What are some games you would describe as "offensive" or "insulting?"

@finaldasa: You know the men are often barely clothed too, right? The Men show off their masculine features and the women show off feminine features. They're all larger than life characters that exist to do impossible fight moves. It's all cartoony/anime over the top because it's fun and that's what the most creative character designs come from.

Ok but...that's Tomb Raider. I think you're discrediting the genuine artistry that goes into over the top character designs tbh. Revealing character designs for both men and women aren't always just about sex.

@dudeglove: Yeah, I totally feel for the developers and I always loved the illustrations of Dante in promotional materials and such for DMC2.

Don't know if insulting or offensive is the right word but I got really frustrated playing Mass Effect Andromeda. I spent a lot of time trying to assess why it wasn't clicking the same way that the previous games had and just realised it was a total misfire and a bit of a misunderstanding of the audience who loved the series.

I recently started playing Tales of Berseria and that main character's design is pretty egregious. It's especially ridiculous when you consider that she starts the game in perfectly appropriate "let's go on an adventure" attire (here) before being thrown into prison for three years and walking out in rags that only just cover the bits they need to cover. I like the story they're trying to tell and I'm willing to meet the characterization halfway but that character design is really off-putting.

There's also Bayonetta, but I honestly think that's an exception because that series is one hundred percent aware of what it is and celebrates it. That's somehow less creepy than putting Velvet in this and then never commenting on that or doing anything with it (beyond one other female character saying "yo, aren't you cold?".

Otherwise... yeah, video games seem to have moved pretty far away from hyper-sexualized female characters. Not completely, but mostly.

To answer this thread - I'm kinda drawing a blank. I can name certain trends in video games that I find insulting - the various shitty implementations of microtransactions and loot boxes top that list - but I can't think of a real standout example, a single game where I just got mad at everything.

Something that doesn't get mentioned much - I don't like games that never feel like they "get started". By that, I mean something where the actual gameplay constantly gets interrupted by some kind of exception - a cutscene forces you to pay attention to a set piece or a quick time event happens and all you do is play Simon Says for a minute or two before the game drops you back into gameplay. But, much like microtransaction-laden bullshit, I find it pretty easy to avoid the worst offenders of that practice.

I'm also pretty much sick of open world games where you lay down a waypoint, walk to it, do an activity, and then move on to the next waypoint. I'm done with that.

The men might be barely clothed and the women might be barely clothed, but the issue is that they're all drawn to appeal to the straight male gaze. If you ask a man to draw "a powerful man", they'd probably come up with something reasonably close to one of those character designs, but if you asked a woman to draw "a powerful woman," they'd be far less likely to come up with someone like Ivy from Soul Calibur. There's also, generally speaking, a lot more variety in male character designs than female character designs in those games; it's not just that some female characters are sexualized, it's that most of them are.

On that note, I'd say Xenoblade Chronicles 2 offended me, due to both the pretty-bad female character designs, and their sometimes-worse portrayals as characters. Most of the female characters' personalities in that game fell into the archetype of "hot," "in love with the protagonist," or both, and it really rubbed me the wrong way.

I think the one time in recent memory I felt truly wronged by a purchase was the PUBG release on Xbox One. In all fairness, it was released initially in a state of "Early Access," but it was legitimately barely playable at the outset. For Microsoft to put their stamp of approval on something in that bad a shape and then proceed to charge players even $30 beggars belief. From the sounds of things, it doesn't seem like it has gotten all that much better.

@dudeglove: I put that game on my wishlist a long time ago, around release, based on the things you mentioned early in the beginning. I think I watched Jason or someone play it and thought it looked interesting, but then left it at that.

Having read your post I've removed it from my wishlist because that just all sounds awful.

Tomb Raider (2013), for turning the once awesome and spunky Lara Croft into a punching bag.

Sea of Thieves, specifically their most recent dev post has turned me from disappointed to completely sour on this game.

Like a fool, I preordered this game because the sailing/shenanigans looks like so much fun. I was partially right, the sailing is fantastic but that's where the fun stops. If you listened to GOTY you've already heard all the gripes about this game, but then I saw this developer update.

This "The Pirate Code" is insulting to me because they are pretty much asking players not to engage in PvP. I realize they don't say that specifically, but these rules are all about treating your fellow pirates with respect, yadda, yadda. When really the issues they are having with griefing are a product of their own design.

The mission content in this game is extremely lacking and repetitive, what else is there to do in this game but to engage in PvP?

PS: Drop the damn price! This game is still full retail on the Windows Gamestore (only version you can run on PC).

I genuinely find Final Fantasy XV, at least upon release since I'm not sure what they added or changed, to be insulting. The story in that game was/is a fucking trainwreck. Real talk, just think about what they did. An hour or two into that game, they hit you with a montage from Kingsglaive, a movie you had you have to buy separately/pay extra for, that establishes the main conflict of the entire fucking game. A montage that paints a very barebones picture unless you've seen the movie. Not only that, this should completely change the entire tone of the game.

