Xmas is over so I'm going to grinch it up with half a dozen grievances about current trends in game design!

Christmas is over so I feel like playing Grinch and complaining about some of the recurrent issues in modern game design that piss me off. These aren’t the most serious issues in the game industry (such as workplace abuse, microtransactions, NFTs etc…) and they aren’t even issues that annoy every gamer but they are complaints that I need to get off my chest and so I’m gonna do it, and nobody can stop me! Except the moderators. They could stop me. But nobody else can stop me!

GRIEVANCE #1: Long, multi-stage, boss battles you need to start from the beginning each time.

One thing that has improved considerably in modern gaming is checkpointing. Old games were caught up in the 8-bit console mentality that forcing the player to play through the same parts of the game over and over in order to advance created good value. It does not, it’s mostly just boring (if the game is actually fun to play over and over then you’ll organically play it over and over even if you don’t have to.) Modern games generally have generous checkpoints that let you focus on the part of the game that you’re struggling with or learning and not have to boringly plod back over areas you’ve already mastered to get there, taking unnecessary hits from sloppiness because you’re so disengaged by a part you’ve already seen.

Except when it comes to long boss battles. Then designers throw these ideas entirely out the window and force you to go through the earlier phases repeatedly in order to learn and eventually conquer the later phases. The thinking here appears to be in part based on immersion (it would be weird to start a boss fight part way through, right?) and in part based on the tension of being sent far back if you die, thus ratcheting up intensity. Beating two phases of a boss only to immediately die to the unfamiliar attacks of the third phase isn’t tense it’s dispiriting and crappy. I generally don’t like boss battles, but I really don’t like boss battles where you have to play the same parts over and over. It doesn’t create tension it creates frustration. As for immersion…there’s nothing immersive about dying over and over and being sent back. Your character died. The story should end there. Some masochist gamers enjoy this stuff and that’s fine. It should be left in their masochist gamer games and not become a standard in the mainstream.

Bonus points here if you get an unskippable cut scene before you start each fight.

GREIVANCE #2: Combos and upgrades that are functionally useless.

What follows is an imagined conversation between myself and a game designer.

“You know how in your game you can save up in game currency to use flashy new power combos?”

“Yeah, we worked really hard on those. They’re awesome!”

“Trying to use them when there are lots of enemies around doesn’t work because another guy will hit you from behind and interrupt your combo.”

“Yeah, you gotta stay on your toes. Stick and move, lol!”

“Trying to use them against bosses doesn’t work because bosses can just shrug off the hits and counter back mid combo.”

“We wanted to maintain the challenge.”

“But the only place they work then is when faced off against a single relatively weak opponent.”

“Yeah that’s a good situation for them.”

“But I don’t need new abilities for that situation. It’s literally the easiest situation in the game.”

“I don’t understand.”

“These combos are just flashier ways to do something I can already easily do.”

“So?”

“It’s very dispiriting to spend a bunch of currency on something that doesn’t actually do anything useful.”

“That’s like your opinion, man.”

“You’re not very good at game design, are you?”

“Wait until you see my fast travel system!”

GREIVANCE #3: Bad fast travel.

Fast travel is something that should be relatively simple. Forza Horizon 5 is a game that does it relatively well. When you start out you can only fast travel between certain festival locations (for a fee) which encourages you to explore the map and drive around, which is much of the fun of the game. Eventually you unlock the ability to travel wherever you want on the map, and as you find bonus boards the price goes down, so by the time you’re deep into the game fast travel is cheap and close to unlimited, allowing you to mop up objectives quickly without a lot of wasted time. This should be a model for other games but it’s not. I’ve encountered two games in the last month (The Ascent and F.I.S.T. Forged in Shadow Tech) that feature two separate fast travel systems and force you to make transfers between them like you were taking a municipal bus system. This is…not at all fun. It’s very annoying. I’ve commuted by public transit for much of my life and it’s not an experience I am eager to relive in video game form (though fortunately there’s no smell-o-vision option that can replicate the NYC subway system). Both these games also feature few fast travel locations and maps that are onerous and annoying to traverse, so even when you get to the closest fast travel location to your destination you still have a bunch of annoying traversal before you get to where you’re actually going. This sucks! So many games seem to treat fast travel as something that has to be closely rationed so the player…doesn’t have too much fun? Doesn’t avoid boredom? I don’t know. Not every game needs the highly adaptable Forza Horizon system, but just let me warp between check points or whatever, even if there’s a nominal fee. Why are you forcing me to do the boring stuff over and over, especially in games like Metroidvanias where it’s impossible to 100% an area the first time through?

GREIVANCE #4: You know what’s better than a short bad story? A very long bad story. No wait-

Not every game can afford a dedicated writer. Writing is also something that everyone thinks they can do well, unlike other game-related disciplines like 3D animation, music, or programming. While some one man band projects have good writing, most small team games without a dedicated writer don’t. That’s okay, since most of us don’t play these games for their stories anyway. The problem is that so many bad writers seem to think they’re great, and proceed to jam their games full of the most inane and boring lore and dialog. Bad writing can be forgiven when it’s sparse and just used to set the tone or give some vague goal to accomplish. When it’s something that takes up a huge chunk of game time it’s unforgivable. Nobody cares about your long and intricate backstory when it’s told by characters who your playerbase wants to punch in the face even though they’re nominally the good guys. Hire a good writer or just keep it short. This can turn an otherwise enjoyable game into a frustrating slog when you’re constantly being interrupted for some masturbatory infodump.

GREIVANCE #5: Opaque progression requirements or mechanics.

In the 1980s and 1990s games frequently hid their progression requirements or important mechanics. This was sometimes done intentionally (much of the “gameplay” of classic adventure games is figuring out what unintuitive series of actions will progress the story) or through bad translation or oversights (Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest is infamous for this.) At the time this was sort of understandable because designers needed to squeeze length and value out of relatively short games with limited memory and because they often didn’t know better and didn’t have outside testers so they weren’t able to judge what would be intuitive. Today we see these mechanics creeping back into games, where you need to scour every pixel in order to advance, or you need to talk to person A followed by person B and then person C before talking to A again to move forward, with no hint as to how that works. You can argue this is even more acceptable today because we have the Internet and people can look up how to advance, but you’re wrong. It sucks! If I have to look something up and risk spoilers only to find that the thing I couldn’t figure out was either something I already tried but not quite in the right order (or, worse, has an inconsistent trigger or requires repetition with no signal that you’re on the right track) then you have failed in game design and should not have designed it this way. Likewise if your game has some crucial mechanic that’s hidden from player understanding and requires crowdsourcing to fully grasp it then congratulations you’ve created a bad time for everyone. Not everything has to be super obvious, but there’s a difference between obvious and something nobody could figure out on their own unless they were an obsessive. Not all of us want to put hundreds of hours into the same game, and even if we do it’s probably not your mediocre game, bro. This often involves the same kind of designer narcissism that leads to #4. Nobody cares about your bad story and nobody wants to waste days searching every corner of your crappy open world.

