I really don’t like when games intermix tutorial with story. Unless the story is the main attraction, I cannot get myself to care for it. And then having to click through tons of story texts to pick out the tutorial parts, that is just cumbersome.
I also have to say, though, that it really doesn’t help my immersion when the fairy, that just told me she’s from the clan Uhgaloogah, then tells me to press the X button on my controller.
If you put in a lot of effort, you can make it credible that the controller is part of the game world and the fairy would know the buttons. But most games do not put in that effort. And then, IMHO it is a lot less immersion-breaking when the game just shows an info box, where we both know that it isn’t part of the game world.
Speaking for myself, the average game got way better when the industry figured out it was better to mix the tutorial with the story. Bespoke tutorials felt like homework, and a lot of people are inclined to skip them, never figure out how the game works, and then come away with a negative opinion of the game. In general, and I’m curious to hear your perspective on this, you can make it exciting by starting the story en media res, so your character is using all of their usual verbs; then you can sidestep that immersion breaking moment by having the button prompts exist in a freeze frame thing, outside of the context of the story, that highlights the action it wants you to do. Do you prefer the bespoke tutorials that we got in the likes of 90s PC games? Do you like the way Gears of War does it, where it still keeps it contextual in the course of the story, but they very clearly give you an option to say that you know what you’re doing?
I’ve been playing V Rising lately and it does this weird thing where dodging and blocking are equippable spells with (usually) 8-second cooldowns. In return they also get powerful side effects, but I’d rather have a normal dodge or block button I can use at will than have them relegated to yet another move I use whenever I notice the cooldown has expired.
It doesn’t help that your basic movement speed is glacial. Winning boss fights come down more to your character’s stats than actual player skill since you can only dodge a few times a minute and bosses love throwing out a half dozen AOEs every few seconds, turning them into DPS races.
This is why mages are hard mode in RPGs. You’re limited by mana in how many fireballs you can cast. The sword does more damage and costs nothing to swing even though fatigue is a real thing.
Soloable games that are balanced for multiplayer. It almost always means that basic tasks take ten to a hundred times the resources they should, and arbitrary timers are added to crafting and upgrading to slow down progression.
It’s the bane of survival crafting games especially.
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.
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.
I really hate the trope of having a mission around the 50-75% mark where you are stripped of all your gear and unlocked abilities. I know it must be popular because it keeps popping up in games but I just don’t enjoy it personally.
I thought of another one: shitty covers. OMG, The Surge? WTF is that Steam library cover? There are exceptions like Catherine: Classic, but most covers where the protagonist stares at the camera suck so much.
Specifically if it’s an action game: show the character in action, FFS. The Wonderful 101 has a great cover. So does Vanquish.
And when half the cover is the logo… just stop with that already. Or an atrocity like Scarlet Nexus… it’s just a cropped image… like Bandai couldn’t afford to commission a cover.
In 3rd-person games with a free moving camera, pressing the joystick not repositioning the camera behind my character. It’s so annoying in action games to have to manually reposition the camera while 5 enemies are happy to attack you from off screen.
Personally I don’t like having anything on stick press (at least for game controls, I can tolerate occasional use to open a menu or something). I think it feels terrible and I have no idea why this progressively became a thing on controllers since mid-00s.
Worst use of that I’ve ever found was Fable (at least the 360 version). The game wants you to push the left stick while also using it to move to sneak.
Hmm… I think for action games it’s somewhat of a necessity because there are so many actions the character can take at any given point, so you kinda need to utilize every clickable button.
That said, I agree it never feels great. No matter how good the controller is, it always somehow feels wobbly, specifically after long-term use.
I guess it would depend on the game, but I rarely play games where those are necessary.
I mean, we’ve reached a state where controllers have more or less been standardized as 2 sticks, 4 face buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, 2 triggers, usually 2 small buttons used for menus/map. Plus 4 directions on the D-Pad, if it’s not used for movement. That’s a lot already.
That said, every once in a while I do get a game in which they go absolutely crazy on stick press commands. No man’s sky use them all the time, including a baffling right stick press to sprint.
To clarify: by action games I’m specifically talking about Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, The Wonderful 101… etc. Among basic movement, combat mechanics, and weapon switching, they typically eat up the entire controller layout.
I don’t imagine Persona, for example, having any strong reason to utilize the sticks like that. Not sure why No Man’s Sky did that either; I haven’t played it, but it doesn’t look like a high-octane game.
I believe it is going to be a huge deal as the gamers are aging out. (And if you play on a Tv).
Give me a freaking texts size option! And not just size 6 to size 8! Big effin text!
It is a huge pet peeve of mine.
These days I think my biggest gripe about games is those which through intentional design decisions either massively disrespect the player’s time, intelligence, or most often both. I’m looking very hard in Nintendo’s direction, here. Miyamoto says: If the player is not locked into a succession of inescapable and slowly plodding text boxes where they’re offered neither choices nor agency, it must mean they’re not sufficiently engaged!
