What aspect of modern game design do you hate the most?

Of course not counting the ones shoved down our throats by businessmen like DLC and microtransactions, which aspects of modern games do you not like the most?

For example, I find way-points to be such a bummer a lot of the times. Most games lack the sense of discovery even though games are bigger than ever. Way-points seem like a lack of confidence from the developers in their audience and themselves. Often times it feel likes they are hiding or getting away with terrible level design. Also, the most linear of games use way-points, it’s almost offensive.

Another example is rubber-band AI. Series like Need for Speed take games with a solid arcade driving engine and ruin every fucking entry with an insulting and embarrassing rubber-band AI. I’m sure the online is great and all but some people like me just want to race in a career mode. Rubber-band AI make sense in cart racers, not in racing ass driving games.

EDIT: Bought a PS4 last fall which came with Destiny The Taken King blahblah edition. Not a multiplayer guy so just played through the "story" missions and got kick out once 'cause my internet dropped. Developers please just let me play my single player bits without a connection requirement. That is madness. What happens when you shut down Destiny servers in the future...

Scary amounts of things are starting to be stored/managed server side, going back to games in the future might be a huge bummer...

Small fonts. Really. Every game post-Nuts and Bolts has the stupidest fucking font size ever. Sure, great, you can cram one hundred words of text into your UI on the screen at one time, but no one, even with perfect vision, can read the damn thing.

Same goes for overclogged, badly designed mini-maps, or ones that just weren't playtested by colorblind individuals. The most egregious example of this I can think of was GTAV using black on slightly less black maps. It was dumb as hell.

I think you're right about the way "way-points" are implemented, however, I don't think it has anything to do in lack of confidence in themselves but solely in the ability of the player. More often than not a players ability to discern where to go can be troubling. I've noticed this lately by watching my significant other try their hand at games like Uncharted. Even though this is an extremely linear experience she will often have trouble figuring out where to go and what to do. For people that aren't as savvy with video game tendencies it can be tough so having that there as a fallback for them can be to the benefit of both developers and players. I do agree with the sentiment that way-points can to a disservice to exploration elements of a game so what they really should do is have the option, make it something that you can toggle on or off as needed.

The whole let's make our game as shallow and lifeless as we can to appeal to the most people shit. I know business and all that bollocks, but there are so few games these days that actually have character and are interesting.

I'm with Ron Gilbert on this one. The problem isn't that she's having problems, it's that developers and publishers would consider her having problems a failure. It's ok to get stuck and not know exactly how to proceed once in a while, it can even make making progress feel like an actual achievement instead of just holding the stick in the direction of the dot on the map.

@amafi:

I totally agree with you, the one thing I want to point out though is that the whole gaming market is so casual at this point and more and more people are playing these games, this makes it so developers have to cater to these people as much as they can. People who are newer to playing games like this just don't have the patience unless they are constantly being pushed in the right direction.

Unlockables in every game. I don't need something to level up if you create a good enough game to keep my attention. There comes a point with a game like Battlefield (which I love) where I have to stop and ask why there are so many guns and attachments with very little difference between them. Why are you giving me 9 shotguns, 16 assault rifles, and 13 sniper rifles?! Stop!

Open worlds that don't need to be open. Give me multiple paths through a level or whatever, but I don't need a gigantic lifeless open world to walk around in. The older I get, the more I can't stand games that don't value my time. Fast travel, skipping dialogue, and good checkpoints are a must.

Possibly my biggest annoyance lately is when games take too long to give me control. Video games are bad at telling stories, but surely there's a way to tell a story without taking control away from me for a long ass cut scene. The payoff is rarely worth it. Loading up a new game and having to sit through opening cutscenes, dialog, or opening credits completely kills my excitement. The time between selecting "New Game" and giving me control should be no more than a couple minutes.

Supernatural elements in games that are just fine without them (Uncharted). Upgrades to stats that have no significant meaning. And noticeable screen tearing is harder for me to look at than drops in frame rate. Also, everything else that has already been mentioned.

Dunno, my aunt beat Myst back in the day, and I'm pretty sure she never played a computer game before or since. I think if a main stream audience was presented with something that challenged them a lot of people would appreciate it. Not everyone, but probably enough people for a reasonably budgeted game to be profitable.

Focus testing too much, sanding all the rough spots down, that just leads to everything feeling samey and boring, like over produced pop music on the radio or something.

