Any worthy candidates for Please Stop in 2017?

The problem with microtransactions... which I 90% of the time despise... is people are not accepting of the solution to them generally.

Think about it. Game development costs have gone crazy high up.. but they still cost the same amount to purchase a game. So they HAVE to have something else to keep them at 60 dollars. Honestly these days I rarely play 60 buck games though. I mostly go with smaller steam games that interest me more than AAA titles, or if I do get one after they go on sale on steam haha. Personally I wish these big studios would spend less time on big fancy graphics and more on just making deeper games but whatevs :)

The other option would be to have a higher base price for a game [probably something I would be more in favor of... but you know they would just put microtransactions anyway haha]. But some microtransactions feel super skeeezy to me.

Some rare games I totally don't mind them being in there. But man 90% of them just feel nasty. Often time you can clearly tell parts of the game were made less fun than their potential just to encourage microtransactions.

The thing with procedural generation is if it is over used then what it is used on always feels generic and lifeless white noise almost. I think there is still extreme value in proc gen but you have to do it the right amount. I think the please stop means it is something that there isn't much value left in doing more... and I do think there is value in doing it.

Yep. It's kind of a fishing analogy. Using the same bait, you catch many smaller fish, but you can also catch entire whales, people with either far too much disposable income, or people who are addicted to your game and the promise of either gaining an advantage or being able to continue playing.

As for MY pick for "Please Stop 2017," I'd say cover songs in game trailers. There are some AWFUL cover versions of some really otherwise good music in far too many game trailers. One of the more egregious examples:

An example of the kind of trailer Titanfall 2 should have had:

The actual Titanfall 2 trailer:

Literally a cover of a cover of a song. Without Kill Bill, there's no way that makes it into the playlist of whatever marketing douchebag decided on that track. Sonny and Cher, being covered by Nancy Sinatra, being covered by someone else entirely. This one doesn't even keep the original lyrics. Every aspect of this song is garbage, save for the vocalist, who is actually genuinely talented. Her voice is wasted on this, though. It's terrible.

No offence to anyone who liked that version, to each their own, this is just opinion, etc.

But if a song is popular, it's because THAT song is popular, not just the lyrics. The music and vocals associated with that song are kind of important, but I guess this is the cheap way to go about it, so we just get shitty cover version after shitty cover version, in trailer after trailer.

Please stop.

I doubt it will change. You know why? Whale is actually a very old term for this kind of thing. It predates free to play mechanics and I actually think it predates video games altogether. Where does it come from?

The casino industry. Wealthy players or addicts have been called whales there for a very long time, and are highly prized and sought after.

That's right. Gacha boxes are so close to gambling that they've actually taken the terminology from the gambling industry. That should tell us something.

Just to expand on the term, the idea of a whale is that they if you can land one they provide so much money that it doesn't really matter how many other smaller "fish" you lose (obviously in biology whales aren't fish.) People are broken down into non-spenders, whales, dolphins, and minnows. Just like in fishing how minnows are so tiny that it's very difficult to catch enough of them to equal the size of one whale, people who are willing to spend a few bucks on some cosmetic item can't really compare to someone who may be willing to drop a thousand dollars on gacha items. Thus the free to play mechanics often cater to those huge spending players (not in terms of trying to make them happy but in terms of trying to get them to spend) and sort of ignore the "minnows" who spend minimally and "dolphins" who spend a bit more.

In addition to being scummy, this screws up game balance, because developers are more than happy to compromise the experience of most people in order to get that sweet sweet whale money. In a free to play game that's understandable, but when I pay $60 for a game I expect the developers to focus on trying to make the average player happy, not create gameplay loops shaped around manipulating gambling addicts.

Can't think of a good short title for this one so I'll just go with "The monetization of unfinished games". What I mean is this new trend of increasing the price of early access games prior too release and the addition of microtransactions prior to release. For the former we've seen Ark: Survival Evolved double it's price to a full triple A $60 price point, prior to release(plus with a $20 dollar expansion released in early access too!), though the game does have a planned release date of the end of the month. Now We Happy Few is doing the same thing, going from $30 to $50.99 and that's with no solid release date that I could find. For the latter we have PUBG adding in loot crates before release and I believe Killing Floor 2 did the same prior to it's eventually release.

TLDR version is stop trying to get us to give you more money before you even finish the dang game.

Also at this point I think "Steam store is filled with shovelware" should just get a lifetime achievement award.

Paid "Early Access" as an excuse to release unfinished games for money.

Please stop loot crates

Rogue-likes, prodedural generation, or any other excuse for not making bespoke levels.

I agree with the general sentiment of roguelikes and loot boxes being the worst things. I've only every been in love with one roguelite (Rogue Legacy) and I've played more then a few games that I'm sure I would've liked if they weren't roguelikes.

Haven't played them yet, but are on my list. But that's sad to hear, should I ask? how awful it is?

@rigas:

Haven't played Persona, but for BOTW, I assume he's talking about the super stereotypical gay character. It's cringey, but I took it as a tone-deaf localization issue, which isn't exactly a new problem for Nintendo.

I haven't played Persona but I would say for Zelda it's not terrible, just somewhat uncomfortable.

It features both a cross-dressing sequence and a flamboyant (presumably) gay character played for laughs. In neither case is there real mockery or disgust directed at the idea, it's just poorly handled and not contextualized. In another context Bolson (the flamboyant character) could be non-problematic, and in fact I found him super likable and charming. The cross-dressing needed a few more passes to not be a bit icky, but it's clearly not intended to be hateful.

I am pretty sensitive to this kind of thing and neither really interfered with my enjoyment of the game.

Thanks! I'm the same way, so thats comforting. Whenever I get around to playing it.

@lestephan: But companies don't use that term publicly so why would they need to change it internally?

*edit Aside from Rockstar with their GT Online cash cards

- PSN Download speed is still incredibly slow. I pay for 500 down and 200 up fiber internet and a 10GB patch for Uncharted took 2 days.

- Splatoon 2's Salmon Run - needs to work on it's difficulty curve. spawning 4+ bosses in the first section is just cruel when playing with randoms.

I would give it to "boxes". They can have their place but having most of your progression tied to boxes can really fucking suck. ME: Andromeda's multiplayer is a great example. I went like really 30-40 hours into the multi before I had a decent mix of weapons that covered every category.

If you are unlucky, your progression experience can really just suck. It's not better for the player in some of these instances for sure. And then you get the duplicate problem. It's really just a worse progression system for some of these games over systems that have already really been figured out (just do a normal ass RPG type system).

I think it's "Boxes" for sure.

@nevergameover: @bigsocrates: @rigas: As other's have said. Neither examples are so bad that it should stop you playing the game. However, Persona 5 repeatedly use the idea of being gay or having gay sex as something disgusting and a joke. No one is ever called out for it in a game that's entire set-up is based around the idea of calling out hidden oppression that ostracises people. It's not new for Japanese games, but it is completely unacceptable (and makes the idea that Persona 5 fights for social justice rather insulting).

Breath of the Wild had the cross-dressing quest (video) which annoyed me most because of how everyone treats Villia (the trans Gerudo who will sell female Gerudo clothes to Link). The scene in which you meet Villia is fine. It's a series of tired tropes, but nothing chastising. Villia seems confident in herself and effectively deflects Link if he tries to refer to her as a man (she clearly doesn't want to be called a man). The moment the wind suddenly blows to imply Link being shocked to see Villia's face just harkens back to "the bearded lady" being used as a joke or a shock reveal at a fair. However, Villia takes it in stride and warns him to avoid the wind which Link finds humorous. While completely unnecessary, the wind-moment isn't terrible because Link is written as a naive character that is easily shocked, and he doesn't make a big deal out of it.

Link suddenly acting effeminately when he puts on the clothes is annoying because it strips the personality from Villia and reduces them down to a result of the clothes. Villia is a shy feminine character who wants to wear women's clothes and treated as a woman. Link is a rather obnoxious naive boy who suddenly acts kawaii when he puts the clothes on. The moment would be fine if Link's motive for putting them on wasn't completely manipulative to get inside the Gerudo village. In that context, it doesn't come off as Link suddenly feeling comfortable in the clothes to be feminine (which would have been good) but instead reads as Link using testing on his role to trick people. It just reminds me of all the men who put on women's clothes and act especially flamboyant to try and point out how trans women shouldn't be allowed in women's bathrooms.

Nevertheless, the scene in isolation is okay, it's sort of poorly executed but not horrendous. What really annoyed me though is how everyone who refers to Villia describes her as "the man" that snuck in. No one (not even Link) accepts her wish to be referred to as a woman. Her entire agency is boiled down to a character who was smart enough to subvert the Gerudo guards. Her entire character exists purely to trick people and not to simply be happy as herself. That's deplorable. Especially so since it makes no sense: Villia looks like any other Gerudo (All of them are tall and muscular). But in the game, that doesn't matter, because everyone knows she isn't a real women and just the man that got in.

I appreciated this short Paste essay on how Jennifer Unkle found Breath of the Wild betrayed them, and this Kotaku article by Heather Alexander about how fans were reclaiming it outside the game's plot.

Wouldn't have thought about it myself, but this is a good shout. Even when it's a good cover, "moodful cover of known song" is just such a cliché at this point.

Also, that fan-made Tf2 trailer is perhaps a little on the nose ("burning through the sky"), but yo, that's a good trailer!

@stordoff: @spaceinsomniac I agree on the trailer thing. It's actually comical how already run into the ground this was and then I feel like this year it kind of came back harder than ever. Like you say too, with most of these it's a really bad cover of a song that would have even been better if they just used the original. I also got that stupid Lawbreakers one promoted to me on Twitter for a month straight.

It would be a Runner Up for me.

Companies bringing out card games.

Oh yeah and PSN just being bad, plus the influx of games like life of black tiger on there store.

card games

keys to open loot boxes

the ever slowing speed of ps4's menus

For me it's:

• requiring a 100% persistent online connection for any single-player game. No one wants to get kicked back to a menu screen if their internet goes down for 2 minutes (or worse, the game's servers themselves take a crap).
• major releases moving more and more into a homogeneous hodge-podge of base-building/crafting/loot/survival/sorta-open world/dark souls combat/light rpg progression mechanics. Lately, a lot of major titles are looking more and more like they come off the same assembly line with a different coat of paint.
• microtransactions in single player games that shortcut you through the grindy bits the developers put in the game solely to justify the microtransactions the publisher is requiring them to shoe-horn in.
• the hard and fast infiltration of straight-up gambling/exploitation mechanics (especially loot boxes). I am willing to bet that it's the proliferation of gambling in games that leads a government agency to launch another bid for full-on government oversight/regulation of the video game industry.

Came in here to say cover songs for trailers, but I see that's being represented well, so I'll add this - Mass Effect. Just... let it die.

Steam. They introduced a new system after years of mulling about Greenlight's issues, and... it solved literally nothing. If anything it made it easier for that stuff to get on the site since you just pay your way in instead of needing community votes.

Please stop marketing gambling to kids. Whether it's about match gambling, skin gambling, lootbox gambling or whatever, it's not cool. All esports tournaments / teams pretty much do this. Boo. I have no problems with adults choosing to gamble, but when you are bombarded with all kind of gambling sites and lootcrate gambling stuff, to an audience that exists mostly out of kids, it's a bummer. Especially since those sites don't give a fuck about your age. They just want to get as many users as possible before it's shut down.

Also, stop peerpressuring people into buying shit.

I love Dota, but i hate the whole 'level up your tower' phase. It adds the battlepass levels of all teammates, and the higher the number, the cooler your towers look. It's such a dumb thing , that i have not have anyone whine about it personally . But i can easily see how a group of 12 yo kids team up together and peerpressure their lowest battlepass level friend to spend some more money to give their team prettier towers. "You are the lowest level Ricky, we already spent money. Cmon dude, you get some cool shit if you buy 10 levels too!.

Totally disagree. I think all the RPG elements on their own are all great for a person who plays fighting games not that seriously. I don't care about tournament balance and neither do most people who buy Injustice 2. It adds good depth and progression to a genre lacking in it.

I saw a mention of Early Access in general and I have to agree with that. I don't dislike long support for games and community feedback but it's such a nebulous thing and although some games handle it just fine some other ones just abuse it. It's annoying as a consumer because after burning out on a few games when they were very new in EA and unfinished, I don't want to jump into some of these games when they are so unfinished.

Dead Cells is a great example. The developers have said they will be an EA for at least a year and major things will be added and changed. On GB all the crew were saying this wasn't the case and the game was almost done when they talked about the game across multiple videos and podcasts, and this was info I found after looking it up myself. This stuff is confusing unless you do all this research on a game before you buy and man, that is tedious at some point. I don't want to have to read your design doc and figure out what you are going to add and even with some of these games if you are going to actually add that stuff.

Kickstarters shutting down with no accountability of the expendature of money.

Open world and padding out open worlds because devs don't know how to fill an open world once it's created. Specifically, I lay "exploration" and a "vast, open galaxy" as the main reason Andromeda ended up the way it did. Too many devs are confusing the word "exploration" with simply "traversal". Traversing an open world for the sake of traversing it is not fun. There has to be substance there, things to discover, people to meet.

I would say please stop loot crates but not because of the fact that I can't have any of the cool shit, I literally could not give a fuck as long as it's all cosmetic -- I'd say please stop because, before long, they're going to have to start answering questions about why they're not considered actual, literal gambling and exploiting gambling addicts.

It's the exploitation that bugs me. I know it's easy to shrug it off as "Oh, they're either wealthy fuckos from some Silicon Valley startup, an oil baron's kid or some Saudi Arabia prince with way too much time", but I'm fairly sure lots of people who aren't particularly rich spend way, way too much money on loot crates as a form of escapism. It's just wrong to keep peddling that stuff.

It is insane to do for real money and provide no info on odds and things like that. Also, Blizzard is super shitty with this. In China they were forced to show the odds (because rightfully it was ruled as gambling) but they managed to even weasel around that. They know exactly what they are doing. For me that was a big moment to stop making excuses for these companies with that.

