We’ve all got them, gaming pet-peeves. Maybe it’s the unskippable cutscene, or the poorly placed checkpoint that means you’ve got to sit through the aforementioned cutscene once again. Maybe it’s the end-game boss with a surprise second health-bar, or the random difficulty spike that doesn’t feel fair.
What’s on your videogame sh*t list?
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- Additional unnecessary launcher. I will accept the launcher that I bought the game from (i.e. Steam, for a game I bought on Steam)
- Always online single-player game
- Recurrent online activation game, especially one where the servers keep going down.
- Not having a working pause function
- Restrictions on when you can save
The one online singleplayer game I like is Deathloop.
In Deathloop, you’re a man who keeps waking up with a hangover on a beach on an island of people who want to kill you. Your hallucinations say you should probably break the loop. However, a strange woman with an EXTREMELY personal grudge against you keeps murdering you.
That strange woman is another player, who will unlock more items in her game if she finds creative ways to kill you. You’re playing a singleplayer campaign, but she can show up and turn your game into pvp whenever she wants.
It sounds like that’s an important and interesting part of the game - and I also have no issue with No Man’s Sky’s shared Universe and so on.
I suppose it’s more those games that have no reason for needing it. Rise of Flight was one where the single player campaign was kept on their server, and you land back at base after an hour-long mission, and it would fail to connect to the server, and delete all your progress. Dirt Rally was bad for deleting your progress because “Could not connect to Racenet”.
Also Deathloop has a failsafe. If nobody on the internet is playing as Julianna, the game will make her an NPC instead. She’s also an NPC during several scripted sequences.
Hunger mechanics. I don’t find them fun at all even in survival games.
Valheim (and to a lesser extent, Palworld with the feed bag) had it right. You don’t need to eat to survive but there was still incentive to farm and cook different food for the buffs they provide
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You phrased it better - it’s really when hunger mechanics distract me from the actual game.
I thought of another game where I don’t mind it - Don’t Stare (/Together). It’s part of the challenge of the game, not some side thing you have to maintain
I mean, imagine modding out hunger mechanism from something called “Don’t Starve”.
I’m sure someone made a mod for that lol
I just like the idea of an entire ass cheese wheel being worth more than 5HP.
How nutritious/healing is ass cheese?
:D
It’s the constipation that kills you.
Micro transactions for non-cosmetic items, such as weapons, skill points, dlc, etc… Especially on a game you already bought.
Oh, and adding a game breaking anticheat/DRM to a already launched game. Scrap that, anticheat/DRM in general. If you have to do it, at least do it right.
Or anticheat/DRM that prevents games from running in a VM, annoying AF. My main desktop would probably be Debian with Windows VM on a GPU passthrough if it wasn’t for that shit.
Micro transactions
for non-cosmetic items, such as weapons, skill points, dlc, etc… Especially on a game you already bought.Pretty much. No microtransactions, thank you.
Overlays. Steam, my controller, mouse, headset, discord, my GPU all want overlays going at the same time. It’s maddening.
Inability to invert the y axis.
Not having a save/checkpoint immediately before a particularly difficult spot. Retrying a boss a couple times can be fun, but not repeating the long, tedious trek from the nearest checkpoint.
Hollow Knight was a bit annoying for this, I remember one boss where I probably died more times on the spikes than to the actual boss. I guess it’s part of the challenge though, and the harder the boss the better feeling once you defeat them.
How about unskippable cutscenes between saves and boss fights?
Shit, yeah I forgot about those!
Unnecessary crafting time. I don’t need instant crafting for everything, but some games take it to far and it serves no purpose other than to slow down gameplay. Im playing through Scap Mechanic right now. If I want to make a car, I need to craft bearings for the wheels. Each bearing takes 30 seconds and I need at least 6 for a car. Not to mention the crafting chain of basic materials that you need to get the things needed to craft the bearings all take 20 - 30 seconds each. It can take a couple of minutes to craft from start to finish. I can’t be waiting around all day for my stuff to craft.
When your walking speed is not matched to the NPCs you must walk with. W stop W stop W stop fuck it I’m just going to crouch maybe that’ll work
The last boss of Paper Mario TTYD (original gcn version) has a huge unskippable cutscene you must watch every time you attempt the fight (and it’s a hard fight)
The Legend of Zelda Skyward Sword has multiple, the most egregious of which are 1. Item pickup notification interrupts gameplay, and 2. They copied and pasted the worst boss fight in the game (like, the gameplay is poorly designed) so you have to fight them 3 times
Also in thousand year door there are a couple levels where you have to go back and forth through the same infested forests several times to progress through the level. The worst one is the spooky forest with the flowers that can make you go to sleep. It’s such a drag!
You can use Vivien to hide from them and avoid the combats though, I assumed you were supposed to do that given the other stuff that happens in chapter 4 which makes it a bit harder.
When games take away control too often, or for really minor things. Unsighted, a great indie game, was terrible for this. It would constantly rip control from you to slowly pan to a door opening or enemy spawning.
End credits that can’t be skipped or sped up
Shoutout to Telltale for making it so you could skip the credits but you’d get a “Telltale Games will remember that” message just like during the actual game.
And then they never remembered. Just like during the actual game.
Cutesy games with violence as part of the gameplay.
I’m not talking about games which intentionally put these into a juxtaposition, like Cult of the Lamb or Binding of Isaac, but rather games which want to be cutesy, but also don’t have any other idea for gameplay than making two characters bash each other’s head in.
Nintendo is often weird here, like Advanced Wars 1+2 is literally a war game, but when your army invades a foreign city, the animation has a soldier just stomping on the city sprite, because I guess, this genocide needs to be child-friendly. Pokémon is also very weird.
Peripherals (USB headphones, mouse, etc) that try to install software suites EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. you plug them in. Razer products piss me off so much!
I consider it gaming shit list worthy because they target gamers.
They went after gamers
Yet more evidence of the targeted bigotry against gamers
Unnecessary dialogue, ESPECIALLY if that dialogue must be repeated ad nauseam in order to complete what should have been a bulk action. Animal Crossing NH, as much as I fucking adore that game, has got to be one of the absolute worst offenders in this regard.
Also, difficulty that isn’t “tough but fair”, and is instead “every enemy does 10x damage, has 500x HP, has their numbers increased by 5000x, and also you die in one hit.” I’m exaggerating obviously, but my idea of a fun challenge isn’t being given no room for error against overpowered enemies, it’s the Souls approach; once I learn the patterns and flow of things, I should be able to almost play the game on autopilot. I still boot up DS3 all these years later just to relax, as I know the game THAT well now.
Fishing mini games!
I know they’re very popular and people love them, but I don’t like them at all! I hate the mechanic, in some games it feels poorly implemented (cult of the Lamb), and I just find them to be a boring chore.
Better or worse than hacking mini games?
Much worse, I actually kinda love the simple hacking puzzles in the fallout games
The hacking mini game in nier automata remains my favorite
