What are your pet peeves about the games you play?

What are those niggling issues that mess with your patience in game?

Personally I HATE when a npc is taggling along and urging me to hurry up, unless the scene in the game suggests that I should be hasty about it.

Bad checkpointing. Arkham Knight had some really bad ones.

I dislike unintuitive controls or certain feelings of sloppiness/imprecision in my actions. Basically, it's when the mechanics of what I'm doing, either with my hands or inside the game, just don't feel good. It's a case-by-case thing, and very personal, so it's hard for me to list out specifics. I simply know when I don't like it.

I have others, but that's probably the most common one.

I always hate the random beefed up thug dude with extra padding who is always thrown into 3rd-person shooters to add "difficulty". Uncharted and the new Tomb Raider reboot are the biggest perpetrators.

@jaypb08: Agreed; in most cases, bullet sponges feels like a lazy implemention of increased difficulty.

I'll second this one. Nothing pisses me off more than a checkpoint before an unskippable cutscene.

I hate it when games require my email address to play. Sports game are terrible for this.

Situations in games where if you get too far away from the objective the game yells at you. Even worse, kills you or forces you to reload because you failed by being too far away.

Power teases. Not a big deal, but I don't like when I have to feel like I'm spending the game getting upgrades to get back to where I was at the beginning of the game.

As said above, checkpoints. Ever since Jak II I've had a burning hatred for badly spaced checkpoints.

Guard or follow this npc to the objective missions when the npc moves slower than your characters running speed. Witcher 3 has a few npcs where I have to stop sprinting and let them run ahead of me a bit so I can begin sprinting again. And I can't use the regular run because they move faster than those speeds and will outrun me. Pretty annoying. Especially since other npcs in that game are perfectly fine with keeping up with me.

No animation for walking on stairs.

Bad checkpoints. Y'all have already covered this.

Bullet sponge enemies for enhanced "difficulty." Really pissed me off in the Tomb Raider reboot and kinda soured me on the whole experience. Also...

Quick time events that instantly kill you. Again, Tomb Raider is extremely guilty of this and all of the huge spectacles to get you from point A to point B took away from the game, especially when I jumped at the last moment like I'm supposed to and Lara fails to grab the edge for no good reason.

Games that don't checkpoint/have a continue system and rely on you saving as a checkpoint. This isn't really a modern problem, but as a kid I never saved on my own unless there were save points on the map (think Final Fantasy), the game asked if I wanted to save, or if I was going to quit playing. Otherwise, I'd tank on ahead through the game and if I ran into some sort of difficulty spike such as a boss and lost, that typically meant my previous save was hours behind where I died. Dark Cloud 1&2 and Disgaea come to mind. Also I'm playing through Disgaea 3 right now, is that still the case? If so, I nearly had this happen last night.

That's all I got now but I'm sure I can think of more

Games that don't let you adjust the FOV or pull the camera back. I'm having a real hard time playing Witcher 3 - the camera is just too damn close.

Insta-death with games that have long load times.

Insta-death with games that have shitty checkpoint systems.

No jumping.

Weapons that take up 1/4 of the screen.

Games that don't let you invert the camera. I really wanted to play FF12, but never could because of its camera.

Invisible walls.

Invisible walls in flight games. Or games with flight that just automatically make you loop back.

Games that cut to cinematic views, only to expect you to pull off some sort of feat of dexterity a half second later.

Needing to sign into a rockstar, EA, Ubi whatever account.

I'm starting to dislike HUDs in all games. When I watch E3, it's with this really distant and skeptical sense about what I'm seeing, because all E3 demos almost entirely remove the HUD. This makes the game look beautiful, because 40% of the screen isn't taken up by objects and text elements. Part of the reason Silent Hills 1-3 were so visually arresting is that they take out all obvious game elements from the screen and allow you to get absorbed in the world, you're not focusing on your minimap or your magic points, you're looking at the dirt on the walls, the rust on the floor, the broken stonework and the stained hospital beds.

I wish there was a game that made the HUD into a button press for when I want to actually check some information. I totally understand that a game without a HUD is much harder to play, I do want a minimap and my health status and a compass and an objective marker... but maybe I don't want them all the time?

In F1 2013, getting hit by the AI drivers. I've had to use so many flashbacks because they'll hit my car and spin me out, ruining an otherwise good race. This is usually especially bad at the start of each race going into the first turn. In general, AIs in racing games are frustrating because they never seem to follow the rules you are expected to follow. I've been illegally overtaken in F1 2013 a few times.

