I totally understand how annoying save handling can be.
Wait, so how does that work for games that store saves in ‘c:\users%user%\my documents’ and stuff? That’s why I assumed they’d also need a separate user account on the pc.
Nintendo is infamous for this. Animal Crossing is a great game on the Switch, but it’s meant for one person. You can join an island, but unless the island creator has everything unlocked, you can’t progress the game. And even if they have, there are certain recipes you can’t get without cheating (treasure islands) for some reason.
Pokémon is the same way. They literally want you to buy a second Switch.
Oh yes, wasn’t even thinking of that. Part of my twins gift to me of New Horizons was the promise they wouldn’t play the game as well because it’s one island and it’s miiiiine. So many other games on the switch, just use a profile and bam! New game! Bah Nintendo.
Yeah, but accidentally clicking the quit button when you meant to click options or whatever and the game just instantly dropping you at the desktop is equally as annoying. Two click exit is a good compromise. Four is way too many though.
I believe it is going to be a huge deal as the gamers are aging out. (And if you play on a Tv).
Give me a freaking texts size option! And not just size 6 to size 8! Big effin text!
It is a huge pet peeve of mine.
Game developers should add text size options to be big enough or at least legible enough at small resolutions like 240p. This can help scale UI design too accomadate for potentially huge text sizes.
You should play Policenauts. Its a visual novel adventure game from Hideo Kojimas early days in 1994-1996 following a private eye investigating a disappearance on a space station.
When you load a save file, the game gives you a summary screen of the events in the game that have happened so far (at least it does in the SEGA Saturn version that I played). Its the first instance I recall of this happening in video games, and I do wish it could return in more games. Its possible that other games had this before, but if there was a game that did, I dont know it or remember it.
I’ve also seen volume settings not kick in until you loaded a save file. Also, PS1 era Final Fantasy games that don’t acknowledge your button mappings until the save has been loaded, so that B is select and A is cancel on the main menu, but the other way in-game.
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player’s time, intelligence, or most often both. I’m looking very hard in Nintendo’s direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they’re offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they’re not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So. Also cutscenes you can’t skip even after you’ve already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can’t skip after you’ve seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can’t press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn’t even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I’m a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That’s probably why I write so many words. You don’t need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It’s called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I’m also including stuff like, “You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it’s a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type.”
No Man’s Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I’m glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can’t be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
Also,Don’t even come at me with, “But realism! Everyone needs to sleep!” First of all, the other denizens of your boat don’t sleep because they are all dead souls. And second of all, the game can’t even hold it in until the actual ending before revealing that so are you, so it turns out Stella doesn’t even need to sleep either.
The latter complaint also includes games which insist on stopping the action dead incessantly to pop up a message box and have your mission control fairy tutorialize at you in a condescending and unskippable manner. Especially if it’s not on your first playthrough. Frankly, if you can’t figure out a way to teach your game’s most basic mechanics to the player naturally and have to resort to unskippable popup nagging, you suck and you need to find a new career. Game development obviously isn’t for you.
Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they're offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they're not sufficiently engaged!
What Miyamoto game is this describing? If anything I'd say he's got a reputation for being anti-text.
What games have you played that prompted the complaint you brought up regarding sight reading? I’m the same way, and sometimes I find I have to turn subtitles off because I want to actually enjoy the voice acting instead of skipping through everything. The Witcher 3 was especially hard for me in this regard, along with Baldour’s Gate 3. I just started Clair Obscur the other day, and I’m really enjoying the way they subtitle each line out into pretty short chunks because I’ve found I’m much better able to actually listen to the dialogue with their way.
I’m trying to think of a game I’ve played where I have the opposite problem, the one you’re describing where you can’t skip dialogue sections, and I’m coming up blank. Not trying to say you’re wrong, I’m just really curious at this point. I mostly play RPGs and online FPS games, maybe thats part of why I can’t think of an example?
Basically every console RPG ever. Certainly those which are not voice acted, and present characters “talking” at you by slowly ghost typing their lines out one character at a time into a text box and then awaiting your input at the end before proceeding to the next line, but inevitably with the dialog box refusing to even start listening for button presses until some seconds after I’ve read the text multiple times over, plus its partially completed form several times more.
I’m adding another dishonorable mention on this front which isn’t even a text box: That fucking treasure chest opening animation in Vampire Survivors. If you know, you know.
One of the best examples of a game that did it right was Heaven’s Vault. The game was decent/mediocre (imo) but every time I opened it it summarized what I did last time and it had awesome timeline history
In Stardew valley no matter what you had done its so easy to just start doing something you like and the game smoothes you in. Its plot has zero time limits after all
Forgot to add my pet peeve: non adjustable time/turn/action/decision limits in single player games. I hate when I have to play a game with ‘perfect knowledge’/wiki to get desirable outcome because I wanted to schmuck around trying things instead of focusing the main plot/whatever the game wanted me to do. Games like Homeworld, FTL, Phoenix Point and some CRPGs I made an error early into the game and instead of giving me a way to correct my mistake the game just became unwinnable at the end. “I have to live with the consequences of my actions.” Some people love that but for me it ruins the feeling. Games aren’t real life. I just spent 10+ hours and I can’t continue anymore? Sucks.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne