Gaming pet peeves.

[GabeZhul]

Ludonarrative dissonance

This, and I especially hate it in JRPGs. Even the best, most widely lauded JRPGs suffer from this to the point where it could be called a (very annoying) staple of the genre. You know what I'm talking about. The unwinnable fight that you could totally win but the opponent then pulls out a fuck-you move that is never used again to defeat your party. Or even worse, when you actually defeat your enemy fair and square, possibly whithout taking a hit, only to transition into a cutscene about how overpowering they are and how you have no chance to defeat them.

The worst this trope becomes is when combined with another game mechanic, the New Game+, another JRPG staple. Why? Well, when you are level 99 from the get-go, every single battle which is followed up by a cutscene where the characters comment on how powerful the opponent was (aka. most boss fights) become this.

No reputation.
We all heard about or experienced first-hand the classic Skyrim lunacy of NPCs mouthing off your character even though he is the savior of the world, a Dragonborn with the power to blow them to bits with words, the leader of the Companions, the Archmage of the College and who knows what other more sinister organizations bow to him... However this is not unique to Skyrim, it's just that the phenomena gets more and more obvious the greater your immersion gets.

The thing is, while some games try to do something akin to tracing your reputation through a numerical value or another, in the end it usually ends up just some kind of mechanical advantage, like merchants giving you better prices. The only game I can think of that really tried to change this formula was Pillars of Eternity, but even that game didn't really succeed in establishing the most important part: If you and your party are murder-machines who cleave your way through monster-infested dungeons on a daily basis, maybe, just maybe, the roadside bandit wouldn't want to tangle with you.

As a matter of fact, this is the kind of thing that I am missing: Your level, reputation and previous choices actually changing how the game-world reacts to you. For example, giving you completely different quests depending on your level and your reputation (the local merchant's guild might not want to hire a bunch of level 2 pacifists for caravan guards and nor would the king want to sent a level 20 party of combat-munchkin demi-gods to do diplomacy with the orcs either (especially if your party happens to be known as rabid orc-slayers)), or NPCs reacting differently based on your party's appearance (because seeing a bunch of people decked out in +5 armors and robes and weapons in broad daylight should make everyone nervous the same way you would get nervous if you saw a bunch of guys with assault rifles marching down the street). These are small things, but exactly the kind of stuff that helps immersion and promotes replayability more than having a good/evil/greedy choice in every quest.

 

[Kae]

Let me fucking lose in Telltale games!
If I do fucking stupid choice in a Telltale game just kill me, don't continue the plot regardless making all my choices pointless in the grand scheme of things.

That's something I liked in episode 2 of the first Walking Dead Season, there's one scene in which you can get shot if you say something stupid, it annoyed me greatly that it was only that scene in the entire season though, they really should have more choices that lead to death or just some kind of failure, QTEs don't count as choices obviously.

 

[DementedSheep]

Another one I was reminded of recently, what is with rpgs putting long dialogue sequences before a (often heavily RNG dependant) boss fight and then making you repeat it every time you die? I honestly do not understand why devs keep doing this because its stupid as hell. Just put an autosave after, not before, the dialogue. Problem solved.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Make it DARK!

Personally, unless you're going to add some kind of light mechanic there's no reason for this. In last of us a flashlight could've been used to make you choose between attracting enemies and seeing better but it's not necessary that they do that. They instead went for mood lighting, which is fine for what it does.

Human enemies actually do get attracted to your flashlight, only zombies don't. And a nice feature would've been that instead of having flashing items, that the flashlight would highlight them instead.

 

[Dragonbums]

I don't like games that have weird invisible walls.

You know when you see a big hole and your character should hypothetically be able to fit in that hole and yet for some reason you are unable to.

Another thing I can't stand is when games at the beginning give you a text wall of their story as opposed to integrating it in with characters and books and stuff.

That and textwall tutorials. I hate those.

 

[Nomad]

Pretty much this when it come to online MMORPG due to the fact the massive multiplayers defeat the purpose of the one of the chosen one. Has there ever been an MMORPG that has the npc that address the character as one of the few/ group/ heroes that save the world/ slayed the villain or monster etc?

None that I know of, which is exactly why I prefer creating my own character in MMOs over single-player games. Since I'm just one of many players in the world, I never feel like the world revolves around me.

I take it you haven't played Elder Scrolls Online? It is filled to the brim with chosen one-speech directed to you specifically, even though you can plainly see ten other people standing right next to you, speaking to the very same NPC about the very same thing.