GREIVANCE #6: High difficulty, low polish.

I’ve often said that an easy bad game is better than a difficult bad game, and that’s true even when the game isn’t bad per se but just unpolished. If your game has issues like a faulty camera or inconsistent timing on button presses or anything else that interferes with game play then you should build in some difficulty cushion for your players to avoid frustration. I can handle difficult games when everything feels fair and I know what I need to do to improve. When I’m playing a really difficult part and doing well but then I die because the camera gets stuck in the geometry you can bet I’m going to warn people away from your stupid garbage game. I understand that not everyone can afford to polish their game to an AAA sheen and that’s fine, but do your player the service of not punishing them for your ineptitude by killing them off because the camera couldn’t follow what they were doing or their grappling hook failed to deploy due to programming bugs. Please and thank you.

GREIVANCE #7: The Dark Soulsification of Everything

This sort of incorporates all the above grievances except for #4. Dark Souls is obviously a series with massive appeal and has had a lot of influence over gaming. I’m not a fan myself but I can respect these games and I’m obviously fine with there being clones and influences. I’ve even enjoyed some explicitly Souls influenced games like Death’s Door and Fallen Order. The problem with the Dark Souls influence is when it creeps into random games where high difficulty doesn’t really match the vibe and makes them teeth grindingly frustrating. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an example of this. It looks like a gentle adventure game modeled on 3D Zelda and Star Fox Adventures, and that’s the vibe you get from the story, but its boss encounters are all heavily Souls influenced and a real pain in the butt. It doesn’t make the game more fun or better, it just makes it take longer. Especially since this is a game with a deeply flawed camera that just can’t keep up with the action during a lot of the later boss fights. In general many of the Souls influenced games lack the series’ budget and development time, meaning that they throw in mechanics or ideas they are not capable of fully executing. A hard and very well designed game can be a joy, but most games don’t need to be very difficult. If your game’s pleasures lie in its visual design or story or sense of progression then throwing in viciously unfair bosses is often a big detriment rather than any kind of asset. A souls influence can be good if you’ve got the chops to make it work, but often it just ends up being difficulty or opacity for difficulty or opacity’s sake and that just sucks. Nobody has time for your self indulgence if you’re not Miyazaki, and you’re not Miyazaki, bro!

CONCLUSION:

I’m sure I’ll get a bunch of blowback on this list and people saying “git gud” or other tripe. Bah, HUMBUG! I don’t care. The only person on this website who can make me cry is @rorie, and he would never! You’re all getting coal in your stocking next year if you disagree with me!

If, on the other hand, you want to join me in stuffing an egg in the Christmas spirit and embracing your inner grinch feel free to add your own grievances below. Holiday cheer is over, let’s get negative!

Regarding mid boss fight checkpoints - generally, I do think they're a good idea, but what if part of the challenge is figuring out how to beat the first phase without blowing all your resources right off the bat? Sometimes it can be a test of how well you pace yourself. A mid fight checkpoint with an option to restart the whole fight could be useful... but if I were a designer I'd be afraid that most people would miss the idea that you need to figure out how to get through the first bit without dropping meteor every turn. This is mostly thinking about turn-based games, especially JRPGs, by the way, although I still think it makes sense for an action game where you might be trying to test a player's endurance as much as their mechanical ability.

Unskippable cutscenes are always an unforgivable sin, though. I'll watch all your cutscenes once, but after seeing it for the fifth time I don't want to see it anymore, especially if your game is purposefully difficult.

Likewise if your game has some crucial mechanic that’s hidden from player understanding and requires crowdsourcing to fully grasp it then congratulations you’ve created a bad time for everyone.

In general, I would agree that this is bad design. However, I would also argue that one of the major reasons Demon's/Dark Souls blew up so much was because people were talking about it online, trying to figure out just what the hell those games were and how to play them well. There's an extremely careful balance here - tell people enough that they can get themselves through the game, but hide enough that there's still something to figure out. Of course, an alternate way to do this is make your game mechanically dense and systems-heavy enough that people can figure out other ways to play your games - an absurd build in Pathfinder or figuring out how to get to the castle in Breath of the Wild within five minutes or stacking up vending machines to skip parts of the level in Deus Ex Human Revolution or something.

My point is that designing games such that people are encouraged to share information isn't necessarily a bad idea, it's just one that's extremely vulnerable to the hubris you mentioned in your writing bit. I think that's where most of these concepts you've mentioned go wrong, really - someone (or a group of someone's) think they're great designers when they really need a lot more practice and constructive criticism.

Anyway, while we're being negative grinches, I want to mention that roguelike design principles and time loops are fucking garbage ideas that should never be implemented again. No, I can't experience the same thing that you experienced while playing Outer Wilds because I was trying to figure out the writing on this wall when the fucking sun exploded, again, and I don't have the patience. I realize that my arguments about multiple stage boss fights above could be expanded to an entire game, but I really don't want to restart at the first level, and no I don't care that I now have a blueprint for a nicer gun or something, I want the gun I had back and I never want to see the first area again. Returnal looks so cool except for the fucking roguelike bit, it's like if someone were to design an amazing futuristic car and then demand that every one of those cars sold had to have a giant turd decal on the hood.

@justin258: These things are trends because they can sometimes be done well. Outright terrible ideas rarely spawn imitators. But if an idea only works well if perfectly executed and otherwise is a pain in the butt or an outright hinderance then it's something that should only be used by teams that have time to carefully refine and polish their games.

As for the idea that "if I were a designer I'd be afraid that most people would miss the idea that you need to figure out how to get through the first bit without dropping meteor every turn" I reject that kind of thinking. Let people drop Meteor every turn if they want to and that's what's fun for them! I'm tired of these precious little designers who demand everyone play things their way. Authors don't get to control whether people skip to the ends of their books. Filmmakers don't get to control whether people fast forward through the talky bits to get to the action or nudity. Musicians can't force people to listen to all the songs on the album and not just the catchy singles. Game designers need to let people just play games how they want to.

These tantrum throwing "NO! PLAY IT MY WAY! I MADE IT SO YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT MY WAY!" designers can go soak their heads. That's not how media is supposed to work. Now of course there are ways to gently guide people towards ways to play that are richer or more satisfying, and that's fine, but all too often that's not what's done. It's just brute force stubbornness and it doesn't actually teach you those lessons. Instead it brute forces you into "gitting gud."