Zombie games

Crafting

Microtransactions in AAA games that don't need it

Meaningless side tasks in games, i have a job i don't need a second virtual one. Spend that time on making a better story or a more detailed world.

Steam (and now PS4) garbage games that have no reason to be in the store at all.

Loot boxes, kind of fits in the with microtransactions a bove.

@bigsocrates: I too was not especially put off by this in Zelda. I was incredibly disappointed by Persona 5 in this regard. As has been said the entire game is about fighting social injustices. The series has in the past had gay characters and analysed personal struggles with sexuality and the stigmas people attach. There is even a moment in 4 where a character is chastised for using crude homophobic humour. We are clearly shown that that kind of outlook is not acceptable and that game has a positive message about homosexuality and acceptance.

Unfortunately, 5 does not live up to that. The only gay characters are there for a crude joke at the expense of gay people characterising them as predatory. This is the only way homosexuality is portrayed in the game. They are literally all the game has to say about the issue, which is pretty troubling. If the characters were straight women, the joke would still be of questionable-at-best taste but would function and be markedly less offensive. If the game had positive portrayals of gay characters or tackled the issue with any of the tact 4 had, that would also soften the blow. However, no, this is all you get, and I was rather annoyed. It is fortunately a very minor (though sadly not missable) part of the game and shouldn't ruin the experience overall.

Anyway, my three are microtransactions in full-priced games, gambling mechanics, and the Steam/shovelwarification of console store fronts (mainly PSN, but I'm worried it will happen to the Switch as well).

Most of mine are "Please Stop" for gaming trends on the last couple of years and not exclusive to this year:

• lootboxes
• microtransactions
• mandatory online connection on single player games
• rogue-likes
• over-complicated skill trees
• unnecessary moba-style elements
• unnecessary open world
• unnecessary light-rpg mechanics
• crafting and/or collecting resources to upgrade
• poorly used procedural generation
• companies trying to force e-sports into every multiplayer game
• character-based/class-based multiplayer games (Overwatch, Paragon, Battleborn, Paladins, Agents of Mayhem, Fortnite, Lawbreakers, Quake Champions,...)

Michael Transactions is a menace that must be stopped. And there's only one cop who can do it...

"Edge" Casey

(sorry I just really like that old Bombcast bit)

Anthem is being advertised as a "live service" game, as if that's something anybody would actually want. For me, candidates would be Procedural Generation, Microtransaction-Gambling (loot boxes/keys), and the perennial open-world template. Open world games took down ME this year, Horizon: Zero Dawn is very, very much one of those (but still a decent game in spite of it).

Dev's need to stop following the leaders and go back to tightly handcrafted content, even if that means a massive reduction in game scope. I'll trade all the procedurally generated or barren open worlds for a smaller high-production-quality experience.

This is as much games coverage and fans as the games itself. Also, Maybe this is just factor of me getting old. But I've been noticing a continuing slow increase in the perpetuation of myths and false histories around games. Mostly it's just nitpicking nerd stuff, but it can escalate into truly offensive nonsense being promoted.

Some relatively benign examples:

* 'Early Access' is a new thing.

* Calling things 'roguelike elements' that would normally disqualify something from being a roguelike.

* "Nier: Automata is nothing like the first Nier"

* Various unfounded nonsense about the performance of some game engines. (I include the "It should be forbidden to inform readers what engine the game runs on!" essay in this.)

Like a lot of people mentioned: Lootboxes

I feel like this year the whole exploitative gambling system is finally spilling out of bounds, whatever those are. The "core" gaming industry is literally taking the worst thing about f2p phone monsters, because money. When it was restricted to mobas and cosmetics it was to me kind of ignorable, this is quickly ceasing to be the case at an increasing pace.

IMO the lootboxes in games should be classified as a form of gambling and subject to both warnings, age restrictions and regulation/oversight. The bureaucratic overhead alone would provide at least some form of barrier to just slapping that shit around on everything. For what it's worth I think this will come about eventually anyway, but it's probably going to take some time and a public outcry or popular media finally taking notice and creating a big deal out of it.

I have no problem of not biting to those systems myself, primarily because gambling does nothing for me psychologically. But a child is not going to have those same resistances, education or logic barriers set up.

Secondly I very much agree with this as well:

Free to play Hero Shooter MOBA thingies. I feel compelled to try them all because they are free, but I don't like any of them.

@meierthered: Increased amount of garbage games that look like mobile ports for PS4 definitely gets my vote. It's even more perplexing, when some of those games get trailers that are shown on the official Sony Youtube channels, like The Life of Black Tiger or whatever.

Agree, its really sad. And also it seems like when these games hit PSN the developers actually increase the price compared to what they go for on Steam.

Dead Cells is a damn near perfect game, please explain what would make it better?