Things that irrationally and instantly drive you up the wall in gaming?

I play in the dark and company logos on white backgrounds, omg, makes me so irrationally mad. Who thought leaving the player temporarily blind to start was a good idea? Do you have anything in gaming that is an instant trigger for you?

I really don't like weapon degradation. Anytime it's bearable, it's also so insignificant that it might as well not be there. Anytime it's a meaningful gameplay mechanic, it's also a horrible annoyance at best and actively keeps me from playing an otherwise good game at worst.

@justin258: Are you talking about Zelda?

Slow walking, climbing, moving through narrow passages. Pretty much caused me to drop GoW 2018 3/4 of the way though. I just could not fucking watch Kratos slowly crouch through another fucking hole. Uncharted 4 is a perfect example of everything in gaming that makes me irrationally angry. Hated that game.

Edit: Also, unskippable splash screens when you boot a game up.

Almost every encumbrance system ever. It's rarely implemented in a realistic way that makes sense, as in I can only carry two guns and some grenades. Usually, encumbrance means you've looted 90% of a dungeon and have 5 sets of armor and multiple weapons, but picking up a random junk item pushes it over the edge.

Really bad hitbox's / hurtbox's in games drive me to instant controller throwing, tv punching, screaming murder rage. The Monster Hunter and Souls series of games are notorious for doing this to me. There are times when I'am clearly well out of an attacks range and it still either instantly kills me or sends me flying across the room for no reason. I'm looking at you almost every giant Bloodborn boss! Just because your trying to punch me doesn't mean the entirety of your body needs to do damage within a 20 foot radius, just your hand / arm god darn it! Also looking at you Lunastra, we both know your tail swing shouldn't somehow do damage in a nearly 360 degree arc around your body! Hate that crap.

Breath of the Wild is one of my go-to "weapon degradation really sucks" examples, but I think the mechanic in general just sucks. Dark Souls II is another game that comes to mind - better keep a backup weapon on hand in that game!

But weapon degradation also doesn't really seem to be all that prevalent anymore anyway. And wasn't ever really that prevalent, if I'm being honest, I've just never seen it implemented in a way that was interesting.

These are supposed to be irrational irritations, not perfectly reasonable and common ones!

For me, I seethe with anger when a PC game bars the player from being able to expediently escape from an interface system. For a recent example, in Overload there's an inter-mission upgrade interface during which you can't abort or pull up the main menu, so you have to pick/confirm upgrades you don't care about, then wait for the next mission to fully load in before you can finally pull up the menu and quit out. One of the most egregious examples is character creators that, once started, you can't get out of, forcing you to finish creating the character whose very existence you now instantly hate, then load into the game before you can finally quit out. This stuff is probably just a trivial thing to others (and it only bothers me in PC games, not console games), but it gets under my skin like little else--I goddamn hate it so much.

Invisible walls or ledges you can easily get to, but don't have collision or you bounce off of. Its just lazy level design. Destiny 2 has a bunch of that. I kill gods and strike fear into the hearts of the enemies of mankind, but I can't muster the strength to climb up a ledge my ankles bounce off of or stand on an edge 3 feet below the rest of the world without dying instantly.

Boring ass wide empty open world gaming trend

I really hate it when a game takes too long to just quit. The worst offenders are the games that makes you go back to the title screen, confirm that you want to go back to the title screen, wait through slow fade-outs and fade-ins and company logos, choose to exit again, an lastly confirm that you want to exit. Even if it doesn't take more than a few seconds it just infuriates me that I can't quit immediately from inside the gameplay.

Binary character movement speeds in third person games.

This really bothered me in the Witcher 3. Geralt could either walk, jog, or sprint with no granular changes in speed. This makes sense when playing on a keyboard, but when you're using an analog stick you expect gradual movements of the stick to correlate with gradual changes in speed. Moving the stick slightly to see no change in movement speed, and then crossing a threshold that prompts Geralt to immediately snap from walking to jogging just feels bad.

Going from the fluid feeling of the movement in something like Uncharted or Assassin's Creed and then playing a game with 3 set "gears" for your character's movement is jarring.

Games that take forever to start up. Missing a way to pause at nearly any time. The glorification of choices in story. Platforming sections. Rogue-like/lite survival run based whatever.