Too many open-worlds. A lot of these games just don't have the gameplay to support 20 to 30 hour experiences, and you're stuck doing too much nonsense. Plots are less focused, there's a lot of wasted time just running around, the games use their technology to build big areas instead of interesting areas, and set-pieces can take a back seat (which only sucks if it's a series that's known for that sort of thing).

Even MGS V, which I thought played super well, lost a lot of focus with its narrative. You can say it adds replay value, but I very rarely replay an open-world game. Sticking with MGS, I beat the old ones at least a dozen times each. But I don't plan to play MGS V ever again.

Does quantity over quality count? Because that's my answer.

I find it pretty disappointing that the transitions between cutscenes and gameplay are still often so rough, even in relatively high budget games, with charcaters teleporting into place, character customizations not showing up etc. You'd think after 15+ years of cinematic cutscenes in videogames someone might have found a reliable way around that.

Large open world design that doesn't justify the size of the world. When the gameplay isn't well suited to messing around with an open world or if the map is just too damn big that you feel like you spend more time commuting around it than playing the game it really sucks the life out of the experience.

I could do without on rails tutorials that are teaching you very basic things about how a game works. When we're talking about running/looking around/jumping don't make me do it three times in a row in a clean room then go OK now try this three times, just let me at the game and I can figure it out as we go.

Unskippable tutorials for relatively simple controlling games, particularly FPS's. They pretty much control universally the same but we still have to go through the whole "press the right stick to look up" process for example. Remember when games used to just throw you into the deep end?

Every multiplayer game having leveling up systems and unlockables since COD 4 got annoying 7 years ago too.

Yes. This. I have good eye sight and a big TV but my couch is like 2 feet further than "optimal viewing distance" leaving me squinting at most games' text nowadays.

Developers really need to start testing their UI beyond: "It looks great on the Apple Thunderbolt that I'm currently sitting 18 inches away from".

I hate that so many games need to be open world. Considering how many great games are always coming out, it means I'll usually end up ignoring most explorable areas.

Also, I hate that so few games let me save whenever I want. It makes sense for something like the Souls games, bit for the most part it's just really annoying.

Small fonts is one that bugs me. I don't care if it looks nice and presentable, that doesn't matter if I can't easily read stuff after an hour of play. I would like to see UI's that scale better in size, especially in CRPG's.

I want to see less pointless open worlds. I don't want to see a bunch of gray superlinear shooters again, but more stuff designed like Dark Souls would be nice, or more stuff with smaller, more meaningful areas to explore like Deus Ex. The whole industry could do with a lesson on scale.

In addition to the complaint about too many open-world games, I would add a complaint about too many games adding crafting systems. I'm tired of constantly hauling around sacks of random garbage in the hopes that I might be able to put together a great recipe.

Watching a character perform an incredible acrobatic feat in a cutscene when it could have been exciting gameplay.

Every time it happens I'm left thinking "Wow, that looks like it would have been fun to do."

Or, more granularly, seeing the player character traversing or performing an action in a cutscene (e.g. climbing or manipulating the environment) in a way that the player cannot.

It's not really a modern thing but games forcing you to go through dialogue before a boss fight every time you attempt that boss. Just let me skip it and try the boss again.

This is mainly aimed at Undertale.

Dumb, irrelevant, jammed in, hidden collectibles.

The roguelikes trend. Not a fan of procedurally generated levels and little to nothing earned between runs. I think they are amazing for streams because of the variation though. I hate playing Spelunky, but Spelunkin' with Scoops was one of my favorite features. Games like Dark Souls work a similar way because of all the options you have and the background/optional storytelling.

I don't know. Games are kind of fun.

Probably the lack of a true successor to Final Fantasy Tactics.

linearity and needless rpg skill trees in genres other than rpgs...

The "we have a billion things for you to do in this open world." When the world map is just covered in things to collect it's a real bummer. Mad Max, Assassin's Creed (most open world Ubisoft games), Just Cause, etc. to name a few

I'm 34 years old and have been playing games my entire life. I ALSO had a hard time figuring out where to go in Uncharted 3, the only Uncharted that I played. I HATE that game. It came free with my PS3, which is why i played it, but I had to quit about half way through.

What modern game design things do I hate? Pretty much everything Uncharted does.