 

[Dornedas]

All right time for my pet peeves

No Mana-regeneration

I love playing a mage in games. Because they can throw lightning and stuff and that's pretty cool.
What is not cool is when I have to drink a mana potion after every third lightning because I'm pretty much useless otherwise. But this is just a little gripe unless it is paired with something else

Potions have weight
Ok that is not a pet peeve of mine unless it is paired with the one above. I get that it would be illogical for potions to be weightless.
But when this is paired with no Mana regeneration that means:
I can't fight properly because I have to stop every 10 seconds for a potion break.
This leads to me spending a lot of money to buy these potions
Because I need a lot of money I need to loot and sell everything.
For this I need high strength because I want to sell a loot to make loads of money. AND I also need to have buttloads of potions in my inventory which weigh me down.
Because I have to be strong I can't put as many points into the spelly lightning kill skills as I would like. This means that they are not mana-efficient which leads to me needing more spells and mana potions to kill enemies. and so on and so on

Poor Morrowind suffered from this.

And finally to satisfy the ghost that lives in my neckbeard.

Make your game hard ... sometimes
I guess this ties in to the gluconative distance mentioned above.

Let me take Mass Effect 3 as an example.
A story about the Reapers, an unstoppable and horrifying enemy with an army consisting of improved versions of your own soldiers.
But even on the highest difficulty setting my Shepard was simply destroying platoons of their soldiers.
Except for the Banshees.
Make a whole game consisting of nothing but Banshees (please don't)

 

[SquallTheBlade]

When in-game mechanics and canon stop working in cutscenes
Often a character is reduced to a pathetic shadow of their usual selves for the sake of driving the story - ingame you can usually take half a clip of assault rifle fire to the torso and regain health by resting momentarily behind a wall, but suddenly a single 9mm round is deadly. And that health kit/revive potion that usually lets you reroll death? Guess what, they suddenly stopped existing.

I have a good explanation for this. Games battle system doesn't reflect what "really" happens. And this is a good thing. IF they did then you would face 2 problems. Either you would need to accept that everything during battles would also work outside of them. This would mean that healing people in split second or even reviving them is a possibility. This would make any threat of death pretty much meaningless.
Or you would need to restrict the games battle system so much that it wouldn't break the "realism" of the world. That would make for pretty boring battle systems.

Both cases are not good and should be avoided in my opinion.

 

[someguy1231]

Pretty much this when it come to online MMORPG due to the fact the massive multiplayers defeat the purpose of the one of the chosen one. Has there ever been an MMORPG that has the npc that address the character as one of the few/ group/ heroes that save the world/ slayed the villain or monster etc?

None that I know of, which is exactly why I prefer creating my own character in MMOs over single-player games. Since I'm just one of many players in the world, I never feel like the world revolves around me.

I take it you haven't played Elder Scrolls Online? It is filled to the brim with chosen one-speech directed to you specifically, even though you can plainly see ten other people standing right next to you, speaking to the very same NPC about the very same thing.

No I haven't, and I don't think I will now. Thanks for the warning!

 

[Batou667]

Hey, I just thought of a bunch more. Criticism comes easy to me, you see, for I am a curmudgeon.

"Nobody can see me! Sneaky sneaky!" "Why's that dude crawling around in plain sight?"
I get that cosmetic details need to scale depending on distance, but when *you* think you're stealthily picking your way through tall grass and bushes, and the enemy sniper across the valley sees you exposed on a bare hillside... that's a problem.

Spinning pickups in otherwise serious contexts
This kind of nonsense belongs in platform games and nowhere else. See also:

Glowing orbs. Glowing orbs everywhere
I suppose it's *one* way of visually representing your character earning currency and XP, but it's another convention that tends to kill immersion for me. The Fable games were really bad culprits for this. It's become a lazy and hackneyed design choice, I feel.

Look, a beautifully-animated and rendered enemy... completely obscured by a BIG RED enemy marker
Asdfafds. Thank you, game, for pointing out an enemy in the least subtle way possible.

This game has a cool feature. Let's make it dominate every other aspect!
Oy vey. I'd love it if a game could have a particularly neat feature - say, water physics, or deformable terrain, or a grappling hook - and NOT have every core gameplay mechanic be joined at the hip to this one damn feature. Especially because the game tends to become a one-trick-pony and everything else (narrative, level design, depth, fun..) is neglected to ensure the game's one friggin' unique selling point is constantly being used. Notable offenders: Red Faction, Fracture, Timeslip, Hydrophobia.

Hey, I just thought of a game that introduced a fantastic USP and *didn't* flog it to death: Half Life 2's gravity gun. It's fantastic fun to use, it opens up new playstyles and rewards players who use it in creative ways... but the game isn't JUST gravgun-based physics puzzles. That would have been tedious.

This game was really popular. For the sequel, let's throw out everything popular about the preceding game and act bewildered when people complain!
Halo 4...