If you were going out with some friends and I gave you a call like "heeeeey...soooooo...the house is on fire and there's a bunch of dudes pointing guns and knives at everyone here...but I mean like...no worries I guess? Have fun, I'll catch you when you get back homie" how the shit would you feel? That's the beginning hours of FFXV in a nutshell. Shit is going down, but meh go out and have fun and we'll worry about it later. Even setting that aside, the story doesn't have a leg to stand on.

The characters are so badly developed, that they had to add DLC for each of them to finish the job. And compared to even just past Final Fantasies, they still did a bad job from what I can tell. Each of your party members goes through life changing events and you do not see it unless you play the DLC. Shit just happens to them offscreen and they come back and they're different now. You don't really ever get a good sense of who the fuck the secondary villains are or what they want. The main villain, hell even the main love interest are given a pitiful amount of screen time. They tried to recreate an Aeris moment with a character you see for maybe 20-30 minutes with tops.

They had the audacity to try and recreate one of the most iconic things in Final Fantasy history, The World of Ruin and they did abso-fucking-lutely nothing with it. You don't see any other faces besides those of your party members and Talcott the Infodump machine. There's not much of anything to explore. It's like recent Star Wars-levels of "HEY, YOU REMEMBER THIS THING, RIGHT? WE'RE SO COOL FOR REMINDING YOU THAT THIS THING EXISTED!"

Fucking go ahead and toss all that aside if you want. Doesn't bother me, but at every single turn, this story is flawed in some catastrophic way. There is literally a scene in which the main antagonist rescues the protagonists and it fades to black after they board the airship. "Two days later..." POPS UP ON THE FUCKING SCREEN and the characters go, "aw man, that was crazy, wasn't it? I can't believe all that shit that happened." And then you just go on your merry way without anyone actually saying what the fuck happened. Who the hell wrote this shit?

This game is the definition of resting on your laurels. For real, if people wanna give Destiny shit along with Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and whatever other bullshit with bullshit stories, this shit deserves to be right alongside all of that. The story in this game is bad.

I wish I could remember the game's name (Edit: why I can't remember is because I have owned an IOS device since my iPHone 3G and have almost 20,000 apps tied to my account by now so sometimes old memories get a little cloudy), but the only time I have feel offended by a video game was on IOS. I paid money for a title, then a couple of weeks later the developer put out a patch that turned the game free-to-play and didn't do anything to help out the players who paid for the game. So what ended up happening is that, this RPG now had the leveling curve fucked with, had timers installed, ad's popping up everywhere, there was an energy system in place, and a bunch of IAP that was trying to sell me on disabling these new "features." I was so pissed off and what made it worse is I went on the Toucharcade forums to complain about it and everyone else started saying things like "well the dev's were obviously forced to change the game because it wasn't selling and they are human and need money as well," or "this is standard practice on IOS, get used to it," type shit and completely ignoring the fact that they just screwed anyone who was willing to give the dev's money.

Any Mario party or smash bros pretty much

That time when Quiet 'got over sexual assault' by wearing less clothing.

@avensis: Well that's nice but nobody said anything about hating a game

@berserk007: But not Mario Kart? Lol, could you elaborate more? Do you get insulted by the items in Smash or what?

Many things in video games serve no purpose. It exists simply because it's eye candy for those that enjoy it. Same reason strip clubs exist and restaurants like Hooters. I feel it has just as much of a right to exist as much as violence does in video games. To completely remove something because you don't like it is pretty wrong and selfish.

Metal Gear Solid 5.

I'd always liked MGS mostly from afar but this game hooked me. It's a great game, wonderful design, good missions, a bit too light on story... but I loved that game... Then I reach the 2/3rds-ish point where it wants me to replay missions on harder difficulty/different objectives and I realize "wait... is this just shitty padding?" I start googling and find out yeah, that's basically all that remains before the 'endgame', there's almost no story left at this point and if I really want the story that should be in the game I have to watch deleted scenes that were in the super special edition (that I actually bought, so I'm not pissed I didn't get it, I'm pissed they would do such a thing). It is painfully obvious that Kojima was not done that game and Konami didn't give a fuck and said "You got a few months to ship what you've got."

I stopped playing and never went back. I watched on Youtube what I missed story wise (not much) and wrote the game off. It really is a great 2/3rds of a game but the fact that Konami pull that shit (and that reviewers somehow ignored it/didn't notice it when reviewing it) pissed me off and soured the entire experience for me. What should have been Kojima and Konami's Magnum Opus turned out to be an unfinished wreck because some suits wanted their investment back right then instead of a year from then. In closing, FUCK KONAMI.