I personally never like those online "let's figure this all out together" zeitgeist things. Part of this is because I don't like playing games at release (they're often in their worst state then) and part of it is that I like figuring stuff out on my own. That's personal taste but this is my list of petty grievances, not an objective list of problems (in which case labor issues would be #1.)

I mostly agree with you on roguelites. I think games like Returnal would be much better as linear action adventure experiences. But some games that play radically different with different builds (like Hades or Enter the Gungeon) justify their roguelite status and let you re-experience the same levels with a whole different approach in a way that's really fun. In some ways roguelite mechanics are like other things in this list. Sometimes good but overused and often badly implemented.

I agree with all of these

Everything having RPG elements.

Honestly I'm pretty "I don't get it, it's fine" with most of this but the myriad ways in which developers do not understand the purpose of or desire for proper Fast Travel is always going to strike a nerve for me.

I don't care whether or not it makes narrative sense I don't care if the developer is worried about immersion or concerned about whether it would stop players from exploring.. I want to open a map and select a location and be there or within striking distance of it.

It's hard to argue with this list, especially #5. Games need to tell the player what they need to do and how to do it. Secrets and obscure tricks are fine as bonuses for exploration and experimentation, but never for a critical path or a vital mechanic. That doesn't respect the player's time.

If it takes a community of people to figure out how something works in your game, that's an indictment of the game.

I'm the site's resident roguelike defender. It's a perfectly fine design philosophy. However, even I'll admit that it's sometimes used in games that would be better without it.

I wish developers would stop chasing "photorealistic graphics" and experiment with more unique art and animation styles. The graphical arms race is a huge part of why games are so expensive to make, and it's completely unnecessary.

As people who have played a ton of games, what makes a good tutorial? We're all probably aware of how designers lead players to points of interest.

GREIVANCE #2: Combos and upgrades that are functionally useless.

Honestly, i think most games are awful with their skilltrees and struggle to fill up the skilltree with meaningful options. But they do want to give the player that feeling that they are getting stronger over time and gain access to advanced moves. This is why the devs end up giving you a whole lot of stuff to unlock, of which only 4 or 5 options might give you a feeling of 'huh.. i actually feel excited about getting to pick this option!'.

Even a game like Witcher 3 which presents itself as a action adventure RPG, has an incredibly flimsy skilltree. Now i understand that the devs never intended Geralt to become a chainlightning swinging, flying half-god of a hero, but i really don't need 3 different options depending on which armor i'm wearing. I also wonder how many people decided to pick the skill 'Advanced Pyrotechnics: Damage dealt by a bomb's explosion generates 0.1 Adrenaline Points. 0.1 Point... did anyone over at CD Projekt Red feel excited about this? Was there some mad man that lobbied to make it give you 3 points and then the rest of the table kicked him out of the window? Or the skill In Combat's Fires: You ignore Bomb and special bolt effects. Now i've played over hundred hours of the Witcher 3 and i can tell you that the existance of enemies using bombs and special bolts on you is just not anything you should worry your pretty head about. There's just so much junk in most skilltrees.

Shoutout to Transistor for giving you a lot of very useful and interesting options.

It's junk but I feel most skill trees spread themselves far and wide for hypothetical people. Like how Nioh tends to throw skills across different stances that .... feel kinda superficial.

Authors don't get to control whether people skip to the ends of their books. Filmmakers don't get to control whether people fast forward through the talky bits to get to the action or nudity. Musicians can't force people to listen to all the songs on the album and not just the catchy singles.

If you skip to the last few pages of The Lord of the Rings to read about the Scouring of the Shire, you haven't experienced The Lord of the Rings. And if that's all you want to do, OK, but you haven't read the book.

If you watch Terminator just because you heard it had boobs, you haven't seen The Terminator.

If you only listen to Dreams, you sure as hell haven't heard all of Rumours.

Have you ever looked at Pathfinder: Kingmaker's difficulty options screen? Or the one belonging to its sequel, Wrath of the Righteous? Owlcat Games has done pretty much everything in their power to ensure that anyone playing those games can get the experience they want. If you don't want to engage with character planning, pick one of the archetype main characters or "recommended builds" and allow the game to auto-level you and your companions so you never have to look at the level up screen, except to acknowledge that you leveled. If you don't want to deal with the kingdom management at all, you can downright turn it off. If you're just there for the music, visuals, and story, you can set the game to where it's nearly impossible to lose and just burn through it. On the flip side, you can turn off pretty much every helper feature available and pick the "unfair" difficulty, which is literally unfair and designed to fuck you over at any and every turn possible. And every level of complexity and difficulty in between!

I find this pretty amazing and I am all for implementing such customizable difficulties, especially in complex single player games like Pathfinder. However, even with all such options, each difficulty has to be "balanced" in some way. If you intend your normal difficulty to be the one that most people play on (an attitude I'd argue is fairly standard), then you probably intend at least some challenge to be present. If you, as a designer, want all tactics and strategies to be viable, then you're going to find it near impossible to make a genuinely challenging game. If you, as a designer, want an absurdly powerful spell available late in the game, but you also want that spell to be special and you want some kind of challenge to exist, you have to find some way to limit the casting of that spell such that it doesn't essentially function as an auto-win button. As an example, look at Symphony of the Night. That game starts somewhat challenging, but can rather quickly be broken, and even someone who doesn't know anything about the game can find themselves steamrolling virtually everything in the game by the halfway point. Parts of the inverted castle can get difficult again, but not particularly. Compare that to the much later Order of Ecclesia, a rather difficult game that limits the player in more ways, but also forces the player to learn how to play the game. It doesn't force you to learn how to play a specific way. It doesn't demand that you use this precise tactic against this monster and it never tells you that you had better fight this way despite other options being available. But it does tell you that you need to get better at dodging, sliding, dashing, you need to use a variety of weapons because there are strengths and weaknesses, you need to have some mastery of that game to finish it. If you strongly dislike any of those mechanics, it might not be the game for you, even if you're really enjoying the music and art style and you think it's cool that Shanoa can keep up with all the Castlevania heroes while wearing a backless dress.

And you can't gain any mastery of a game if you're just casting Meteor - or whatever the most powerful thing in the game is - over and over again. That's no fun at all. I know that some people think a power fantasy in video games is walking into a room and just easily crushing everything, but I don't get a power fantasy from that. I just feel bored. I get a power fantasy from scraping by the skin of my teeth. And sometimes casting Meteor when I have no other option.

And I would also say that you haven't experienced all of a game if you didn't learn at least something significant about how to play it. I mentioned Dreams above and I don't think that comparison necessarily holds here - if you played through Pathfinder with every single difficulty option tuned as easy as it can be, I'd say you experienced Pathfinder - but in the same way that someone who listens to all of Rumours with all of the basslines removed has heard Rumours.

