Criticisms of video games you are tired of hearing

GonzoGamer

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TopazFusion said:
I'm gonna go real meta with this and say I'm sick of people criticising those who have criticisms.

I'm so sick of people dismissing and hand-waving away legitimate criticisms as nothing more than "whining", "fanboyism", and "entitlement".

I can't even discuss my (legitimate, not whiny) criticisms of Mass Effect 3, without people raining on the parade all ready to label me as being a whiny entitled fanboy.
Yes, gamers have overused the term "entitled" more than conservatives, and that's saying something. Now when I hear/see someone use it, I tend to ignore the rest of what they have to say because you know it's going to be something you've heard 30 other people say. Someone complaining about other people being entitled is someone who's ran out of things to complain about.
 

scorptatious

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"Games are too easy nowadays".

Yeah, gaming has become more widespread and there are more games designed for less experienced gamers. But there are still plenty of tough games today. Like Dark Souls and the like.

Besides, most of us have been gaming for years, and have an easier time adapting to things in games than when we were kids. Well, at least I do anyway. I remember playing Crash 2 as a kid and never getting past that damned snowball level. Several years later, I came back and beat the entire game within a day. (Mind you, I didn't go for all the gems)
 

Hero of Lime

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"All Zelda games are just the same game over and over again!"

Say everyone who has never played more than one or two games in the series. This annoys me to no end.

"All Pokemon after gen 1 either suck/aren't real Pokemon!"

Again, the people who say that probably have never played another Pokemon game since the first ones. Not to mention those who assume every Pokemon is a garbage bag or ice cream because 5 out of 150 new Pokemon being of "questionable" design magically make the rest invalid.

"You only like (insert game series here) out of nostalgia!"

Can't a game just be good? Going back to Zelda, there is a reason the games are well rated, it's not because every game reviewer has good memories of older games, maybe they are just good?
 

Robert Hilliker

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I have two and they both irritate the hell out of me!

Number one: When people use the existence of games like Flower and Gone Home to bash the CoDs and GTAs of the world. Gaming is a big space and should have room for all kinds of experiences. Why do some like making this swipe at something a little more shootery than they like?

Number Two: When someone brings up that it only costs around $500 dollars to build your own gaming PC as if it's the most natural inclination in the world. Some of us prefer a plug and play experience and would rather not deal with the head aches of making sure the parts we buy are compatible and the sting of Murphy's Law when we assemble the thing.
 

The Apple BOOM

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"This game is objectively too repetitive!"

I've heard this about Monster Hunter a lot and the recent Monster Hunter inspired game Mercenary Kings. I understand that maybe you yourself want more variety, but there are plenty of us who like these games just fine. Sometimes it looks like they're looking for variety in the wrong place, too. Plenty of people say you're playing the same level over and over for Mercenary Kings before you unlock the next area, when in reality you're playing the same tile set over and over, but there are actually 4 different levels. I could go on more, but I'd just be going further away from my original point. Just because you're not a fan of it, doesn't make it a terrible game.
 

Dalisclock

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immortalfrieza said:
Maximum Bert said:
Its not realistic. I can get this criticism if the game is marketed as something like a realistic aircraft simulator but it boggles my mind when people complain about this in games that obviously arent going for slavish recreations of realism because they are more concerned with being a game and providing an enjoyable experience.

Most games arent going for realism just some facsimile of it unless they were going for ultra realism and the game demands it then I dont see its lack of realism as a criticism merely an observation similar to saying the sky is blue.
This is another one that pisses me off pretty badly. It's majorly missing the point of FICTION to begin with, to show the viewers a world that's different than ours, that doesn't have the same rules. I suppose my initial post about people complaining about things in video games not making sense has to do with this as well.
There's a limit though. Until recently I was a big fan of the CoD series. This series has never been an accurate, realistic depiction of war but it usually seems realistic enough as to not jar me out of the experience and I can just have fun and enjoy the 'plosions. That being said, MW3 had numerous moments where all I could think was how little sense certain things made and it's like the people making the game failed to do basic research nor could keep their own universe consistent. That suspension of disbelief was broken enough times to reveal the cracks and diminish the enjoyment of the game.

And I didn't even bother with ghosts.
 

Dalisclock

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AntiChri5 said:
"The developers were being lazy!"

No. No no no no no.