I don't think the design choices of some of theses concepts are always bad, but I really have to force myself to give it a chance which probably said more about me and my habits than the games.

Recently, it's cheap difficulty due to crap design. Mega Man 3 was a big victim of this, where if you didn't have the correct weapon (read: guesswork), you might as well be trying to kill them with gentle massages. While I know this persists throughout the series, 3 is the worst about it so far. My jaw dropped when I saw just how little damage my attacks were actually doing, while enemies could take entire quarters or even half of your health bar just by walking into you.

And while I did have fun with Devil May Cry, auto targeting should never be a thing in an action game EVER! I can't even begin to tell you the amount of times I had an enemy clearly in my sights and about to get wrecked only for Dante to totally whiff because he decided to turn and go for the other enemy a few feet away in the opposite direction. If I WANTED to hit that guy, I would've ATTACKED that guy! Also that FREAKING CAMERA! If you're going to make camera angles fixed, either have it pan wide enough for me to see the entire arena, or don't have ranged enemies who can shoot me from off screen with no warning!

"Trendy" UI design. It's kind of frustration spilling over from my actual job experiences, but whenever I have to deal with a bullshit UI design decision and I just see those fucking giant squares with pictures on.... I just want too diiiiieeeeeee

I also can not deal with randomness as a gameplay aspect. Even in situations where it's a completely legitimate (maybe even good) design. It just drives me crazy to leave aspects of my game to chance. I get irritated just playing normal family card games with a deck of 52. Though not in much of an asshole way, I can deal with it. It's just still irrationally frustrating.

Unskippable cutscenes. If I've seen it once before, I don't want to see it again.

I don't care if it's hiding a loading screen. Just give me a loading screen with some nice art and a percentage bar.

Repeated lines of dialog during a boss fight. Also cutscenes in the middle of a boss fight. (I'm fine with small qte's and stuff like God of War and Yakuza do)

Bad controls or overly complicated controls that can not be remapped. Nothing takes me out of a game faster when I am playing a game and it just does not control properly or the controls are purposely handicapped to make the game more difficult. No matter how amazing a game is I can not enjoy what I am playing when it comes to these annoyances.

Not much since there are a lot of things that people take issue with of which I usually write off as hyperbole (including me shit-talking JRPGs), but games that take a little too long to actually let my play the game by starting off with hours of plot dump and tutorials push my fairly high limits. ...though, even can be a mild complaint if the story setup is decent or if the gameplay is good enough to overshadow the initial slog.

• Games with five audio logs every twenty feet.
• unrealistic graffiti that doesn't look like it was painted in a rush, or is painted with a ridiculous amount of blood and a perfect paintbrush.
• when there's a huge gap in dialogue before another character interrupts.
• whenever a character is nudged, jumps, falls, or bumps into something, and it sounds like an orgasm.
• shotguns that are only effective at the closest of ranges.
• when romancing is gender-specific.
• when hats erase the style of hair you pick, or remove it entirely.

When games don't let you alt+f4 out immediately. I just wanna bypass all the menus and loading screens and just leave, but instead,when playing CS:GO hitting the keys, instead of booting you out just makes an impotent click that sounds like you've run ammo. Its infuriating.

Another one is failing to "skyrim your way up a mountain", i know the game does not want me to do it, but usually these games have a generous enough jump that makes it see like you juuust might me able to make it, but then you fail and its sad and annoying.

When getting knocked to the ground in a 3rd person game means your character lays on the ground for a few seconds, then spends another 3-4 seconds slowly standing up, then another 2-3 seconds standing there looking dazed, then suddenly snapping to action pose when the player has control back. All while enemies/bosses and jumping around like crazy.

Tiny UI text.

Hey devs, gamers are getting older. Don't make us sit 3 feet from the TV.

Anything that impedes my movement in games where movement is especially fast/fluid. Biggest example is Dying Light. Anytime I got grabbed by a zombie I found it just irrationally enraging.

A more recent example is Warframe. At least 50% of my enjoyment of that game is the ludicrously fast movespeed, but certain missions have a lot of enemies that can knock you down for a disappointingly long period of time.

I find story-driven games where the characters constantly comment on everything they do annoying. For example, in The Last of Us I hated that every line during gameplay was breathy and consisted of mostly mundane commentary on water being cold or something being gross.