...I swear I didn't write a whole bunch of text just to tell people that "this is what easy mode is for", but... well... there you go. Seriously, I do think an expansive "customize your difficulty" menu is a pretty good idea for most games - it doesn't affect people who want your "intended experience" and only expands your audience.

These tantrum throwing "NO! PLAY IT MY WAY! I MADE IT SO YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT MY WAY!" designers can go soak their heads. That's not how media is supposed to work. Now of course there are ways to gently guide people towards ways to play that are richer or more satisfying, and that's fine, but all too often that's not what's done. It's just brute force stubbornness and it doesn't actually teach you those lessons. Instead it brute forces you into "gitting gud."

Out of curiosity, what are some games that you feel do this? Without mentioning Doom Eternal, I've talked enough about how that game doesn't do this on this site (the DLC does, the base game mostly doesn't).

GREIVANCE #7: The Dark Soulsification of Everything

This is the main one that has been pissing me off for the past couple of years. It's like most game developers now wants to make a Souls rouge-like instead of just a standard action game. Yes, the Souls games can be epic, but trying to make every game like Souls is destroying the Action/RPG genres. Soulborne's are like that fun food you only eat every now and again during the year, because despite liking it, you know you'll get sick of eating it every single day, like maybe Tacos. Well, this is what a lot of developers are doing with their games, forcing gamers to play the same style of game in almost every entry, and its becoming too much to mentally disgust. Yeah, I think Returnal is a very good game, and I'll play Elder Ring at some point. But again like the food, that is because one is well made and the other is from the original chefs. Most food places can make a hamburger, but only a few places make an excellent hamburger.

@justin258: I never said that skipping to the end of The Twin Towers would mean you've read the book, just that people should be able to do that if they want. What if someone doesn't want to hear all of Rumours? A lot of people don't. So what? Many games allow the gamer to select how much they want to play and what they want to experience through various means. Only some insist you must learn "x" lesson before they'll be kind enough to show you the end and they mostly aren't worthy of the time commitment they demand.

If you want to limit the casting of "Meteor" there are lots of ways to do that. Like just...limit the casting. Make it a spell you can cast once before you need to "rest" at a save point to recharge the ability. Or whatever. There are lots of ways to impose these kinds of limits without forcing players to replay boring sections over and over. Forced replay is a blunt and stupid way to try to get this point across. Just be more creative and design outside the box. Or if players really want to do it let them even if it's not what you'd rather they do. Lindsey Buckingham won't come to your house and spill wine on your sofa if you just want to listen to "Go Your Own Way" on repeat. His check cashes just the same.

I'm not against challenge in games or even games specifically designed around having high skill floors. I'm against stupid difficulty spikes, bad balancing, and forced repetition. There are good ways to do these things and bad ways and designers too often just choose the bad way to prove a stupid point.

There are tons of games that throw tantrums if you won't play them the way the designers think you should. There are games with flat out unviable builds and games that are much much harder one way rather than another for reasons you wouldn't expect. One game that did this almost by accident was Deus Ex: Human Revolution. If you weren't combat specced the bosses were so impossible they had to launch an updated version of the game to make it actually playable with multiple specs. Oops! That seems to have been due to internal miscommunication but it's far from the only game that's built that way. Whether it's forced failure stealth sequences or games that lock away core content behind higher difficulties the gaming world is full of prima donna designers who seem to be very opposed to actually letting the player enjoy the game they bought in the manner they'd like.

Highly customizable difficulty is great and becoming more common. Gaming is finally realizing that this is an accessibility issue and some companies are stepping up. Others aren't, though, and I have no patience for the "old school" mentality or the idea that you have to earn the right to enjoy something you paid for.

Charge me money or make me jump through hoops. Not both.

This was the main reason gaming developers killed the console cheat device industry after the PS3 and Xbox 360 were released, like the Game Genie, Gameshark, and Pro Action Replay. And why they tried to kill Cheat Engine on PC but has so far failed. It's really stupid, because it does nothing against them as they already got the money from the consumer, and whether the consumer uses a cheat device or not is none of their business. I'm not saying gamers should use them, but they should have that option. Personally, I use Cheat Engine on PC all the time on RPGs to give myself Infinite money so I don't have to do a lot of grinding for items and equipment. Makes the games play a lot smoother.

@av_gamer: publishers killed cheat devices so they could sell “time savers” like currency and XP doublers, which they do for tens of millions of dollars every year. It wasn’t about snobby artistic purity it was about Ubisoft getting them Asscreed time savers buxx.

Thank god for having other hobbies, am I right?

I'm pretty alright with games right now, not even feeling particularly grinchy. One of my biggest game pet peeves: shitty delay-based netcode for fighting games, is looking more and more like it's on its way out. At the start of the month Blazblue Centralfiction got rollback, so that's been taking up most of my gaming time. It's fuckin awesome.

That's a pretty good thread!

I have a billion grievances, but here's a random one (not necessarily the biggest one):

In most story-centric single player games, they usually add in background chatter between NPC(s) and your character to fill the silence when you're walking towards some pivotal waypoint, but you reach the waypoint too fast so the dialog gets cut off and you miss out on the conversation/content.

@goosemunch: I agree that's very annoying and quite common. It's also easily solved. Just add a button prompt to trigger whatever happens at the destination or a marker that shows that if the player reaches location X then the ongoing conversation will cease and the next thing will trigger. Then people can decide to listen to the rest of it or just move on.

The weirdest type of this thing is when the actual transit itself is a race or chase or other timed thing. Your goal is to get where you're going as quick as possible and then you're punished for it by missing the end of the conversation. Talk about mixed design imperatives.

@onemanarmyy: This is the biggest one for me. It drives me crazy to play a game with shoehorned RPG elements with a skill tree full of “+3% fire damage (0/10 ranks)”. If that’s your interpretation of the skill tree, you shouldn’t have even bothered.

As for The Witcher 3 (which I played through for the first time earlier this year), it’s kind of amazing how little engagement I had with that skill tree. I leveled the weak attack first thing and never needed anything else for the entire game. There’s really no reason to even look at most of it, which is a shame because it’s an absurdly long game.

Are we complaining about stuff? I love complaining about stuff! Here's my list.

Grievance 1: Keyboard controls on a console port (or "Press Enter to Continue")

As a PC player, I'm used to launching a game and immediately looking at a main menu. When I launch a game and get the logo alongside "Press Enter to Continue," my expectations for the game are instantly lowered. I don't know why the "press a button to continue" screen exists, I just know that it's common in console games. Also, have you seen where the "Enter" key is on a keyboard? If you're playing a shooter, your hands are usually on WASD and the mouse. How are you supposed to hit Enter? Anyway, when I see that screen I'm instantly prepared to fight with the game's insistence that I use a controller.

