random things that annoy you about video games
ngon master
Characters still can't walk up stairs properly? Really? Stairs have been in video games since doom, and we still can't get decent walking up/down stairs animation?
Picking up random objects = floating objects, Half life 2 has been out for 4 years, when can we expect to see people actually grabbing/holding onto objects (without the "jumping into your hands picking up a gun in a FPS look")
Guns clipping, I've seen enough snipers sticking through walls.
2 loud foot step sounds that get repeated over and over, there needs to be some variation.
Protect AI and have them follow you missions.
Bad endings, Fallout 3's ending kinda ruined the game for me.
Picking up random objects = floating objects, Half life 2 has been out for 4 years, when can we expect to see people actually grabbing/holding onto objects (without the "jumping into your hands picking up a gun in a FPS look")
Guns clipping, I've seen enough snipers sticking through walls.
2 loud foot step sounds that get repeated over and over, there needs to be some variation.
Protect AI and have them follow you missions.
Bad endings, Fallout 3's ending kinda ruined the game for me.
Replies
As far as the "floating objects when you pick them up" problem, don't most FPS games render the fps view gun/hands at a different FOV than the world?
Another thing in Farcry 2 that i loved, was the slide, where you crouched (or something) while sprinting and you slid forward. This is something i'd love to see in more FPS games, especially online ones.
Ehm, not sure what else. There's bound to be loads of problems but they're all such common occurrences.
I usually hate these too, but damn did resident evil 4 shatter that. They did some awesome work with making her duck or sidestep when I needed to shoot behind her.
AI that isn't intimidated by you.
Not being able to climb up onto a ledge that clearly is possible given you are a super all round likeable guy.
Bad endings that do not inspire.
Knife combat that just involves slashing and weak sound effects.
Inconsistency in the game world. (STALKER, everyone can have their guns out, but I have mine out they all tell me to put my shooter away. )
Reloading gun magazines animations that take forever. It's amazing how much screen time is spent slapping magazines into guns.
Quicktime Events. They're not fun, they're not cool, they distract from watching the cool stuff your character is doing, since if you don't hit that button in half a second, you lose, and die. QTE's need to vanish forever.
Bad controller setup. I got Too Human the other day, and god what a pain in the ass it is to get used to that...
Bad character "customization" Sorry, but no matter how long you sit there tweaking settings, your Oblivion character is NOT gonna look cool, or even good.
I can think of a few more, but I can't sit here all day typing this.
For instance, one of the side missions, underground, you need to tell him to run up a wall, then jump to the right. 90% of the time, it was misinterpreted, and he would jump straight at the screen, rather than where I had aimed him. But, to top it off, it caused him to fall into the water below, which required me to go way back to the beginning.
That leads me to irritation number 2, very restrictive completion times. So, in that same part of AC2, you have to repeat this shitty jump method several times as you travel around the room, but you have to complete it before the timer goes off. That's fine, but the timing is so tight, that if you don't perform that shit jump perfectly each time, you can forget about finishing in time.
I like them in games where they need to add a sense of urgency, there's been a few recent games where its constantly saying hurry, this is about to explode, but you could just sit there for 20 minutes and nothing would happen. LoZOT did it well.
Its been how many years since Doom and just about every FPS relies on this convention ?
You mean the assassin's tomb with the easter egg squid/octopus?
[ame]
It wasn't that bad for me, i can see how it's an annoyance the first couple times though.
Having time limits is fine, but making the limit so short, giving you such a small window of time to be able to actually achieve what you need to do is ridiculous. Example, the time trials on Superman 64. THAT was bad time limits (among other things). Having a good time limit might be, say, metroid after you kill motherbrain. Not too short, not too long, which still gives a sense of urgency to you getting out, but keeps it possible without having to retry it a thousand times.
+100
Examples:
-Dom in Gears 1 & 2 loses his brain. He refuses to take cover half the time and gets shot up. Seems to be smarter when you play from the disc for either game.