I totally agree. I love open world games, but only when the open world ADDS something to game. A lot of modern games have big open worlds for no real reason at all.

I don't understand why developers moved away from the concept of levels. I can understand there being lots of great things OUTSIDE of the structure of levels, but getting rid of levels entirely is throwing the baby out with the bath water. A level is a specific, curated challenge. Get from point a to point b. As a busy person who just wants to have fun, the concept of a level is perfect.

Buffets are amazing. Omelet stations are great. Pick your own ingredients places are okay, from time to time. But sometimes I just want to pick something off a menu and have it brought to me.

It's more of an attitude than a true gameplay aspect, but the idea that your game must be all things to all people to pull in the maximum audience is really dragging a lot of games down these days. Games tend to be better when they have a clear understanding of their audience and limit their scope to that audience. I'd list games like Dark Souls that do a pretty good job of that. From knows it's audience, budgets its game to the size of that audience, builds its games to please that audience, and doesn't make a ton of compromises to try to grow the audience.

However, most AAA publishers seem to have this compulsive need to add more and more and more to their games without regard to whether the more that's being added is any good or not. And then they complain when the budget spirals out of control and they don't make their money back.

Personally, I think that's why shitty DLC practices have become so prevalent. AAA publishers have realized they can't possibly recover what they've invested purely on the original sale, but rather than just cutting back on the content (and probably making a better game in the process), it's easier just to throw in an in-game store and sell shitty character skins instead.

This is why I really appreciate the Witness. I'm not really enjoying it very much, but I can appreciate it. It knows exactly what it wants to be and who it's supposed to appeal to and it makes no apologies for it. I try to imagine the shitshow that game would be if someone like EA or UbiSoft got ahold of it and I shudder. Competitive puzzle solving mode! Buy the solution to this puzzle for $1.99!

The road that all first person shooters have gone down, following first the example set by Call of Duty 4 and then Titanfall. I've really enjoyed Halo 5, Destiny, Advanced Warfare and so on, but it's sad that every one of those games now feels the need to fill the screen with a million explosions, have the characters move around like spiders and include progression in every minute detail of the game. The formula is exciting, but getting worn out pretty fast. For once, I'd like to play an FPS game with a slightly slower pace and some sort of feeling of exploration. I actually intend to jump into Squad sometime this summer, once I upgrade my PC.

The whole "everything is scored and your score is compared to your friends list and also to random people you've never met! Share on Facebook!" trend is extremely annoying to me. In a racing game sure I want to know if I can beat a track faster than someone on my friends list, but that doesn't mean you should tell me how many points I scored for each damn corner I take, leave me alone. If it's an open world racing game and you're timing me on literally every single stretch of road it just loses all meaning.

This also goes for games like Just Cause 3 where you keep getting these messages popping up like "You glided for 32 seconds! Your record is 35 seconds! You beat RandomStranger420's highscore!"

I want memorable level design to come back, some TLC is needed badly on this front. Give me sound tests, and give me cheat codes, not buy to win DLC... I hate that pretty much all games nowadays hold your hands. I liked it when I had to come up with the solution on my own terms instead of the game trying to force it on me.

Stop making, or at least stop announcing, add-ons before a game is out. If it's already in development, put it in the game. Also stop releasing a game so early, when it's clear that the game has PROBLEMS... Take your time.

JRPGs need to be long again instead of the lousy 10 hour episodic carp that happens nowadays. I miss long games, I miss good plot, I miss quality fan-service. [today's stuff is weird and can be a bit creepy]

Faster shooters, DOOM4 doesn't seem to be hitting the old speeds it use to, it's somewhere in between DOOM 2 and garbage reboot DOOM. [that's right DOOM 64 is the actual DOOM 3, fight me]

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE STOP making Mother-likes; LISA, Citizens of Earth, and Undertale are all horrible games that don't seem to understand what made the Mother series a cult classic. They aren't even good throwbacks, and not even clever/smartly written at all.

I ABSOLUTELY agree with this.

My favorite FPS game of all time is Lucasarts Outlaws. You moved slow, you had a six shooter, you had to count bullets and you had to manually reload. The thing about the game is that you felt like you were a PERSON. You know... the second word in First Person Shooter.

I've never been interested in games where you jump two stories into the air, run alongside a wall, backflip and headshot a person while you're upside down. I get that some people find that to be thrilling, but to me it completely removes the game from the context in which it is supposed to be rooted.