Halo infinite is a recent example of this ("Look up, Chief! Now look down. Do you want to invert your mouse?"). This isn't a gripe about the usual control settings for shooters. I'm already used to raising mouse sensitivity, disabling mouse acceleration and maxing out FOV on nearly every FPS. I feel like most PC players have come to terms with that. What bugs me are the control choices that are clearly made without a PC player in mind.

When I opened the map in Halo, I audibly groaned. The map floats and moves around if the mouse cursor is pointed in any direction but center. When you click on a waypoint, the camera slowly moves over to the spot, and then stops. At first I thought, what the hell is wrong with this map? Then I realized I'm supposed to use WASD to move the map around, like I'm emulating a joystick. How could a game possibly get maps wrong?

And then there's the grappling hook. Great addition to the game. The Titanfall-ification of shooters is one trend I'm perfectly okay with. Press Q to zoom around. Great! Then I unlock the enemy detector thing, and I'm forced to equip it before I can use it. It uses the same exact hotkey as the grappling hook. WHY? Why can't I just push Q to use the grappling hook, and a different key to throw the stupid radar thing that I literally only use when stealth guys are around? Let me bind this! Then later on I get a dash move, and it's the same problem. I have to switch to it, dash, then switch back to the grapple. In other words: I never used the dash move throughout the entirety of my playthrough of Halo Infinite. Doom Eternal solved this problem so easily, I wasn't even aware it was a problem. I understand there are only so many buttons on a controller, but there are LOTS of buttons on a keyboard.

Grievance 2: Verbal hints when the game thinks you're taking too long (or "Hey! Listen!")

This one is more of a pet peeve. I'd be more okay with it if there was a "turn off verbal hints" option or something, but I've found that to never be the case. Halo Infinite also has this issue. You're given a kind-of-open-world map with markers and locations to go to, but if you're not following the story marker your robot buddy will chime in with "We should check out the story mission! It's important!" Okay Cortana, or whatever your name is, I get it. Let me explore the game that people took time to design.

This is real egregious in Psychonauts 2. Great game. Beautiful art and level design. Heaven forbid you want to explore or goof around when the game expects you to be solving a puzzle. There's a particular area where you're given a set of words (ideas) and need to connect specific ones to incept a thought into your teacher's mind. Each mental connection connection you make has a unique voice line associated with it. Some of them are pretty funny or clever. Naturally, I want to link the wrong ideas and listen to them all. However, the entire time I'm doing this, Raz keeps chiming in with hints about what I'm supposed to be doing. "Hmm. If only there was a way to convince her to change her mind." "Hmmmmmm, I bet I could do something about her fear of RISK." "HMMMM, what if I change her idea of MONEY?" "HMMMM. JUST CONNECT "RISK" WITH "MONEY" YOU IDIOT."

What the hell, Tim Schafer? I'm trying to enjoy your writing. Stop telling me to hurry up!

Grievance 3: The grind (or "It gets good after the 8 hour mark")

Uuuuuuuuuuuugggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Now I don't feel like writing anymore. Thanks, Back 4 Blood. Thanks for nothing.

@besetment said:

That giant novelty keyboard probably seemed like a funny idea at the time but just look where it's got you.

@besetment: #2 is another one that has a very easy solution. Just give the player a button prompt to hit when they want a hint. Games figured this out in the 90s but modern games seem to think we love having puzzles spoiled if we don't immediately solver them/make a bee line for the solution (or even sometimes if we do; I've had games shout out the answer at me before I could ever have actually solved the puzzle given the walking speed).

Does anyone actually like being nagged about what objective to go to? Sometimes I really wonder who exactly these 'features' are for. Probably braindead executives who don't really play games and need everything spoon fed if they ever bother.

@efesell

@bigsocrates: Yeah...I agree with a lot of these. I will say, I don't think long, multi-stage boss battles with no save checkpoints are a current trend. They still happen, but I think it's an older design philosophy that hasn't gone away more so than a current trend.

You are fucking spot-on about useless upgrades. Either you can't complete combos because you get hit or can't complete combos because the only enemies susceptible to them die after move #4 on a 6-move combo.

The Ascent has terrible fast travel, made worse by an awful map.

Regarding story and writing in games, there was actually a Twitter discussion about this last week where long-time game devs said exactly that. Everyone in every department thinks they can write. According to these devs, no other department in game dev gets as much unwarranted input--and as much demand to make changes based on that input--than the writing department.

Your last three points are related and I 100% agree. There's a difference between a puzzle, and something designed to be obtuse just to satisfy a game designer's ego.

Ooo! Some good stuff in this thread! First to reply to a couple of comments made previously:

This is known as policing fun, and is exactly what the OP was complaining about regarding devs getting angry about playing their game "right". That fine that you don't find it fun nuking everything with meteor, but some people do enjoy that. "That's no fun at all" is a personal opinion, not some universal constant. Your Kingmaker paragraph is pretty spot on though. Adaptive difficulty options are definitely where the money is at. That being said, your comparison to Rumours doesn't make a whole lot of sense, especially the "listening without a bass track" option. If anything, I'd compare it to listening on dollar store earbuds vs a full remastered release on a high end soundsystem myself, rather than removing an entire member of the band. (side note: at least this comment got me to listen to Rumours for the first time in a while. The Chain is still the best song on that album).

You would be alright with BBCF getting rollback. You sick fuck.

Regarding the first, yes, you have more access to buttons on a keyboard, but the part you seem to be missing is that the game was balanced around needing to switch tools on a controller, so having easy access to everything all the time could in theory mess up the designers' intended balance (much like how you don't have access to FOB weapons during the long single player missions). That being said, fuck the devs, let people map the controls of a game how they want.

As for the second, WEAPON DROVE ME FUCKING NUTS WITH HER CONSTANT BARKS TO GET BACK ON TRACK WITH THE STORY, just holy shit. I even checked the options multiple times to see if there was an option to turn down the frequency, since that game is pretty good for accessibility options otherwise. It's an open world game. The player fucking around between main missions is the whole point. Imagine if an NPC in Skyrim just kept barking orders at you to kill the dragons or whatever. Madness.

As far as my own grievances, everything being a roguelite is one of the worse ones for me, but that's mostly because I'm bad at video games, and they all are tuned to be arcade hard, not modern console game hard. Fine for those who like it, but more than any other genre, these games need significant difficulty options. I was never even able to beat Hades for real without cheat engine (and then it turns out I had to beat the game another 9 times on top of that for any story resolution. Talk about a game that killed its fantastic gameplay by forcing me to play way more of the game than I wanted). I don't want to play the same intro level 30 times, getting more bored and frustrated every time I have to replay it. One possible option would be to make a "canon": seed that you could play like a normal game, with the roguelite portion being for those who want to further explore the game's mechanics. I'm more of a content tourist, (and Hades was a game that had a shitload of great content in terms of music and writing), why do I have to keep playing until I don't actually like the game anymore just to experience that content? Now there's this fantastic action game with brilliant art and writing and fun gameplay that I will never touch again because beating it once wasn't enough, gotta beat it 10 times actually.

