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.
Invisible walls. And I’m not saying the ones that are like way up out of the way that you have to nearly use glitches to get to. I’m talking the “walking down a city street and then you’re stopped in the middle of the road for no reason” kind. Like, you put area there that I can see, I want to go there. If you don’t want me to go there at least put something there to indicate it’s the edge of the map.
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)
Cutscenes that can’t be paused, especially if they’re longer than 10 seconds.
Do you have the slightest idea how frustrating it is to be mid-cutscene, something else requires my attention, and I cannot fucking pause it? Singlehandedly my biggest gripe with gaming.
Yeah, when the start button instead just skips the cutscene with no additional prompt? Extremely annoying!
Same with unskippable cutscenes, especially before a difficult boss. It’s no fun to have to sit through it over and over if I’m struggling with said boss, or have to sit through a cutscene I’ve seen several times in previous playthroughs. This also applies to the game’s credits.
“It is I, Ansem”
Unskippable cutscenes at boss fights. God forbid the boss kills you.
I’m always afraid to test ESC during a cutscene because I’ve been burned by games that auto skip cutscenes when you hit ESC. Who does that.
Anything that needlessly makes me repeat content I already beat or similarly wastes my time. Some examples are:
Fixed save points in general.
Unskippable cutscenes between the last fixed save point and the boss fight.
No autosave or fixed save point after a boss fight.
Preventing me from backtracking after I stumbled into a cut scene and/or boss fight because it wasn’t obvious which path led to a point of no return.
Oh, and no Play Station style controller glyphs. Come on, it’s an additional set of images, now hard can it be to implement?
Fixed save points in general.
To be fair, non-fixed savepoints introduce a bunch of additional work, especially on the gameplay design and testing sides, and for some games that work is better invested into other aspects of the game.
But if savepoints are fixed, they have to be frequent enough to not become an issue.
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.
The fact that games act like climbing doesn’t exist. You reach a path blocked by a small rock that any normally able bodied human could climb and it just pisses me off.
Like Pokémon games with a rock you could easily just walk around but noooo you gotta travel to this other town to get a special item or learn a special skill to get around this thing you could easily climb over or walk around.
It’s even worse in VR games. As much as I love Half Life Alyx, there were certain barriers that are literally just a pile of rubble or a chain link fence.
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.
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!
Games that don’t allow you to pause and skip cutscenes.
This is the main reason I cannot replay Valkyrie Profile
Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.
Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.
A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.
Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.
It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.
Points of no return and anything else that’s permanently missable. No, I am not doing a second playthrough of a 100 hour JRPG.
It really depends of the implementation for me.
I completelly understand that if you take a mission where you kill a merchant, you loose the option to purchace from them or miss their questline etc. Its a story point where your acts changed the world.
But if you miss some unique loot item from dungeon you can go trough only once, because, it was too well hidden or it was behind some convoluted puzzle that you missed, im pissed.
Final fantasy 9 comes to mind but I know all of them are guilty of it
Especially when there is some kind of “open every treasure chest” type of achievement, with one or two things locked out. So if you miss them in your initial playthrough, you’re completely locked out of that achievement until you replay it from the beginning.
Skyrim has a collectible item that is found in a main story area that is only accessible once. Its a very early mission and in one of the last thief’s guild quests they will tell you to get that item. That might be 200h after you did that main quest …
Good thing modding exists
I hadn’t had any games like this for a while until stalker 2. at the end I just wanted to be able to chill in the zone, hunt mutants and find artifacts but nah game over.
Trails in the Sky has some interesting logic behind this where the gameplay serves the story.
You’ll do some quests for people who actually end up being evil later in the plot. There’s also party members who temporarily join you while they have time off from their other job - then as the story progresses, their “lunch break is over” and they go back to their life. So, if you try to save content for later, it won’t be there anymore.
Those little things end up putting more focus on what is accessible at a given moment, so a level 60 player isn’t going back to the starting area to wrap up quests he doesn’t care about for completion.
Unrealistic loot.
Like when you kill a wolf and get shotgun shells as loot.