Just because there is something in the game that isn't to your satisfaction, or something not included you think should have been, doesn't mean that that is because the devs spent the time they were going to spend on it masturbating. Most of the time it simply wasn't a priority. Resources like time and manpower are finite. The devs have to choose what to focus on and what to sacrifice. Disagree with what they focus on all you like, but don't be so arrogant to assume that they were just wasting time or couldn't be bothered to do it right.
Sometimes this is stupid but sometimes this is warrented. If a game is outright missing or has badly implemented features, or entire sectons of the game feel rushed or missing then at very least the devs were not managing their resources very well.

I'm looking at you, David Cage.
 

Dalisclock

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Sonichu said:
This, and "that's racist!". Not quite as widespread though. I was also surprised it's going on for decades, just the gaming press didn't care about the crazies back then, and there wasn't really internet yet, so the gamers didn't know.
I sometimes see this criticism and often it looks kind of odd. I normally agree with Yathzee but he does have a tendency to accuse certain games he doesn't like of being racist. I believe he's done it with some of the CoD games and the first Uncharted specifically.

Unfortunately, he can rarely actually substantiate why it's racist, with his reasoning seems to boil down to "You play a white male who shoots people who are darker then you are(even though they are trying to shoot you first to begin with)."
 

D-Class 198482

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"Oh, well, it's just walking around and clicking!" for games like the Stanley Parable. Seriously. It's a terrible, terrible, terrible argument.
 

Maximum Bert

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Dalisclock said:
immortalfrieza said:
Maximum Bert said:
Its not realistic. I can get this criticism if the game is marketed as something like a realistic aircraft simulator but it boggles my mind when people complain about this in games that obviously arent going for slavish recreations of realism because they are more concerned with being a game and providing an enjoyable experience.

Most games arent going for realism just some facsimile of it unless they were going for ultra realism and the game demands it then I dont see its lack of realism as a criticism merely an observation similar to saying the sky is blue.
This is another one that pisses me off pretty badly. It's majorly missing the point of FICTION to begin with, to show the viewers a world that's different than ours, that doesn't have the same rules. I suppose my initial post about people complaining about things in video games not making sense has to do with this as well.
There's a limit though. Until recently I was a big fan of the CoD series. This series has never been an accurate, realistic depiction of war but it usually seems realistic enough as to not jar me out of the experience and I can just have fun and enjoy the 'plosions. That being said, MW3 had numerous moments where all I could think was how little sense certain things made and it's like the people making the game failed to do basic research nor could keep their own universe consistent. That suspension of disbelief was broken enough times to reveal the cracks and diminish the enjoyment of the game.

And I didn't even bother with ghosts.
Yes there are limits each game has to abide by its own set of rules and what it is trying to depict breaking that can harm the experience as every game by their nature requires a certain suspension of disbelief.
COD and Battlefield provide a sort of arcadey realism towards war yeah thats probably not a word but hopefully you get what I mean and so they have to abide by certain expectations within this to not harm the experience so for example as soemone mentioned earlier a knife that can destroy a tank here wouldnt be very believable in the setting of the game but things like regenerating health and guns that always fire straight as a die well that fine. In another game a knife destroying a tank may not be unbelievable if the setting allows for it.

What bugs me is complaining about the lack of realism in areas where its not supposed to mimic our idea of it such as a sword thrust not killing you instantly in a fighter or a character getting beaten the hell up and not keeling over dead or a characters jump is to high in a platformer or something stupid like that theres complaining about a suspension of disbelief caused by the game not playing to its own rules (which is a fine complaint imo) and complaining about a lack of realism for the sake of it if your going to complain about a lack of realism that way then there are many books and films just as guilty and im things would get very boring very fast if we complained about everything that was not realistic.
 

DirgeNovak

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Mass Effect is not an RPG because stat progression is limited and it has third-person shooting combat.
That annoys the crap out of me. To me an RPG (or at least a western-type one) is a game in which you create a character and choose how they act. In ME, playstyle changes a lot between classes and the story can change significantly depending on your choices. It's a fucking RPG.

I'm also tired of hearing complaints about the ending. It wasn't the best they could have done, but it was alright.
 
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Sack of Cheese said:
Linearity.
A linear game is not necessary bad, it just means your experience is manually crafted by the developers. A well-crafted adventure can be just as fun as an open-world sandbox one.
I truly don't care if a game is linear or not due in part that I'm a huge retro gamer. Most nes, snes, sega master system, sega genesis and turbo grafx 16 where very linear but still fun to play aside from a few expectations. What Upsets me is when they take a series like metroid which is known for it's exploration, back tracking and weapon upgrades and dumb it down. Such an example would be the heaping disaster we all know as Other M, which took away everything we grew to love about the series and squashed it.
 