You made me curious about the "Press Start to Continue" splash screens so I did some digging and found this explanation for why it exists in an old thread from a game development subreddit:

They are TCR/TRC's on the consoles for certification; i.e. to be on that platform it's a requirement to ship.

There are a few reasons why this exists:

• One, it means you can reach an interactive state as soon as possible as a Press Start Page is about as light of an asset load as you can get. UE3 was notorious for having bulky and slow-loading menu systems, to the point that if you didn't have this screen you could actually fail a different cert test (needing to reach an initial interactive state in X time)
• Two, it means the first thing you see for the game is not a menu. Hence why these usually have a game logo or other "attract screen". It's a lot nicer to see a big "MASS EFFECT 2" logo than a dense menu. This is more a relic of "Demo stations" in electronics stores to be honest. Some games will have an "attract" video sequence that plays if this screen is idle for a certain amount of time for that reason.
• Three, you can use this screen to resolve any profile sign-in or controller issues. For a single player game whichever profile and controller is used to actually press start will be the controller/profile the game pays attention to. Last thing you want is someone grabbing controller 2 and being able to move your guy; but you also need to be able to start the game with controller 2 if that's the one you're using.
• Four, once you're past the start screen games are usually starting to save some info to your profile (even if it's just making directories for later gamesave or preference changes). You can't get past this screen without a profile usually.
• Five, it's a page to return to in the event of a profile change. You sign out of your live account and your friend signs in. It returns him to the start page so that he can't delete your saves, etc.

You'll notice pretty much all of that is specific to consoles. Not having to deal with profiles, multiple controllers, or just the testing requirements in general really means there is a lot less value for a PC game. Many PC games skip this for that reason.

I do agree that it's a personal opinion that a stiff challenge isn't necessarily fun for everyone. I do think it's a good idea to get as close to that Kingmaker-esque difficulty options menu as you can. However, my comment was primarily considering a "normal" difficulty setting, or "intended", or whatever you want to call it, as I wrote here:

However, even with all such options, each difficulty has to be "balanced" in some way. If you intend your normal difficulty to be the one that most people play on (an attitude I'd argue is fairly standard), then you probably intend at least some challenge to be present.

I feel like careful difficulty pacing and balancing is an important thing to consider in game design - and I don't think you can carefully pace and balance difficulty without also bringing limitations to the player. You either remove all the fun awesome stuff that does tons of damage (like Meteor) or you limit its use (in the case of Final Fantasy IV, by giving players a limited pool of magic points and then making Meteor cost a lot of magic points). Balancing difficulty is part of the art of making a good video game and completely removing that element is, to me, like removing the bass from a seminal record - it's an important part of the experience. That's what I meant.

If the designer wants to implement a significant number of difficulty modifiers, that's great! I like that idea and so do many others. But they shouldn't be obliged to.

I do have to ask how narrowly you and @bigsocrates are defining this whole "play how we want you to!" argument, because I feel like we're on completely different pages here. Back to Pathfinder... sorry, I've been playing that a lot... I would think of "play how we want you to" as "you can be one of many different classes but we think Fighters and Paladins are the best so if you're not playing one of those you're going to have a bad time". You guys seem to be coming at it from the direction of "what if I want to have infinite fireballs and wield two greatswords while wearing the heaviest armor in the game?" That just sounds like you guys want cheat codes back, or like you want a mini cheat engine in every game.

Finally,

One game that did this almost by accident was Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Extremely restrictive game design is, I think, something to be heavily criticized, as it was for this game. You can get completely screwed over in DE:HR if you didn't pick "the right things", though that can be chalked up to rushed development and outsourced boss fights (hey yo if you need to outsource your boss fight, just kill them in a cutscene instead, OK?).

@ll_exile_ll: That was a really cool read. Thanks for that.

I mean, I won't lie. a lot of times I prefer playing games on PC just because it does allow me to use cheat engine. I never would have seen the first ending of Hades without it, let alone the tenth. Ultimately though, I tend to use something like Cheat Engine to "sand down the edges" of an experience, so to speak. Infinite currency or XP (or at one point, health in Hades) At some point, the player almost always gets ahead of the game in modern game design, with the story or gameplay or gameplay execution becoming the limiting factor.

A dev trusting the player to enjoy their game how they want, not how the dev intends is where this leads, right? Especially in some more punishing genres. Pathfinder is a great example of this. They made a whole Kingdom simulator that you can just...turn off. Or Celeste has to be the best modern example, no? Splatformers are a notoriously difficult genre, but Celeste's devs realized it was more important that players play the game and experience the story on their own terms rather than be forced into trying to complete a game that they don't enjoy.

And ultimately, that's what it REALLY all comes down to. A dev asking "is it more important to me that someone play my game and do it the way I see as correct, eventually leading to the player dropping the game? Or is it better to allow the player to play it in ways I never intended, but they keep playing my game and having fun with it and experiencing the game on their own terms?"

@heyitsdale: The Forza Horizon 5 fast travel system is designed to unlock in phases. You do get a basic fast travel to outposts as soon as you start the game, and in a game where the whole POINT is driving and there are rewards for exploration it makes sense to start off with somewhat limited fast travel. Then you improve your fast travel options over time through gameplay methods. 2 million credits is a lot but not an obscene amount in a game that showers you with currency and wheelspins, and having the travel boards require some tricky maneuvering to get creates in game challenge and goals. You can argue for tweaking it in one way or another but it's well thought out and evolves as you get deeper into the game. You start out incentivized to drive everywhere and explore the world and by the time you're deep into things and have seen basically everything and done all the exploring you want to you can basically fast travel wherever you want for close to free.

@justin258: So I didn't actually say that people should just be able to play whatever they want however they want I just said that if you want to limit people in some way (like from using meteor too much) there are ways to do that besides punishing them with long boss fights with no checkpoints. My point there was more about it being the wrong tool for that purpose.

All that being said, I actually do think that players should be able to cheat at will in single player games. Why not? Can you name a game that was ruined by cheats? Many classics had them, from Contra and SimCity to GTA III. Every NES game with a password system functionally had cheats even if they weren't officially cheats because magazines would publish level skip passwords. It didn't ruin any of these games.

The developer can tune the difficulty to whatever they want and let the player circumvent that difficulty through cheats if they want to. Incentivize playing the standard mode through achievements if you really want or whatever but...what's lost in this scenario?

Remember Doom 1993? That game had a full suite of cheats and a lot of people wouldn't have seen the whole thing without them, but nobody thinks the game was ruined by it. History shows that letting people cheat freely in single player games doesn't ruin them or keep them from being hard or whatever.