When a save file says the time of day it was saved at instead of the time within the play through the save was made.

I guess Destiny style fake mouse interface, but even them I think I'm too old to be bothered much and just roll with it. Not worth it to me to always be angry at things, I guess.

It really annoys me when games default to the repeat what I just said option. Zelda games are the biggest offender that comes to mind, but other games do it too. It's even worse when you can't skip the dialogue the second time.

Excessive handholding in games annoys me. Anything that takes control away from me that doesn't seem to add any value.

Examples might be a cut scene that's showing you a door opening up once you've unlocked it -- its not necessary most of the time. I'd rather just stay in control and find my own way.

But if we're talking full irrational... I get annoyed when PC games default to Low/Medium quality, which a large chunk of them do. It's a waste of time turning all those settings up and changing the resolution, sometimes the game needs to restart as well.

Mandatory failure like in the latest Fight Night game. There's a fight in the story mode I reset maybe 30 times as soon as I got knocked down. At one point I think I landed 10 haymakers in a row and something like 200 hits in total while dodging and countering the opponent's every blow. He just wouldn't go down.

So eventually I go down once, hit the opponent a few times, win. Shut it off and never played the game again.

Merchants that don't have infinite gold. Yes, I know that's not "realistic" but having to trot all over the goddamn map to sell loot in something like Witcher 3 or Divinity OS 2 is the most boring kind of busywork and I don't feel like it adds anything to a game.

@banefirelord: playing through Witcher 3 right now and so much this

Mario tennis single player made me realize how much a loathe games that don’t allow you to retry or reload.

Hey you just failed/died? Guess you gotta go back out and retrigger the mission over again and deal with any text or diologue too!

@sloppydetective: This is a really good one. Give me both, if you want, but give me the damn gameplay time if you're only gonna do one!

They actually patched in a retry option for Mario Tennis. You are no longer dumped back to the overworld upon failure.

I hate it when standard enemies in games are upgraded, like in the Uncharted games.

All of a sudden the basic enemy type has a helmet and headshots doesn't one-shot anymore. What a cheap way to make a game harder as you progress.

Cinematic walking for sure.

@mems1224: Would you prefer loading screens?

Anyways, something that drives me up the wall is broken scripting stopping my progress and me frantically searching google trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong and eventually realizing the game broke.

Nothing much, I don't get annoyed or mad often or at all. One thing that's super annoying that I can think of is in racing games when you can't cut down lampposts etc. It's an issue since sometimes you wanna slightly cut a corner by going over the sidewalk and imagine there's a lamppost on it and it's like "nope, you're going nowhere fucker, i'll stop you to 0 speed." I recall really liking Midnight Club Los Angeles but I think you couldn't or could only cut down some lamps and it was the worst.

EDIT: Got another one, gold piles in RPGs that are containers (which is fine I guess, it's done for a reason). The worst thing is when a pile of gold has a small number of gold in it. Like, here's several piles of gold with 30g each in them and I wanna scream "it's a pile of gold, like thousands of gold in there, ugh" Divinity Original Sin 2 from last year is an example. Maybe Definitive Edition changed that or at least put lots of gold in those piles.

Other than fanboys... cut scenes you can't skip especially the ones before a big battle that you keep dying in. My XboxOne came with a copy of a Forza game (played it twice don't recall which version it was) that had this long drive along intro that annoyed me because I just wanted to get into the game. The intro was so long and boring. The slow introduction of weapons to your arsenal in sequels. Each game you starts with you being treated like your character hasn't fired a weapon before.

Hand-holding opening hours in video games that serve as tutorials

Dialogue boxes that don't let you skip through instantly and/or that require too many button presses. By "skip through instantly", I don't mean "skip the entire conversation", I mean "skip from one box to the next without any pauses". This is one of the things that killed Octopath Traveler for me. In Octopath Traveler, you get to the end of the dialogue box, and the game waits for you to press the button to move onto the next box. But when you press the button, it doesn't bring the next box up right away. You hit the button, then wait a second or two, and THEN the next box comes up. This pads out a conversation that would have taken 4 or 5 seconds to skim through into a scene that takes 12 seconds to get through. That doesn't seem like much, but in games where there is a ton of talking, and most of it isn't even all that important, it adds up to a maddening amount of waiting.