-Fallout 3 and Fable 2 are plagued with graphical errors when played from the HDD. Random black textures on enemies after they die, verts going everywhere, flying off into space...
Guess it isn't the games fault, but that's annoying!
Noticed this quite a bit in nintendo games starting with the gamecube era.
This wasnt such a problem when I was 15 and had all the time in the world so perhaps Im just not target market anymore
I'd really like to know how you expect that to happen. Aside from taking control away from a player so the game can control everything while they perfectly walk down the steps? I guess you could plan spend millions on developing an unprecedented level of collision detection on par with the server farms that control PetMan?
Is it important enough for something so minor?
It's a trade off between being able to play a game with important features or making sure the players feet are EXACTLY where they need to be 100% of the time because OMG some nerd is going to complain. It's not a lack of animation skill, its a wild list of variables that are really hard to nail down. Most places aren't going to spent that much time on something so minor when there's so much else to focus on.
List of annoyances:
- Inconsistent pixel density. A character with a 4096 standing next to wall that uses a 256.
- Facial animation. Some get it right, most get it wrong, it can be done without morph targets and on a real time budget if you get the right people.
- DRM that interferes with paying customers, annoy the pirates, don't annoy me.
- People who complain when they haven't got a clue. Better yet people who assume they can do better without ever having done something.
ololololololol
I wannna enjoy my games not hurry through it like a monkey on crack
I hate autosaves ie you have to complete a whole massive section or mission before you are able to save . mass effect 1 is awful for this.
how hard would it be when i turn on my console to just pick up where I died.
longwinded cut scenes - I don't wanna play an interactive 'B' movie. I wanna skip cut scenes completely or just turn them off.
animations that don't blend. that really gets me ie the anim jerks between walk to turn or run
Collectibles that do absolutely nothing except give you an achievement!
Made me chuckle!
Also one thing that annoys me is disappearing bullet holes, bullet holes do not disappear! Besides, I want to spray my name on the wall with an ak47 baby.
Think of the memory! Think of the memory!
I'm not heavy on the programming of games but I imagine those decals need to go away to save memory you know =P
You can pee in Heavy Rain :poly121:
One thing that does start to get at me is that a ridiculous amount of games are about violence. Sure, it's simple and effective, but I'm feeling rather desensitised and the very notion of bad guy grunts actually being characters is odd just to think about. I suppose the FPS genre is sort of built around, well, shooting, but why do RPGs, even when they're lauded for immersion, storyline, dialogue and what-not, always focus around killing a ridiculous amount of bad guys? Vampire: the Masquerade - Bloodlines turned to crap when it became about defeating hordes of enemies, Mirror's Edge became lousy when it asked you to pick up a gun and shoot people, Indigo Prophecy took a nosedive when it decided the main character was a a superpower ninja, and still, very few games do without combat altogether.
Also: Sewer levels.
Seriously? I think explosive barrels are one of the best things ever in the FPS genre. Get this, they actually encourage you not to shoot at the enemy, but instead a piece of the environment. No longer do you take the simple solution of clicking on every head you see, no, you've got to time things out, lure enemies to the right position, and you can only use explosive barrels once. They're genius, I tell you! I'd much rather play a game in which you could only shoot at the environment than Medal of Duty 46: Gears of Kill.
Third person action games where you can do cool combo moves, but you can't change direction at all while you're doing them, so most of the time the bad guys sidestep, or more come around from behind, and you can't hit them because your guy is busy punching at the air like 7 times and you have to wait until he finishes before you can turn to face them.
Mandatory racing in non-racing games.
Achievements for things that mess up multiplayer.
Really really hardcore games like Q3 / Quake Live. It's a fun game, but it's been like 15 years and I still can't do that strafe-run thing.
Levels where everything looks the same and it's really easy to get lost and start going in circles back the way you came. I hate that.
But I guess they are not random things
As for random things, hmmm, I'm not sure actually.
One thing I shall say - I love exploding barrels. Is there anything more satisfying in a FPS than shooting a barrel and watching it explode? Especially if it gets a couple of bad guys in the process?