@onemanarmyy: Yeah, people overlook that reviewers criticizing certain things over the years caused the ridged game development we now hate. Over the years read old reviews:

Critics state negatives:

My personal one. Games that force you to listen to audio inside the menu for fear it cuts out or plays over a cutscene and gets reviewers to dock it. I dont care about minor glitches, and plenty of gamer's don't its only mentioned and criticized so much in reviews cause its a have to tell, not the end of the world. Devs we know your just human. Also final bosses immune to everything besides slashing. Let me turn him to a zombie and cast life on him to kill em...its fun.

I know this is part of a larger point, which I do agree with in general, but it's pretty weird that in this giant list of generalities, one of the few games you call out for being too hand holdy is Destiny. Like, Destiny is a game with dungeons and raids that give you literally no direction at all. You either figure out what you're supposed to do or you look it up. Sure, some of the more accessible content has waypoints and the like, but the best content in Destiny doesn't give you any direction at all. Day 1 Raids in Destiny are some of my favorite gaming memories of the past decade because it's just you and five other people working together trying to figure out mechanics through experimentation and problem solving.

And thus, the slow walk-and-talk section was born!

@shindig: I know you're joking, but slow walk-and-talk sections in Naughty Dog games and Gears games were some of the biggest offenders I've noticed. I assume they couldn't get the timing down because their QA people were too enamoured by beautiful graphics that they couldn't help but stop and gawk at every other step.

This is sort of a parallel to the "Why do I need to press x to continue" from above. Games that just go directly into a new game when you first boot them up, no menu. Drives me up a fuckin' wall.

I have things to do at the start of a game, slow the fuck down.

This specific moment irked me too. Apparently a lot of people got stuck here in play-testing, though, so I understand why they did it.

I don't mind multi stage boss battles if they are well designed. Sekiro, for example, does this rather well. The final boss is a 4 part fight and I loved going through the different phases each time because they all offered a different kind of challenge. Then you have games like DOOM Eternal, which has a boss that is basically do this same thing 5 times in a row to win, then start over if you lose. Boourns to that.

To your point about Immersion: I die a bunch of times in pretty much every game I play. If I wanted true immersion I guess I should turn Mario off after the first pit I fall into lol. I'm just ribbing ya.

@spacemanspiff00: fair point about immersion, never heard that response before. Maybe its the graphics or story but boy do people hate failing QTEs or dying in say uncharted even though the will have died like what 20 times total the entire game but 30 playing for 3 hours in mario. They will say immersion broken and quit in uncharted but im guessing its the cinematic nature thou...might as well watch it all on youtube if you fear failing so much.

Okay, I'll be the fly in the ointment in this thread -- my main grievance with games is the exact opposite of all this. I don't enjoy how the majority of games are so similar, with all their rough edges sanded off as to avoid displeasing anyone.

I wish I could find the thread, but I read a great Twitter thread from a dev that compared what's happening right now with mainstream AAA console games to what's happening with blockbuster movies -- homogenization, less releases but far larger and more risk averse. Game devs have found so many "best practices" in the past 20 years or so that make games easier to pick up, but more samey than ever, from the controls to the menus to the checkpointing to the basic gameplay. It's suffocating.

Another thing I'd point out is, in RPGs especially, the sort of "I wish I could do anything!" approach is counter-intuitive. If you want it to be an accessibility option, or cheat, or toggle, that's fine, games should let you do that if you want. But I find a lot of modern RPGs so milquetoast because they give you a million options and all of them work just as well as the other, so it's a false choice. Give me different classes that genuinely create different playstyles, instead of "here's the lightning hands magic, the frost hands magic, and the fire hands magic and they're all the same" cough cough Skyrim cough.

I'll give one of my own Grievances:

Games That Force You To Play Co-Op With Other People When You'd Rather Play Solo

Games like Take Two and No Way Out are obvious examples of this, but also games like the Destiny series which doesn't have matchmaking for raids, dungeons, and other content in the game, making many people who play solo miss out on the events and the content they can earn. Take Two did add the option to play with other people online, unlike No Way Out. And of course, there is the Back 4 Blood backlash that happened after it was revealed that all the major content could only be earned playing co-op, and playing solo locked everything. I just hope that this doesn't start another Souls-like trend where developers start to solely make games where you'd have to play co-op with other people or you can't play at all. That would suck for a lot of people like myself. Don't get me wrong, co-op can be very fun, but it should always be a choice, not a requirement.

I quoted this to quote this:

One of the most difficult things I've had to take away from the roguelite explosion over the past decade is this: not every game needs to be for everybody, and sometimes you enjoy everything about a game except the core concept.

Earlier in this thread, I spoke about how giving players options on difficulty and such is a good thing, and I'll stand by that, but I also made a passing mention that they shouldn't be obligated to do such. Dark Souls *shouldn't* have an easy mode if the developers don't want it to. If a developer wants to design their game with a hard focus on co-op to the exclusion of solo players, that's OK. That's, paradoxically, also a good thing, because they're taking a stand with what they want their game to be. Not to be too blunt, but if you're not looking for a co-op experience, then It Takes Two, Destiny, Back 4 Blood, and so on aren't necessarily the games for you.

Going back to the Pathfinder bit I was keeping up before, Owlcat made two games with a ton of options and customization for what you want out of this experience. On the flip side of that coin, Underrail doesn't have much of that at all and you're very much expected to learn the game or not play it*. Neither of these approaches should be thought of as "bad" or "wrong", they are legitimate choices, and both of them give the player plenty of room for expression. One just excludes people who are only interested in experiencing part of the game and not the whole thing.

And that's OK.

*I'd also like to make a different point about "learning the game", because this doesn't mean "play the game the way the devs intended". Player expression can mean anything from preferring the DMR to the plasma rifle in Halo to specc'ing out a character in a complex RPG and everything in between. It does not mean that a game has as few limitations as possible, because figuring out how to play your way within a set of limitations is one of the most satisfying things a video game can offer. I think video games offer plenty else and someone might not be interested in meeting that challenge and for those people I think there are plenty of options as well, from games that are simply very easy (Spiritfarer) to games that have an easy or even impossible to lose mode. Or cheat engine and mods, if you want outside help.

@av_gamer: What about single player games that don't have coop? How do you feel about those?

I mean... I think in most cases the choice is there and that's "Don't buy games that are blatantly co-op experiences". You not liking a genre is hardly something that the industry needs to stop and have a think about after all.

Now if Back 4 Blood made it seem like it was equally viable solo then yeah that's a failure of communication but I feel like most games that use co-op as the hook are pretty blatant about it.

