Your Cardinal Sins of Gaming

DrownedAmmet

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Apr 13, 2015
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For me its putting waypoints in a fucking linear game.
If I'm in a fucking hallway, with two doors, and one of them I came in, I don't need you to put a fucking X over it, and tell me exactly how many meters I have until I reach the door, because it's the only fucking way to go, I can figure it out myself thank you very much!
 

Burgers2013

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Nov 3, 2013
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I usually won't play games that have the following attributes:

Thou shalt not try to sell me things in game. I mean this in terms of micro transactions displayed in-game. A menu option to look for DLC is acceptable because I don't ever have to click on it.

Thou shalt not get me to join U-play. If I bought the game on steam, there is no reason for another layer of DRM. I won't download another steam clone store front in order to play a game I already bought. If I bought the game on console, stop asking me about it every time a boot the game.

Thou shalt not be "free-to-play." If I want your game I'll buy it. I don't play free-to-play games because of pay walls. I'd rather know what the actual cost of the game is up-front.

Thou shalt only release software that is functional. I can tolerate bugs (I still love Bethesda games), but an over-abundance of game-breaking bugs and crashes is a great way to get me to not buy or play a (non-early access) game.

Thou shalt not send me on a quest to collect 20 bear pelts and not have all bears drop a pelt. These sorts of gathering quests are just lazy anyway, but layered with the fact that animal parts have a non-100% drop rate is a huge turn-off and a massive red flag. If there's only skin present on 80% of bears, how much time will I be wasting trying to get a rare item drop later in the game?

Thou shalt not artificially extend the number of games in a series. This is mostly for Assassin's Creed. I loved 1 and 2. 2.5 was okay. I was tired of the yearly releases, so I didn't play 2.75. 3 was bad. I gave up after that. Why they decided to go from trilogy to yearly-releases, which completely trashed the possibility of a cohesive and complete story or further innovation of the mechanics, is beyond me. Well, actually, it isn't, but it's still disappointing.

Thou shalt not cancel Silent Hills. Still mad.
 

Bad Jim

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Nov 1, 2010
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JUMBO PALACE said:
Bad Jim said:
JUMBO PALACE said:
When an NPC you have to follow somewhere is moving just fast enough that your walk speed can't keep up, but just slow enough that if you run you'll out pace them. DAMN IT DEVS JUST PICK ONE.
That shouldn't be an issue. If it gets on your nerves, the real problem is that you are spending too long just following/escorting an NPC without anything interesting happening. Either there should be lots of fighting on the way, or it should fade out and skip the journey entirely. Or have a cutscene if there is exposition.
Sorry if I'm way off base but the way this is worded makes it sound like I'm part of the problem in this situation. I'm sure you just meant the devs shouldn't make you follow anyone for that long though.
Yes, it's devs making boring missions that's the problem. You don't really want to match the speed of an NPC and plod along. It's less annoying than not matching his speed, but it's still boring. You want something interesting to happen, and if it does you probably won't want to match your companions' movement speed at all.
 

FirstNameLastName

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Nov 6, 2014
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So I started playing Alien: Isolation yesterday and it's pretty good so far, but damn if it didn't remind me of a few sins I'd forgotten about.

Not being able to pick up enemy weapons: I get it. Sometimes you'll find yourself fighting enemies that carry weapons you won't be expected to acquire until later, so I get why they do this to control exactly when you get the weapon, but this was not the case here. I ended up finding myself unable to sneak past one of the enemies and had to kill him instead; I then had the privilege of looting his corpse for ammo before mashing every button on the keyboard in a desperate attempt to pick up his fucking gun. Eventually I figured I probably couldn't pick up the weapon, which seemed to be confirmed by the fact that the gun was acquired a couple rooms later. What advantage would I have gained by picking up the gun when I first found it rather than at the designated gun acquisition point? Considering the fact that I'm yet to fire a single round, the answer is none. It didn't effect game play at all, it just pulled me out of the experience, which is a shame in a horror game that goes out of its way to immerse you in what's happening.

Pointless quick slow time events: I've heard this game is excessively long. Well, I've only recently encountered the alien for the first time and I'm already sick of mashing E to turn on generators, and holding Mouse1 + Mouse2 + A to operate the maintenance jack. At this point in the game I'm still passing all sorts of other barriers with different tools required, so it looks like I'll be getting to know my fair share of button prompts by the end of the game. I have to wonder how much of this game's length comes down to all this pointlessness. Pretty much the only thing these types of button prompts do is distract you from how overly long the animations are for all these repeated tasks.
 

votemarvel

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Nov 29, 2009
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Estarc said:
And Mass Effect 2 was way smoother to replay than its sequel thanks to the fact you could skip basically every lone of dialogue.
You can do that in the first game too. Press X on the 360 and spacebar on the PC (no idea what it is for the PS3 version).
 