In Project CARS, on the main menu on PC, they have an X at the top right corner to exit the game that I hit at least once a session by accident when I actually meant to close a pop up window or exit a certain menu. The whole Project CARS main menu UI is a bit of a mess.

In general, any game that requires me to sign up for a service to play. At least with Codemasters games, you can skip this if you just want to play single player, but for Ubisoft games, it's especially annoying.

Games that are too easy at the expense of being "cinematic". This is a huge issue with a lot of modern games. They have fancy cutscenes and story but the gameplay is mind-numbingly dull.

Random difficulty spikes and bad checkpoints when they are my only option to save/stop playing.

getting stuck on things - this so very rarely happens in real life, we have the ability to move over or slide around or along obstacles even when we can't see straight or walk in a straight line.

excessive prodding and camera shake. i'd say this stuff breaks more than helps with immersion, it's just too annoying.

loss of audio as a way of conveying low health. it seems like this is becoming a thing of the past but man it drove me crazy in the mass effect games.

In fighting games, I hate when I can't change the language of each character individually. And I think only Street Fighter does it.

Games that talk too much. Just shut up and let me play. If I'm in the middle of some kind of combat situation, don't pipe in with voice-over mission updates because I can't pay attention while I'm busy in combat. If I'm not busy doing something, then just say what you want to say and be done - I don't need a 5 minute "walk and talk" to tell me to go through the double-doors to the next objective.

The best recent example I can think of off the top of my head are the Batman games. My clearest memory of Arkham City is that somebody was nearly constantly babbling at me via radio/phone/loudspeaker. I haven't played Arkham Knight, but if the Quick Look was any indication, it has more of the same - just non-stop yapping.

Another one that comes to mind is Far Cry 4 - with yawn-inducing unskippable cut-scenes that dragged on for about three times longer than they should have. Ugh.

@brodehouse: I am not as annoyed by HUD in general as I am tired of every game using the same template to give you one. And more often than not it feels made for a resolution lower than one's own HD display with no options to change or move it. There are exceptions, like Witcher 3, but in reality I think I just want more elegant solutions than simply resizing and moving them around.

Following people. The only game that does this right is The Witcher 3 and that game doesn't even do it right all of the time. I hate it when I can run past the people I am supposed to be following. Occasionally in The Witcher 3 npcs will match your speed which is nice.

@flasaltine: You can never outrun Elizabeth in Bioshock Infinite. In my experience, no other game has done this better: she's always leading the way, and she never gets stuck in geometry or leads you astray.

I hate it when games rely too much on cutscenes, especially if character animation is subpar and the camera work is wonky. I actually don't mind walk-and-talk sequences -- at least, The Last of Us has done this really well.

Bad running animations.

Bayonetta, Mass Effect 3 are a couple of really bad ones.

First thing that came to mind was "random encounters." D:< I find it hard to enjoy exploring when I'm just tensely waiting for an unseen enemy as I walk around.

I feel like there was a thread like this not too long ago, so I'll just say the same, "random" numbers. Not talking about RNG, but stuff like attributes on things, amounts needed to finish quests, turns/time required to complete a task, etc etc. Too often these numbers just seem picked out of thin air without any consideration of how they affect the game experience. The most obvious recent example is Riddler trophies in Arkham Knight. How did they come to the conclusion that 240+ (or whatever it is) was the right number of trophies ?

bad UI design.

I played a bit of Nosgoth when it was in beta and the entire UI has this dark gothic theme going on, but the shop icon is a fucking yellow icon with a shoppingcart on it.

Slow menus on games that may require frequent restarts. I'm playing the PS Plus free version of Driveclub, and I'm still getting used to the handling so I'm having to do a lot of pressing start, selecting the "restart race" option, then X. Having to keep moving analog sticks/push buttons more than once because it seems like the menu hangs for a little before you can do anything gets old fast.

On top of that they decided to put a photo mode on the right side of the touch pad right next to the button that pauses, so sometimes I press that by accident and have to do even more.

Bad checkpoint/punishing load times upon death usually make me just turn games off. Enemies and bosses that spawn other enemies are also very aggravating. I'm not a big fan of the walk and talk, if I can still move and traverse at normal speed it's fine but forced walk animations suck.

@bluefish: Oh man. I love Mass Effect as though it's my own child, but that franchise probably has the worst implementation of a run function there ever was. Not just animation but just basic press a button and have it work. So bad.

Runrunrun stop, turn, runrunrun, stop, turn, runrunrun get stuck on something, get unstuck, runrunrun, stop, turn.

Yeah it was pretty bad. Gears of War had some pretty shit sprint/run as well.