I totally agree with you. But the thing about long RPGs is that it's not the LENGTH that really matters. It's the complexity that length affords. You used to have to get down and dirty with your characters. You could choose from lots of different weapons, spells, armors etc. to create a build that you liked. I dislike Final Fantasy VII, but MAN was that Materia system great. You could have a version of Cloud that 100% different from the guy in the house next to you.

Modern games throw all that out of the window.

The overall feeding of information through floating icons and HUD elements that are not integrated in the game world (Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, The Witcher 3). I'm totally fine with that stuff when it DOES make sense in the context of the game (Watch Dogs, The Division, Deus Ex).

It pains me to see something like Far Cry Primal, where everything feels and looks like the stone age and then it gets 'game-afied' with a layer of HUD elements. I know that in most cases you can get rid of the stuff in the options, but then you are suddenly all alone and don't know what to do where. Games should be designed with less HUD in mind.

The menu's and HUD in Dead Space were great for instance. You can see the ammo count on the gun and your lifebar on the spine of your character: AWESOME!

Tutorials, there are some games that have a very natural process for a tutorial but most games today waste our time with them. Back in the day you'd just read the manual if you wanted/needed to and just chuck the game in and play. Easy.

I don't so much hate aspects of modern game design as miss random aspects of older game design. These days, I pick up a game, and depending on the genre, I know almost exactly what to expect. Ten - twenty - thirty years ago, games were a crap shoot. Games by big developers even. Now, the only surprises come from Indie developers, and even they adhere to a few too many conventions.

For big retail games it's definitely the focus on being 'cinematic' (though this entire craze seems to be dying down a bit). I don't mind cutscenes, but I hate having control constantly ripped away from me just so a scene can play out the way the developers envisioned it. I also find cinematic games to be wildly inconsistent - a good chunk of the reason why I could never get into the Uncharted games was due to what Nathan Drake could and could not do and what he could or could not climb at any point in time feeling completely arbitrary (he can climb around on something like a tapestry one moment, but he can't climb a few crumbly walls or trees the next).

As for indie games, I hate how a good number of them label themselves as 'retro' or '8-bit' and then proceed to spew spikes and pixel perfect jumps everywhere. I love plenty of old games, but their notoriously high difficulty, which is generally not actually as high as many people seem to remember, usually came from careful level design and enemy placement and not from lining every surface with instant death.

I don't mind having long cutscenes but sometimes I would like to pause it but I don't know of touching any button would allow me to pause it or would end up skipping it. Every game does it differently. If everyone could just agree to put some indication what the pause and skip options are on the screen somewhere that would help.

The seemingly omnipresent abandonment of storytelling via visuals. Only after replaying Bioshock did I remember how games are consistently too lazy to try to design the environment in a way that conveys narrative information to the player. It often seems like every environment is just 'make this structure look real and then pass it through the game aesthetics filter so that it fits he look we're going for'.

Also: highlighting important elements of the environment in a way that is not a property of the environment itself. For example, making a door glow instead of using level design and framing to so that the player receives visual cues indicating a door's importance. So sort of like waypoints in a way. It just completely breaks immersion.

This is something I've been thinking about making a blog post on after trying to play two different games on my Vita and having trouble reading any text in it. Bastion and Volume, both games have way too small a font size to be played comfortably on that system. Transistor being played on anything but a large tv if you're not just a foot away from the screen is another one.

It's like we went from big giant fonts to tiny ass ones with no middle ground.

I get it, you've got this "vision" for "style" in your game. That's great, but if I can't read things that add story and instructions to your game I'm not going to enjoy playing it when I can't read the damn things.

Risk free climbing with obvious gripping points, I've never like it in the new Tomb Raiders, or Uncharted games. They just feel like a waste of time, and break the immersion.

Forced tutorials are my pet peeve. Theres laying out mechanics to teach the player, and then theres ramming a novel's worth of text boxes into the intro of the game. I get that manuals aren't a thing, but can't we just get a digital one to do that job?

I actually didnt like big fonts because they'd get shoved onto PC ports and make the UI too big. The difference between 2ft from the screen and 10ft from the screen is huge. This can be fixed by implementing both console and PC UIs (big UI still useful on PC for using Steam Link and the like to play on a couch)

All I can think of is overly designed and flashy menus. Don't know if it's a trope for "modern" games (since I haven't seen too much of that lately). But I hate it nonetheless.