 

[Auron225]

Make it DARK!
Two of my most recent favourite games suffer from this (The Last of Us and The Witcher 3) and it's when I get presented with nighttime sections that just aren't dark enough. Because I can only assume the developer doesn't want to obstruct the player's vision, we get areas where it's apparently night that bath in ambient lighting. Now, I can understand that the player needs to see where they're going, but when they have a source of illumination for the player character to use it just feels like a missed oppertunity.

Even stranger is that both these examples have areas where it is sufficiently dark. This always gets me slightly miffed, to the point where I feel inclined to mess around with my screen settings just to get it nice and dark. One game that actually handled this very well was Dragon's Dogma.

And in direct contrast to that...

I can't see where the f*ck I'm going!

Some games have small sections (usually indoor, industrial type sections) where there is no "natural" source of light and so everything is dark. But there is no in-game way to brighten the place up and I can't see ANYTHING. I'm just running blind until my character is jogging on the spot into a wall or falls off a ledge or somehow finds where I'm meant to be going, missing lots of collectables on the way. A section of Kingdom Hearts 3D did this in the Country of Musketeers (it's the only one that comes to mind right now) and it drives me bat-shit insane.

 

[Batou667]

I have a good explanation for this. Games battle system doesn't reflect what "really" happens. And this is a good thing.

I get that narrative is often the enemy of gameplay. But developers should be taking steps to make the transition from playable to non-playable sections as seamless as possible, not have them occupy seemingly parallel universes with different sets of physics.

 

[DementedSheep]

When in-game mechanics and canon stop working in cutscenes
Often a character is reduced to a pathetic shadow of their usual selves for the sake of driving the story - ingame you can usually take half a clip of assault rifle fire to the torso and regain health by resting momentarily behind a wall, but suddenly a single 9mm round is deadly. And that health kit/revive potion that usually lets you reroll death? Guess what, they suddenly stopped existing.

I have a good explanation for this. Games battle system doesn't reflect what "really" happens. And this is a good thing. IF they did then you would face 2 problems. Either you would need to accept that everything during battles would also work outside of them. This would mean that healing people in split second or even reviving them is a possibility. This would make any threat of death pretty much meaningless.
Or you would need to restrict the games battle system so much that it wouldn't break the "realism" of the world. That would make for pretty boring battle systems.

Both cases are not good and should be avoided in my opinion.

Excuse me? It's completely possible to create an engaging and entertaining battle system that's completely consistent with what happens in rest of the game.

In some circumstances, like if it's sci fi and you have shielding or fantasy with magical healing and people just being ridiculously durable. But with many world settings not really because in real life you might not die immediately from being stabbed, shot or burnt depending on how it bad it is but's it's going screw you for a up a while and require medical treatment.
Making everything in gameplay match the story throws up a huge amount of unnecessary hurdles and restrictions when that what happens in a battle in gameplay isn't going to be exactly how it would have played out in the story is easy enough to understand. If a game dev dose make a compelling battle system that makes complete sense for the world and is seamless with the cut scenes good for them but it's shouldn't be standard.

 

[DementedSheep]

When in-game mechanics and canon stop working in cutscenes
Often a character is reduced to a pathetic shadow of their usual selves for the sake of driving the story - ingame you can usually take half a clip of assault rifle fire to the torso and regain health by resting momentarily behind a wall, but suddenly a single 9mm round is deadly. And that health kit/revive potion that usually lets you reroll death? Guess what, they suddenly stopped existing.

I have a good explanation for this. Games battle system doesn't reflect what "really" happens. And this is a good thing. IF they did then you would face 2 problems. Either you would need to accept that everything during battles would also work outside of them. This would mean that healing people in split second or even reviving them is a possibility. This would make any threat of death pretty much meaningless.
Or you would need to restrict the games battle system so much that it wouldn't break the "realism" of the world. That would make for pretty boring battle systems.

Both cases are not good and should be avoided in my opinion.

Excuse me? It's completely possible to create an engaging and entertaining battle system that's completely consistent with what happens in rest of the game.

In some circumstances, like if it's sci fi and you have shielding or fantasy with magical healing and people just being ridiculously durable. But with many world settings not really because in real life you might not die immediately from being stabbed, shot or burnt depending on how it bad it is but's it's going screw you for a up a while and require medical treatment.
Making everything in gameplay match the story throws up a huge amount of unnecessary hurdles and restrictions when that what happens in a battle in gameplay isn't going to be exactly how it would have played out in the story is easy enough to understand. If a game dev dose make a compelling battle system that makes complete sense for the world and is seamless with the cut scenes good for them but it's shouldn't be standard.

It's really not that hard. And dude, you're talking to a guy that owns and enjoys Arma 3, Red Orchestra and Insurgency. I've modded my skyrim game to have hunger and thist meters, diseases and hypothermia. That kind of thing is not a negative to me.