Cybylt

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KarlMonster said:
immortalfrieza said:
Maximum Bert said:
Its not realistic...
This is another one that pisses me off pretty badly. It's majorly missing the point of FICTION to begin with, to show the viewers a world that's different than ours, that doesn't have the same rules. I suppose my initial post about people complaining about things in video games not making sense has to do with this as well.
Why is Truth stranger than Fiction? It is because Fiction has *got* to make sense!
A fictional/alternative world is typically a reflection of, or an interpretation of, the real world that we live in. We live in a world that is completely coherent, complementary, and where everything is normal.

Unless you have taken the time to examine the flaws of the real world.

And I'm going to take that one step further with my major irritant; "the weapons feel weak/light/(whatever)".
Excuse me? You're sitting on your butt, playing a videogame that cost about the same as 3 boxes of pistol ammunition. The weapons don't feel like anything, because you aren't really holding them. A majority of the critics don't appreciate the basic truth that, if presented with an actual firearm, its is actually difficult to hit what you are aiming at. Nevermind that the propellant generates a significant amount of force which, as Galileo and Newton explained, affects the user as well. Maybe firearms are made of papier mache in the future? Deal with it.
I've only ever seen the "this feels too light" complaint leveled at melee combat games. Then again I don't talk to people about shooters much.

I understand the melee combat in the "too light" argument though, it's about the feedback to your input as well as visual queues and pacing. It's kind of a weird thing to describe but generally in a fighting mechanic you want something that feels like you make contact/impact and that things are responsive like in your Devil May Cry's, Souls games, Monster Hunter compared to a combat system that gives little to no feedback at all like TES where melee combat is your character swinging at nothing in particular the air even when you've "hit" things.

Shooters... I don't even know, shooters don't feel like they could have anything resembling the feedback or impact of a well tuned melee system so I can't even imagine how people make that complaint for the genre.
 

ShogunGino

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Cecilthedarkknight_234 said:
Sack of Cheese said:
Linearity.
A linear game is not necessary bad, it just means your experience is manually crafted by the developers. A well-crafted adventure can be just as fun as an open-world sandbox one.
I truly don't care if a game is linear or not due in part that I'm a huge retro gamer. Most nes, snes, sega master system, sega genesis and turbo grafx 16 where very linear but still fun to play aside from a few expectations. What Upsets me is when they take a series like metroid which is known for it's exploration, back tracking and weapon upgrades and dumb it down. Such an example would be the heaping disaster we all know as Other M, which took away everything we grew to love about the series and squashed it.
I find it a little funny that you say that you don't care if a game is linear, and yet Metroid fans seem to be the most vocal when anything dares to make a Metroid game a little more linear.

I hate to use you as an example, because I don't want to make it seems like I'm picking on you in particular, but I am tired of the criticism that when a certain series that tries to be particularly different with its gameplay and story in a new game is always a bad thing, and I find Metroid fans to be particularly guilty of this. Their complaints about linearity are second in my book of "Complaints about a particular game that I am sick of hearing" right behind the Mass Effect 3 ending.

There are multiple ways to look at it, though. First off, I was never a big Metroid fan. I didn't grow up with Super Metroid, and I wasn't very good at Metroid Prime, and it took me a lot of use from walkthroughs to make it through it. I get that its fans love it for particular reasons, and that Other M took a different route, similar to Metroid Fusion, with more focus on a plot, which tends to make games more linear. I also see that Fusion gets a lot of flak for that reason. I watch SpeedDemosArchives' videos of speedruns, and in one of their recent charity Twitch events, Metroid Fusion was one of the games that was being played, and some people in the room with them would just NOT SHUT UP about Adam, and when it reached one point late-game where you aren't being guided because of plot reasons, someone actually said "This is point where it actually becomes, you know, a Metroid game!"