Gun designs that remove the butt of the gun. I know it's for a technical animation reason, holding the gun and running might have the butt clipping through the characters arm, but why not fix the animation?
Getting an item that allows you to do a trick, then throwing something at you that requires you to use that trick in such a way that makes you never want to use it again. Example for bad description: Devil May Cry 4. The little gauntlet grabby thing, where you can lock onto orbs, and use them to get to high areas on the map. It's been a while, but there's a point in the game where I just said "fuck this game" and put it away never to play it since. Because they made it so hard to get through the area, and you can ONLY do it by using that damn gauntlet grabby thing.
If a game doesn't have the "new game +" If I beat a game, it's really cool to be able to go back through it with extra crap I earned on the first play through. Darksiders dropped the ball on that one. Sure there's the abyssal armor, but that's it.
Time manipulation. I'm so freaking sick of time manipulation! It's sooo lame and tired, put it to bed already. Sometimes it can be cool, though. I haven't played it, but isn't there a super popular puzzle game on XBLA that uses it well? But for the average FPS game it's just stupid.
Facebook achievement auto-spam.
Reading the instructions, only to find the first level is the mandatory tutorial.
Bad UI decisions:
Click OK to exit. Are you sure? Unsaved progress will be lost! Click OK to confirm.
I played some of the Just Cause 2 demo last night; going through the options was a chore, especially when setting up controls. It wanted to save preferences every time I backed up a level, like for each of the control subset menus. It was an annoyingly long save, for just checking to see what the controls are.
- No "Real" Soldier of Fortune 3
- 3 games of the same exact genre/scenario in a holiday (or yearly season) that release simultaneously that do nothing "extremely" different from one, or the other...
- Monthly based subscriptions for these MMO's.
- Companies that re-release the same IP with nothing extremely new, other than visuals for a $60.00 price tag... >_0
I think Uncharted 2 had a system that looked about as good as I would ever expect a game of its genre to have for showing foot position. Where if you were standing sideways on two different levels one foot would actually be lower than the other (is there a tech name for this?).
It made sense for this game genre though since you have to jump and frolic about in/on the environment puzzles.
Oh and Pankake "Postal".... of course you didn't HAVE to pee... maybe we need a pee meter. Someone make a Fallout3 mod... you already drink a ton in that game.
- any game content that's simply a grinding chore and has zero entertainment value
- games that punish you for attempting to enjoy yourself. I cannot think of a more heinous crime in game design. But come to think of it, its not really an annoyance since I can only actually think of one game that is really guilty of it ... and for that reason, Dead Rising might be the worst game ever made.
QFT
* Invisible walls, especially small cliffs/fences/whatever that are clearly reachable via jumping, but blocked by some invisible barrier forcing you to walk all the way around.
* Rockstar Games Social Club
* Spamming the "loot" key on every object in the map (Bioshock...)
On the topic of that AC2 water dungeon, I don't remember getting frustrated at any of the jumps there, was pretty easy
amm..Lessee were to begin...
Ahh..World of Warcraft:
Human Male paladin (or any class with human male)
- Runs like, he is running to the washroom for number 2. Thats just annoying.
- There are no running up the stairs animaion so I cant say it annoys me or not. However; Gnome jumping through out the entire raid is rather close to annoying. <.<
That is just for general observation. Not the entire logic part of PVP and raids in wow. Which are extremely annoying.
Thief:
Game relies on the light and the footsteps, and it was awsome till Thief: the metal age. Thief: The deadly shadow was good but their walking stairs animation or sneaky stair animation was just....not there. Actually I never experienced their walking up/down the stair animation...(since it is related to the topic I stated that) aside from its glitches of suddonly stuck in the wooden floor on the docks, or being stuck in the walk while sneaking. The game was epic.
Untold legends: Dark Kingdom:
There is no running up on the stair animation at all, which makes the annoyingly funny running animation of the mage, even funnier, if you run him up the stairs.(I actually ran him up and down for few minutes while laughing this very fact)
Assassin Creed 1 and 2: both had misleading jump cycles. On with that, I couldnt figure out how to save my game.