Hypothermia, disease and basic needs are one thing, I always modify Bethesdas game have that sort of thing although I wouldn't want every game to have that sort of thing. It adds depth and another thing to manage. Dying in one hit or having your character needing to go to hospital and spend months healing before they can back into the action while not being as strong as they were before is completely different and would mess the plot and difficulty of most games. I never said you couldn't do it, I said it only works in some circumstances and shouldn't be standard because it's restricting.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Low drop-rate percentages
Oh man, I really hope I get this item from this enemy. This is the only enemy in the game that drops that particular item...hours pass, you grind many of that particular enemy, you still don't see that particular item. I recall Final Fantasy IV being notorious for its low drop-rates more so than any other JRPG but this is annoying no matter where you encounter it

Being unable to skip the cutscenes
I'm playing Final Fantasy X HD on the PS3. I beat Final Fantasy X on the PS2 a few months ago. I know about the story, I've seen these cutscenes before, I can access them anytime online, I don't want to keep crying all the time JUST LET ME PLAY THE GAME!

Auto-Save...right before a lengthy, unskippable cutscene...and then a difficult fight

Online Only Achievements/Trophies
Perfect Dark Zero is the ONLY games that got this right.

Exposition is being delivered therefore, NO RUNNING
Gears of War, Batman: Arkham, etc...This is a really annoying little thing that happens that never really seemed necessary to me. There has to be an easier way to deliver exposition.

The Game that starts X hours after you start the game
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess & Skyward Sword, Final Fantasy XIII, Ni No Kuni...I dislike when a game starts off slowly...part of what I like about Final Fantasy XIII-2 is how the game truly starts after about an hour whereas the first one took about 12 - 15 hours to really get...enjoyable.

Edit for more bitching!

Moral Choice
Moral Choice messes up RPGs for me. I really wanted to punch people as Shepard but that's not very paragon and if I'm at all Renegade, it might cause my crew to die during the end-game...somehow...Dragon Age Origins did this right; I could literally kill a child in front of his screaming, crying mother and still have companions side with me and everybody would agree that I'm not evil. InFamous was one of the worst examples...it might as well have asked at the very beginning if I was going to be a good guy or if I wanted to be a bastard during the course of that playthrough...

Safety Walls
These are more or less the same as invisible walls but they're set up in such a way that it completely prevents you from falling off of cliffs or ledges. These are more annoying in games where I take damage from campfires. When I encounter one it just makes me feel like I might as well be in a corridor.

 

[FoolKiller]

Ludonarrative dissonance
When cutscenes and gameplay totally contradict each other in terms of how the world works. Like in Borderlands, you play as Roland, a buff, tanky Soldier who's been shot over a hundred thousand times before the end of the game - but in Borderlands 2, when he is an NPC, he takes a single handgun shot to the back, and falls over dead. I know that's been said before in this thread, but that's the most stand-out example I had.

Well I will agree that I hated that. In fact, its one of the worst examples and even more egregious because of the nature of the New U stations. But as a fan of Borderlands, I like to think that Handsome Jack deleted or blocked Roland's DNA pattern in the New U inside the area he has angel.

 

[The Ditz]

I know it's REALY petty, but

npc allies in games that reward exploration
...and no, not for any sensible reason like they slow me down, no I just can't stand their judgment. I always feel like they are silently telling me to hurry up as they stare at me break crates and walk around a room for half an hour looking for something I missed.

Timed events that are required to advance
Too much pressure man. Especially awful when there are climbing mechanics involved, I always manage to find the one pipe on a wall that my character wants to backflip off of several times. I never finished Assassins Creed 2 because of this.

 

[[Kira Must Die]]

It's very minor, but when a game gives you the option to create a male or female character, but in the cutscenes, the animation is clearly made with a male character model in mind, particularly in the walking animations or the way they would stand. The Saint's Row games come to mind as an example of that, and I notice it in GTA Online, too.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

Boss Rush
I was thinking of finishing your game, but I think I'll just stop right now. As much as I loved Viewtiful Joe 1 and 2, I am never finishing either of them on normal difficulty level, especially since they make the bosses even harder and the framerate goes to utter shit. I almost tapped out on Shovel Knight because of this Thankfully, they give you full health right before nearly each encounter, they're the same difficulty level, and based around simple patterns. It still wasn't very fun, though.

 

[DementedSheep]

Another one I was reminded of recently, when skill descriptions use ambiguous phasing like "low", "moderate" or "high" rather than the actual parentage and I'm not even a min maxer. How low is low health? 30%? 20%? 10%? I guess they don't want scare player off with too many numbers or something because it doesn't make the skill description any longer or more confusing.