Cactusapple

Basically, any lack of customisability, where the developers have decided for me exactly how aspects of the game are going to work instead of putting in an option. I'll use an example from another thread on here; someone was lamenting over-use of tutorial sections, because we all know how games work and don't need to be told press C to crouch under here etc and it always ruins the pacing of the firs half-hour or so of the game. The counterpoint was "well, every game is someone's first game, you can't leave that stuff out or you're potentially excluding new people. Both valid points.

Some devs will be of one school of thought and we get 8-hour tutorials like AssCreed 3, others will throw you into the deep end without really explaining shit (MGS V for example).

The answer that actually good developers use is, of course, to design your title screen maybe something like this:

Start New Game

Continue

Play tutorial

Options

Exit to Windows

Which gives you the OPTION to play the tutorial, or go right into the game. The stellar developers, however, will have the following options when you click "play tutorial":

Chose which description fits you best:

1. "I've played enough games to know what the following phrases mean without having to look them up: "invert Y" "Grinding" "FPS" (both meanings) "Character Build" - I just haven't played this particular game, please quickly show me what I need to know before jumping in."

2. "I'm pretty new to gaming, in fact this may even be my first. Please tell me everything I need to know, including the basics, to help me get the best experience as I get up to speed"

Option 2 will have all the "this is how you move your character, this is jump, this is roll, this is crouch. This is how you access your inventory, this is how you equip items, this is how the save/checkpoint system works" and all that jazz.

Option 1 skips that and just goes straight into more specific game mechanics like "here's a brief description of the ins and outs of our nemesis system (for example) and a few suggestions to get you started on discovering the many ways it can be interacted with and played with, for example if you have the following character build, and are dual-wielding, you can do this..."

So yeah, tl;dr: don't decide for us that we're going to/not going to have an informative/boring ass tutorial, or that our FOV is going to be stuck at 75, or that crouch is going to be a toggle, or that we are going to have to watch this entire cutscene, or that our UI is going to be displayed at all times/never, or that we're going to have arbitrarily restricted inventory space, or that there'll be a timer on every mission, etc etc you get my drift. Let us decide all those things from a detailed options screen that is accessible at any point in or out of the game, since we're the ones actually paying for and playing your game, not you. Your "artistic vision" isn't as profound as you think it is, so let us enjoy your product as we see fit by including more customisability, less railroading.

Unironically Mankind. Next to us, the rest start looking pretty pathetic. We've risen to the top of the foodchain to absolutely DOMINATE the entire planet, and that is no small feat. I'm fucking proud of us. Nothing any other living being on this rock can do at this point stands a chance to regain control, barring stuff like pandemics but even then we're advanced enough that we stand a chance. We systematically breed, farm and slaughter the other primitives in a manner animals can only dream of doing (and had they evolved instead of us, you can bet they'd be doing the same to us so they get no sympathy from me) Hell, we stand a chance of detecting and even dealing with a killer asteroid; could the dinosaurs have done that? No, they were too dumb.

I mean, look at those wildlife programmes where a couple of lions start on a pack of like 500 gazelles. What do the idiot gazelles do? They all fucking run! If they just grew some balls and dogpiled the lions they'd never have to live in fear again, but they're too dumb, and compared to Homo Sapiens, so are all the rest of the fools.

We fucking rock, and for us the sky (isn't even) the limit. For any other "predatory" species... not so much.

Oh, they all will, they have Gametrailers on their CV's; they'll be absolutely sorted.

To be honest theirs was one of the sites I couldn't help but stop trusting and I ended up mentally lumping them in with the IGNs and the Gamespots of the world. This doesn't feel like any great loss at all to me. I think it was one Shane Satterfield shilling of some crappy AAA game too many on that old, long dead Invisible Walls show that tipped me over the edge, and funnily enough that was only a few months before they got rid of him anyway. I wonder what him and Marcus Beer are doing with themselves these days...

Also, that boss in the forest dungeon in oot. Working out you can hit his projectiles back at him with your sword took me longer than I'd like to admit.

Every time I break my "never preorder or buy on the first week/month of release" rule.

Every. Time.

Any Call of Duty, Medal of Honour, any Metal Gear game, Broforce, Battlefield Hardline, Spec Ops, any GTA, Dark Souls.

"I really want to like this game, but I can't seem to square my personal experience with most of the reviews that were compiled yesterday."

Now, take a moment to think hard about this, and try to be brutally honest with your thoughts on this occasion. What does this tell you?

Lol if anything derails this game it certainly isn't going to be some dumbass escapist article. From the sidelines this whole thing looks like children throwing dogshit at each other in the park.

I feel like WoW should be on John Oliver's "How is this still a thing" segment.