FrozenLaughs

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Sep 9, 2013
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Blatantly feeding ai.

Noticed this a lot on match 3 games like Gems of War and marvel puzzle quest, etc. Ai opponents match something simple and are awarded a cascade of magically matching tiles that buff up their mana to ludicrous levels. Rarely ever happens to you.
 

cojo965

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Jul 28, 2012
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I got another one:

YOU MUST RELY ON OTHERS FOR PROGRESSION

I remember Poke'mon being particularly bad at this in that certain evolutions can only be triggered by trading with someone else, but I haven't played the recent ones so maybe the online mitigates that annoyance. However, when the game builds a specific challenge around someone else in another role in a multiplayer game, I will be pissed. Battlefield: Hardline pulled this shit in the Syndicate Assignments with the Rep system. These are essentially score streaks that give you more mags, faster reloading, and the like. You get Rep by doing pretty much anything in the multiplayer and the Hacker can hand out bonus Rep to good performers. Here's the thing though: NO ONE WANTS THE BE THE HACKER! Because of this your only options are: be a god at the game, or get a good Rep booster out of Gold Battlepacks. In other words, good fucking luck with that.
 

KoudelkaMorgan

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Jul 31, 2009
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Not fixing your glitches, and then adding more with updates and never fixing those.

There are plenty of major bugs that found their way into Skyrim on PS3, and they are never going to be fixed. One minor one though is that wolves no longer play the howling sound if you have one of the DLCs installed (I forget which). I'm glad that my reward for shelling out more money is to forever have ninja wolves, on top of Dawnstar getting attacked literally every time I go to it by vampires even in broad daylight unless I finish the Dawnguard dlc in its entirety asap on every character I make now.

I could just reinstall the entire game minus the dlcs, but that would take too long and then I'd lose arrow smithing/nord armor.
 

MysticSlayer

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Apr 14, 2013
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inu-kun said:
MysticSlayer said:
Then there's the idea of requiring the play to do stuff in an area that will get cut off later in the story without letting the player know about it. Xenoblade Chronicles, I'm looking at you! (Yes, I'm aware Xenoblade normally alerts the player, but it didn't catch everything.)
I actually think the opposite, I love when games surprise me and suddently kill/destroy important stuff, it makes them more engaging rather than the games who are afraid to do anything to change the status quo, I'll agree though when it makes dungeons inaccessible, especailly if it has cool loot.
To me, the issue with games like Xenoblade and pretty much all the Tales games is that some interesting stuff can get cut off without the player having any way to know it might get cut off. Since these games often go into the 50+ hour mark, it can be very infuriating to realize that I'll through all that content again just to see a couple things I missed, no matter how much I may love the game as a whole. That said, I'm personally fine with changes to the world and story when the player is given an opportunity to adjust or the player knows beforehand that they may lose access to something.

Overall, it's not really a game breaking issue for me. It's just one that can really leave me feeling down about a game for a while to a degree that few things can accomplish.
 

Strazdas

Robots will replace your job
May 28, 2011
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Escort quests. annoying. i hate any kind of escorting, companions and other crap like that. i tend to play games my way and suicidal companions charging into enemies is not that way.

the "must follow the script" disease. imagine there is a settlement and a boss in there owns an unique item. you have arrived in the settlement, killed the boss and took that item. as soon as you walk out there is a NPC waiting outside of town with a quest to get that item. however you cannot give him the item you just took. in fact the game ignores everything you did so far because you havent done it in order the game wanted you to do. this is a frequent mistake in open world games and i hate it.

Artificial technical limitations. for example tieing game speed to framerate (Stronghold series). Whats interesting is that sometimes you could even get multiplayer matches where people with faster computers had the advantage if building faster.

level scaling. hate that stuff. populate the world with enemies you want and leave them like that. i dont want to go to beginners area and leave super elite mutated deathclaw nor do i want to go to the most dangerous area and fight rats. if you cannot enter because monsters are too strong - tough. being able to beat a strong monster is the challege and being high level with low level mosnters in beginner areas is how its supposed to end up.

AI cheats. for example endless resources in RTS games for AI.

time limit. you can fuck right off with limiting time for me to finish the mission. i know that sometimes it supported by games story but i hate being rushed and this results in horrible experience.
 

KissingSunlight

Molotov Cocktails, Anyone?
Jul 3, 2013
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Let me start with something I called "Stupid Difficult". When you clear all the enemies in the area, and you can't find a way to advance your character. After you bang your head against the wall for an hour, you will find a small hole behind a bush with the ladder going down into it. You can only see it from a specific unobvious position.