I hate that the vast majority of games don't let you increase text size at all. I run 1920 X 1080, sit a reasonable distance from my monitor and there are a lot of games where I can not read the text at all unless I reduce the resolution size in the game, but then it's all squished and ugly. Just let me embiggen damn you!

When the entire game consists of looking for 50 different people. Looking at you Geralt.

Collectibles in non open world games are the worst especially when they place them in moments that are supposed to be frantic and you just slowly walking around like a dildo looking for some folder with backstory in it. some of the worst culprits are dead space, alan wake, and uncharted.

To kind of echo what other people have said:

If you are going to create a "hardcore platformer" where you are likely to die the first few times you attempt a section, you have got to get those load times down. Aaru's Awakening was free on PS+ a little while ago, and I gave up on the game pretty quick because the load times after death were 5 - 6 seconds. I doesn't sound like a lot but it adds up in a game like that, especially when you are stuck on a part where you die in a matter of seconds after respawn.

Meaningless additions. Variation for the sake of variation. I like a clean and focused experience, or at the very least janky and ambitious. I just don't want to do crap that doesn't add to the game in a meaningful way.

F2P mechanics in retail games.

Really obvious clipping drives me crazy, for example: running while carrying someone in Ground Zeroes, part of Snake's arm clips all the way through whoever he is carrying. Thankfully it appears to be fixed in The Phantom Pain.

Walking from A to B, without any intervening gameplay.

Lots of games do this; There's a cutscene, and after it ends you get the control over your character back, only for you to take barely five steps before another cutscene kicks in. Just have it be one longer scene, and minimize the amount of times you take away control from the player.

Also, stunlocks. Fuck stunlocks.

I remember finishing the Order 1886, and I felt like I was being so careful checking every nook and cranny to make sure I get all the collectible on my first playthrough. Then I finished, and saw that I didn't find every newspaper or voice recording thing. How? That game only had like a handful of locations in the first place. Now I'd have to replay the entire game again to find the rest but it's definitely not worth it. Just kind of sucks when you can't just get everything on your first playthrough like you'd want to.

tutorials

UGH. This always drives me crazy. Especially if the cutscenes are long.

- I also hate when a game as an extremely long opening cutscene. I get that the story has to be set up somehow, but don't make me sit there and watch what feels like a full length film before I can ever take control of a character. I kind of get annoyed when games want to force feed me too much story. Just let me learn the story through short cutscenes or through gameplay.

- Getting to a boss fight that looks like it's going to be a great battle but ends up being a short QTE-fest.

- Depending how good the boss fight is, I hate when there are no checkpoints in a multi-phase fight. It's terrible when you're pushing through a shitty boss fight, die during phase 4 and have to start over.

I'm sick of the open world game design that Ubisoft invented. All side quests are fetch quests. Like in Arkham Knight: Destroy 50 defense towers, find 5 murder victims, chase this guy 5 times, complete this mini game 10 times in slightly varied ways, I'm sick of side quests just being to do lists.

The only open world game design I like is Bethesda games. Just wander around and discover stuff just through exploration, you don't even need to look at your quest list or the map if you just want to spend the day exploring.

Games where the targeting graticule doesn't match up with the arc of your grenades. I can't count the times in Half Life 2 or Timesplitters when trying to lob a grenade through a door or window resulted in it bouncing off the frame and landing at my feet.

QTE's that result in fail-states.

Fuck that

I don't like ending credits in games. Why would you do that in an interactive medium? The credits could be anywhere. It seems narcissistic and is just another way games try to be like movies. They would be easier to read as a document in the menu. One that you can move back and forth through. If you made a good ending, wouldn't you want people to think about it and everything that lead up to it instead of focusing on names and technical terms?

• Collectibles. It isn't any fun and nobody searches for them without a FAQ anyway.
• Defending missions. It isn't any fun to have a fail state tied to something like this.
• Chasing/tailing missions. They are literally no fun whatsoever.
• Forced walking sections. It is boring and frustrating. Equals no fun.
• Being stunned. It isn't a fun mechanic. I'd rather you have me killed instantly than taking control away from me and then having me die to any other hazard currently going on.

In short, I often get the sense that certain developers think about game design in a way of 'what's currently hot? What should we implement? How do we separate ourselves while still copying existing designs?' and other questions, but they often forget to ask 'is this fun?'.

For example, there isn't a single person I know that think chasing/tailing missions are fun and have ever been fun. The fact they still exist is crazy.

I drop any RPG that doesn't let me directly control all party members.

Puzzle rooms.

Block puzzles mainly ugh