But also more subtle stuff like enemies in a remote place that don’t carry or have any kind of food and drink with them.
And when the enemy is clearly carrying a weapon, but it’s not lootable and you get some random stuff instead.
Reminds of the old pile of gold (empty) meme
In Hades II, there is a zone which has sentient gold bag enemies and flood littered with gold. Neither of these things provide you gold apart from standard drop rates.
I think shotgun slugs would be good loot from a werewolf, but they should be a junk item or a crafting item to combine with gunpowder and casings to make new ammo, not ready to use shells that’s just silly why does a werewolf have those?
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.
spongy bosses don’t always mean they’re challenging. I can’t count how many times I’ve fought a boss who isn’t hard or interesting but just wastes time cause they have a ton of health.
mechanics matter.
I love my older retro games, like I’m a huge Metroid fan, but jebus to Betsy, they fall for this trapping all too often.
I don’t fault them, those were the Wild West of gaming when devs were still figuring things out, but damn does it make going back to older games a bit rough.
My particularly niche gripe is bad dialogue tree options. There are so many games where the mechanism is selecting an option and watching it play out, but so many of them are shit when it comes to the difference between what you see as the option and what actually is said/done. Heavy Rain did it. ‘What should the character say next? Unreadable zalgotext option A, or unreadable zalgotext option B?’ Or ones where the options on screen are ‘A) I thoroughly agree. B) I thoroughly disagree. or C) What?’ but selecting C means the character isn’t just asking for clarification because ‘What?’ actually points at the voiceline, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, you piece of inhuman filth? I bet your a murdering rapist.’ If I can’t have some idea of what selecting an option will do, I’m not actually playing a game at that point. I might as well be trying to play Mario with a controller that remaps itself randomly.
Obligatory tutorials. Make it a choice.
QTE “final bosses”. Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.
“Open world” or “Sandbox” games that don’t care about your progress, where it’s painfully obvious that your actions don’t matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield
Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes “Hah, you were just lucky!”
I’m left-handed. Key rebinding has gotten better in some ways throughout the evolution of gaming, but it has recently regressed in the past few years.
I make custom layouts for every game I play. IJKL to move, Semicolon to sprint, Quote to crouch, M to interact, etc. I find many games where “I” is hard-bound to inventory, some bindings overlap keys I’ve bound with no way of fixing without going outside the game, some keys are unable to rebound entirely in-game, some keybindings menus require jank to actually work, some keybindings menus completely glitch out as I change entries, some games require .ini edits, some keys seem like they are working fine rebound, but completely bug out in unique ways, some games allow keys to be bound with modifiers (e.g. Shift + Mouse Button) and some don’t, and so forth.
It’s very frustrating. I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it’s this hard for me. I’ve tried using my right-hand for my mouse and WASD, but I get way too much pain doing so - even if I could properly learn to use a computer and game that way. I can’t use WASD and my left-hand on the mouse as it is incredibly painful.
I just have to imagine this is all the case because QA is nonexistent and developers are overworked.
When the game let’s you rebind some but not all keys it is like spraying lemon on the wound, at least when no key is refundable you can guess they could not be arsed to do it, but when they just do a shitty job on it is like it was almost there, why not do it right?
Yeah, really. Like a lot of games refuse to let me (re)bind:
1through0[];',./\BackspaceEnterLike c’mon. I need those keys to be modifiable. It feels like laziness and is sometimes the result of a console-focused development cycle (with PC as an afterthought). They add all the major keys, but those special characters?
Nah.
I can only imagine what people with physical disabilities and assistive devices deal with if it’s this hard for me.
I learned AutoHotkey and I genuinely couldn’t play many of the games I do without it.
Unfortunately, some games seem to monitor keyboard activity directly, not letting AutoHotkey assignments take effect.
Yeah, I’ve encountered a few games that do that.
Same, but I left Windows. On Linux/Wayland, it’s a bit more difficult and less powerful with current tools. AHK can’t be beat right now over here.
It’s also pretty bad when you’re not using QWERTY layouts.
