We all know these. It's those little things that game developers don't seem to be able to get right - the little things that piss us off and ruin a game that might be perfectly awesome otherwise... but THAT ONE DIFFICULT PART OF THE GAME WITH A SAVEPOINT BEFORE A LONG UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE JUST MAKES YOUR BLOOD BOIL.
Those things! Those are what this list is about - things we want to see less of in future games!
Really. Even the Metal Gear Solid games allow you to skip cutscenes, and they are among the most Cutscene-heavy games in existance - and don't get me wrong, I think Cutscenes are very important for the enjoyment and the suspension of disbelief for the player. However, there are so many games who handle cutscenes wrong - like placing unskippable cutscenes after a save/checkpoint.
The Unskippable Credits are a related, if not quite as severe sin.
Come on. I start a second playthrough, and I have to suffer through an hour long tutorial? Why can't I skip this?
That said, those tutorials have become fairly rare - guess it tends to be more of an "easy first level", instead.
Specifically, I'm referring to games with mixed single-player/multiplayer achievements. Modern Warfare 2 got it RIGHT (though the Spec Ops bit is questionable...), Crackdown 2 got it WRONG. Monday Night Combat got it right, Halo 3 got it wrong.
And so on.
*sigh* Even developers who acknowledge that Escort Missions are a problem get Escort Missions wrong. Can it be done right? I don't know - but the one in Metro 2033 (where you carry the kid on your shoulders), is probably the one that got it the most right (besides making me motion sick :P), in pretty much all other cases, you are escorting someone who moves slow, runs into enemies (and dies) or does something else you did not expect, seemingly just to piss you off.
Still haven't played ICO, but it sounds like they got it right as well.
That's right. Open World/Sandbox games (MMO's are not covered here!). Specifically, I'm looking at Grand Theft Auto and all of it's clones and variants (Saboteur, Crackdown(s), etc). What all these games have in common is that they've blown their entire budget on crafting an enormous setting, but seem to have almost no content (or worse, content that makes the world less believable!), which makes the games feel like second-rate MMOs, except there are no other players around.
And yes, Grand Theft Auto 4 is definately one of the games I'm talking about here. Assassins Creed: Brotherhood is not.
Specifically, this is in reference to cliffhangers at end of games - the open ends that are just there to keep the door open for a sequel. Halo 2, Mafia 2 and many others are included in this category. An open end can be ok, occasionally, but I feel it's hard to get right without the player feeling like they did not get any closure.
I'm talking about traps you can see a mile away, but have no way of avoiding. In some cases, you even normally have the tools to deal with the trap, but the game keeps you from it. There's one of these scenarios near the start of Spec Ops: The Line. You come across a group of enemies that are clearly not dead, but for some reason, your weapons don't appear to be functional in that area... until the trap is sprung!