If you can update retro games to current consoles and computers, you can put in an options for save points. As fun as retro games are, the limited lives and the hours you have to spend to finish the game has left me to abandon classic games before I can finished the final level. It would be cool to be able to see how these games end.

Short solo campaigns to focus more on multiplayer.

Anything that shortchange customers by not having a complete working game available on it's release.

An enemy character that was extremely difficult to kill when you first meet it becoming easy cannon fodder afterwards.
 

Zenn3k

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Feb 2, 2009
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Neverhoodian said:
-Unskippable cutscenes, particularly if it's right before a difficult segment like a boss battle. Frankly, there's no excuse for it in this day and age.

-On-disk DLC. If it's on the disk in a finished state I should be able to play it without paying more. End of discussion.

-Crates/lockboxes in F2P titles like Team Fortress 2 and Star Trek Online. You know, the ones that you can't open unless you cough up real money, where 99.9% of the time you get vendor trash and that .01% gives you an extremely prestigious item. It's essentially gambling, only you don't even win anything in real life. The worst part is they drop so frequently that you can't even trade them away or sell for in-game currency. I either have to delete them outright or let them sit in my inventory, silently taunting me. Since we're on the subject of F2P titles...

-Any F2P game that's pay-to-win or requires an insane amount of waiting/grinding. Publishers would do well to look to TF2's and STO's business models, where (almost) everything is available to everyone, premium players just get some extra perks. But hey, at least those other F2P games have an (albeit flimsy) excuse for their nickel-and-diming and Skinner box methods. What is absolutely inexcusable is...

-Implementing the above F2P schemes in a full-priced game. Few things will kill my enthusiasm for a game quicker than this variety of naked greed. There's a special level of video game hell reserved for these kinds of corporate leeches.
I dropped $150 on lockbox keys this past weekend...I opened at least, which with discount was over 150 lockboxes, on my VERY last one, I finally got an item that had ANY value at all, but it wasn't the one I was trying to get. I don't mind a little gambling to support a game I really like, but STO's lockboxes just cause pain, lots of pain.
 

OneCatch

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Jun 19, 2010
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ObsidianJones said:
My Sins are variations of each other.

Rubberbanding Ai:

Leveling Monsters:
Yeah, these are both mine too. If I want to make something easier for myself I can very easily turn the difficulty down - but I'd like that to be my choice.

I think that a degree of monster levelling is ok, but only within certain constraints:
1) That it only results in a certain change in the base stats - say, 30-40% either side, so that the enemy remains roughly the same strength.

2)That you provide a degree of variation at all levels. So if you face 10 wolves in total at level 1, you'd expect 6 of them to be weak, 3 to be medium, and 1 to be strong.
If you face 10 again at level 10 you'd expect 2 weak, 5 medium, 3 strong, with a somewhat diminished, but not insignificant challenge.
But by the time you hit level 30 you'd be fighting almost all strong, but the fight would nonetheless be completely trivial.

3)Thirdly, that you mix up enemy times as characters progress. I'm not saying that low level creatures should be completely eliminated at higher levels, but they should be supplemented with new types, or greater numbers, or more challenging tactics.

For all of these, I think that the Morrowind midgame is a great example of how to do it. They managed to incorporate it into the story by having disease spreading during the story, producing variants of animals which hit harder and attacked more ferociously. You could also contract the diseases.
The way that the enemy spawning worked was to use 'levelled lists'. So any enemy you faced would have maybe 20 different spawn options. The options would be linked to level so you'd usually get an enemy roughly commensurate with your level, but it was still RNG'd for variation - so one time you'd get something pretty challenging, another time something less so. Some spawns would only start at a higher level so as to make some areas way too tough for low level characters.
Additionally, there were certain spawns which included multiple creatures. So you'd face a rat at L1, a wolf at L5, and an entire pack at L20.
To supplement the levelled lists, there were also fixed spawns, so you'd still get utterly mulched if you went somewhere dangerous at low levels. And it then felt somewhat satisfying to return to those areas later.
 

sonicneedslovetoo

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Jul 6, 2015
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Tutorials:
now tutorials for obscure systems are fine, heaven knows Star Ruler 2 could use one for its planetary management system(possibly a glossary as well). I'm talking about the painstaking "W is to go forward" tutorials that also walk you through the S, A and D buttons as well. It bothers me so goddamn much to be walked through the absolute basics of a game again and again and again and most of the time they aren't skippable.

