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.
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.
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.
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…
Another one is QTE in the middle of a cutscene, ugh.
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.
I never pause cuscenes, not because I don’t want to ever but because I’m always afraid I’ll skip it instead.
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!
I want to GIT GUD but I’m not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can’t do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I’ve always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.
I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn’t have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There’s what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I’ll be thinking about enjoying a different game.
The thing I hate about parrying games is that there’s rarely ever any consistency about what you can and cannot parry and also never any way for you to learn if you’re parrying too early or too soon or what.
Lies of P did a great job of color coding things (and generally being more leinent/realistic with timing). It can still be a hard game, but the most approachable parrying based game of that ilk.
*for me at least
Parrying is not mandatory in any of those games, maybe try approaching them differently? Also, invest in endurance, problem solved!
Odd take. Resource management is key in a lot of games to the entire design of how they play.
I play heavy tank builds in those games and block/dodge instead of parrying. It’s just a different mindset I guess to enjoy that level of resource managing to know when to commit and when to back off and get defensive, especially when my attacks take a chunk of stamina and are slow to wind up. It forces the player to be strategic so you don’t leave yourself winded mid string.
I guess what I call strategic playing you call tedium. To each their own.
Wresting control away every time I take ten steps for some stupid exposition. Just leave me the fuck alone. Damn. I want to explore and discover stuff by, you know, playing the game.
This is why Final Fantasy is my favorite game in the series.
Far Cry 5 was the fucking worst with this. Every single thing you did added to a sort of “story progress” bar. And when it filled, you were forcibly dragged away to do a story mission. They literally sleep-darted you from off screen, and had you wake up at the start of the story mission. Like you couldn’t make a more comically overdone “get forced to do story mission” scenario if you tried.
The devs said it was because they wanted to avoid that he Skyrim Syndrome, where players quickly forget about the main story in favor of all of the side content. But the implementation resulted in player agency taking a cudgel to the teeth every few hours.
Stop doing what you enjoy and pay attention to what I want.
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.
Bad console ports on PC where mouse control code was recycled from gamepad control code. For example, in Just Cause 2, the maximum turn rate is capped and so is the minimum cursor acceleration, with the end result being when you move the mouse your character moves like you’ve mushed a gamepad control stick instead of the fast, smooth, PC cursor style movement of the reticle that every other PC FPS manages to pull off.
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.
To add, give me some way of tracking these collectables.
If I’ve collected all of the trinkets in a given area, mark that area in some way. If there are 100 trinkets, number them and give me a list. Give me a map, hints, thing that beeps, something.
I don’t need any of the above to be unlocked from the start. You can add it in the post game or after I’ve collected some percentage of them or make it a side quest.
It’s annoying going online and someone has posted “I found 99 of 100 things, where else to look?” and basically no one can help them. It’s annoying being that person, to be so close and yet so far.
It’s OK. You can say crimson nirnroot.
Why must you remind me of this repressed memory? The reward wasn’t even fucking worth it.
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.
Excessive reliance on audio recordings and written text for storytelling / world building. Oh look another game where I’m alone in this world and I have to listen to a ton of audio recordings or collect snippets of text throughout the entire game to learn anything about this world and what happened to it!
If anything, let it be audio, not text, I’m tired of reading through often very subpar writing, I just glaze over it. Better yet, have actual (skippable) voice actors read any text out loud. Ideally, weave all that info into the game’s main storyline or side quests, and have it communicated to the player via interesting NPCs. Also, use environmental storytelling more than info-dumps. Show, don’t tell.
Text/in-world notes/memos/books and found audio recordings have a place but don’t let that be the main way of learning about the world or my place in it.
I understand it’s also a budget issue, so I’ll cut indie games some slack.
I’d prefer text over audio, so long as I can skip the text when I am done reading. (Grr argh to the games that have both, but won’t let me skip because the NPC isn’t done speaking.)
Being able to choose either as the primary information delivery would be fantastic.
True, reading is faster. Narrating I find more pleasant, more engaging if done well. But that’s personal opinion. So having an option would be great. And yes to making dialogues or narration skippable. I think most games do that nowadays. To be honest, if I am really immersed and interested and the voice acting is top notch I may not skip at all. But that should be left to the player to decide.
I like the way bioshock did it
I like the way bioshock did a lot of things (1 & 2, anyways)
I agree on everything except the audio over text bit. If it has to be anything, let it be text. Let me be able to skim it if I want, don’t make me sit through an audio file to get background lore.
If it isn’t gonna be presented through the actual storytelling of the gameplay, put it in a text file.
Yeah I get it, but I like having the option of having a voice actor narrate the text to me rather than having to read everything. Especially as I mostly game on a TV that was not meant for reading.
Audio processing disorder (AuADHD) so being narrated at is pretty much white noise for me; so can’t relate.
Huh, never heard of this before. Does it affect music perception too?
Not really. It’s less to do with hearing/perception and more how the human brain processes regular speech; neurodivergent people, like those with ADHD and/or autism like myself, process these things differently.
The brain processes singing differently than regular speech and the issue with audio processing disorder is that how we process regular speech makes it hard for us to hold conversation. Like I need people to repeat things a few times occasionally and if I’m not paying direct attention to the person speaking then voices are basically like “whomp-whomp” from Peanuts, so if someone calls for me while I’m doing something I straight up won’t know I’m being called for.
So needing to listen to an audio log takes forever cause I need to replay it a few times to fully process the words being spoken. Especially if they have audio effects like distortion added over the voice.
I see. Happens to me too that I lose focus while listening to an audio recording. But not to the extent you describe. Have always had difficulty separating voices from background noise though, like when a few people talk in parallel or when loud music is playing in the background. I don’t remember what that’s called, but I remember a long time ago reading that it’s a thing. Doesn’t affect my gaming much though if at all. Anyway I’m always interested in things having to do with auditory perception, thanks for sharing.
For me it’s too much sound input makes everything resemble the Peanuts adults talking.
One person talking is ok, two people talking is harder, three is pure white noise.
Drop music or environmental sounds on top of it and I can’t understand a damned thing.
That’s normal. The brain isn’t able to process multiple sources at the same time, it has to bounce around and eventually too many inputs means nothing gets processed.
For those with APD, even a single input is a struggle.
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.
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)
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!
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.
When a game rereleases with an enhanced version or remake and it ruins the atmosphere. Been playing SMT Strange Journey Redux, and the new artstyle feels so generic and bland compared to the OG Strange Journey. The original had this kind of dark and oppressive atmosphere that Redux is sort of missing. Its really minor, since Redux does add a ton of stuff, so its probably still the better way to play, but that original tone just isnt the same.
I’ve got perhaps an unusual one - 99% of the time I play games with the music turned off. I just find it much more immersive and I enjoy, for example, not knowing that combat is about to start because the music’s just changed.
There are plenty of games where you can’t turn the music off. I’m not a fan of that, but I get it. The devs want you to play their game in a certain way, and turning the music off isn’t part of that. No complaints.
But then there are games which allow you to turn the music off, but all the rest of the sound has been made under the assumption that the music will be playing. The music often covers up a litany of jankiness like background sound effects not looping well. And sometimes the atmosphere sounds (say the drone of an engine in a spaceship) are also controlled by the music slider.
So, if you’re going to give the option to turn the music off, make sure that the game still sounds good without the music.
You should be useful in beta testing for sound simply because you prefer no music. That’s kind of neat
I’m a muted game player as well. Music is the first thing I turn down to negligible, followed environmental sounds. If I can’t control those, buhbye all sounds.
In the murder hobo games, I don’t really need to listen to that anyways.