I like a lot of things games are doing now. For example, many games working RPG aspects in I really enjoy.

If I had a complaint I would say some larger productions just sticking more to convention and playing it safe. There's always room for that of course (I like iteration) and I get why it makes sense money wise, but it's a shame to not see more risks. I tend to see a lot of good experiments in game design just get abandoned in pursuit of what's big or playing off of what is big pretty closely. Independent games are rising up to help in this issue for me. For example Squad or ARMA can be different kinds of shooters vs many that chase Call of Duty. But in the RTS genre for example, you just see people chase what's hot. It was traditional RTS and now it's MOBA. When for example Relic is usually doing something interesting and different and no one else takes those risks.

But overall there are a lot of games coming out with variety that I really enjoy. I guess just some of those more interesting ideas expanded out with higher production values. Like for example, games with destruction and physics fun with the world to the level of Red Faction Guerrilla or Psi Ops haven't really progressed even though those games are quite old now. It seems like there should be more of that but we don't see it really because it is a risk or these games get made on more modest budgets as indie games can can't be full 3D games. The big studios aren't making games like that. I do miss bigger Japanese games in this respect because they usually will go for something different (and recent examples like the Souls games and Dragons Dogma are favorites of mine).

Personally I would also say I wish there was more of a focus on genres I particularly enjoy and think there could be more great games in but that's of course a personal thing.

I also think the rogue-like aspect is overdone for some games. Many that have RPG aspects make me wish they were just proper RPGs instead even if they weren't all that long.

haha this is a good one. It is still insane! With mobile possibilities and downloadable on all platforms. Also the SRPG genre being stuck on only mobile. Although I just recently saw Disgaea is coming to Steam so maybe they are realizing there is a bigger market of people who have always liked turn based strategy on PC.

Small fonts on HDTVs...ist 2016 and they STILL do this!

Very few actually mature themed games, I mean emotionally as well as in story telling. It mostly with some of the indie games that we are starting to get ideas and stories that are not 'safe & sanitized for what some game executive 'THINKS' won't offend/confuse/question white, straight, cis gender young-men.

The industries lack of understanding that when society questions "what is this game saying" that doesn't mean "You can't make it". It means be prepared to defend or admit a lack of forethought openly and honestly about what you make.

That lack of pirate ship games ( A year ago it would have been space flight sims, but now we have a ton of them!) So....more pirates now, and in three years some more ninjas.

Free-to-play games that have really terrible in game for real money currency/gem systems.

The lack of games with robust dialogue systems where player choice branches the story. Yeah, I want to say what "I THE PLAYER" think more often that I get in most games.

More variations on games that work like "Life Is Strange" more games that are about "what you say" than "what gun" you use to kill everyone. Games about boys! Games about cats! Games about a grandmother going to visit her "shitty" grand-kids where teh whole game is what she says and does on a bus ride to see them. A game where you leane that grandmother was this amazing, talented, intelligent, complicated woman who was 1000x more alive than her shitty grand kids.

Where the fuck do I go now?

Exactly what I was going write. Unlocks and loadouts turned me off modern multiplayer games.

Also, loot games where you are on an endless treadmill to get incrementally better stuff. Something I really liked about Defiance when it launched was that whether you were level 1 or 2500, you had access to the same guns, with the same stats. It wasn't the gear that improved as you leveled up, but your character which you specialized to make better use of the guns you liked. Sadly they changed all that when it turned free to play.

I'm with you for the most part, although I enjoyed the Modern Warfare games and Titanfall is the only one of the hyper-mobility FPS games that's actually pulled it off, IMO. CoD really took a nosedive with Ghosts and has only gotten worse since. It's now designed specifically for 12-year-old boys and stoners. Seriously, there's a goddamn waterpark map now. It's become a ludicrous twitch shooter where everyone's zipping around bullet-spamming from midair.

FPSs absolutely need to slow the fuck down and get back to some realism. I don't want to play as a fucking superhero flying around shooting zombies to unlock weed/meme weapon skins in some ridiculous neon world that's constantly exploding in overstimulated bullshit. I want a game like Rainbow Six 3 again. That game had substance, and tactics and skill mattered. I don't know if a game like that would even sell today, but I'd be elated to see something like it again.