Those "Powered by Nvidia" cutscenes at the start of games:
These really piss me off because oftentimes they take too long(and are even extended) and there is a 50% chance I'm already using the graphics card they're advertising every time I start up the game.

Pop up style tutorials:
these are a pain in the ass because not only do they interrupt flow constantly jerking me out of any hint of immersion I could be building up. Developers also seem to think that its ok to write an essay or two into EVERY GODDAMN ONE OF THEM, without pictures of any kind. Its a visual AND interactive medium use tooltips and pictures.

Whenever a game asks me to press the enter button for ok:
this is an indication of poor design choices all around the only comparable thing I could think of is if on a controller you had to push the xbox/ps4/home button for "OK" in dialogue.

Mobile ports:
you have no idea how many goddamn mobile ports I've seen that fall into the categories listed above, they will hold your hand until it turns black and drops off from lack of bloodflow. And then people talk about how they're the "future of gaming" god damn it every time I hear that phrase I want to force somebody to play a single mobile game without paying for micro-transactions and see how long before they go insane.

Always online DRM:
Elite Dangerous I'm lookin at you.

10 minute loading times:
Hello GTA 5 how the heck did you get off scott free with this one?

Hack, Slash, Loot:
this game in particular, this pretender to be an RPG roguelike I hate it the most.

Revenge of the Titans:
Also gets its own entry all alone because I've never seen a more poorly balanced game in my life. If you want to know what the hell I'm talking about you can take a look at the wiki and try to figure out how much of the the game is designed to be useless. But if you don't want to do that I'll save you some time and tell you this: most of it right off the bat and eventually all of it.

The developer admits to balancing the game based on the "feel" of it and by god does it show, towers become forcibly obsolete very quickly, the game is by default set on an adaptive difficulty setting, the research tree is full of vaguely worded research topics most of which are only there to unlock more research and don't actually do anything. And to top it all off the entire resource gathering tree is a surefire way to lose money and lose in general, that's right the resource gathering was specifically designed to actually LOSE YOU MONEY.
 

RedRockRun

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Jul 23, 2009
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Having to memorize level layouts
I'm looking at you, From Soft.

No easy-to-compare stats
This is something which may actually give me headaches. Am I expected to write down the stat values for items and NPC's? What about histograms with no numerical values? Usually, I just take a pencil and lay it against my computer screen or go back and forth comparing each bar, one by one.

Secret stats
Oh excuse me for not knowing that besides these five other stats, there's like three more circumstantial ones.

Long corpse runs
Whether it's a corpse run which takes me through a level's worth of obstacles or a respawn and run to the boss, I absolutely loath when each death means ten minutes of down time. I'm sure I'll eventually get better and learn how to beat the boss; it'll just take me a few hours after factoring in the corpse run time.

Maps which do nothing
Try and navigate using the local map in Fallout 4. Just try.
 

008Zulu_v1legacy

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Sep 6, 2009
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1- Rushed/lazy console ports; If you don't want to do a PC version, then don't bother at all, you're only hurting yourself.

2- Always online connection required for single player; I get that you want some measure of anti-piracy, but the pirates don't have to worry about things like this. You're only hurting your legitimate customers.

3- Meaningless choices; *cough* Telltale *cough* Bioware *cough* (I need a lozenge). You want people to feel drawn in to your game, then don't give them choices which later turn to mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of things. Telling a story is important, giving the illusion that players control the story is a cop-out.
 

Binkan

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Oct 14, 2012
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When leveling curve just stops and you have to grind for like 5-10 levels to reach the next part in quest lines (most asian MMOs) does this.

And when AIs get cheats at higher difficulties.

I would very much like to see a learning AI which can adapt to tactics like the ones used in Tiberian Sun and Red Alert.
 

chaser5000

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Sep 11, 2012
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Overly long tutorials/ unskippable tutorial
If you have a RPG that encourages multiple play throughs or a new game+ mode, don't have an hour long tutorial or force the player to go through it every time.

Hiding information on your website
For some reason companies want to hide information on their websites that should be in the game, like BF4 keeping all your MP stats on battlelog, or worse Destiny only allowing you to read lore items you unlock in game on the Destiny website.


Just increasing enemy health for higher difficulties
Turning all the enemies into bullet sponges is not hard it's just annoying. I can remember one game (I think it was SOCOM 4) hard difficulty just made the enemies ridiculously hard to kill, it would literally take two shots to the head with .50 cal sniper rifle to kill normal enemies.

Game overs for the party leader dying
FFXIII is the first game to come to mind for this, if the character you're controlling dies it's game over but if a team member dies you can just revive them no problem.

Scaling enemies
It just destroys all sense of progression