As far as requiring too many button presses, I'm looking at Dragon Quest Heroes (or whatever the DQ Dynasty Warriors game was). I don't mind if text animates in, as long as I can press the button to have it fill in right away. One thing that's NICE to have though, is to start filling in text quickly/instantly if you've just quick-filled the previous box. In other words (not actual spoilers, I'm just using spoiler blocks to save space)...

In DQH, it's... (not actual spoilers, I'm just using spoiler blocks to save space)

Hm... I can only think of two off-hand.

1. Giving the player convenience of life upgrades late-game that should have been in the default starting kit. The most egregious example of this that I have experienced was in Mass Effect: Andromeda. The sub-par open world vehicle in that game (I think it was called "The Mako" or something) had two settings for its tires and suspension: one for flat surfaces that went just fast enough to leave you only significantly bored, and one for inclines and bumpy terrain that was EXCRUCIATINGLY slow on even the slightest slope, slowing to a 5 to 10 kilometer per hour crawl and trudging like it had all the horsepower of a child's tricycle. It was exasperatingly dull, and the bland open-world planets with zero ambient music and almost no environmental sounds outside of my tires crunching stones didn't help. Then my squad-mates would talk, and I'd long for my character's death.

However, a merchant on one of the later planets sold me a relatively cheap Mako upgrade that inexplicably boosted the off-road setting's speed and horsepower to such an extent that it was faster than the flat surface setting. Hills? Mountains? Physics? The Mako cares not. It was like driving the Humvee equivalent of a Skyrim horse. I remember shouting innumerable expletives at the screen in a blind, seething rage. All the hours of pure tedium and dullness that could have been avoided if this setting had just been the default setting. I had no idea this upgrade was even in the game, so I had done every scrap of side content before this later planet... grumbling and glowering in my slug-mobile. What a piece of trash.

2. Games with characters that break character (that aren't Deadpool). For example, Jacob Frye in Assassin's Creed: Syndicate rips on almost everyone. He can't resist a below-the-belt joke or snarky comment, and he churns them out like he's afraid that they're going out of style. No one is safe from his witticisms and vulgarities.... except one person in the whole game. Victorian England was not progressive with regards to women in business, and as a result some women would dress and present as men in order to bypass this socioeconomic taboo. A merchant you interact with repeatedly is one such entrepreneur, albeit clearly new to the concept. Her outfit is skin-tight and form fitting, accentuating her feminine frame. Her long hair is done up in a bun and visible beneath her Bowler Hat, and she makes no effort to throw her voice whatsoever. Outside of the male pseudonym, it's amazingly apparent that Mr. Merchant is actually Ms. Merchant in disguise... but Jacob says nothing, ever. The most irreverent man in all of England, who pokes at every single thing he can in regards to every single person in his life, drops every ounce of snark around Mr. Merchant and becomes a stoic, boring, completely different person until Mr. Merchant leaves the room... at which point he torments his sister about her Crow's Feet and mocks a street urchin for having less meat on him than a picked-over rib.

I get why Ubisoft did this (The Internet would have eaten them alive), and it's such a small thing... but jeez did the out-of-character moments irk me.

Edit Addition: oh, and I'd like to give an honorable mention to Gears of War 4, where the three new characters on your squad break character every other scene by swapping their characterizations. Each one of them is intermittently "a stoic warrior," "an impish fiend," and "an exasperated techie genius saddled by a stoic stick in the mud and an imp." They all make Baird seem like a Shakespearian character.

@justin258: Weapon degradation worked pretty well in The Witcher 3. It was enough that you wanted to return to a town (and get new quests and the like) every couple of hours but was rarely an issue in normal gameplay. BOTW was basically Far Cry 2 all over again (in a lot of ways) where it just discouraged you from ever caring what you used.

As for my own thread contribution: Slow Walk sequences that don't immediately earn their intrusion. Rationally I understand it is no different than an unskippable cutscene and I actually like the MGS "Look around in first person while someone talks" gimmick. But by giving me just enough input that I can move but not enough that I can impact anything just makes me angry and bored. It takes me OUT of game far more than watching a long cutscene with periodic QTEs or something.

Forced stealth segments with no alternative. Ugh.