I just hate that, when they say that X game is "not an X game" because it tries to be different. It all just reeks of "I don't like change!! Never change anything!!" to me. Personally, I'm fine if a series tries to mix things up. I'm never too attached to one gameplay style that I can't bear to see it altered in any way. In that sense, I was fine with the gameplay style of Other M, a little less exploration, and a larger focus on story, because I thought it was an interesting change. All I ask is that the changes hold up the game well. I thought Other M's gameplay could use some tweaking, but I thought its style was fine. (I really would have preferred to use the nunchuck's control stick rather than the Wiimote D-pad, that would be the first tweak for me)

As a Zelda fan, I frequently see this a new game is released. Fans always seem to hate it compared to the previous major release when it comes out, but a few years later, they like it enough to hate the new one for being different than it. It's very frustrating cycle.

-You will notice that I haven't brought up Other M's story and characterization yet. Mostly because I didn't like them either for pretty much all the same reasons as the fans, but it takes a lot for a game to make me truly mad, and Other M didn't make me mad. I just think the game is 'okay'.-
 

ninjaRiv

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I don't really have an issue with people criticising things, but I do take issue with delivery and context. Saying that, there's a whole bunch of stuff I'm sick of:

Difficulty. Already been mentioned quite a bit. Mostly, it's when people complain about something not being difficult enough for them, therefore it's a bad game overall and it's not hard enough for anybody. People went fucking nuts when they found out Dark Souls 2 was going to have an easy mode. It's the fast travel thing all over again: Just don't use it. Difficulty can be ramped up in nearly every game, anyway.

Graphics and FPS. I just don't care. I don't care. I really don't care. 30fps and 60fps? I don't care. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate real nice graphics but it's the tiny details that people get stuck on. It's always stuff I never pay attention to. I'm not to sick of this one in the sense that I hate that people criticise it, I just get bored of it. I'm sick of hearing it because it's so uninteresting...

"It's a male power fantasy." OH MY GOD I don't care... Sure, we need better female role models and so on. Same with race and such. But that doesn't mean a good male power fantasy game is a bad thing. I like playing is big, burly dudes who can't express emotion. I like blowing shit up and screaming "fuck you, I'm a man!" Almost as much as I like a well told story with well developed characters.

Last one, I swear:

"It's just like the last one!" This one was aimed at Arkham Origins a lot. It was pretty much all they had against it. "It's exactly like that awesome game that everyone loved! GRRRR!" Not every sequel needs to do new and exciting things... These same critics would then say "they should have just copied the last one" when they review a sequel that sucks. More of the same can be a good thing. You don't need a revolutionise the franchise with every single one. It's like eating pizza: You don't change topping for every slice (Fuck you if you do) but it's good to change toppings next time you have pizza.
 

Jolly Co-operator

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This isn't exactly a criticism of the game itself, but I hate it when people bash a Pokemon they don't like by saying "it looks like a Digimon". Sure, Digimon hasn't been nearly as successful as Pokemon, and I've never been a particularly huge fan of it, but that franchise has had its share of badass creatures.
 

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Accusations of ripping off something else because it is in the same genre. I've heard halo be accused of ripping of just about every other sci-fi IP in existence. Some people even claim it ripped off the flood from the zombies in half-life. I'm not saying that zombie-like aliens are terribly original but half-life didn't invent zombies either. Same thing with accusing every medieval fantasy game of looking too much like Tolkien. If it had no similarities too Tolkien at all it would hardly be medieval fantasy. Maybe there are too many medieval fantasy stories out there but even in a crowded genre interesting things can be done and criticising something just for fitting in a certain subgenre of medieval fantasy rpg or sci-fi shooter is just lazy.

Also, the color-palette thing. Some games have a style where brown and grey work better than purple and green. Quite a few shooters for example. Unless you'd like your fallout or your amnesia with all manner of bright colours too pretending that certain colors are a problem in and of themselves is silly. Bright colors work for Rayman and Pokemon. That doesn't mean they work for every other game as well.
 

PainInTheAssInternet

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SKBPinkie said:
"Brown / gray military shooters"

This just means that you have an issue with the game being a military shooter. It not having color is a bullshit "argument", because you never hear that complaint when it comes to games like Fallout, Skyrim, GTA IV, etc. Especially Fallout, what with its muddy tetures and vomit-inducing color palet.

I don't like most military shooters either, but there are actual, legitimate problems with their pacing, mechanics and other gameplay elements that contribute to that opinion.
I actually hold that position. Bethesda Games make me bored or otherwise disengaged fast due to the crap aesthetics. I still haven't finished FO3 because of that. GTA IV felt very murky and the graphics reinforced that.