This was marginally acceptable when we were twelve years old and had all day to sit in front of the video game console, and arguably nobody knew any better. But now gamers are adults. We have jobs and chores to do and some of us have kids, and most people have only a very limited slice of time left in the day for gaming. That time should be spent actually playing the game, not waiting for your game to get out of the way of its own damn self.
But games are now going in the wrong direction, to ever greater heights of trying to manipulate players in to make the fucking thing their full time job, either due to incompetence (in single player/traditional console games) or greed (in online/live service games).
So. Also cutscenes you can’t skip even after you’ve already seen them (this includes all the dumbass logos before the game actually starts), dialog boxes you can’t skip after you’ve seen them the first time as well, doubly so if you can’t press some button to cause them to skip their typing animation and simply display in full. Extra quadruple especially if you were too cheap to have your game voice acted — yes, Nintendo, that means you again, see me after class — because then you didn’t even have the excuse of trying to keep the text synchronized to the voice lines.
I’m a sight reader. I assure you, I can read your text as fast as you can put it on the screen. That’s probably why I write so many words. You don’t need to slowly type it out one character at a time with little scritchy bleepy bloop noises. If other people need that for accessibility purposes, fine. But let me turn it off. And if you are going to insist on forcing me to pause for several seconds at the end of each paragraph before the prompt appears and allows me to press A to receive the next text box, I’m afraid I’m going to have to hunt you down and slap clean out of your chair with this here rubber chicken.
This explicitly also includes games which force the player to grind for some critical resource or progression or need some absurd amount of in-game currency to do anything, and are clearly designed around the grinding being the point. I already have that. It’s called a job. If the grind can be conveniently eliminated by paying a microtransaction; in that case your game just got uninstalled. I’m also including stuff like, “You need this item to access this content, but it randomly drops and too bad for you that you need ten of them and it’s a 1/1,000 chance. Go kill more spiders. No, not those spiders. Only these specific spiders, which spawn in this specific area, but only with a 1/50 chance. The other spiders that spawn here are the wrong type.”
No Man’s Sky in particular is deeply guilty of this, forcing you to go to specific planets in specific types of systems which you often have no way of filtering or searching for to look for specific objects which may drop specific materials which you are required to have multiple of to build some object for your base/ship/suit/whatever. Let me just say, I’m glad that the item duplication bug in that one remains unpatched.
Games which force you to stop progression for a completely arbitrary reason, and for no other purpose than to be annoying. One example I can name off the top of my head here is Spiritfarer. This is a game that, by and large, revolves around doing menial chores to cater hand-and-foot to ungrateful people, all of which require engaging in some manner of real-time minigame. You do this while scooting all around the world to visit areas you need to be physically present in to trigger events in which you can gather required resources. Your boat sails itself once you plot a route, leaving you free to engage in said minigames (with varying levels of tedium) while it steams away in the background. The game has a day and night cycle. Your boat stops moving at night. You have to run all the way down the length of your boat (which gets progressively larger as you play) to go to bed in the cabin at the rear, whereupon the smarmy going-to-bed jingle can’t be skipped, wait for the fade to black, and then run back to where you were to pick up what you were doing before you were interrupted for absolutely no compelling gameplay reason. Fuck you very much.
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?
Combat system that is advertised as skill based but you find out it’s actually damage based and randomized.
Doing really well and winning the impossible mission because you spent time and effort leveling up and honing your skill to defeat a boss or level that you know is going to be difficult. Only for you to fail the mission and get reset or perma death because the plot demanded it.
No controller support on PC
Mobile games with fake game play advertising and demos. In game banner ads or forced ads.
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.
My biggest pet peeve are collectables in games not primarily about exploration.
I guess it can be implemented in fun way, but I hate backtracking or not being sure I can continue without looking in every corner in a segment of a level.
Replayed Mario Galaxy and it was rather pleasantly surprised being able to play it in your own way.
I am aware that nothing is stopping me to do so, even with collectables. Unfortunately I hate half full progress bars just as much TT.
Skipping straight to action instead of main menu and options is annoying.
When I started playing [game name here, atm can’t remember it, it’s from warframe people] it immediately started a plot cutscene which wasn’t available later on. I sure wanted to see that plot presented in a 720p medium settings on my large 1440p display.
Sure, in the grand scheme of things the plot in the game is irrelevant as it can be, but damn it, let me enjoy it full screen.
They have likely fixed, but holy hell, why was it like that in the first place. Abysmal new player experience.
Unless I missed it, Where Winds Meet forces you to do an entire damn boss-fight before you can invert the vertical camera! Unbelievable. I realize I’m the freak for learning “flight control” aiming where down is up, but I’ve been doing it for decades; can’t change it now! It’s unhinged to not let people access or change options until after you’ve beaten a boss…
I had to force the PS5 glyphs by creating a Game.ini file and inserting the appropriate lines to get the ps instead of Xbox button glyphs for my ds4 in Clair obscur the other day. It was definitely annoying.
Thanks to searching for a solution to that I found a mod to remove the abysmal sharpening, uncap cutscene frame rate, and remove pillar boxes on my 21:9 display though, so it all worked out.
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