Sonic 4 or 5 (I think, whatever version was out for PS3): If the sonic is in the mega boost speed, and you touch the analog of the controller. The sonic dies.
There are many more glitches and parts of some games that are suppose to be there, but they are not. Which are rather funny then annoying. Cant really recall them right at this moment...
There is marely anything that annoys me about video games, because I used to play the crappy games for example "silkroad online." forget the game, the lag in the game will annoy you soo much that you would want to punch the monitor screen...and I played that for 6 months.....I think thats why I fail the see what annoys me about the video games and enjoyed them instead. =\
as far as MMOs, when we do stairs the collision mesh is usually a ramp.
Game Annoyances
-Horrible cutscene dialogue, scene composition!
Generally to me it seems, game devs are nerds, feed on games and hollywood movies and series and dont know how people are living and talking in the real world. Notable exceptions might be, hl2, portal, mass effect etc, but they are also kind of special dialogewise. Battlechatter works for me most of the time, but damn, most cutscenes dialogues in nowadays games are horrendous and suck my brain out. Like stripped directly from a B C and D movie. Plot holes, Goofs are just the tip of the iceberg.
Thankfully not so plagued but still i expected more, Heavy Rain has its moments, but most of the time i didnt feel convinced by the dialog (presentation aside) , especially sad for a game that relies on that so heavily.
- Old Formulas and Bland Design
WTF is up with those turrets included with semi convient ways to sneak around it, take control of it and then shoot a mass of soldiers that suddenly appear from some very obvious corner? or what was up with MW2 single player? So we had this nice helicopter crash scene in mw1 and in mw2 its raining helicopters. Bigger , better faster mhh? I really want to see some original stuff. Why not have a short swim section before the oilrig level? Why was there no, even if minmal, gameplay in this weird space smashcut level?
somebody posted some neat ideas on the mw2 thread back then and i thought that would have made a nice touch. still good game, no offense.
Most of the scenerios i encounter in games, feel very repeated throughout games. Even features are just slight variations of what we already know.
- No Immersion via Control Layout.
Even if i wouldnt miss mashing B to open a pot of health in a beat em up like god of war, I would like to see more player immersion using the controllers given.
Also when i think about the funny race sony and microsoft is doing with their new motion devices right now. I mean for example, It was a nice touch to hold R2 in Shadow of the collosus to hold onto the collisi and environment. It was a bit exhausting but it made it fun and bit more immersive and that on a PS2.
I think its just lame nowadays that you can run up to an enemy press B and then we see a gory animation, mostly the same very often, without the feeling you really accomplished anything. Its nice people spend so much time on presentation, but sad to see a lack of focus of what a player actually wants to do.
Same with player movment, as said before with far cry 2. Sprint + crouch should result in a slide on the floor. I am kinda suprised not many people have been inspired by mirrors edge in that regard.
-Arenas
Nothing better than a 50 x 50 meter space with tons of cover objects and 10 enemies to kill, most effectly from on corner of the space. Your done? Cutscene with horrible dialog, next Arena. Yay fun
-shotgun with reload interupt
Wondring why sometimes I cant shoot even though at least one shell is loaded. Also L Trigger aiming should be possible? Or did i miss some design importance here?
-Interesting topics
Dunnno which game to look forward to except of Last Guardian but i feel a lack of non violent (or at least non gory) maturely presented games with interesting settings. Not because its the only types of games i would play but i wish for some diversity in that field.
Anyway, as long as a game is fun, all is good, but would be nice to see more titles letting go of old habits. my 2 cents
The seemingly 99% of "people" that have Xbox Live and a mic headset.
That is all.
Rubber band AI in racers (I'm looking at you Jak X).
Half-assed music. I like alot of game music, but more often then not it doesnt feel like studios are even trying in that area.
You dont have to be an artist to be an art critic.