@lapsariangiraff: Yes. Imagine what would be lost if we had games that lacked such wonderfully diverse features as *checks notes* long and terribly written stories and useless upgrade trees.

I'm being a bit facetious but I don't know where you got the idea that this was a call for the further homogenization of games. Other than point 1, which is a personal pet peeve and where there are some design counterarguments that apply in some scenarios (if your game is ABOUT being mechanically difficult and requiring the player to hone their skills then long non checkpointed boss fights make some sense; the real issue is when they pop up in games where they're thematically inappropriate given the rest of the game's construction) most of this stuff is about games playing to their strengths and AVOIDING shoehorning in things that don't belong.

Worthless upgrade trees are often the result of someone (in the studio, publisher, whatever) feeling like the game needs an upgrade system or just more upgrades but nobody knowing how to do that within the design of the game. Long bad stories can be the result of people thinking that games need narrative complexity despite nobody on the team having the skill to pull that off. High difficulty low polish can be the result of people thinking a game should be difficult in certain specific ways (like requiring tight timing windows) but not having a game that's designed to support that and just sort of kitchen sinking it in.

Opacity is another one where sometimes it makes sense, but a lot of time it's just a matter of aping Dark Souls or ancient adventure games, but often at the cost of massive fall offs from player bases and frustrated players with no real gains (again, opacity occasionally works out when it's carefully thought through and implemented.)

Many of these things have the effect of making games seem more homogenous because they're done so often these days. It seems like a third of indie games feel the need to add Dark Souls style bosses these days. And not every game needs an upgrade tree, or at least one with a lot of nodes. I play a pretty large variety of games at all kinds of budget levels and genres, and I often stay away from the AAA space because it is so samey these days, but a lot of these trends actually make games more similar, not more diverse.

@lapsariangiraff: Reading what you wrote, made me think of the series "quest for glory" did you ever play that? Granted it's ancient by today's standard but in it you could pick different classes, and while the story beat and puzzle setups were the same each class had a unique way to solve the puzzles or get through the game. A fighter would bust down the door to an enemy stronghold, a thief would sneak in, and a mage would utilize their spellbound.

It is essentially what I look for now in class based games, some variance to how they play. If each class just uses a machine gun, what's the point if me tech tree changes a die roll, when I'm still killing everything with the same machine gun.

I agree, but I don't think the natural reverse of the current trend is all that desirable either. When different playstyles have different levels of effectiveness, you tend to wind up in the "if you are not speccing in one of X particular ways you cannot reasonably progress" curse that makes a lot of older RPGs a pain in the ass for anyone who wants to experiment or roleplay rather than min-max. I'd rather have false choices by dint of everything being viable than having the more time-consuming false choice of there being de facto "correct" ways to play.

I think the better solution is having mutually exclusive content and story consequences based on choice of playstyle. Hard-gating factions or quests or what have you behind specific skills/classes/playstyles that then prevent you from joining other factions, etc. once you commit is a lot more interesting of a consequence than "you can't beat this boss because you didn't put enough points in strength 5 hours ago, dumbass." For example, one of the weaknesses of Skyrim and Oblivion compared to Morrowind is that the Dragonborn and the Champion can become the head of every single guild with nominal effort. In Morrowind, if I recall correctly, the skill-tests necessary to advance in each guild were a lot more strict and required you to really commit to certain playstyles to finish those questlines. What's more, some guilds were mutually exclusive from one another--you couldn't finish both the Thieves Guild and Fighters Guild quests because the two guilds are at odds. That's the sort of game design I'd like to see come back into vogue with RPGs and games in general, but I'm not holding my breath. Even Arkane, the long-suffering "playstyles have consequences" dev, finally gave that all up with Deathloop and got showered in praise for it. Ugh.

On that note, I strongly agree with OP's "everything's a Soulslike" kvetching. I want to live in the alternate world where From's and Arkane's fortunes were reversed, with Souls games becoming a praised-but-mostly-niche cult series while the mainstream is awash in prickly imm-sim-alikes with interesting choices. Instead, Souls reigns supreme and Arkane's "best game ever" by the estimation of way too many critics traded player agency and consequence for roguelike and Soulslike mechanics. No, I'm not bitter, why do you ask?

Imo, older games (<2015?) were like Java Minecraft, while modern games are like the Bedrock version.

There's also the stultification of game mechanics/customization to better suit the average joe (who apparently wants to watch youtube, play music and have a phone call while gaming).

Loot boxes/MTX/extreme engagement tactics to psychologically manipulate/persuade people into spending all their time in 1 game.

Releasing minimally viable products to get early-adopters to back a game, then just kind of drop it and move on to the sequel.

Games that change every month, forcing you to relearn core mechanics. Games trying to reinvent the wheel.

Giant downloads that take 10+ hours, even when you bought the disk.

Always online games that shouldn't be... (Hitman).

Etc. etc.

@imunbeatable80: I haven't played that! Sounds interesting though.

@banefirelord: Oh god, hard agree on Arkane and Deathloop. That game was such a step back in terms of roleplaying and choices in so many ways, and of course everyone lauds it for "making immersive sims more accessible" -- no, actually, it just simplified them to the point of losing what makes them special. I attempted experimenting or exploring early on in Deathloop so many times, only to be rebutted at each point with "WELL THE OBJECTIVE MARKER SAYS YOU CAN'T SAVE THE WORKSHOP FROM THE FIRE YET" -- just, ugh.

@bigsocrates: To be clear, I was responding to the thread overall and the debate over mid-boss checkpoints that was occurring. Your points in the OP are fine, even if the more of your stuff I read the more I think some designer hurt you in a Batman-esque tragic backstory. Seriously, comments like: "I'm tired of these precious little designers who demand everyone play things their way." or "These tantrum throwing "NO! PLAY IT MY WAY! I MADE IT SO YOU HAVE TO PLAY IT MY WAY!" designers can go soak their heads. That's not how media is supposed to work" are, while clearly hyperbolic, still kind of extreme? Lol.

But anyway, back to my main point, I think it was this phrase that got me thinking more than anything else, "Some masochist gamers enjoy this stuff and that’s fine. It should be left in their masochist gamer games and not become a standard in the mainstream.." I can't see this as anything other than advocating for certain kinds of games to not exist in the mainstream, because you happen to not like them. But at other points, you advocate for these kinds of systems to just not exist in games that otherwise don't fit, like Kena. So I am confused: if a mainstream game comes out that's difficult, and meant to be difficult, and perfectly designed around that goal, would you still be making this point? Because it genuinely just sounds like you have a particular bone to pick with A) challenging games and B) games that place limitations on the player in general.

Yes, a boss that only has a checkpoint at the beginning is an inconvenience. But what if the goal is to truly excel at the patterns or understand the first phase, especially if this is a boss that's teaching you a crucial mechanic or idea in the game?